{"id":151103,"date":"2015-05-15T03:29:46","date_gmt":"2015-05-15T03:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=151103"},"modified":"2015-05-15T03:29:46","modified_gmt":"2015-05-15T03:29:46","slug":"how-americas-news-media-killed-americas-democracy-tpp-ttip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/how-americas-news-media-killed-americas-democracy-tpp-ttip\/","title":{"rendered":"How America’s ‘News’ Media Killed America’s Democracy: TPP & TTIP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

As I\u00a0reported on Wednesday<\/span><\/a>, a deal was worked out in the U.S. Senate on the early afternoon of May 13th to “Fast-Track” through to approval U.S. President Barack Obama\u2019s proposed trade deals, TPP with Asia, and TTIP with Europe. (It should have been reported on the nightly TV news programs, but most of them ignored it then, and reported the news only the next day when the Senators made it official.)<\/span><\/p>\n

TPP and TTIP have been represented in America\u2019s press as ‘trade’ deals, but instead they\u2019re actually about sovereignty. They\u2019re about America and the other participating countries handing their democratic sovereignty \u2013 on regulation of the environment, consumer protection, worker protection, and finance \u2013 over to panels, all of whose members will be selected by the large international corporations that for years have been working with U.S. President Obama\u2019s Trade Representative to draft these \u201ctrade\u201d treaties.<\/span><\/p>\n

If some corporation \u201cC” under these \u2018trade deals\u2019 then brings a case to one of those panels and says that country \u201cX” has any regulations regarding the environment, consumer protection, worker protection, or finance, that are stricter than the ones that are set forth in TPP and TTIP, then country X will be assessed to pay a fine to corporation C, for \u201cunfair trade practices\u201d against that corporation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: these corporate panels will constitute a new international government, with the power to fine countries for exceeding the regulations that are set forth in these international \u2018trade\u2019 treaties.<\/span><\/p>\n

President Obama\u2019s Trade Representative,\u00a0Michael Froman,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0has told the AFL-CIO and U.S. Senators that when countries such as Colombia systematically murder labor-union organizers, it\u2019s no violation of workers\u2019 rights \u2013 nothing that is of any concern to the U.S. regarding this country’s international trade policies or enforcement. On April 22nd, Huffington Post, one of the few U.S. news media to report honestly on these treaties, bannered\u00a0“AFL-CIO’s Trumka:\u00a0USTR Told Us Murder Isn’t A Violation,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and reported that, “Defenders of the\u00a0White House push for sweeping trade deals argue they include tough\u00a0enforcement of labor standards. But a top union leader scoffed at such\u00a0claims Tuesday, revealing that\u00a0administration officials have said privately\u00a0that they don\u2019t consider even the killings of labor organizers to be\u00a0violations of those pacts.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: this is and will be the low level of the playing-field that U.S. workers will be competing against in TPP and TTIP, just as it is already, in the far-smaller NAFTA. “Trumka said that\u00a0even after the Obama administration crafted an agreement to tighten labor\u00a0protections four years ago, some 105 labor organizers have been killed,\u00a0and more than\u00a01,300 have been threatened with death.\u201d The Obama Administration is ignoring the tightened regulations that it itself managed to get implemented on paper. “Pressed for\u00a0details about Trumka\u2019s assertion that murder doesn\u2019t count as a\u00a0violation of labor rules, Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO deputy chief of staff,\u00a0told HuffPost that USTR officials said\u00a0in at least two meetings where she\u00a0was present that killing and brutalizing organizers would not be\u00a0considered interfering with labor rights under the terms of the trade\u00a0measures.\u201d Furthermore: \u201c’We documented\u00a0five or six murders of Guatemalan trade unionists that the government had failed\u00a0to effectively investigate or prosecute,’ Lee said. ‘The USTR told us that\u00a0the\u00a0murders of trade unionists or violence against trade unionists was not\u00a0a violation of the labor chapter.\u2019\u201d That U.S. Trade Representative, Michael Froman, is the same person Obama has negotiating with foreign governments, and with international corporations, both the TPP, and the TTIP.<\/span><\/p>\n

Any country in TPP or TTIP that brings up worker-protection regulations which are beyond this abysmal level will be fined by corporate panels, and those fines will then become income to the companies whose \u2018rights\u2019 (such as to murder labor-organizers) have been violated, under the terms of the given treaty: TPP or TTIP.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s just one example of the type of sovereignty (in this instance over workers\u2019 rights) that is being ceded to international corporations, under these ‘trade\u2019 deals.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the UN\u2019s top official on such matters has said, TTP & TTIP will produce\u00a0“a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically\u00a0elected governments call the shots.”<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

It couldn\u2019t have happened if not for the fact that such news reports as that just quoted from Huffington Post have constituted only a tiny minority of the \u2018news\u2019 reports about these proposed \u2018trade\u2019 deals, in the American press<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Every Senator, and every member of the U.S. House, who votes for \u201cFast Track\u201d approval for these deals, is looking for big money from big corporations, and not for fulfilling his or her supposed and oathed job: to be an authentic representative of the public back home \u2013 and of their children, and future generations.<\/span><\/p>\n

The idea that these are ‘free market’ treaties is the biggest of all Big Lies. They\u2019re a transfer of sovereignty from national democracies to a fascistic world government. This is the biggest news-story of our times, and it\u2019s been virtually ignored, until it\u2019s too late to stop.<\/span><\/p>\n

———-<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0of \u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse As I\u00a0reported on Wednesday, a deal was worked out in the U.S. Senate on the early afternoon of May 13th to “Fast-Track” through to approval U.S. President Barack Obama\u2019s proposed trade deals, TPP with Asia, and TTIP with Europe. (It should have been reported on the nightly TV news programs, but most of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":149073,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[115,30,96,974,529,535,522,843,694,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-151103","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-cover-up","12":"tag-democracy","13":"tag-fascism","14":"tag-global-news","15":"tag-obama","16":"tag-tpp","17":"tag-ttip","18":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}