Trans-Pacific Partnership protest planned for Friday

Detractors call proposed plan "NAFTA on steroids"

This post was submitted by  Peter Nightingale. It has been edited for style, grammar, and punctuation, but NOT FOR CONTENT.

There will be a protest against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal at the Federal Building on Kennedy Plaza in Providence this Friday, April 17 at 3 pm, .

Although it has been in the making for years, not too many people know what TPP is about—trust the corporate media not to get in the way of this new corporate entitlements program.  Obama wants to push this deal through Congress with fast-track authority so that the legislation can be passed before The People figure out what has hit them. 

Time for a quick summary of this attempt to legislate by diplomacy. 

At the People’s Climate March in New York City last September, Rhode Island documentarian Robert Malin recorded an interview with Vandana Shiva, a renowned environmental and anti-globalization activist. This is her penetrating diagnosis of the global system of exploitation and inequality,  “It's wrong to talk about countries when the economy is globalized. We should talk about corporations and their footprint."

But the owners of the globe want more and more and more, and their friends on Wall Street and the people they own in the U.S. government are there to help out.  For years the United Corporations have been negotiating in secrecy over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).  Lori Wallach director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch explains what’s wrong with this deal:

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Well, fast-tracking the TPP would make it easier to offshore our jobs and would put downward pressure, enormous downward pressure, on Americans’ wages, because it would throw American workers into competition with workers in Vietnam who are paid less than 60 cents an hour and have no labor rights to organize; to better their situation. Plus, the TPP would empower another 25,000 foreign corporations to use the investor state tribunals - the corporate tribunals - to attack our laws. And then there would be another 25,000 U.S. corporations in the other TPP countries who could use the investor tribunals to attack their environmental and health and labor and safety laws. 

And if all that weren’t enough, Big Pharma would get new monopoly patent rights that would jack up medicine prices, cutting off affordable access.

And there’s rollback of financial regulations put in place after the global financial crisis. 

And there’s a ban on "Buy Local," "buy domestic" policies.

And it would undermine the policy space that we have to deal with the climate crisis—energy policies are covered. 

Basically, almost any progressive policy or goal would be undermined, rolled back. 

Plus, we would see more offshoring of jobs and more downward pressure on wages. So the big battle is over fast track, the process. And right now, thanks to a lot of pushback by activists across the country, actually, they don’t have a majority to pass it. But there’s an enormous push to change that, and that’s basically where we all come in.

Not too surprising that these negotiations are are taking place in secret!  Fortunately, WikiLleaks has been publishing segments of this shady deal for a while and this is what Julian Assange, publisher of Wikileaks, had to say "WikiLeaks release shows that the public sweetener in the TPP is just media sugar water. The fabled TPP environmental chapter turns out to be a toothless public relations exercise with no enforcement mechanism."

Are you shocked that people would protest this kind of deal and the method used to ram it down their throats?