UNLIKE the empty word “inclusive,” which means nothing standing alone—“inclusive” of what?—the initials TPP (TransPacific something, perhaps pahirap) means more than you will ever learn from the people who want it. Ralph Nader told Pulitzer Prize journalist Chris Hedges that the TPP is the most brazen corporate power grab in America, and it will go worse for countries like ours. Its reach will be global and evil, like ISIS but with daily showers, no facial hair and sporting suits instead of pajamas.
TPP allows corporations to bypass the three branches of a democratic government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare a country’s minimum wage and labor-safety laws, as well as consumer and environmental protections, to be non-tariff barriers and, therefore, illegal.
Countries will be fined for noncompliance because TPP can compel democratic governments to pay multinationals all of their taxes for protecting their citizens. It will lift all price controls on essential commodities like food and medicine, while punish any attempt at self-sufficiency as violations of free trade as multinationals will define it, and as violations of global patents on manufactured and natural goods.
TPP can mandate that only genetically modified seeds be bought from Monsanto at every planting season at Monsanto’s whimsical prices. TPP, says Nader, will abolish national sovereignty, remove labor standards, and commodify all aspects of human activity, perhaps even human organs —or children if there is money to be made from trading in them. There is a market for them among a certain brand of Caucasian, usually old.
This will not help universal equality, but will favor global slavery. Obama took the occasion of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) to express in passing his preference for TPP’s corporate combinations in restraint of free and equal trade, over China’s proposal of market-driven, not corporate-dictated, market reforms along a silk route of progress circling the globe.
The TPP not Apec is what the left should have rallied against during Apec, except the TPP isn’t here yet. But it will be. By then, the left will have wasted its credibility before the real fight that is coming between national sovereignty and multinational empire, without a shot fired at multinational expense, because our own elected governments will enforce its tyranny. It’s happened before when Filipinos put straw bags with eyeholes over their heads and fingered their fellow countrymen. Keep well.