TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP - TPP - AUSTRALIAN LOSERS

TPP – TRANS PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

Australian Human Sheep and Cattle being led to Slaughter Having been Abandoned by the Left who Haven’t seen the Precipice.

Some thoughts on the ignorance of those who should know better – wilful or otherwise.

2 July 2014

Mushrooms have been treated better than humans around the issue of the TPP and some early history might provide a little background information.

On 25 June 2013 a US online activist group called “Nation of Change” started an article with the following headline:

“TPP (Trans-Pacific Pact) – the 1% Solution to Democracy – Government by Corporate Dictates”

“TPP…… the most dangerous trade contract you never heard of…..”

The reason for this headline is the fact that whatever is being done with TPP is being done in secret so that no one finds out what the US government and its minions are planning for the future of ALL of us around the globe!

A chronology of events will show the perfidy of successive United States governments before, during and after the neocons started making their presence more and more felt in world politics.

On 17 October 2013 I assembled the following items in order to try and get some understanding of what lies ahead:

TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP – WHAT IS IT?

Before we even start to find out what TPP is, what it stands for, what it does, or will do, it is necessary to examine where it came from and what it means.
Copyright and censorship – particularly internet censorship – are the issues which affect the major organisations around the world, and we need to bear in mind that these issues arise in the United States of America.
Before TPP there were SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, NAFTA, and also on the horizon a recent discussion involving Europe with something similar to TPP, the TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP.
According to the US government, “On January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico (NAFTA) came into force. All remaining duties and quantitative restrictions were eliminated, as scheduled, on January 1, 2008.
NAFTA created the world's largest free trade area, which now links 450 million people producing $17 trillion worth of goods and services. Trade between the United States and its NAFTA partners has soared since the agreement entered into force.
With NAFTA U.S. goods and services trade totaled $1.6 trillion in 2009 (latest data available for goods and services trade combined). Exports totaled $397 billion. Imports totaled $438 billion. The U.S. goods and services trade deficit with NAFTA was $41 billion in 2009.
The United States has $918 billion in total (two ways) goods trade with NAFTA countries (Canada and Mexico) during 2010. Goods exports totaled $412 billion; Goods imports totaled $506 billion. The U.S. goods trade deficit with NAFTA was $95 billion in 2010.
Trade in services with NAFTA (exports and imports) totaled $99 billion in 2009 (latest data available for services trade). Services exports were $63.8 billion. Services imports were $35.5 billion. The U.S. services trade surplus with NAFTA was $28.3 billion in 2009.”

Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act - CISPA[1]

If you read the introductory paragraphs of the following article from PC mag you will get the gist of what the US government is trying to do and the consequences for all of us:
According to Chloe Albanesius of PC magazine “A controversial cyber-security bill known as CISPA is once again in the news. The US House approved the bill last week, and it now moves to the Senate, but opponents of the measure are not going down without a fight. Today, in fact, hacker collective Anonymous is calling on websites to go dark in protest of CISPA as they did last year against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).”

Why is CISPA being compared to SOPA and PIPA? 

What is CISPA? CISPA stands for Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. It would allow for voluntary information sharing between private companies and the government in the event of a cyber attack. If the government detects a cyber attack that might take down Facebook or Google, for example, they could notify those companies. At the same time, Facebook or Google could inform the feds if they notice unusual activity on their networks that might suggest a cyber attack,” Albanesius says.
To understand how the US government is trying to control the whole world, look at all the web sites you can lay your hands on, and be afraid – very afraid! [2]
http://www.cispaisback.org/
From CISPA, we have had SOPA and PIPA and these on their own are grim and frightening, but we should also examine COICA. Here’s where we start:

COICA is the Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act.
SOPA is Stop Online Piracy Act
PIPA is Protect IP Act. (IP=Internet Protocol)

On 18 January 2012 an internet blackout occurred after dramatic international collaboration between individuals and organisations who saw the dangers of these draconian bills being passed by the US Congress.
The history of this event is captured in a book called “HACKING POLITICS” which tells the story of how Geeks, Progressives, The Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and save the Internet”.[3]
A young man Aaron Swartz, who was involved with this campaign and who was an initiator of REDDIT, (reddit is a source for what's new and popular on the web. What does the name "reddit" mean?It's [sort of] a play on words -- i.e., "I read it on reddit.") and who committed suicide in January 2013 because the US legal authorities of the Federal government had indicted him for alleged overuse of an online cataloguing service called JSTOR, stated after the SOPA/PIPA victory that the US government and Congress will not give up and they will work on something which will make the earlier bills seem like child’s play in comparison.
Welcome to the world of TPP, the Trans –Pacific Partnership.
Australia’s Choice Magazine’s Madison Cartwright reported: “Choice recently attended the 18th round of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in Malaysia and raised concerns the agreement may include provisions that will harm Australian consumers, particularly in the areas of intellectual property and food and health labelling.[4]”
The notoriously secretive TPP has been holding its negotiations behind closed doors – the only information available about the TPP have come from leaked drafts.
The TPP currently includes 12 countries – Japan, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US, Vietnam and Australia.
Of real concern for Australians will be the possibility of Internet censorship, restrictions on pharmaceuticals – affecting thousands in Australia and elsewhere because generics may be a thing of the past, and so many other issues about which we are not able to know anything because it is all so secretive and the media are involved in this conspiracy of silence.
There are a few media exceptions but they do not allow us to find out what is involved in the negotiations and who is doing the negotiations on our behalf.
Those locally who have written about TPP are Antony Loewenstein (published in theguardian.com 9 October 2013) and Peter Martin, (Article published in The Age 23 September 2013) Economics correspondent for Fairfax Media.
Our web pages provide many articles from Australia and overseas, including Loewenstein’s and Martin’s, and these can be found on:

http://www.josken.net/tpp.htm
http://www.josken.net/freetr.htm
http://www.red-jos.blogspot.com
____________________________________________________________
[1] “What is CISPA and Why Should You Care?”http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2417993,00.asp
[2] http://www.cispaisback.org
[3] HACKING POLITICS edited by David Moon,Patrick Ruffini and David Segal, published by OR Books, 2013
[4] TALKING TRADE Item in Choice Magazine, September 2013

In the beginning was NAFTA

The following article was written by Jim Hightower in “Nation of Change” on 2 October 2013:

“The Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Corporate Coup in Disguise

 Jim Hightower

What if our national leaders told us that communities across America had to eliminate such local programs as Buy Local, Buy American, Buy Green, etc. to allow foreign corporations to have the right to make the sale on any products purchased with our tax dollars? This nullification of our people's right to direct expenditures is just one of the horror stories in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
This is a super-sized NAFTA, the 1994 trade scam rammed through Congress by the entire corporate establishment. NAFTA promised the "glories of globalization": prosperity across our land. Unfortunately, corporations got the gold. We got the shaft — thousands of factories closed, millions of middle-class jobs went south, and the economies of hundreds of towns and cities were shattered.
Twenty years later, the gang that gave us NAFTA is back with the TPP, a "trade deal" that mostly does not deal with trade.

Of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters! The other chapters amount to a devilish "partnership" for corporate protectionism:

—Food safety.

Any of our government's food safety regulations (on pesticide levels, bacterial contamination, fecal exposure, toxic additives, etc.) and food labeling laws (organic, country-of-origin, animal-welfare approved, GMO-free, etc.) that are stricter than "international standards" could be ruled as "illegal trade barriers." Our government would then have to revise our consumer protections to comply with weaker standards.

—Fracking.

Our Department of Energy would lose its authority to regulate exports of natural gas to any TPP nation. This would create an explosion of the destructive fracking process across our land, for both foreign and U.S. corporations could export fracked gas from America to member nations without any DOE review of the environmental and economic impacts on local communities — or on our national interests.

—Jobs. 

US corporations would get special foreign-investor protections to limit the cost and risk of relocating their factories to low-wage nations that sign onto this agreement. So, an American corporation thinking about moving a factory would know it is guaranteed a sweetheart deal if it moves operations to a TPP nation like Vietnam. This would be an incentive for corporate chieftains to export more of our middle-class jobs.

—Drug prices.

Big Pharma would be given more years of monopoly pricing on each of their patents and be empowered to block distribution of cheaper generic drugs. Besides artificially keeping everyone's prices high, this would be a death sentence to many people suffering from cancer, HIV, AIDS, tuberculosis and other treatable diseases in impoverished lands.

—Banksters.

Wall Street and the financial giants in other TPP countries would make out like bandits. The deal explicitly prohibits transaction taxes (such as the proposed Robin Hood Tax here) that would shut down speculators who have repeatedly triggered financial crises and economic crashes around the world. It restricts "firewall" reforms that separate consumer banking from risky investment banking. It could roll back reforms that governments adopted to fix the extreme bank-deregulation regimen that caused Wall Street's 2007 crash. And it provides an escape from national rules that would limit the size of "too-big-to-fail" behemoths.

—Internet freedom.

Corporations hoping to lock up and monopolize the Internet failed in Congress last year to pass their repressive "Stop Online Piracy Act." However, they've slipped SOPA's most pernicious provisions into TPP. The deal would also transform Internet service providers into a private, Big Brother police force, empowered to monitor our "user activity," arbitrarily take down our content and cut off our access to the Internet. To top that off, consumers could be assessed mandatory fines for something as benign as sending your mom a recipe you got off of a paid site.

—Public services. 

TPP rules would limit how governments regulate such public services as utilities, transportation and education — including restricting policies meant to ensure broad or universal access to those essential needs. One insidious rule says that member countries must open their service sectors to private competitors, which would allow the corporate provider to cherry-pick the profitable customers and sink the public service.
Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch, correctly calls the Trans-Pacific Partnership "a corporate coup d'etat." Nations that join must conform their laws and rules to TPP's strictures, effectively supplanting U.S. sovereignty and canceling our people's right to be self-governing. Worse, it creates virtually permanent corporate rule over us. Is it impossible to stop? Nope. There is also a broad, well-organized and politically experienced coalition of grassroots groups, which has stopped other deals and will do it again. We the people can protect our democratic rights from this threat of corporate usurpation. Check out

globaltradewatch.org.

Copyright Creators.com
ABOUT JIM HIGHTOWER

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.”
There is enough information to whet your appetites for more in order to find out what the future holds for you and everyone around you, so a concluding item from a group called “Sum Of Us” is a recent happening which brings the story into 2014 Australia as you thought you knew it:

11 JUNE 2014

Trans-Pacific Partnership - Apathy in Australia Will Ruin Us All

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) issue is one that will come back to haunt Australia and Australians who so far have shown an apathy in relation to this urgent matter which is breathtaking in its ignorance.

When one contemplates the Australian prime minister travelling to "enter" the world stage and when in a certain North American country he calls that country Canadia, and later crosses the border to the currently most powerful country in the world and denies climate change and all the disasters coming with it, we have to understand, with horror, the implications of this "head of government" being in charge of Australia being ruled by the US government's TPP proponents, we are in for a rough ride.
Many thanks to the SUM OF US group for their actions and update.
“Almost two weeks ago we took the fight against the Trans Pacific-Partnership (TPP) right to the doorstep of our democratic representatives in Canberra. We delivered a little less than 150,000 SumOfUs' members signatures calling for the TPP to be made public.

SumOfUs members in Canberra
But not only were SumOfUs members and signers raising their voices against the secrecy of the trade deals. Other partner groups Avaaz and GetUp also brought members’ signatures totalling a staggering 1.8 million Australians demanding that the TPP be made public. The press and those present also heard from industries which will be negatively affected by the trade deals, MPs who oppose the TPP and members of communities whose rights are under attack as a result of these.
The need to open democracy has never been more urgent. The little we know about the TPP is dangerous enough:

It will give corporations the power to sue governments for diminishing their profits in a secret court known as the Investor State Dispute Settlement.
Longer patent allowances which will increase the price of generic pharmaceuticals.
A systematic erosion of worker’s rights and human rights as corporations gain more power to exploit people and resources unregulated and unchecked by democratic governments.
Limiting internet and journalistic freedom, which will diminish our ability to stop corporations from abusing power.

In short, the TPP is the handover of our democracies to corporations and their unstoppable pursuit of profit, at the expense of people.
If the details of the trade talks are made public, we will be able to keep fighting to make sure corporate power is out of our democracies with the determination of our members at the forefront.
Thank you for standing against the secrecy of the TPP.
Thank you for all that you do,

Paul, Hannah, Ledys and the rest of us at SumOfUs.”