The Duplicitous Trans-Pacific Partnership — More Jobs Lost, More Money Stolen — and Even More Control Given to the Robber Baron Elite

© 2015 Peter Free

 

06 October 2015

 

 

Robert Reich accurately nailed President Obama’s perfidious Trans-Pacific Partnership

 

I will quote him because one cannot beat the former Secretary of Labor for concise clarity:

 

 

[T]he TPP would be a disaster.

 

It would be the largest trade deal in history — involving countries stretching from Chile to Japan, representing 792 million people and accounting for 40 percent of the world economy – yet it’s been devised in secret.

 

Lobbyists from America’s biggest corporations and Wall Street’s biggest banks have been involved but not the American public.

 

They want more international protection when it comes to their intellectual property and other assets.

 

But they want less protection of consumers, workers, small investors, and the environment, because these interfere with their profits.

 

The TPP also gives global corporations an international tribunal of private attorneys, outside any nation’s legal system, who can order compensation for any “unjust expropriation” of foreign assets.

 

[T]he tribunal can order compensation for any lost profits found to result from a nation’s regulations.

 

[T]he TPP is a Trojan horse in a global race to the bottom, giving big corporations and Wall Street banks a way to eliminate any and all laws and regulations that get in the way of their profits.

 

At a time when corporate profits are at record highs and the real median wage is lower than it’s been in four decades, most Americans need protection – not from international trade but from the political power of large corporations and Wall Street.

 

© 2015 Robert Reich, Here’s Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Is Just Plain Wrong, TruthDig (06 October 2015) (extracts)

 

 

The moral? — We do not need yet more institutionalized thievery

 

NAFTA and its ilk have been bad enough for American workers.

 

Now President Obama, not surprisingly acting in strict tune with all his recent predecessors, is trying to sneak this American Dream-killing monstrosity up our buttock-bounded back doors.

 

One would think that the economic decency issue would unite 99 percent of Americans into opposing the TPP, from libertarians to commutarian socialists and everyone in between.

 

We should stand against the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the engaged passion that Second Amendment folks display in protecting gun ownership.