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Ed, please call home! Edward Snowden, that is: Come quickly, your country needs you.
Once again, the American people are being victimized by a hush-hush blanket of official secrecy. This time it’s not about wholesale spying on us by our government, but a wholesale assault on our jobs, environment, health, and even our people’s sovereignty by a cabal of global corporations and the Obama administration.
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Their weapon is a scheme hidden inside a scam called TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The scam is their claim TPP is nothing but another free trade deal – albeit a whopper – one that ties our economy to Brunei, Vietnam, and nine other nations around the Pacific Rim. But of the 29 chapters in this deal, only five are about tariffs and other trade matters.
The real deal is in the 24 other chapters that create a supranational scheme of secretive tribunals that corporations from any TPP nation can use to challenge and overturn our local, state, and national laws. All a corporate power has to do to win in these closed tribunal proceedings is to show that any particular law or regulation might reduce its future profits.
This enthrones a global corporate oligarchy over us, yet it’s been negotiated by the 12 countries in strict secrecy. Even members of Congress have been shut out – but some 500 corporate executives have been allowed inside to shape the “partnership.”
Now that Obama and his corporate team ready are to ram it through Congress, he arranged a briefing to woo House Democrats. But he classified it as a secret session, meaning the lawmakers can’t tell the people anything they learn.
Holy Thomas Paine! Obama is hiding his oligarchic scheme from us because he knows we would overwhelmingly oppose it. This is government by sucker punch – it’s cowardly… and disgraceful.
“A Pro-TPP Campaign Built on Four Pinocchios,” www.huffingtonpost.com, March 12, 2015.
“Elizabeth Warren Says Trade Deal May Force U.S. Payouts to Overseas Firms,” www.bloomberg.com, March 11, 2015.