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On June 12, a leaked copy of the investment chapter
for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was made public. This copy was analyzed
by Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch and has been verified
as authentic. This agreement has been
negotiated IN SECRET for 2-1/2 years and no information has ever been released
until this leak. So why have the details of this negotiation been so secret? This
agreement has been framed as a "free trade" agreement and yet out of 26 chapters only two have anything to do with trade. The
other 24 chapters grant new corporate privileges and rights, while limiting
governments and protective regulations.
If implemented,
this agreement will hard code corporate dominance over sovereign governments
into international law that will supercede any federal, state, or local laws of
any member country. This TPP agreement alone should set alarm bells ringing, but if
one steps back and looks at the larger picture, the future ramifications look
even more ominous. After completing this reading, see what your conclusions
are.
This
video is a must see for anyone who wishes to more fully understand the
implications of this secretly negotiated agreement. This article will also show
how if this agreement is considered in the context of other recently passed
legislation and developments, and the "dots are connected", the results would
be total corporate global governance
with an accompanying police state. In this new system the role of elected governments would be to serve as subservient agents
for the transnational corporations, while the armies, police, and courts would serve
the interests of these transnational corporations. The status of the member states would be
locked-in, similar to countries once
they are inside the Eurozone.
The TPP is being negotiated by some of the same cast
of characters that brought us NAFTA, CAFTA and other so called free trade
agreements. Some of the provisions in this document include the establishment
of a parallel system of justice to be administered by 3 attorneys with no conflict of interest limitations.
This 3 attorney tribunal could order sovereign governments to use taxpayer
money to pay these transnational corporations for any environmental or regulatory
costs that these corporations expended to meet local standards. Many existing
laws would need to be rewritten and no new regulatory laws could be passed.
Governments that tried to pass regulations such as
limits on the financial industry using risky bets such as derivatives would have
the burden of proof to defend such regulations in a court system controlled by
the corporations. The taxpayers would pay should a corporation prevail in one
of these "private courts". In fact over $350 million
of taxpayer money has already been paid out to corporations under the NAFTA
style deals, because of zoning laws, toxic bans, timber rules and other
regulations. This TPP agreement is like NAFTA on steroids. This corporate
tribunal bears a resemblance to the private US Supreme Court approved binding
arbitration that corporations use to severely limit an individual's or a
group's right to sue for damages. With binding arbitration we essentially have
a " private
corporate court system " outside of any government judicial system where the
corporations choose the arbitrators and pay for their services. This creates an
apparent conflict of interest because
the arbitrators know that if they do not rule
favorably to the corporations in the majority of cases, they will not be
hired back.
The kangaroo
courts setup by this TPP agreement will have binding corporate guarantees with
both trade and cash sanctions. These cash sanctions would effectively transfer
taxpayer money to transnational corporate coffers. Can
you imagine the excesses we will see in the financial industry as they
challenge regulations within their own private court system forcing governments
to pay or eliminate them?
The result of these corporate tribunals will be
to setup a race to the bottom, where if one country chooses not to regulate
something, then the corporations would be able to sue the other nations inside
of the TPP to have taxpayers cover their losses for any such regulations. These
other countries would be vulnerable to corporate led lawsuits to be decided in
the corporate tribunals.
So how could such an extreme agreement that
literally gives corporations everything they could possibly want have been negotiated with little or no resistance? The answer is
that the ONLY way this agreement could ever pass is if everything is
done in secret and the details never see the light of day. Lori Wallach , the director
of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch recently said:
"These agreements are a little bit like Dracula. You drag
them in the sunshine, and they do not fare well. But all of us, and also across
all of the countries involved, there are citizen movements that are basically
saying that this is not in our name. We don't need global enforceable corporate
rights. We need more democracy. We need more accountability."
These talks have
been so secret that Senator Ron Wyden, chairman of the Trade Committee in the
Senate which has jurisdiction over trade
agreements has been denied any access to information on the negotiations for
over 2-1/2 years. This is a man who is on the Intelligence Committee and has
access to nuclear secrets, yet he cannot see this TPP agreement? On the Democratic
side, Senator Wyden has introduced legislation
to force the Obama administration to make the details of these secret
negotiations available to the Senate Committee.
On the Republican
side, Representative Darryl
Issa has also questioned the Obama administration's extreme levels of
secrecy on this agreement. This is not a liberal cause, this is not a
conservative cause, this is a common cause. It is vital that the public be
aware of this TPP agreement because BOTH of the 2012 presidential candidates
are supporting this agreement. Since TPP
was negotiated under the watch of the Obama administration, and Mitt Romney has
indicated that he wants to quickly complete negotiations of this bill, the
results of the next election will be irrelevant to the future status of this
bill.
With the corporate
takeover of sovereign governments, we see the very essence of a global fascist system.
When most people think of fascism, they think of Hitler brown shirts marching
through the streets, however, that is not the real definition of fascism. Fascism
was defined by President Franklin Roosevelt:
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the
growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their
democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of
government by an individual, by a group"
Polls
show that most Americans from both major political party believe that money exerts
far too much influence on public officials, effectively making these elected
officials the "hired servants" of the wealthy elites. Both the Tea Party and
the Occupy Movement believe that there is too much influence of money on our
legislators. Our representatives are essentially the puppets while the
corporate elites are the puppeteers. What this TPP agreement does is to take this puppet
metaphor to the international level. Our elections have been reduced to the
people choosing who will be the "hired servants" of the power elites from a
list preapproved by these same elites.
This TPP agreement
is nothing less than a power grab by the largest corporations on the planet to
establish a legal framework for global corporate government making all sovereign
governments subject to international law enforced by corporations. Passage of this bill would essentially be
corporate coup against all member states.
So while this TPP agreement should frighten anyone who is still breathing, the threat does not end as the corporations make their ultimate grab for power. Here are some of the other forces that are potentially focusing the power of the corporate state.
