Wall Street rides again! If anyone doubts that the pact is a corporate boondoggle dressed in trade clothes, let them read its shameful financial provisions. "Too big to fail" laws, ensuring that the costs of a bank's collapse would be borne by investors, not taxpayers? Under TPP, giant global banks could scamper into private tribunals to grab billions of our tax dollars if they have to comply with such laws. Also, our nation's financial regulations would have to be "harmonized" to comply with TPP's extreme deregulation, re-creating the anything-goes Wall Street ethic that crashed the world economy in 2008. A Robin Hood Tax on volatile, super high-speed speculators? Nope. TPP specifically lets global banks challenge and kill these laws.
And so many more Pandoras, including: Greatly restricting any TPP nation from regulating fracking. Extending patent monopolies for Big Pharma so those ruthless giants can hold world drug prices (and profits) artificially high, while denying life-saving drugs to millions. Forcing our country to weaken food safety standards (including pesticide levels, toxic additives, GMOs, etc.) that are stricter than international standards--as most of ours are.
And let's not forget this: the US can't change a comma in TPP's thousands of pages of retrograde rules unless every country agrees. Once the US joins, future presidents and congresses must limit their policies to what's permitted in the agreement. And if a country decides to say "adios" and get out, there's a "hangover" clause that extends the corporate rights to raid our treasuries for another decade.
Sneak attack on the peopleIn its six years of incubation, this corporate deal has been kept behind doors that have been locked, bolted shut, sealed in plastic wrap, and shrouded in a dense fog of official secrecy.
And the people are not the only ones kept in the dark. Just for fun, ask your own personal congress critter what the TPP is and what's in it. Chances are you'll get a blank stare, for even our lawmakers have been denied "permission" simply to attend the negotiations as observers -- until last June, they were not even allowed to see the drafts of rules that are being considered. As for the public and the press, it's only because of leaks from appalled negotiators and the determined digging of public interest advocates that we know anything about the Trans-Pacific Partnership's threat to our democratic rights.
Not every outsider has been denied access, however. Top executives, lawyers, and lobbyists of 500-some major corporations who serve on 16 Industry Trade Advisory Committees do have access to the secret texts and to the negotiators themselves. They get to review and amend official proposals, submit their own drafts, and generally look after their own very special interests.
But now, finally, We the People get to play -- and we have an ace card called "Fast Track." Before the TPP cabal of Barack Obama, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and their front line of fat-cat corporate lobbyists can even submit the substance of this anti-democratic coup to Congress, they must first get more than half of the members of the House and Senate to do something extraordinary: Surrender Congress' exclusive constitutional authority (and responsibility) over US trade policy to Obama.
This Fast Track procedure is nothing but a railroad job, first laid down by Richard Nixon in 1973. Once Congress passes fast-track authorization, it lets the White House unilaterally launch negotiations, set the agreement terms, and sign onto a trade deal -- all before Congress even gets to vote on the pact itself. Then the White House writes legislation conforming wide swaths of America's laws to the deal. This legislation is then sent to Congress, bypassing congressional committees entirely; it must be voted on within 90 days, with minimal debate and no possibility of a filibuster. Members cannot offer any amendments to the complex proposals in this thick document -- they get only a single yes or no vote on the total package.
It's a super-slick plan, and the full corporate-financial-political establishment is behind it, knowing that Fast Track is the only way that TPP can become the law of our land. But the elite power players forgot one very sticky factor: You and me.
Stopping the scamPolls show that whenever the people get a whiff of this betrayal, the overwhelming majority not only oppose it, but howl in outrage. Polls, however, won't defeat it. Only by joining hands, standing up, speaking out, and otherwise getting in the face of power will the people overcome TPP's would-be plutocracy.
Now here's the good news: Thanks to a broad and well-organized coalition of dozens of grassroots organizations and just plain mad-as-hell folks, We the People are already strategizing, organizing, and mobilizing to stop this highballing scam right in its Fast Tracks.
Led by such experienced and savvy pro-democracy fighters as the Communications Workers of America, Public Citizen, and the Sierra Club, a Stop Fast Track coalition is demanding that Congress just say no when the White House tries to get lawmakers to okay the Fast Track process this year. On the right, grassroots conservative groups are also mobilizing against it.
This trans-Pacific snow job will melt if Congress refuses to give up its constitutional responsibility and have a full and lengthy public debate about its terms. Leaders of all 12 countries know that a public airing of their handiwork will spark a public revolt against the agreement that they secretly negotiated.
With many House Democrats already committed to "no" on TPP's corporate usurpation of our people's sovereign rights, and with a chunk of GOP members already loath to give Obama any unilateral executive power, it's quite possible for our voices to make a difference on the Fast Track vote.
Again, this is not a decision about trade -- the TPP represents a tectonic shift in public policy that would radically alter the fundamental structure of our society and thrust a global corporate plutocracy on us. Shouldn't we have something to say about that?
The vote is expected as soon as March. For some ways to weigh in, check our suggestions in the Do Something section below.
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