Opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership—dubbed 'NAFTA on steroids'—is receiving unprecedented popular opposition and nearly no news coverage by major outlets. Last week, more than 550 groups, representing tens of millions of individual members, signed a letter to members of Congress urging them to vote against a push by President Obama for 'fast track' authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a so-called "free trade" now under negotation between the U.S. and eleven other Pacific rim nations. The week before that, another 50 groups launched an energized online campaign called StopFastTrack.com in order to kill the TPP agreement—dubbed "NAFTA on steroids"—that they say "threatens everything you care about: democracy, jobs, the environment, and the Internet."
NEW YORK—Despite subfreezing temperatures and heavy snowfall Tuesday, New York Congress members, unions, and environmental groups, huddled outside City Hall to call attention to some fast track legislation proposed in the Senate. The legislation would give the president the ability to negotiate the terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) without Congress being able to discuss or amend any part of it. “And because of fast-track legislation it will not provide adequate transparency, accountability or oversight. It fails to protect American workers and American jobs,” said Mario Cilento, president of the New York State American Federation of Labor Congress and Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
The past couple of decades of globalization have been a disaster for planetary ecosystems, indigenous peoples, and most middle-class citizens, but a gravy train for big investors, investment bankers, and managers of transnational corporations. This unprecedented expansion of international trade was driven by the convergence of key resources, developments, and inventions: cheap oil, satellite communications, container ships, computerized monitoring of inventories, the flourishing of multinational corporations, the proliferation of liberal trade treaties (including NAFTA), and the emergence of transnational bodies such as the World Trade Organization.
Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.
“Control oil and you control nations,” said US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. “Control food and you control the people.”
Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.
Mainstream media is very persistent on missing some very important subjects - this time the Trans-Pacific partnership has been neglected by them. While the Obama administration boasts about the trade benefits that come with a closer partnership with the nations of the Pacific rim, others are not as eager to jump on the TPP bandwagon including American activists and some members of Congress who are concerned over the secrecy surrounding the negotiations. Melinda St Louis, international campaigns director for Public citizen's Global Trade Watch joins RT's Kristine Frazao to discuss this.
