Another trade scam.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Trans-Pacific Partnership - Vox Populist

A cabal of global corporations and their friends in the Obama Administration are waging a wholesale assault on our jobs, environment, health, and even our people's sovereignty.

Their weapon is a scheme hidden inside a scam. Called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the scam is their claim that TPP is nothing but another free trade deal that ties our economy to Brunei, Vietnam, and nine other nations around the Pacific Rim. But of the twenty-nine chapters in this deal, only five are about tariffs and other trade matters.

The real deal is in the twenty-four other chapters that create a supranational scheme of secretive, private tribunals that corporations from any TPP nation can use to challenge and overturn our local, state, and national laws. All a corporate power has to do to win in these closed proceedings is to show that a particular law or regulation might reduce its future profits.

This is big stuff, amounting to the enthronement of a global corporate oligarchy over us. Yet it's been negotiated among trade officials of the twelve countries and 500 corporate executives in strict secrecy.

In March, the President arranged a briefing to woo House Democrats to support the TPP. But he classified the briefing as a secret session, meaning the lawmakers are not allowed to tell you, me, or anyone else anything about it.

A gag order on Congress? Holy Thomas Paine! The only reason Obama is desperate to hide his oligarchic scheme from us is because he knows the people would overwhelmingly oppose it. So he's resorting to government by sucker punch. It's cowardly--and disgraceful.

The wonkish, gibberishistic jargon in these corporate boondoggles they call "trade deals" is tooth-achingly boring and incomprehensible. Could that be on purpose? Of course! If they wrote these wage-destroying, environment-killing, sovereignty-sucking scams in plain English so we commoners could understand what they're doing to us, they couldn't...