Supporters of the TransPacific Partnership said the text of the agreement needed to be kept secret because if the public knew what was in it they’d oppose it. So they did keep it secret (although leaks to Wikileaks gave us an idea of what it entailed) and voted to give Obama fast-track authority to negotiate the deal bypassing Congressional input. The TPP, written by corporations, will give them cheaper labor (many think reducing the US to a 3rd world country, ability to bypass labeling laws such as GMO laws, take away our internet freedom, and many other freedoms in every walk of life.
One of the most devastating blows to US sovereignty since the country’s founding was dealt today as the Senate handed President Obama his Trans-Pacific Partnership victory.
Despite massive opposition from the American people, Tea Party Republicans and a majority of Democrats, Obama was granted fast-track authority by a 60-38 vote.
Sections of the TPP published by Wikileaks have revealed the treaty’s vast influence over multiple areas including individual rights, internet freedom and even the rule of law itself. Unelected corporate boards and the President can now wield unprecedented control over almost every aspect of human activity.
“If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs,” Wikileaks’ Julian Assange wrote.
Secret TPP chapters regarding immigration also grant President Obama an even greater ability to erode the country’s Southern border.
“Packaged as a gift to the American people that will renew industry and make us more competitive, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a Trojan horse,” Zero Hedge noted on Monday. “It’s a coup by multinational corporations who want global subservience to their agenda. Buyer beware. Citizens beware.”
“Obama will be able to finalize all three of the Obamatrade deals, without any Congressional input…” notes Breitbart.
The TPP, which covers 12 countries and more than 40% of the world’s economy, will place North America under the same global government structure as the European Union, where laws are increasingly crafted outside of public influence.
Source: Infowars
The end result of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passed by a traitorous Congress will be to reduce America to a third world wasteland on par with Mexico where the median household income is $4,500.
The idea behind the so-called trade agreement is to replace and expand NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement passed by Bill Clinton.
“NAFTA was supposed to create 200,000 new jobs through increased exports to Mexico but, by 2010, growing trade deficits with Mexico had eliminated 682,900 U.S. jobs, with job losses in every U.S. state and congressional district,” write Robert E. Scott for the Economic Policy Institute.
NAFTA streamlined the process of moving manufacturing jobs from the United States to Mexico and eventually China and now Vietnam where the monthly salary is around $150 per month.
NAFTA resulted in the loss of around 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs and the TPP will dramatically increase the losses.
40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if the current trend deindustrializing America continues under TPP, notes Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University.
In addition to sending jobs offshore, the TPP will significantly decrease the wages of non-college degree workers.
Scott writes that “expanded trade with low-wage countries has reduced the annual wages of a typical worker by $1,800 per year. Given that there are roughly 100 million non-college-educated workers in the U.S. economy (about 70 percent of the labor force), the scale of wage losses suffered by this group translates to roughly $180 billion.”
“The TPP’s implications on the poor and working class of the United States are grave and serious. From information gathered thus far it is known that the TPP would drive down wages even further,” writes the Rev. Bruce Wright, President’s Commission on Ending Homelessness.
The corporate trade agreement will create a “potentially dramatic increase in poverty, unemployment, and homelessness due to decreasing wages, further joblessness, and increased health costs.”
The federal government’s Census Bureau reports half of the United States population is now living at or below the poverty line. Median household income adjusted for inflation has declined for five years in a row.
“During the four years that marked President Barack Obama’s first term in office, the real median income of American households dropped by $2,627 and the number of people in poverty increased by approximately 6,667,000, according to data released (today) by the Census Bureau,” CNSNews reported in September, 2013.
More than 50 percent of the population — 165 million of 308 million Americans — receive some sort of government assistance and the number of Americans on welfare has increased from 97 million to 107 million since Obama took office.
The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today.
The New Corporate Serfdom
This corporate drive to impoverish humanity and consolidate wealth and power is part of a process designed to reinvent and modernize the feudal system of the Middle Ages. The new serfdom now emerging will not simply control Europe, but the entire world under the rule of a globalist government.
In the Middle Ages under monarchical feudalism peasants were slaves who had no rights, were perniciously taxed, were forced to turn over the best part of their harvest to manorial lords, were not allowed to own oxen or horses, hunt (under penalty of death) and had to ask permission to move or get married. They were not allowed to own weapons.
As Daisy Luther notes, a return to this system is now emerging. From globalist trade agreements and corporate monopolization and ever increasing government regulation, today’s oligarchs are ushering in a return to serfdom.
“Agenda 21, a document devised by the United Nations, goes even further to separate the 90% from the 10%,” she writes. “In the name of tree-hugging largess, A-21 is quietly working to round up the peasants and place them in cities, with massive restrictions on their movement. Through public transit that only goes to certain places, A-21 is ‘keeping the peasants on the estate.’ People are shoehorned into tiny apartments with no opportunity to become self-sufficient and grow their own food. Using ‘national land’ (parks) requires payment in many areas. Even the collection and use of rainwater is being targeted by Agenda 21, sending the very clear message: WE OWN EVERYTHING.”
TPP is about the global elite not only owning everything but also reducing humanity to a state of grinding poverty. People on the edge of starvation and homelessness are less concerned with liberty and overthrowing the elite and their minions than merely surviving.
Source: Infowars
Comments once content of TPP was revealed on Jan 26, 2016:
‘President Obama has sold the American people a false bill of goods,’ says Friends of the Earth
(COMMONDREAMS) “Worse than anything we could’ve imagined.”
“An act of climate denial.”
“Giveaway to big agribusiness.”
“A death warrant for the open Internet.”
“Worst nightmare.”
“A disaster.”
As expert analysis of the long-shrouded, newly publicized Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) final text continued to roll out on Thursday, consensus formed around one fundamental assessment of the 12-nation pact: It’s worse than we thought.
“From leaks, we knew quite a bit about the agreement, but in chapter after chapter the final text is worse than we expected with the demands of the 500 official U.S. trade advisers representing corporate interests satisfied to the detriment of the public interest,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
In fact, Public Citizen charged, the TPP rolls back past public interest reforms to the U.S. trade model while expanding problematic provisions demanded by the hundreds of official U.S. corporate trade advisers who had a hand in the negotiations while citizens were left in the dark.
On issues ranging from climate change to food safety, from open Internet to access to medicines, the TPP “is a disaster,” declared Nick Dearden of Global Justice Now.
“Now that we’ve seen the full text, it turns out the job-killing TPP is worse than anything we could’ve imagined,” added Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America. “This agreement would push down wages, flood our nation with unsafe imported food, raise the price of life-saving medicine, all the while trading with countries where gays and single mothers can be stoned to death.”
‘Act of Climate Denial’
Major climate action groups, including 350.org and the Sierra Club, were quick to point out that the text was notable as much for what it didn’t say as what for what it did. “The TPP is an act of climate denial,” said 350 policy director Jason Kowalski on Thursday.“While the text is full of handouts to the fossil fuel industry, it doesn’t mention the words climate change once.”
What it does do, however, is give “fossil fuel companies the extraordinary ability to sue local governments that try and keep fossil fuels in the ground,” Kowalski continued. “If a province puts a moratorium on fracking, corporations can sue; if a community tries to stop a coal mine, corporations can overrule them. In short, these rules undermine countries’ ability to do what scientists say is the single most important thing we can do to combat the climate crisis: keep fossil fuels in the ground.”
Furthermore, Friends of the Earth (FOE) said in its response to the final text, the agreement “is designed to protect ‘free trade’ in dirty energy products such as tar sands oil, coal from the Powder River Basin, and liquefied natural gas shipped out of West Coast ports.” The result, FOE warned, will be “more climate change from carbon emissions across the Pacific.”
“President Obama has sold the American people a false bill of goods,” said FOE president Erich Pica. “The Trans-Pacific Partnership fails President Obama’s pledge to make the TPP an environmentally sound trade agreement.”
International observers were no less critical. Matthew Rimmer, a professor of intellectual property and innovation law at Australia’s Queensland University of Technology and trade policy expert, told Fairfax Media it looks like U.S. trade officials have been “greenwashing” the agreement.
“The environment chapter confirms some of the worst nightmares of environmental groups and climate activists,”Rimmer told the news outlet. “The agreement has poor coverage of environmental issues, and weak enforcement mechanisms. There is only limited coverage of biodiversity, conservation, marine capture fisheries, and trade in environmental services.”
‘Attack Sensible Food Safety Rules’
With its provisions that tie the hands of food inspectors at international borders and give more power to biotechnology firms,
“The TPP is a giveaway to big agribusiness and food companies,” said Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch executive director. Such corporate entities, she said, want to use trade deals like the TPP “to attack sensible food safety rules, weaken the inspection of imported food, and block efforts to strengthen U.S. food safety standards.”
Last month, the Center for Food Safety outlined the top five reasons “eaters should be worried about Obama’s new trade deal.” At the top of the list was the TPP’s ability to undermine efforts to label GMO foods. “More broadly,” the Center wrote in October, “any U.S. food safety rules on labeling, pesticides, or additives that [are] higher than international standards could be subject to challenge as ‘illegal trade barriers.’”
Indeed, according to Food & Water Watch, the final text released Thursday indicates that under a TPP regime,
“agribusiness and biotech seed companies can now more easily use trade rules to challenge countries that ban GMO imports, test for GMO contamination, do not promptly approve new GMO crops or even require GMO labeling.”
“The TPP food safety and labeling provisions are worse than expected and bad news for American consumers and farmers,” said Hauter. “Congress must reject this raw deal that handcuffs food safety inspectors and exposes everyone to a rising tide of unsafe imported food.”
‘Death Warrant for the Open Internet’
“If U.S. Congress signs this agreement despite its blatant corruption, they’ll be signing a death warrant for the open Internet and putting the future of free speech in peril,” stated Evan Greer, Fight for the Future (FFTF) campaign director.
Among the “several sections of grave concern” identified by FFTF are those covering trademarks, pharmaceutical patents, copyright protections, and “trade secrets.”
Section J, which addresses Internet Service Providers (ISPs) “is one of the worst sections that impacts the openness of the Internet,” according to the digital rights group, which explained further:
“This section requires Internet Service Providers to play ‘copyright cops’ and assist in the enforcement of copyright takedown requests — but it does not require countries to have a system for counter-notices, so a U.S company could order a website to be taken down in another country, and there would be no way for the person running that website to refute their claims if, say, it was a political criticism website using copyrighted content in a manner consistent with fair use.
Section J makes it so ISPs are not liable for any wrongdoing when they take down content—incentivizing them to err on the side of copyright holders rather than on the side of free speech.”
‘Public Review Is Needed’
Like-minded groups in Canada, where newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been on the job for all of one day, are sounding similar alarms.
Citing concerns about how the deal would impact human rights, health, employment, environment, and democracy, the Council of Canadians on Thursday demanded a full public consultation—including an independent human rights, economic, and environmental review of the document—before Trudeau goes any further. The group expressed particular concern over investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions, which allow corporations to sue states for lost profits, asking that they be excised from the deal.
“Trudeau is under a lot of pressure to adopt this deal as soon as possible, with calls already coming in from U.S. President Barack Obama and Japanese [Prime Minister] Shinto Abe,” acknowledged the Council’s national chairperson, Maude Barlow. “But a thorough public review is needed before he can establish whether the TPP is truly in Canada’s interest.”
Or anyone else’s, for that matter. You can read the full text of the TPP here.
Pasted from <http://theantimedia.org/our-worst-nightmares-confirmed-full-text-of-tpp-finally-revealed/>
Recommended Books:
Trans-Pacific Partnership: An Assessment: The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between 12 Pacific Rim countries has generated the most intensive political debate about the role of trade in the United States in a generation. The TPP is one of the broadest and most progressive free trade agreements since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The essays in this Policy Analysis provide estimates of the TPP’s benefits and costs and analyze more than 20 issues in the agreement, including environmental and labor standards, tariff schedules, investment and competition policy, intellectual property, ecommerce, services and financial services, government procurement, dispute settlement, and agriculture. Through extensive analysis of the TPP text, PIIE scholars present an indispensable and detailed “reader’s guide” that also sheds light on the agreement’s merits and shortcomings.
Bad Samaritans was an introduction to open-minded economists and political free-thinkers to Ha-Joon Chang’s theories of the dangers of free-trade. With irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a keen grasp of history, Chang blasts holes in the “World Is Flat” orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman and others who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today’s economic superpowers-from the U.S. to Britain to his native Korea-all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry, a fact conveniently forgotten now that they want to compete in foreign markets. Chang’s cage-rattling, contrarian history of global capital appeals to readers new to economic theory as well as members of the old school looking for a fresh take.
Growing international trade has helped lift living standards around the world, and yet free trade is always under attack. Critics complain that trade forces painful economic adjustments, such as plant closings and layoffs of workers, and charge that the World Trade Organization serves the interests of corporations, undercuts domestic environmental regulations, and erodes America’s sovereignty. Why has global trade–and trade agreements such as NAFTA–become so controversial? Does free trade deserve its bad reputation?
In Free Trade under Fire, Douglas Irwin sweeps aside the misconceptions that litter the debate over trade and gives the reader a clear understanding of the issues involved. This fourth edition has been thoroughly updated to include the most recent policy developments and the latest research findings on the impact of trade.
