The TPP or Trans Pacific Partnership is a big time trade agreement that will cripple any environmental control of big business, lose jobs and lower wages in the USA and make ouir lawmakers lose control of our monetary processes. (read encourage money laundering by illegal sources)
One of the first victims of the TPP will be our loss of the 2002 law called Country of Origin Labeling. This is a law that requires all meat marketers to label their product with the country in which the meat was grown & slaughtered. It lets the consumer know where the stuff he is eating came from. Agribusinesses hate this law and have been trying with all their money and power to get a phony court that they have constructed in Switzerland to kill it.
Trade agreements are tricky things and like most tricky things they favor those with the most dishonest lawyers. When we joined The World Trade Organization in 1999 at the behest of our corporate giants we gave up to it, a huge piece of our right to know what we are eating. Now the President and the corporations want us to give up even more of our right to defend the environment, to corporations, mostly from Asia, through the TPP.
Country of Origin Labeling, has been challenged by a Swiss kangaroo court, incredibly created by large corporations to fight people’s right to know what’s in their food. That court, ruled that foreign meatpacking corporations are allowed under new trade agreements, to challenge a USA law that had been duly enacted for the benefit of US citizens. This kangaroo court ruled that the “profit right” of foreign meat packers is superior to our people’s right or need to know what we are eating. Yes, as my friend Harry would say, Tom Paine is spinning in his grave.
But bad as this piece of corporate thievery is, the TPP is worse. This gigantic power grabs was instituted to wrest control of the regulations that prevent international corporations from running roughshod over the public and rendering all the regulations aimed at preventing abuses on many fronts from being perpetrated.
How will this be done? Well, the fact of the matter is that we don’t quite know, because so far, all the negotiations have been held in secret. Why has this been allowed? Well, the negotiators, speaking with a not quite forked tongue, state, with some hint of truth, that public negotiations are a rank impossibility. That negotiations of any kind held in a public forum always fail.
Okay, that is not entirely hogwash, but how about progress reports. And why is it that details of this monumental treaty that will affect everything we eat, or drink, the drugs we take and all the raw materials that go into everything that we import for manufacture, here, have not been reported by any of our corporate media? None of the major networks or papers have run significant stories about the TPP. There is almost no mention of it in our corporate media. Could this be because all our media is now owned by huge big business interests that don’t want us to know about the raping that we will be taking if this gigantic rip-off goes into effect?
Right now, near as we can confirm, the TPP in its unfinished form contains 29 chapters. Five address tariffs and standard trade mattes. The other 24 are made up of different ways to protect corporations from any accountability to the world’s consumers, or responsibility to the general public. If that seems a little out of balance to you, you aren’t crazy, just logical. Under these 24 charters, foreign corporations can sell you poisonous meat or drugs or they can create manufacturing processes that poison the air or water and you, the general public will have no recourse to compensation and no way to stop them. More important, neither will our government.
Our own local governments would be unable to stop huge international corporations from plundering “buy American” or “buy local” movements that infringed on the profits of the huge foreign corporate agri-businesses. Under the TPP our American business regulations from environmental, to manufacturing, to workplace safety, to financial, would have to be wiped out so that they would be in tune with any TPP order that favored foreign business.
The TPP is a kiss on the ass of corporate greed and if we even get close to passing this egregious, anti-democratic treaty we better start puckering up because we are going to be on our knees for a good long time