It’s a corporate coup. Jim Hightower:
Where does your mayor, school board, governor, or any other “public shopper” go to purchase fixtures, food, furniture, ferns, and whatnot? Where I live, various agencies have Buy Austin, Buy Texas, Buy American, Buy Green, Buy Sweatshop-Free, and other targeted policies that apply our tax dollars to our values. This sensible idea has swept across the country, most likely including where you live, and these agency purchases add up to a big financial boost for start-ups, independents, women-owned, and other homegrown enterprises. Rather than buying everything from Walmart or China (excuse the redundancy there)–thus shipping truckloads and boatloads of cash out of our communities–plow that public money back into the home turf for grassroots economic growth and the flowering of local jobs.
Imagine the uproar if President Obama and Congress tried to pass a bill to outlaw such “preferential procurement” policies, summarily cancelling our democratic right to decide where to make public purchases. I’d get pretty PO’d, wouldn’t you? And what if they also proposed that foreign corporations in Brunei, New Zealand, Vietnam, and other nations must be given the right to make the sale on any and all products purchased with our tax dollars? That’d set my hair on fire!
The American people would never stand for this brazen affront to our sovereignty, so I can assure you that Obama and Congress will definitely NOT be proposing any such thing. Not directly, that is.
Instead, their hope is to tiptoe it around us. The nullification of our people’s right to direct expenditures of our own tax dollars is but one of the horror stories being quietly packed into a political-and-economic bombshell benignly labeled TPP –the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
This thing is a supersized and nuclearized NAFTA, the 1994 trade scam rammed through Congress by Bill Clinton, Wall Street’s Robert Rubin, and the entire corporate establishment. They promised that the “glories of globalization” would shower prosperity across our land. They lied. Corporations got the gold. We got the shaft–thousands of factories closed, millions of middle-class jobs went south, and the economies of hundreds of towns and cities (including Detroit) were hollowed out. (Most Mexicans got the NAFTA shafta, too. US grain traders like ADM dumped corn into Mexico, wiping out millions of peasant farmers’ livelihoods, and thousands of local businesses were crushed when Walmart invaded with its Chinese-made wares.)
Twenty years later, the corporate gang that stuck us with NAFTA is back, hoping to fool us with an even more destructive multinational deal. (This calls for another immortal quote from George W: “Fool me once, shame on–shame on you. Fool me–you can’t get fooled again.” Well, you know what he meant).
This time we really must pay attention, because TPP is not just another trade deal. First, it is massive and open-ended. It would hitch us immediately to 11 Pacific Rim nations (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam), and its door would remain wide open to lure China, Indonesia, Russia, and other nations to come in. Second, note that many of those countries already have trade agreements with the US. Hence, THIS AMAZING FACT: TPP is a “trade deal” that mostly does not deal with trade. In fact, of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters!
The other two dozen chapters amount to a devilish “partnership” for corporate protectionism. They create sweeping new “rights” and escape hatches to protect multinational corporations from accountability to our governments… and to us. Here are a few of TPP’s provisos that would make our daily lives riskier, poorer, and less free:
Go read the whole damned thing.
This should be marketed to the Teabaggers for just what it is a sell out of US sovereignty to the ‘One-worlders.”
How can it be a “coup” when they already own the whole damn place!
“NAFFTA, (a) trade scam rammed through Congress by President Clinton.” If you think Hillary is any better than Bill is on trade and workers rights you’re delusional.
Speaking of coup’s. Guess who supports the murderous military dictatorship in Egypt? Saudi Arabia, Israel, the U.A.E., Assad of Syria, and Jordan. Dictatorships and bad actors one and all. How predictable.
The TPP is an emergency manager law that makes a captive corporate trade court our master.
I think that if the TPP is passes in the Senate, it will be the USG’s final and irretrievable surrender of any legitimacy whatsoever. It would be for this law-abiding citizen the meaninglessness of any US law at every level. If a multinational can flout any law it doesn’t like, why should any citizen be beholden to laws that *they* don’t like? It would signal for me the necessity of not participating in the economy, to the extent I could avoid it, and recognizing that the government has now finally devolved into a corporate fascist mafia state where adjudication of what is just is arbitrary and comes from the barrel of a gun. At some point you just have to know that competing economic Dons will go to the mattresses and the pretense and thin veneer of any sense of decorum will be swatted away like a spiderweb in a sunbeam. What a horrible disgrace are our self-styled “leaders,” and particularly the fork-tongued Barack Obama who has patted down our feathers with a stiletto with serial betrayals at every step in his administration.
Jim Hightower = National Treasure
What he said.