“Free Trade” Frees Who? What?
The “Trans Pacific Partnership” is next in a long list of so-called “free trade” bills awaiting Congressional approval. The others were passed during the Clinton and Bush Administrations, and President Obama is hoping to get this one passed in the last session of 2016. It’s a “lame duck” session in which many congresspersons don’t feel as responsible toward the people who watch them but don’t pay them off.
Earlier, President Obama was able to get “fast track” legislation to grease the wheels so that the TPP could slide through without serious discussion or public scrutiny. Unions and environmentalists are dead set against any more of these bills because they mean lost jobs, lower wages & benefits, and more pollution. There’s a good reason for that.
Corporations Run The Process
Unions and environmentalists have no participation in creating the secret treaties. There are representatives, special trade envoys, from the governments involved — but there are also hundreds of corporate lobbyists in the process! Mighty transnational corporations write these things for their own benefit.
What do the big corporations want? They want low wages & benefits and the right to pollute. They want a free hand to do anything they want and make as much money as can be made. So far, that’s what they have gotten. That’s what the TPP offers them. What does it offer us?
It Isn’t Trade, and It Isn’t Free
What is misnamed “free trade” sets up a separate legal system that overrides the democratic rules of each country involved. That system issues licenses to steal to the corporations who created it. The system guarantees corporate profits, even when the corporation breaks our state or federal laws.
They call it “globalization.” I call it “gobblelization.”
–Gene Lantz
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