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When I was a tyke, momma warned me not to eat anything unless I knew where it came from. That’s so sensible that even Congress acted on it in 2002, passing a straightforward law called COOL (Country Of Origin Labeling). COOL requires meat marketers to tell us whether the meat they sell is a product of the USA, China, or Whereintheworldistan.
This useful information empowers us consumers – which is why global agribusiness giants hate it and are trying to get a secretive, autocratic, plutocratic, private court in Switzerland to kill it.
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This can’t be, you say? But it is. Unbeknownst to most Americans, when the US joined the World Trade Organization in 1999, we surrendered a big chunk of our sovereignty to this corporate court.
Here’s what’s happening: (1) American consumers have a basic right to know where their meat comes from, but (2) that right has been pitted against American corn flakes and ketchup in a “trade war” that (3) is being forced upon us by a handful of corporations that produce, slaughter, butcher, and package meat outside of our country, but, (4) are allowed under trade agreements to challenge a US law that had been duly enacted for the people inside our country, so (5) America was sued in an obscure, autocratic, private organization created by and for corporate interests and headquartered in Switzerland. Then, (6) that corporate “court” did indeed rule that the “profit right” of foreign meat packers is superior to our people’s basic right of self-determination.
This is Jim Hightower saying… Holy Tom Paine, this is corporate tyranny! But it’s about to get worse, for President Obama and Congress intend to hang another bad trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, around our necks this Spring. For more information on how to stop this atrocity, check out: www.exposethetpp.org.