Florida’s Alan Grayson: “TPP Should Be Put To Death.”

Posted on December 27, 2014

by Jerry Alatalo

ongressman Alan Grayson of Florida told Acronym TV’s Dennis Trainor that the United States did not go to war in Syria in September 2013 because the American public “rose up”. He says the same response to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) can prevent an unwise, democracy-killing trade bill from passing the Congress into law.

Although Mr. Grayson didn’t mention his theory of the TPP beyond, agreeably, the further concentration of corporate power at the expense of the people and their right to democratic actions in nations signing on to the trade deal, perhaps the real motivation behind TPP – plus the equally gigantic Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – is corporate solidification of legal rules in their favor, before the people of the world can gather enough strength in unity to stop the trade deals. The reason both TPP and TTIP are so, so secretive is precisely to prevent the people of the world from becoming fully aware and rising in opposition – strongly enough for the people and democracy to prevail.

The feature of TPP which has outraged the most men and women, one of the few provisions which has become known – through “leaks” by Wikileaks and other avenues, is given the legal term “Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement”. This is how every dispute will become resolved among the signatory nations and their people. The angering aspect is that corporate tribunals – not traditional, neutral, government legal institutions – are given the power to make all the legal determinations.

A fellow in the following video gives an example of how this controversial feature of the TPP works. The people of Germany have decided to phase out nuclear power in their country, and a corporation whose business is nuclear energy has sued the German government for over $2 billion dollars for “future lost profits”. He notes there are 500 similar cases in litigation now. If Vietnam signs on to TPP, the trade bill passes, and down the road the people of Vietnam decide to raise their national minimum wage, corporations will be able to sue the Vietnamese government for “lost profits” as a result of wage increases.

The same holds when signatory nations take any of a wide number of normal actions that governments have taken seemingly forever. Think of genetically modified food, free-speech internet, banking regulations, environmental laws, military decisions/war and peace, etc. In essence, democracy will become placed at very serious risk in every TPP/TTIP country, with every action resulting in a possible lawsuit initiated by “harmed” corporations and their owners. According to Grayson, if the TPP becomes “fast-tracked”, members of Congress will be given only 88 seconds each to “debate” what can only be described as the most controversial, secretive, consequential trade agreement in history. The same situation pertains when looking at the TTIP between the U.S., Europe and other potential signatories.

When Texas businessman Ross Perot ran for President as an Independent in 1992, he delivered a line which has become remembered since as an unheeded, ominous warning about the millions of jobs which would leave America if the North American Free Trade Agreement passed – “Americans will hear a huge sucking sound (jobs leaving America)”. Unfortunately, Ross Perot was right but Americans didn’t hear his prophetic warning.

To the men and women reading this, think of Alan Grayson as today’s Ross Perot and hear the warning about TPP and TTIP.

“TPP (and TTIP) should be put to death”.

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For more information, please visit Public Citizen’s website at: http://www.citizen.org

(Thank you to AcronymTV at YouTube)