Why the TPP and other trade agreements are a CORPORATE COUP.
The TPA and all these trade agreements including the WTO are a CORPORATE COUP. They tie the hands of US legislatures when it comes to passing labor and environmental legislation and give multinational corporations a form of international citizenship and standing in special arbitration courts that transcend national authority.
What that means is the end of sovereignty with regard to regulating important aspects of our laws and regulations regarding local and national environmental, economic, labor and even some social (healthcare for example) -- hey, even cultural -- life.
The TPP and our other trade agreements are nightmares. Succinctly stated: CORPORATE COUPS.
They provide corporations with a status that is above us mere human beings in terms of the ability to govern. They permit the multinational corporations to create a now primitive but in the future increasingly power international government run by the multinationals themselves. They bestow on multinationals an international citizenship that we mere human beings cannot claim. Multinationals now operate in different companies bound by the laws of the countries in which they operate. These trade agreements with their courts are the way in which the corporations are moving toward corporate, multinational uniform laws and regulations that encourage and favor THEIR INTERESTS over ours.
I understand that this sounds like something out of Star Wars, a sort of fantastically impossible reality. But, sadly, it is very real. And no accident. Corporations have been very frustrated by the limits on their ability to circumvent the laws that limit their ability to pollute, to maim, to kill and to take natural resources at low prices from nations around the world.
(These multinationals have to be viewed as monsters with huge appetites for markets and resources. The wonderful people who work for them and even manage them become part of the machine of the corporation and lose the ability to control the beast of which they are parts.)
Current American education about government is just pitiful. Most Americans are utterly unable, utterly incapable of understanding that the Constitution that insures us a modicum of sovereignty and democracy (as a republic, if you will) is being chipped away by these trade agreements and the supranational institutions they create.
It is shocking to me that Republican voters get so riled up about the United Nations and just eat up the propaganda about how wonderful these trade agreements are.
If you can think logically at all, if you can understand cause and effect and if you know our Constitution and have an idea how these trade courts, whether the WTO or the NAFTA courts work, and you recognize that trade arbitration courts will inevitably be a part of the TPP, you have no choice but to vehemently oppose the TPP and any auxiliary agreement that permits any international body or a trade court to displace provisions in our Constitution.
We fought against taxation without representation in the Revolutionary War. But here we are accepting it (indirectly but very definitely) by signing up to allow corporations to go to arbitration courts (in which THEY pick one-half of the "judges"
and impose damages, potentially huge damage awards based on speculation about future profits that will in turn impose a tax burden on every American taxpayer.
Those damages awards will not directly confine our ability to govern ourselves. The mechanism is more subtle than that.
But even the recognition of potential awards against the US will influence our law-making and our legislators, and constrict our ability to govern ourselves.
The ability of corporations to go to court -- courts that in no way answer to the people and are not even required to have open and public hearings and trials -- and demand damages gives to those corporations rights that are superior to our own as American citizens.
These trade courts have excessive power. They have no juries of ordinary people. They do not have open trials in which all evidence is made available for public scrutiny,
The systems that are established by these trade agreements are unconscionable. We cannot as a nation agree to these trade pacts and claim to support democratic traditions and goals.
No. No. No. No. No to the TPP.
Let other countries that don't value democracy, countries like China which is still a Communist dictatorship in spite of its wealth and export power, sign up for the dictatorship of the multinationals if they wish. We should not go there.
We have a proud tradition of jury trials in civil disputes. Let the multinationals who have claims or imagined claims against the US or entities including state and local governments with the US bring their grievances into our courts. Let American juries and judges decide whether the companies should receive compensation for alleged losses due to our laws and regulations. Who pays the damages awards when a corporation wins in court? The American tax-payers, that's who. The American taxpayers should not be required to pay awards that are imposed by foreign courts that Americans do not ultimately control. There is no right of appeal from these trade courts. The taxes that they indirectly award have to be paid, and it is the taxpayers who pay them. That is taxation without representation. That is the very wrong that our country was founded to set right.
I hate to be rude, but only fools would vote for or support these trade agreements including the TPP.
Let me assure you that the corporations that are pushing for and paying for the passage of the legislation that permits our entry into these trade agreements have been angry with, frustrated with our democracy and our courts for many years. That they are pushing these trade agreements, one by one, that the factories that produced top quality American consumer goods for generations have been unable to compete with cheap labor from other, less democratic countries, is no coincidence. As I said, corporations have been, shall we say, "disappointed" in American courts that rule against them with regard to environmental, labor and even products liability cases. And these trade agreements do not merely coincidentally "fix" our legal system to suit their wishes. Just take my word for it. Just take my word.
= new reply since forum marked as read
trying to declare it Unconstitutional. And, since it passed today and the only thing slowing it down was TSA which will get a vote next Tuesday (and will probably pass) it means that we have to hope that a lawsuit might slow it down even more after it's released and people get to see the whole thing in its ugliness?
Maybe that RW Group "Judicial Watch" that always seems to be able to get some successful lawsuits will go for it or even one of our Lib Dem Groups? The Obama "Trade Authority" part passed by such a small Dem vote it hardly can be seen to be "Bi-Partisan."
Anyway..I was afraid they'd do what happened in the Senate with the first Vote (getting our hopes up) and then it Passed anyway, the next week. White House Spokesperson, Josh Earnest, in his Presser today called the "TSA" vote a "Procedural Snafu" reminding the press what happened with the Senate vote which he also called a "Snafu" at that time.
We must not allow the billionaires to use their corporate empires to write and enact a global constitution of which they are the only beneficiaries.
Call and tell the whitehouse and congress to oppose TPP and all it's tentacles.
Whitehouse Comments: 202-456-1111
United States Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121