Obama Resorts to Government by Sucker Punch
Ed, please call home! Edward Snowden, that is: Come quickly, your country needs you.
Once again, the American people are being victimized by a hush-hush blanket of official secrecy, rhetorical dodges, and outright lies. This time it's not about wholesale spying on us by our own government, but a wholesale assault on our jobs, environment, health, and even our people's sovereignty by a cabal of global corporations and the Obama administration.
Their weapon is a scheme hidden inside a scam called TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The scam is that the TPP is nothing but another free trade deal - albeit a whopper of a deal that ties our economy to Brunei, Vietnam, and 9 other nations around the Pacific Rim. But of the 29 chapters in this deal, only five are about tariffs.
The real deal is in the 24 other chapters that create a supranational scheme of exclusive, unelected, secretive 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 tribunal proceedings is to show that one of our laws or regulations 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 the trade officials of the 12 countries in strict secrecy. Even members of Congress have been shut out - but some 600 corporate executives have been allowed inside to shape the "partnership."
Now that Obama and his corporate team are ready spring it on us and ram it through Congress, he arranged a briefing to woo House Democrats. But he classified it as a secret session, meaning the lawmakers can't tell the people anything they learn.
A gag order on Congress? Holy Thomas Paine! The only reason Obama is desperate to hide his oligarchic scheme is because the people would overwhelmingly oppose it. So he's resorting to government by sucker punch. It's cowardly... and disgraceful.
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This has been reposted from Jim Hightower's website.
