Corporate Evil Creeps Up Unobserved: TransPacific Partnership Will Undermine Democracy

CAPITALISM, IN FOCUS, ANGLO AMERICA, ASIA--PACIFIC, BRICS, JUSTICE, ECONOMICS, TRADE, DEVELOPMENT, 22 Apr 2013

Prof. Rodney Shakespeare - Eurasia Review

Evil creeps up unobserved. Its plans are conceived in secret; the first furtive moves are made, and then it is ready to attack. Unless we turn to spot it approaching we can be quickly overwhelmed.

The latest approach of evil might not seem much – apparently, just some boring trade agreement. But, in reality, it is Evil Incarnate.

It’s called the Trans-Pacific Partnership and if you thought the World Trade Organization (which forced the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act) and the North American Free Trade Agreement are bad then the TPP is awful! The TPP has gone through sixteen rounds of super-surreptitious negotiations. Six hundred lobbyists from the big international corporations have been ‘advising’ and anybody with a brain knows what that means.

The TPP is intended to (finally) undermine democracy by handing power to the global financial elite and the big corporations. The key mechanism will be the transfer of power from sovereign nations to so-called ‘trade tribunals’ whose purpose is to make national laws subservient to corporate interests. These trade tribunals will do what they like: no government or electorate will be able to influence them.

As a result of the TPP big finance will be completely deregulated (heaven help us!); jobs will be destroyed; wages will be slashed; and health care will be only for the rich. There will be no cheap medicines for the poor of the world. In a recent letter, Doctors Without Borders wrote that the TPP will be “the most harmful trade deal ever for access to medicines in developing countries.”

If TPP gets through, environmental issues will be ignored and there will be genetically manipulated Frankenstein organisms. USA dairy farmers are saying that their industry will be devastated.

Moreover, the internet will be censored; and individuals (plus their towns, cities and governments) will be controlled by being put into ever-lasting debt.

On top of that, cunning as ever, the TPP specifically bans any attempt to reform the main cause of our present troubles which is the corrupt banking system. It does this by outlawing public banks and the issuance of interest-free loans for things like public capital projects (such as bridges, roads, hospitals, airports, water and sewage works constructed at one third of the usual cost).

Intent on maintaining the vicious grip of usury, the TPP enshrines the existing model of international finance which has led to the Cyprus crisis, the Italian crisis, the Spanish crisis, the Greek crisis, the Portuguese crisis etc. One aspect of this is the inability of governments to control capital flows until the point when the bankers collapse the economy and there is the Cyprus situation in which money movements are frozen, customers’ money is confiscated, and an economic and social catastrophe is inevitable.

The TPP is determined to do this everywhere it can so that it can buy up assets on the cheap and turn whole populations into impoverished debt-peons who will do anything not to starve. The TPP elite want endless wealth for themselves and, even more so, they want power, power over weakened, humiliated human beings. The TPP elite are scum.

At present, the TPP only consists of the USA (of course), Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. But the international financial elite are rushing to involve as many other countries as they can.

Inside the USA, President Obama, who is completely controlled by the big corporations and is moving, with other countries, to ‘fast-track’ the TPP so that even the USA Congress will have no say. He is doing this at a time when the USA has fifty million people on food stamps (the number increases each week) and 23% unemployed. Those figures will be doubled if the TPP is implemented.

And remember this. The global financial elite are rapidly acquiring the technology by which they can control any individual whom they view as politically independent or obstreperous. That means many of the independently-minded people and activists who read this article. The TPP will do it in a simple way. One day, the activists will suddenly find that the money they thought they had in the bank has become unobtainable. It will be rather like the experience of thousands of Cypriots except that, unannounced, with no warning, it will happen in an instant.

Moreover, unlike the Cypriots who still like to believe that their experience is not permanent, the activists will find themselves without money, or at least without bank money, forever. They will be sacked from their jobs and notice drones circling overhead. (Obama has said that the 30,000 drones coming in the USA will not be armed but if you believe that you will believe anything).

However, all is not yet lost. The danger can be understood and effective action taken. Japan has not yet joined the TPP because at election time the people found out about the TPP and, quite rightly, were furious. Well done, Japan!

But the West and the Middle East are asleep. They had better wake up or it will be too late.
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Prof. Rodney Shakespeare is a visiting Professor of Binary Economics at Trisakti University, Jakarta, Indonesia. He is a Cambridge MA, a qualified UK Barrister, a co-founder of the Global Justice Movement www.globaljusticemovement.net , a member of the Christian Council for Monetary Justice. His main website is www.binaryeconomics.net . Shakespeare is also Chair of the Committee Against Torture in Bahrain.

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