Black Helicopters Won't Take Our Freedom, But Corporate Control Will

Firedoglake:

“President Obama reiterated on Tuesday his desire to complete an Asia-Pacific trade deal this year, arguing that it will not only boost economic growth but shore up global security.”

The Trans Pacific Partnership has nothing to do with trade and even less to do with economic growth. And the only entities that will feel more secure are the giant corporations who will own us lock, stock, barrel and meaningless Constitution.

Jim Hightower:

The nullification of our people's right to direct expenditures of our own tax dollars is but one of the horror stories being quietly packed into a political-and-economic bombshell benignly labeled TPP --the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

SNIP

This time we really must pay attention, because TPP is not just another trade deal. First, it is massive and open-ended. It would hitch us immediately to 11 Pacific Rim nations (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam), and its door would remain wide open to lure China, Indonesia, Russia, and other nations to come in. Second, note that many of those countries already have trade agreements with the US. Hence, THIS AMAZING FACT: TPP is a "trade deal" that mostly does not deal with trade. In fact, of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters!

The other two dozen chapters amount to a devilish "partnership" for corporate protectionism. They create sweeping new "rights" and escape hatches to protect multinational corporations from accountability to our governments... and to us. Here are a few of TPP's provisos that would make our daily lives riskier, poorer, and less free:

 Read the whole incredible thing.

Meanwhile, we're getting a taste of corporatocracy wherever our elected officials sell off public assets.

Rick Perlstein at The Nation:

And if the city lowered the parking meter rates, the highest in the country? Same problem: that would trigger the “reserve power action” clause too. Chicago, meet your new City Council: the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Abu Dhabi.

And that’s just wrong—illegal, says Geoghegan: “You can’t bargain away—you can’t sell off—the police power of the city.”

He thundered: “This is privatization gone nuts. It’s almost a comical form of privatization—privatization at its very, very most toxic. Because here, what is being sold off is not really a city asset. It’s not really like Midway Airport”—a deal that might be just around the corner, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. “It’s not like a tollway”—the Chicago Skyway was leased for ninety-nine years to an Australian concern for quick cash in 2005 (“With that kind of money to be made,” The Washington Post said, “Americans are lining up to try their luck at Wall Street’s hottest new game—“investing in infrastructure.”) No, at least in those cases it was just property they were selling off. Here, “they’re selling off the governmental powers of a city. And that’s what’s so disturbing about this. And getting those back is insanely expensive. And the City said, in its brief in the court below, that if the deal were undone they would owe all this money and they can’t pay it back.”

SNIP

As Tom Tresser of Chicago’s CivicLab impressed upon me, they’re coming after your meters—and bridges, and billboards, and who knows what other public assets—next. “We have a massive global movement of capital which, because they’ve burned their own fucking houses down through their own greed, don’t have the gilt returns that they’re used to receiving…. So the new guaranteed annual returns that big business and big capital are looking for is our assets.”

And that’s about all of us.

The AFL-CIO is fighting back.

Bad for labor, the environment, internet freedom, and the democratic process – while good for parasitic corporations and Wall Street. If TPP passes those making the decisions that shape your life will be out of reach and not subject to any democratically accountable authority. Like the feudalism of old, there will be an untouchable elite whose choices dictate the architecture of the world – independent and oblivious to the needs of the 99%.