TPP: Even Worse Than We Thought

Not only are they secretly planning to take over the world, they were actually planning to keep us all in the dark about their multiple coups d'etat for four years. In four years -- or so the latest leaked document claims -- they were finally going to let us all know we'd been robbed. How very noble of them.

 Somehow, the corporations and their political lackeys thought that the widespread replacement of legislatures and judiciaries with private corporate tribunals would go unnoticed, for four long years. The estimated one third of the world's population to be victimized would remain unaware of why they were losing their jobs, their savings, their environments and their very lives.

Meanwhile, the people doing the plotting have to be fully aware of how criminally diseased the Trans-Pacific Partnership truly is by slapping a four-year moratorium on public release of the now-leaked portion of the contents.

  By classifying their coup as a national security secret, they admit that they'll never be able to claim that "mistakes were made." Because the people negotiating this deal are acting deliberately. Every bit as deliberately as the pilot who allegedly crashed the German plane into a mountain the other day.  The only difference is that the negotiators piloting this hellish coup-deville will survive their own recklessness. But only for a little while. For when wealth and power are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the whole edifice is bound to collapse from its own top-heavy weight.

Apparently, the TPP plotters thought that suing governments in dispute resolution tribunals and then winning their cases by default would enable them to collect their final judgments from us without our knowledge. They'd never even have to serve us with a subpoena. We would be denied our day in court to act in our own defense. The money would just magically disappear from our pockets and bank accounts, and we'd be none the wiser.

 The thieving pathocrats would do what they always do: lecture us and poor-shame us. We didn't save enough for retirement. We lived beyond our means. We didn't eat healthy foods. We didn't develop the necessary skills to survive in the New Abnormal Economy (aka the Plutonomy.)

But now, thanks to Wikileaks, we know the truth. Whenever an undemocratic government classifies a document, it's to keep the corruption hidden and the rest of us ignorant. So, passing this deal from hell just got a little bit harder for them. When even the New York Times can no longer ignore the criminality, President Obama's astroturf propaganda campaign, sold as a renegotiation of NAFTA and a middle class, progressive triumph, will have to come up with some brand new bullshit in a hurry. Senator Ron Wyden, Obama's main Democratic co-conspirator in getting fast track approval authority rammed through Congress, is being threatened with a primary challenge.

Public Citizen explains all the newly-leaked horror of a global tribunal system run amok, by plutocrats:

Enactment of the leaked chapter would increase U.S. ISDS liability to an unprecedented degree by newly empowering about 9,000 foreign-owned firms from Japan and other TPP nations operating in the United States to launch cases against the government over policies that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms. To date, the United States has faced few ISDS attacks because past ISDS-enforced pacts have almost exclusively been with developing nations whose firms have few investments here.
The leak reveals that the TPP would replicate the ISDS language found in past U.S. agreements under which tribunals have ordered more than $3.6 billion in compensation to foreign investors attacking land use rules; water, energy and timber policies; health, safety and environmental protections; financial stability policies and more. And while the Obama administration has sought to quell growing concerns about the ISDS threat with claims that past pacts’ problems would be remedied in the TPP, the leaked text does not include new safeguards relative to past U.S. ISDS-enforced pacts. Indeed, this version of the text, which shows very few remaining areas of disagreement, eliminates various safeguard proposals that were included in a 2012 leaked TPP Investment Chapter text.
“With the veil of secrecy ripped back, finally everyone can see for themselves that the TPP would give multinational corporations extraordinary new powers that undermine our sovereignty, expose U.S. taxpayers to billions in new liability and privilege foreign firms operating here with special rights not available to U.S. firms under U.S. law,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “This leak is a disaster for the corporate lobbyists and administration officials trying to persuade Congress to delegate Fast Track authority to railroad the TPP through Congress.”

In the past three years alone, at least 150 ISD cases have been launched under the much smaller trade agreements which are currently in effect.  Investors have, for example, already attacked Canada's patent medicine and fracking policies and Australia's anti-smoking policy. Chevron has dodged responsibility for despoiling the Ecuadorian ecosystem with its toxic oil. Under the TPP, American taxpayers would theoretically not only be on the hook for cleaning up the next major oil spill, it would end up owing multinational oil giants many more billions in lost profits. Crooked politicians like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie would never even have to make another sweetheart deal with Exxon Mobil. Polluters would avoid being sued, either criminally or civilly, in the first place.  And then they'd be able to collect cash damages under the table without so much as an embarrassing press release.

All perfectly legal. All perfectly tax-free. All perfectly corrupt. A shadow legal system is just what the shadow banking system needs to complete the global coup.

It's no accident that Michael Froman of Citigroup, President Obama's chief trade negotiator,  pocketed a multimillion dollar "exit bonus" from his employer to complete the dirty deed. Or that Bank of America gifted Stefan Selig with a $9 million severance package when he went to work for Obama's commerce secretary, billionaire Obama donor Penny Pritzker.

So let's stop them in their tracks. Tell your congress critter to say No to fast track authority for Barack Obama and the global mafia. Because the last I heard, we're still allowed to vote amongst all the variants of greater and lesser evil. Let's cling to the remaining tatters of democracy as tenaciously as they accuse people of clinging to their guns and religion.