TPP Deal Reached: Now Only Congress Can Stop It

This week we learned that the 12 nations involved in brokering the largest “free trade” deal in two decades have reportedly come to a final agreement. That so-called “free trade” deal, which presently includes Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the U.S. and Vietnam, has involved at least five years of highly-secretive backroom negotiations. With the final negotations out of the way, the next step is for Congress to vote on the deal. And thanks to the passage last June of the fast-track bill, Congress will only be granted an up or down vote. No amendments may be offered and hardly any debate will be allowed.

Known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP for short, the deal is just one component of President Obama’s “pivot” to Asia, which seeks to stifle the rise of China and to secure U.S. economic dominance across the Asia-Pacific region. These 12 TPP nations compose a combined 40% of global GDP. Note that China, the largest of all Asia-Pacific nations is missing from the list of included nations.

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This, of course, is intentional as the TPP has been specifically designed to draw the region’s economic growth away from China and towards the U.S. It is a form of economic war that intentionally isolates not only China, but Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa. These represent the so-called BRICS nations. These emerging economies represent the greatest threat to America’s continued global economic hegemony and are therefore being managed through a process of economic “containment.”

The U.S. has done something similar with another “free trade” deal known as the Trans-Atlantic Partnership (or TTIP, for short), which seeks to entice Europe’s economies away from China and closer to the U.S.

While the stated goals of these “free-trade” deals may sound fine on the surface, the details are much more sinister. These deals have been brokered in extreme secrecy and have been literally written by multinational corporations. The little we do know about these trade deals comes from leaked documents made available to the public by Wikileaks. These leaks detail a shocking bonanza of special rights and privileges for corporations that leaves America’s middle class and working poor on the hook for the bill.

Also revealed among the leaked documents: the creation of an Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism that permits corporations to sue federal, state, and/or local governments if the laws of those governments in anyway impede or undermine the corporation’s profit-making ability.

This is a disaster and represents a full-blown slide into corporate fascism, where government edicts are literally determined by corporations. And as I will detail in further updates, these deals will ultimately deliver global governance in the name of “free trade.”

As I stated in these pages before, if Americans knew what was inside the TPP, or TTIP for that matter, the Congress would never be able to pass it.

While I strongly oppose TPP and TTIP, I don’t believe that the American people are awake enough to prevent their passage. When you have time, listen to the above clip to learn more about the insidious nature of these trade deals and why they will devastate the American economy in the long-run.

Until tomorrow,
Jerry Robinson