The Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_most_brazen_corporate_power_grab_in_
american_history_20151106/
Posted on Nov 6, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A 2014 protest in Tokyo against the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
(Shizuo Kambayashi / text of the Trans-Pacific Partnershipa trade and
investment agreement involving 12 countries comprising nearly 40 percent of
global outputconfirms what even its most apocalyptic critics feared.
The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North
American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in
American history, Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in
Washington, D.C. It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of
government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These
tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to
be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The
TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance
in defiance of our domestic laws.
The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in
Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all
public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal
Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and
utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy.
The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on
the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.
These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup détat along
with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced
to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to
protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and
find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional
democratic institutions. The agreementsfilled with jargon, convoluted
technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse
phrasingcan be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.
The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a
range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade
tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers,
environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking
redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become
sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.
The Sierra Club issued a statement after the release of the TPP text saying
that the deal is rife with polluter giveaways that would undermine decades
of environmental progress, threaten our climate, and fail to adequately
protect wildlife because big polluters helped write the deal.
If there is no sustained popular uprising to prevent the passage of the TPP
in Congress this spring we will be shackled by corporate power. Wages will
decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our
few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be
accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or
control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public
services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public
education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by
for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including
pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be
drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health
care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will
probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault.
Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including
over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world
into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every
pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding
projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or
consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the
investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and
expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in
compensation from offending governments for impeding their right to
further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace
the common good.
Given the bankruptcy of our political classincluding amoral politicians
such as Hillary Clinton, who is denouncing the TPP during the presidential
campaign but whose unwavering service to corporate capitalism assures her
fealty to her corporate backersthe trade agreement has a good chance of
becoming law. And because the Obama administration won fast-track authority,
a tactic designed by the Nixon administration to subvert democratic debate,
President Obama will be able to sign the agreement before it goes to
Congress.
The TPP, because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of
public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House
and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it
is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding
floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress
cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It
can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.
There will be a mass mobilization Nov. 14 through 18 in Washington to begin
the push to block the TPP. Rising up to stop the TPP is a far, far better
investment of our time and energy than engaging in the empty political
theater that passes for a presidential campaign.
The TPP creates a web of corporate laws that will dominate the global
economy, attorney Kevin Zeese of the group Popular Resistance, which has
mounted a long fight against the trade agreement, told me from Baltimore by
telephone. It is a global corporate coup détat. Corporations will become
more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to
serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with
corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion
that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised,
which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.
The agreement is the product of six years of work by global capitalists from
banks, insurance companies, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and other corporations.
It was written by them [the corporations], it is for them and it will serve
them, Zeese said of the TPP. It will hurt domestic businesses and small
businesses. The buy-American provisions will disappear. Local communities
will not be allowed to build buy-local campaigns. The thrust of the
agreement is the privatization and commodification of everything. The
agreement has built within it a deep antipathy to state-supported or
state-owned enterprises. It gives away what is left of our democracy to the
World Trade Organization.
The economist David Rosnick, in a report on the TPP by the Center for
Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), estimated that under the trade
agreement only the top 10 percent of U.S. workers would see their wages
increase. Rosnick wrote that the real wages of middle-income U.S. workers
(from the 35th percentile to the 80th percentile) would decline under the
TPP. NAFTA, contributing to a decline in manufacturing jobs (now only 9
percent of the economy), has forced workers into lower-paying service jobs
and resulted in a decline in real wages of between 12 and 17 percent. The
TPP would only accelerate this process, Rosnick concluded.
This is a continuation of the global race to the bottom, Dr. Margaret
Flowers, also from Popular Resistance and a candidate for the U.S. Senate,
said from Baltimore in a telephone conversation with me. Corporations are
free to move to countries that have the lowest labor standards. This drives
down high labor standards here. It means a decimation of industries and
unions. It means an accelerated race to the bottom, which we must rise up to
stop.
In Malaysia one-third of tech workers are essentially slaves, Zeese said.
In Vietnam the minimum wage is 35 cents an hour. Once these countries are
part of the trade agreement U.S. workers are put in a very difficult
position.
Fifty-one percent of working Americans now make less than $30,000 a year, a
new study by the Social Security Administration reported. Forty percent are
making less than $20,000 a year. The federal government considers a family
of four living on an income of less than $24,250 to be in poverty.
Half of American workers earn essentially the poverty level, Zeese said.
This agreement only accelerates this trend. I dont see how American
workers are going to cope.
The assault on the American workforce by NAFTAwhich was established under
the Clinton administration in 1994 and which at the time promised creation
of 200,000 net jobs a year in the United Stateshas been devastating. NAFTA
has led to a $181 billion trade deficit with Mexico and Canada and the loss
of at least 1 million U.S. jobs, according to a report by Public Citizen.
The flooding of the Mexican market with cheap corn by U.S. agro-businesses
drove down the price of Mexican corn and saw 1 million to 3 million poor
Mexican farmers go bankrupt and lose their small farms. Many of them crossed
the border into the United States in a desperate effort to find work.
Obama has misled the public throughout this process, Dr. Flowers said. He
claimed that environmental groups were supportive of the agreement because
it provided environmental protections, and this has now been proven false.
He told us that it would create 650,000 jobs, and this has now been proven
false. He calls this a 21st century trade agreement, but it actually rolls
back progress made in Bush-era trade agreements. The most recent model of a
21st century trade agreement is the Korean free trade agreement. That was
supposed to create 140,000 U.S. jobs. But what we saw within a couple years
was a loss of about 70,000 jobs and a larger trade deficit with Korea. This
agreement [the TPP] is sold to us with the same deceits that were used to
sell us NAFTA and other trade agreements.
The agreement, in essence, becomes global law. Any agreements over carbon
emissions by countries made through the United Nations are effectively
rendered null and void by the TPP.
Trade agreements are binding, Flowers said. They supersede any of the
nonbinding agreements made by the United Nations Climate Change Conference
that might come out of Paris.
There is more than enough evidence from past trade agreements to indicate
where the TPPoften called NAFTA on steroidswill lead. It is part of the
inexorable march by corporations to wrest from us the ability to use
government to defend the public and to build social and political
organizations that promote the common good. Our corporate masters seek to
turn the natural world and human beings into malleable commodities that will
be used and exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Trade agreements are the
tools being used to achieve this subjugation. The only response left is
open, sustained and defiant popular revolt.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
The Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_most_brazen_corporate_power_grab_in_
american_history_20151106/
Posted on Nov 6, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A 2014 protest in Tokyo against the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
(Shizuo Kambayashi / AP)
The release Thursday of the 5,544-page text of the Trans-Pacific
Partnershipa trade and investment agreement involving 12 countries
comprising nearly 40 percent of global outputconfirms what even its most
apocalyptic critics feared.
The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North
American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in
American history, Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in
Washington, D.C. It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of
government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These
tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to
be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The
TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance
in defiance of our domestic laws.
The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in
Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all
public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal
Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and
utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy.
The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on
the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.
These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup détat along
with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced
to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to
protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and
find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional
democratic institutions. The agreementsfilled with jargon, convoluted
technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse
phrasingcan be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.
The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a
range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade
tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers,
environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking
redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become
sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.
The Sierra Club issued a statement after the release of the TPP text saying
that the deal is rife with polluter giveaways that would undermine decades
of environmental progress, threaten our climate, and fail to adequately
protect wildlife because big polluters helped write the deal.
If there is no sustained popular uprising to prevent the passage of the TPP
in Congress this spring we will be shackled by corporate power. Wages will
decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our
few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be
accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or
control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public
services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public
education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by
for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including
pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be
drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health
care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will
probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault.
Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including
over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world
into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every
pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding
projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or
consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the
investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and
expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in
compensation from offending governments for impeding their right to
further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace
the common good.
Given the bankruptcy of our political classincluding amoral politicians
such as Hillary Clinton, who is denouncing the TPP during the presidential
campaign but whose unwavering service to corporate capitalism assures her
fealty to her corporate backersthe trade agreement has a good chance of
becoming law. And because the Obama administration won fast-track authority,
a tactic designed by the Nixon administration to subvert democratic debate,
President Obama will be able to sign the agreement before it goes to
Congress.
The TPP, because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of
public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House
and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it
is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding
floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress
cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It
can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.
There will be a mass mobilization Nov. 14 through 18 in Washington to begin
the push to block the TPP. Rising up to stop the TPP is a far, far better
investment of our time and energy than engaging in the empty political
theater that passes for a presidential campaign.
The TPP creates a web of corporate laws that will dominate the global
economy, attorney Kevin Zeese of the group Popular Resistance, which has
mounted a long fight against the trade agreement, told me from Baltimore by
telephone. It is a global corporate coup détat. Corporations will become
more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to
serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with
corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion
that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised,
which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.
The agreement is the product of six years of work by global capitalists from
banks, insurance companies, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and other corporations.
It was written by them [the corporations], it is for them and it will serve
them, Zeese said of the TPP. It will hurt domestic businesses and small
businesses. The buy-American provisions will disappear. Local communities
will not be allowed to build buy-local campaigns. The thrust of the
agreement is the privatization and commodification of everything. The
agreement has built within it a deep antipathy to state-supported or
state-owned enterprises. It gives away what is left of our democracy to the
World Trade Organization.
The economist David Rosnick, in a report on the TPP by the Center for
Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), estimated that under the trade
agreement only the top 10 percent of U.S. workers would see their wages
increase. Rosnick wrote that the real wages of middle-income U.S. workers
(from the 35th percentile to the 80th percentile) would decline under the
TPP. NAFTA, contributing to a decline in manufacturing jobs (now only 9
percent of the economy), has forced workers into lower-paying service jobs
and resulted in a decline in real wages of between 12 and 17 percent. The
TPP would only accelerate this process, Rosnick concluded.
This is a continuation of the global race to the bottom, Dr. Margaret
Flowers, also from Popular Resistance and a Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid., said from Baltimore in a telephone conversation with me.
Corporations are free to move to countries that have the lowest labor
standards. This drives down high labor standards here. It means a decimation
of industries and unions. It means an accelerated race to the bottom, which
we must rise up to stop.
In Malaysia one-third of tech workers are essentially slaves, Zeese said.
In Vietnam the minimum wage is 35 cents an hour. Once these countries are
part of the trade agreement U.S. workers are put in a very difficult
position.
Fifty-one percent of working Americans now make less than $30,000 a year, a
new study by the Social Security Administration reported. Forty percent are
making less than $20,000 a year. The federal government considers a family
of four living on an income of less than $24,250 to be in poverty.
Half of American workers earn essentially the poverty level, Zeese said.
This agreement only accelerates this trend. I dont see how American
workers are going to cope.
The assault on the American workforce by NAFTAwhich was established under
the Clinton administration in 1994 and which at the time promised creation
of 200,000 net jobs a year in the United Stateshas been devastating. NAFTA
has led to a $181 billion trade deficit with Mexico and Canada and the loss
of at least 1 million U.S. jobs, according to a report by Public Citizen.
The flooding of the Mexican market with cheap corn by U.S. agro-businesses
drove down the price of Mexican corn and saw 1 million to 3 million poor
Mexican farmers go bankrupt and lose their small farms. Many of them crossed
the border into the United States in a desperate effort to find work.
Obama has misled the public throughout this process, Dr. Flowers said. He
claimed that environmental groups were supportive of the agreement because
it provided environmental protections, and this has now been proven false.
He told us that it would create 650,000 jobs, and this has now been proven
false. He calls this a 21st century trade agreement, but it actually rolls
back progress made in Bush-era trade agreements. The most recent model of a
21st century trade agreement is the Korean free trade agreement. That was
supposed to create 140,000 U.S. jobs. But what we saw within a couple years
was a loss of about 70,000 jobs and a larger trade deficit with Korea. This
agreement [the TPP] is sold to us with the same deceits that were used to
sell us NAFTA and other trade agreements.
The agreement, in essence, becomes global law. Any agreements over carbon
emissions by countries made through the United Nations are effectively
rendered null and void by the TPP.
Trade agreements are binding, Flowers said. They supersede any of the
nonbinding agreements made by the United Nations Climate Change Conference
that might come out of Paris.
There is more than enough evidence from past trade agreements to indicate
where the TPPoften called NAFTA on steroidswill lead. It is part of the
inexorable march by corporations to wrest from us the ability to use
government to defend the public and to build social and political
organizations that promote the common good. Our corporate masters seek to
turn the natural world and human beings into malleable commodities that will
be used and exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Trade agreements are the
tools being used to achieve this subjugation. The only response left is
open, sustained and defiant popular revolt.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_most_brazen_corporate_power_grab_in_
american_history_20151106/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_most_brazen_corporate_power_grab_in_
american_history_20151106/
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