Stop Obama From Signing the TPP. Here's why...

WHAT THE TPP WILL DO:

 

Trade officials from the United States and eleven Pacific Rim nations: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam, are in intensive, closed door negotiations to sign a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) "Free Trade" Agreement by the end of the year. Every Pacific Rim nation from China and Russia to Indonesia could eventually be included. There are draft texts for this pact's 29 chapters, most of which have nothing to do with trade. Rather, the TPP would impose limits on domestic food safety, health, environmental and other policies. The governments won’t release the text to the public. But 600 mostly corporate U.S. “trade advisors” have full access. America’s worst job killers: offshoring corporations, global banks, agribusiness, and pharmaceutical giants want this deal to be another corporate power tool like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Consumer, labor, environmental, and other public interest advocates want transparency in the process and a “Fair Deal or No Deal.” A few texts have leaked. It is not looking good. U.S. negotiators are pushing proposals that not only replicate the worst of NAFTA, but have championed outrageous new corporate-favored terms.

 

Job Loss

This deal is slated to include extreme foreign investor protections that help corporations offshore jobs. These NAFTA style terms give special benefits to firms that relocate investment and jobs. Since NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, the U.S. has lost 5 million (1 out of every 4) of its manufacturing jobs.

 

Ban on “Buy American”

All firms operating in any TPP signatory country would get equal access to U.S. procurement contracts rather than us recycling our tax dollars here to create American jobs. Specifications like “renewable/recycled” or “sweat free” and obligations to meet prevailing wages can be challenged.

 

U.S. Environmental, Health Laws Attacked

Expansion of the notorious “investor state” enforcement system is slated for this pact. It empowers corporations to use World Bank tribunals to sue governments to demand unlimited taxpayer compensation if they think our laws limit their “expected future profits.”

 

Big Benefits for The Banks

Wall Street wants to use the TPP to roll back new safeguards many nations have passed to get banks and securities firms under control and restore financial stability. Past NAFTA style trade pacts locked in the extreme deregulation that led to the devastating financial crisis.

 

Higher Medicine Prices

Pharma would get extreme new privileges that would jack up prices and cut consumers’ access to life savings medicines. This is not only patent extensions and data exclusivity in developing countries, but new rights to challenge decisions of cost-saving drug formularies which are used here for Medicare and Medicaid.

 

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Take action before this corporate power tool disguised as a trade deal kills your job and formalizes corporate rule over our lives.

 

Get informed, join the fight! Check out: www.citizen.org/tpp | gtwinfo@citizen.org | 202.454.5134.

 

Contact your Senators, Representatives, and state legislators: ask them to demand release of the secret negotiating texts and stop the TPP corporate power tool agenda that slams us 99 percenters.

 

Write to President Obama: tell him that you support his focus on American manufacturing, but that his blueprint will be destroyed unless he gets his trade negotiators on a new track on TPP. We cannot afford another job killing, unsafe import flooding, democracy crushing NAFTA style trade deal.

 

 

 

Done