By Kevin Zeese
This is a very important story. The Obama administration has been negotiating for two years behind closed doors (in secret) the Trans Pacific Partnership — in secret except for 600 corporate advisers who are helping to write the agreement. When people complained about the secrecy they doubled down and wrote into the agreement that it would not be made public until four years after it was enacted! This is a trade agreement on steroids but they don’t use the words “trade agreement” since people have caught on to the fact that so-called “free trade agreements” are actually treaties that greatly empower transnational corporations at the expense of the people and democratic governments.
The law gives corporations more powers than the U.S. government when it comes to foreign corporations operating in the U.S. (and U.S. corporations more powers than foreign governments when they operate within their borders). They set up trade tribunals who can rule that an environmental, labor, consumer, health or other law is a restraint on trade and have the U.S. pay mass fines to make up for the lost profits. Things like laws against underage smoking have been found to be a restraint on the tobacco trade by other trade tribunals. The judges on these tribunals will be corporate lawyers who serve temporarily as judges and then go back to being advocates for their corporations!
Documents were leaked about these negotiations so now the story is getting out. An article about the leaks in the Huffington Post had 25,000 comments! (Of course, the corporate media — the NY Times and Washington Post — have not published anything on the leaks.) Below are links to several articles.
KZ
Controversial Trade Pact Text Leaked, Shows U.S. Trade Officials Have Agreed to Terms That Undermine Obama Domestic Agenda
Leaked Memo Indicates Obama to Give Transnational Corporations Governmental Powers Superseding US Sovereignty, http://itsoureconomy.us/2012/06/leaked-memo-indicates-obama-to-give-transnational-corporations-governmental-powers-superseding-us-sovereignty/
Leaked Trade Document Shows that Obama is Worse than we thought, http://itsoureconomy.us/2012/06/leaked-trade-document-shows-that-obama-is-worse-than-we-thought/ This is the Huffington Post article I mentioned.
