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LD813HF_FINAL.qxd:1308Lowdown 24/7/13 7:43 PM Page 1 VOLUME15 NUMBER 8 AUGUST 2013 The My administration is committed ❛❛to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. ❜❜ ——PRESIDENT OBAMA, January 26, 2009 Memo to Executive branch officials WRITTEN BY JIM HIGHTOWER PUBLISHER, PHILLIP FRAZER Both Bush & Obama have kept negotiations secret about this nuclearized NAFTA The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not about free trade. It’s a corporate coup d’état—against us! IN 2002, IT WAS REPORTED that British Prime Minister Stop making sense Tony Blair had told a friend an amusing tale about our man Imagine the uproar if President Obama and Congress tried to George W. Bush. It seems that the two of them and French pass a bill to outlaw such “preferential procurement” policies, sum- marily cancelling our democratic right to decide where to make pub- President Jacques Chirac had gotten into an economics lic purchases. I’d get pretty PO’d, wouldn’t you? And what if they also discussion, after which George supposedly confided to proposed that foreign corporations in Brunei, New Zealand, Vietnam, Tony that he was decidedly unimpressed with Jacques’ and other nations must be given the right to make the sale on any and all products purchased with our tax dollars? That’d set my hair views: “The problem with the French,” Bush scoffed, on fire! “is that they don’t have a word for ’entrepreneur.’” The American people would never stand for this brazen affront to our sovereignty, so I can assure you that Obama and Congress will ’s head has always been a no-fly-zone for factual definitely NOT be proposing any such thing. Not directly, that is. reality. However, what would boggle his mind even Instead, their hope is to tiptoe it around us. The nullification of more than the fact that we Americans filched that our people’s right to direct expenditures of our own tax dollars is word from the French, is the reality that government but one of the horror stories being quietly packed into a political- is not quite the entrepreneur-devouring ogre (Mon and-economic bombshell benignly labeled TPP —the Trans-Pacific dieu! George, another French word!) that Bush’s Partnership. cartoonish dogma paints it to be. Actually, govern- This thing is a supersized and nuclearized NAFTA, the 1994 trade ment-at-its-bestW can be an entrepreneur’s scam rammed through Congress by Bill Clinton, buddy. One surprising place to see this Wall Street’s Robert Rubin, and the entire buddyship at work is in one of the most corporate establishment. They promised mundane of government offices: that the “glories of globalization” would Procurement (i.e., the Department of shower prosperity across our land. Buying Stuff). They lied. Corporations got the Where does your mayor, gold. We got the shaft—thou- school board, governor, or any sands of factories closed, mil- other “public shopper” go to lions of middle-class jobs went purchase fixtures, food, furni- south, and the economies of ture, ferns, and whatnot? hundreds of towns and cities Where I live, various agencies (including Detroit) were hol- have Buy Austin, Buy Texas, lowed out. (Most Mexicans got Buy American, Buy Green, Buy the NAFTA shafta, too. US grain Sweatshop-Free, and other tar- traders like ADM dumped corn into geted policies that apply our tax dol- Mexico, wiping out millions of peas- lars to our values. This sensible idea has ant farmers’ livelihoods, and thousands swept across the country, most likely of local businesses were crushed when including where you live, and these agency pur- Walmart invaded with its Chinese-made wares.) chases add up to a big financial boost for start-ups, Twenty years later, the corporate gang that stuck us independents, women-owned, and other homegrown enterprises. with NAFTA is back, hoping to fool us with an even more destructive Rather than buying everything from Walmart or China (excuse the multinational deal. (This calls for another immortal quote from redundancy there)—thus shipping truckloads and boatloads of cash George W: “Fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you out of our communities—plow that public money back into the home can’t get fooled again.” Well, you know what he meant). turf for grassroots economic growth and the flowering of local jobs. This time we really must pay attention, because TPP is not just LD813HF_FINAL.qxd:1308Lowdown 24/7/13 7:43 PM Page 2 THE PEOPLE GET WISE 2| Hightower Lowdown August 2013 TO DEALS LIKE NAFTA another trade deal. First, it is massive and open-ended. would be strong incentives for corporate chieftains It would hitch us immediately to 11 Pacific Rim nations to export even more of our middle-class jobs. MOST OF America’s corpo- (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Drug prices. Big Pharma would be given more years rate, political, and media Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam), of monopoly pricing on each of their patents and be cognoscenti are street- and its door would remain wide open to lure China, empowered to block distribution of cheaper generic preaching proselytizers of Indonesia, Russia, and other nations to come in. drugs. Besides artificially keeping everyone’s prices the holy virtues of NAFTA- Second, note that many of those countries already high, this would be a death sentence to many peo- style trade deals. have trade agreements with the US. Hence, THIS ple suffering from cancer, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, But the people (damn AMAZING FACT: TPP is a “trade deal” that mostly and other treatable diseases in impoverished lands. them) are not buying the does not deal with trade. In fact, of the 29 chapters The deal would also restrict the rights of our govern- hokum. In fact, they now in this document, only five cover traditional trade ment to negotiate with drug giants to get lower con- consider NAFTA to be a five- matters! sumer prices with bulk purchases, as Medicare and letter profanity. Last year, The other two dozen chapters amount to a devilish Medicaid do in the US. the Angus Reid polling firm “partnership” for corporate protectionism. They cre- Banksters. Wall Street and the financial giants in ate sweeping new “rights” and escape hatches to pro- found that only one in four other TPP countries would make out like bandits: tect multinational corporations from accountability to Americans thinks that NAFTA The deal explicitly prohibits transaction taxes (such our governments… and to us. Here are a few of TPP’s has benefited workers, and as the proposed Robin Hood Tax here) that would provisos that would make our daily lives riskier, poorer, shut down super-rich speculators who have repeat- more than half of those and less free: polled believe the trade deal edly triggered financial crises and economic crashes Food safety. Any of our government’s food safety is so bad that the US should around the world; it restricts “firewall” reforms that regulations (on pesticide levels, bacterial contamina- either “renegotiate” or sim- separate consumer banking from risky investment tion, fecal exposure, toxic additives, GMOs, non-edi- banking (thus prohibiting Congress from reinstating ply “leave” NAFTA. ble fillers, etc.) that are stricter than “international the much needed Glass-Steagall firewall in our coun- Likewise, just before the standards,” as most are, could be ruled as “illegal try); it could roll back reforms that governments 2010 congressional elec- trade barriers.” Then our government would have to adopted to fix the extreme bank-deregulation regi- tions, an NBC-Wall Street revise our consumer protections to comply with the men that caused Wall Street’s 2007 crash; and it Journal poll showed that 69 weaker global standards. Also, our government provides a backdoor escape from national rules that percent of voters believed could no longer ban meat imports that don’t meet would limit the size of “too-big-to-fail” behemoths. that “free trade agree- our safe-to-eat laws, as long as the exporting nation These extreme provisions would be enforceable by ments… cost the US jobs.” simply claims that its inspection system is “equiva- the banks themselves—TPP empowers them to Even 61 percent of self-iden- lent” to ours. In addition, food labeling laws we rely force governments either to repeal reform laws tified tea partiers agree. A on (organic, country-of-origin, animal-welfare or to compensate banks with taxpayer money for whopping 86 percent of us approved, GMO-free, etc.) would also be subject to “losses” they say are caused by reforms. said corporate outsourcing challenge as trade barriers. Internet freedom. Thanks to public rebellion, cor- of our jobs to low-wage Fracking. Our Department of Energy would lose porations hoping to lock up and monopolize the inter- countries was the top cause its authority to regulate exports of natural gas to net failed in Congress last year to pass their repres- of America’s economic woes. any TPP nation. This would create an explosion of sive “Stop Online Piracy Act.” However, they’ve A 2011 poll by the Mellman the destructive fracking process across our land, slipped SOPA’s most pernicious provisions into TPP. Group found that 95 percent for both foreign and US corporations could export Corporate-created content, for example, would be of Americans agreed that fracked gas from America to member nations with- given copyright protection for a stunning 120 years! we should “keep America’s out any DOE review of the environmental and eco- The deal would also transform internet service trade laws strong and nomic impacts on local communities—or on our providers into a private, Big Brother police force, strictly enforced to provide national interests.