The multinational corporation, Maneato, the largest food concern on the planet, develops and markets a new pesticide. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reviews the research and clinical trials, deems the product unsafe for human consumption, and recommends the ban of its use in this country, and on all imports that contain this chemical.
A Congressional committee studies and endorses the recommendation. A bill is introduced in the House, and our elected representatives vote the ban into law. The bill is ratified in the Senate, and under intense public pressure, the President signs it.
Maneato files a lawsuit against the United States, but instead of wending its way through the U.S. court system, the suit is heard by an international tribunal of lawyers, many of whom are paid lobbyists of Maneato. The tribunal rules in favor of the suit, and awards Maneato tens of billions of dollars in lost potential profits. The United States cannot appeal this decision because it is bound by treaty. The costs are passed down to the American taxpayer. Failure to comply will result in mandated economic sanctions that could cripple our fragile economy.
This is the scenario presented by the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive, sweeping trade agreement between the U.S. and eleven other Pacific Rim nations, representing 40% of the global economy. The talks, started under President Barack Obama in 2010, have been conducted in secret and labeled as Classified. It is only now, as the final wording of the treaty is hammered out, that four out of the twenty-eight major provisions, have been brought before the public by Wikileaks.
Like the most tawdry magician, the U.S. government is a master of slight-of-hand and the art of misdirection. While debate swirled around a piece of cloth, incorrectly referred to as the Confederate flag, Congress and the President, with little note by the mainstream media, quietly and quickly passed a nefarious piece of legislation which will affect the future of our country and of our children for generations to come.
The TPP locks in place the Democrats' agenda of global socialism, and the Republicans' agenda of enabling the rich. Under the guise of free trade and open markets, with such diverse countries as Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam, the bill contains, hidden in its voluminous depths, certain key provisions that hand the American taxpayer's head to corporate kingpins on a silver platter.
The text of the treaty has not been made public, but Wikileaks has published several leaked documents since 2013. Global health professionals, Internet freedom activists, environmentalists, organised labor, advocacy groups, and elected officials have criticized and protested against the treaty, because of the secrecy of negotiations, the agreement's expansive scope, and controversial clauses.
According to the website of the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), the sweeping bill addresses such issues as "competition, co-operation and capacity building, cross-border services, customs, e-commerce, energy, the environment, financial services, government procurement, intellectual property, investment, labor, legal issues, market access for goods, rules of origin, sanitary and phytosanitary standards, technical barriers to trade, telecommunications, textiles and apparel," and most importantly, trade remedies.
Commenting in the New Republic, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, Lori Wallach, said:
We consider it inappropriate to elevate an individual investor or company to equal status with a nation-state to privately enforce a public treaty between two sovereign countries. ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement) gives extraordinary new privileges and powers and rights to just one interest.
The basic reality of ISDS [is] it provides foreign investors alone access to non-U.S. courts to pursue claims against the U.S. government on the basis of broader substantive rights than U.S. firms are afforded under U.S. law.
Countries would be obliged to conform all their domestic laws and regulations to the TPP's rules, even limiting how governments could spend their tax dollars. The investor-state dispute settlement mechanism can be used to attack domestic public interest laws. In March of this year, Wikileaks released the TPP's Investment Chapter. The accord would grant the power to global corporations to sue governments in tribunals organized by the World Bank or the United Nations to obtain taxpayer compensation for loss of expected future profits due to government actions.
United States Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) asserted:
The majority of Congress is being kept in the dark as to the substance of the TPP negotiations, while representatives of U.S. corporations — like Halliburton, Chevron, PHRMA, Comcast, and the Motion Picture Association of America — are being consulted and made privy to details of the agreement. More than two months after receiving the proper security credentials, my staff is still barred from viewing the details of the proposals that the USTR is advancing. We hear that the process by which TPP is being negotiated has been a model of transparency. I disagree with that statement.
Wikipedia states that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has voiced concerns over the chapter on intellectual property, covering copyright, trademarks, and patents. In the U.S. this is likely to further entrench controversial aspects of U.S. copyright law (such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and restrict the ability of Congress to engage in domestic law reform to meet the evolving IP needs of American citizens and the innovative technology sector. Standardization of copyright provisions include obligations for countries to expand copyright terms, restrict fair use, adopt criminal sanctions for copyright infringement that is done even without a commercial motivation (for example, file sharing of copyrighted digital media), place greater liability on Internet intermediaries, escalate protections for digital locks, and create new threats for journalists and whistleblowers.
The twelve nation, binding treaty has been written by a core group of 600 "advisors," 500 of which are highly paid corporate lobbyists.
Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) was permitted to review portions of the documents under an FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request, but was issued a National Security gag order regarding its contents. He did have this to say:
The result will soon be evident to everybody when the agreement does get released, you'll see massive giveaways of our sovereignty, massive efforts to undermine the middle-class in this country, massive efforts to keep us from making decisions we need to do to make ourselves safe, to keep ourselves healthy, and to actually have the kind of life we want to have.
Why? Because we've given the entire process over to special interests. It's no longer even properly called a trade agreement, it's an anti-sovereignty agreement. It has very little if anything to do with trade at this point.
Curiously, the only time in his two-term administration that President Obama has been able to work with his Republican opponents is in "fast tracking" the TPP.
Let's be clear on this. The TPP as it now stands contains over 3000 pages and one MILLION words of binding regulations. To put this is perspective, War and Peace, the longest piece of literature ever written, is approximately half a million words; the Bible, including both the Old and New Testaments, in English, is approximately 750,000 words; and the complete works of William Shakespeare consist of 884,647 words.
The treaty is a top down declaration of corporate global governance. This governance is based on "stakeholder's" rights. The stakeholders are major investors, primarily banks, Wall Street firms, and multinational corporations.
What makes the ISDS so insidious is that governments, and the people they represent (that's us folks), no longer have a say over our own lives. Take the case of Canada, which recently passed a ban on fracking. According to the terms of the TPP, gas and oil companies can bring a suit before the international tribunal, and if the suit is successful, Canada would be forced to allow fracking, or pay huge sums to the energy companies for loss of potential future profits.
Peter Brabeck, the CEO of Nestle, says he believes water should not be a public right, but a commodity to be bought and sold like a candy bar. Nestle is the 27th largest company in the world and does over $65 billion a year in business, much of it in the sale of bottled water. This is what he had to say:
Water is of course the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion is that as a human being you should have a right to water. And the other view says water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally I think it’s better to give foodstuff a market value.
Under the terms of the TPP, Nestle could file suit against the U.S. compelling the government to sell Nestle the rights to our underground aquifers, and even the Great Lakes. Water would still flow from the tap, but at ten times the rate municipal governments now charge.
Nestle Waters' slogan is, "The Healthy Hydration Company." That could soon be, "The Wealthy Hydration Company."
These privatization measures would be financed by internationally chartered banks, such as the Credit Suisse Group, a leading global financial services company headquartered in Zurich. The global bank, in a negotiated plea agreement with the U.S. Justice Department, pleaded guilty in May, 2014 to one felony count of conspiring to aid tax evasion in a scheme that “spanned decades.” Credit Suisse also agreed to pay $2.6 billion in penalties. Credit Suisse has been investigated for other money laundering activities.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made these remarks:
I've come to the floor today to ask a fundamental question. Who will benefit from the TPP? American workers, consumers, small businesses, taxpayers, or the biggest multinational corporations in the world?
This provision [ISDS] fundamentally tilts the playing field further in favor of big multinational corporations. Worse yet, it undermines U.S. sovereignty. ISDS allows foreign companies to challenge American laws and potentially pick up huge payouts from taxpayers without ever stepping foot in an American court. Now, here's how it works. Imagine the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline. We ban it because we believe it is dangerous for people's health or harmful to the environment. If a foreign company that makes this toxic chemical wants to sell it in the U.S. it would normally have to challenge that in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. court and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the company wins, the ruling cannot be challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require the American taxpayers to cough up millions or even billions of dollars in damages.
ISDS has the power to impose gigantic fines, but it doesn't have independent judges. Instead, it has highly paid corporate lawyers who go back and forth between representing corporations one day, and sitting in judgement of corporations the next. We should have real doubts about how likely it is that a lawyer trying to attract high-paying corporate clients will rule against those corporations when it's his or her turn to sit in the judge's seat.
Here's some examples of recent cases under various treaties with ISDS provisions. A French company sued Egypt because Egypt raised its minimum wage. A Swedish company sued Germany because Germany decided to phase out nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster. A Dutch company sued the Czech Republic because the Czech Republic didn't bail out a bank that the Dutch company partially owned.
And American corporations are getting in on the action too. Philip Morris is trying to use ISDS to stop Uruguay from implementing new tobacco regulations aimed at cutting domestic smoking rates.
This isn't a partisan issue. Now, I don't often agree with the conservative Cato Institute, and I suspect they don't often agree with me, but this morning, the head of Cato's trade policy program said that ISDS, and I quote, "raises serious questions about democratic accountability, sovereignty, checks and balances, and the separation of power."
Giving foreign corporations special rights to challenge our laws outside of our legal system is a bad deal. So long as TPP includes investor state dispute settlement, the only winners will be international corporations.
Another major provision of the TPP involves the Internet. Incredible new controls would be put in place that have chilling implications for the free flow of information and the accumulated knowledge of mankind. This is not over-dramatization. Let me give you just two personal examples that have occurred under existing rules.
Shortly after I became ill in 2009 and had to leave my job, I went to boot up my laptop one morning, only to find I could not access the Internet. A blank screen displayed the message that I needed to contact my Internet Service Provider. A Mediacom representative informed me that we were in violation of their copyright infringement regulations for downloading protected movies. The movies were some sort of teenage comedies. I stated emphatically that we did not download any movies, and certainly not the movies in question. The representative said most likely someone accessed our wi-fi, but we were still responsible for any activity attributed to our account.
We went through Mediacom's draconian appeal process, but our appeal was denied. As Mediacom was the only ISP in our area, were were effectively locked out. We further learned that even if there were another ISP we could go with, Mediacom placed our name on a blacklist. And not only were we banned by name, but no one at our address could establish an account without proof of change of ownership.
We were devastated. As days dragged into weeks we came to realize how dependent modern life was on Internet access. Things we took for granted - banking, email, social media, online shopping, Google - were suddenly gone. Especially with my home confinement, I felt isolated, angry, adrift, depressed, helpless. I was actually in a state of shock from digital withdrawal.
My wife contacted our state representative and explained the situation. Coincidentally, he sat on the telecommunications oversight committee in the state capitol, and was able to get Mediacom to reverse its decision. We expressed our gratitude for his efforts on our behalf, but those few weeks made me realize how much control these monopolistic entities have over our personal lives.
The other example happened just recently. I am an ally of the Facebook page "Have A Gay Day." The moderator offers a safe haven for people in the LGBT community to share thoughts, ask questions, and seek camaraderie. In response to the Supreme Court decision on marriage equality, the mod suggested that members add a new friend in a gesture of togetherness. A young woman named Gabrielle sent out friend requests to several people who regularly posted on the site, including me.
I confirmed her request and popped over to her Facebook page. I quickly learned that she is twenty years old and lives in West Virginia. From her posts, it was obvious she was a confused young adult, living in turmoil. I also saw a post where she said Facebook warned her she was in violation of their spam protocols, but she didn't understand what that meant. Several people offered explanations, so I didn't leave a comment.
I logged on the next morning, only to find her Facebook account had been deleted. This is a vulnerable young woman, who reached out to a community for support and friendship, and this is what happened to her. I can only imagine from my own experience what she must be feeling - cut off, isolated, friendless, in shock and grief. I even googled her name to see if there were any reports of her suicide.
I have no doubt that Facebook has a seat at the TPP table.
ISPs would become mandated copyright enforcers. Fair Use licences and exceptions would be eliminated. A few days ago, the bassist for the classic rock group Yes passed away at a relatively young age after a long battle with cancer. I jumped over to YouTube and shared the link to one of their most famous songs on my Timeline. Under the tighter controls, that link on YouTube would not even be there, and if it was, posting it would have counted as one strike against me.
If you're throwing a Disney themed party for your three year old, don't even think about including a picture of Ariel or Cinderella on Pinterest.
The terms of the TPP strengthen the three-strike rule. Under the provisions that have come to light, once banned, your social media accounts, blogs, and websites would be immediately and permanently deleted without recourse. Years of work could be gone in the blink of an eye. It has been suggested that buried within the voluminous pages of the treaty, arcane and vague rules could exist, allowing any corporation to pressure a government into banning virtually anyone who crosses their path. The effect of this on free speech and investigative journalism is only too apparent.
Although it is a bit out there, even for me, one news source that I follow pointed out that the Internet was originally developed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and that the plan all along was to have the sum of human knowledge digitally uploaded, so the powers-that-be could, in one fell swoop (or one swell foop, depending who you talk to) control that knowledge.
This has already been a long blog, and if you're reading this sentence, I am grateful that you've stuck with me this far. I simply feel this may be a pivotal moment in history, and I ask you to follow me just a bit more.
Other sections of the TPP include granting perpetual patent rights on new medications, thereby preventing lower cost generics from reaching the market; and the patenting of individual patient's genes, thus stymieing independent research.
Negotiated monopolies for select multinational companies would freeze out competition by small businesses. Independent grocers, organic producers, and family farms would be crushed to extinction under the weight of onerous regulation and selective enforcement.
Take for example, this gimmick from the Monsanto playbook. Monsanto sells their genetically modified seed to farmer A. Farmer B plants his crop of non-Mansanto seed in his nearby fields. Monsanto goes into court and obtains a warrant to test farmer B's crops. If one plant shows that pollen from farmer A's Monsanto seed is present, Monsanto has the right to seize farmer B's entire crop, AND his land.
Elizabeth Kucinich, Policy Director for the Center for Food Safety reported in 2014 that:
Monsanto imposes contracts and wields patents that forbid farmers from saving seeds year-to-year, a practice that has been part of agriculture for centuries. They demand farmers buy new, expensive seeds each year. And if a farmer stops using Monsanto's patented seeds, they are at risk of breaching their contract. Sprouts from patented seeds planted in a previous growing season can "volunteer," or grow spontaneously the following year, even in a new crop variety. If discovered, the farmer could face penalties for patent infringement.
Monsanto has undertaken an unprecedented litigation campaign against American farmers to end the practice of seed-saving and so maximize its profits. They investigate approximately 500 farmers each year who are suspected of patent infringement. As of November 2012, 410 farmers and 56 small businesses and farming operations have been involved in court cases involving alleged patent infringement, and have paid the company nearly $24 million in damages, a sum that does not include additional litigation costs like attorney or witness fees. While Monsanto has taken action against thousands of farmers, the vast majority reach pre-trial settlements to avoid facing the multinational giant in court. When these pretrial settlements are included, farmers have paid Monsanto an estimated $85 to $160 million.
The report also revealed the dominance that large firms and their genetically altered crops have in the U.S. and global market. It found that 53% of the world's commercial seed market is controlled by just three firms – Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta. Genetically-altered commodity crops have become overwhelmingly dominant. In the U.S. some 93% of soybeans and 86% of corn crops come from such seeds.
It would actually become illegal for countries to include GMO labeling on packaging of consumer products.
Legislation imposed after the trillion dollar bailout, at taxpayer expense, in 2008, of banks and Wall Street firms would be rolled back, allowing even riskier derivative trading that could put taxpayers on the hook for ever larger bailouts.
It should be obvious by now that the U.S. government, under pressure from the U.N. and multinational corporations has pursued a program of systematically dumbing down the U.S. populace, making us sick, and dividing us with "false flag" hot button issues, in an attempt to lower the standard of living that America has come to enjoy, to bring us more in compliance with the rest of the world.
The TPP, through the outsourcing of jobs to countries like Vietnam, where workers earn as little as 56 cents an hour, and the automation of domestic jobs, will eliminate our middle-class. Seniors, the poor, the disabled, and military veterans all fall under the umbrella of U.S. entitlement programs. Once everyone is forced to survive on government largess, we can be socially engineered into accepting the new reality of the haves and the have nots.
In an article published today, journalist Claire Moser reports that just in time for the Fourth of July, the Koch brothers are pushing their "No More National Parks" campaign. An op-ed piece in the New York Times advocates for the privatization of America’s national parks and other public lands.
Under privatization, our treasured conservation areas, including the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, would be open to oil drilling, mining, and logging companies, with the lodges and most pristine environments reserved for the super wealthy.
Under the guise of reining in taxes, the op-ed states, "User fees are based on the idea that those who use a resource should bear the cost of maintaining it. We all pay for federal lands through taxes, but we do not all use them. Fees, not taxes, are a more equitable means of financing maintenance."
In other words, charge more to access the parks. Based on the costs of managing the land, the fees would rise well beyond the means of most taxpayers. The piece continues, "Fees also provide important information about which sites are most popular, and user fees allow federal land managers to know what their customers want." Essentially, the rich patrons would dictate how the parks were run. The piece recommends, "price caps on user fees should be eliminated and the authority to collect entrance fees should be extended."
According to the terms of the TPP, "stakeholders" - private investors, or a foreign based company - could sue the U.S. in an international tribunal to force us to sell our heritage down the river.
In an article on ThinkProgress titled, "Jeb Bush’s Favorite Author Rejects Democracy, Says The Hyper-Rich Should Seize Power," Dr. Charles Murray states, "The emergence of many billion-dollar-plus private fortunes over the last three decades has enabled the private sector to take on ambitious national or even international tasks that formerly could be done only by nation-states.”
The ultra-rich will sneer from the decks of mega-yachts as the rest of us sink or swim in turbulent, poisoned seas. While the new world and the old world become indistinct from the third world, the very few, and the future heirs of their dynasties, will bathe in cream while we claw and scratch at each other to lick the whey off the ground.
Also, remember, this entire blog is based on the four out twenty-eight sections of the TPP, that have been made public. In other words, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Don't take my word for it, do your own research (while you still can).
This has nothing to do with conspiracy theories. What would make you think this is not what's happening? Do you trust these mega-business people and their companies to do what's best for us? Do you believe they're not in bed with the politicians, lying on mattresses stuffed with money? Do their past actions and spoken words demonstrate, in any way, that they give a rat's ass for us?
My family says I'm getting worked up about nothing. That I'm focusing on the most extreme views. They say these things probably won't happen, but with stakes this high, is "probably won't" good enough?
(This would count as one strike against me
for copyright infringement)
*Title taken from a quote by journalist Lee Ann McAdoo
