ERIC ZUESSE
What the U.S. Senate did on 23 June 2015 was to hand America’s sovereignty over to international corporations.
Not only will environmental regulations be frozen into place, once a given treaty is in force, and so the entire planet will become, essentially, doomed (because emerging science will be ignored if it doesn’t serve the interests of the hundred or so top billionaires); but protections of workers’ rights will also not increase — not rise in any country — beyond what the treaty specifies. The set-in-stone standards will govern, while the planet simply boils away, and boils off. This will have been the ultimate conservative victory.
TPP opens the gates to a great international racket: suing nations, for violating the ‘rights’ of international investors — ‘rights’ that transcend any of the rights of the citizenry in any one of those countries.
The end result of that conservative victory will be global impoverishment, and ultimate environmental collapse, while the world’s few billionaires, and especially the richest hundred of them, will become enormously richer, because their freedoms and associated power will be enormously increased, at everyone else’s expense, by what happened on 23 June 2015. And, of course, those international corporations have been lobbying and buying politicians to the tune of billions of dollars, precisely in order to achieve this outcome — their totalitarian international power.
Well done, boys! Now you really did it. Go get your bonuses from your paymasters, and a well-earned pat in the back.
The most curious aspect of this catastrophic outcome is that the so-called ‘charities’ and ‘non-profits,’ such billionaires’ tax-writeoffs as the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations that are already heavily beholden to international corporations and to the people who control those, have been basically silent about the planetary destruction that their sponsors have been fighting to achieve, via Obama’s ‘trade’ deals. (There’s been token resistance, but only token.) The American public had falsely thought that only a few amendments needed to be added in order for these to be ‘good’ ‘trade’ deals for the public — amendments such as “Trade Adjustment Assistance,” which would provide token and brief transitional training to some of the millions of Americans who will be losing their jobs, as those jobs become increasingly outsourced abroad to lower-wage or more brutally anti-union countries and make ‘us’ more like ’them’ — the low-wage and desperate masses there.
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