“Hollywood Boycott Threatens Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
That’s the headline of an article published by the Huffington Post on May 6 reporting on the opposition of many in the entertainment industry to the inclusion of Brunei in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
A coterie of celebrities is irked by the fact that the would-be TPP participant has adopted “a brutal penal code based on Sharia law with punishments including flogging, dismemberment and death by stoning for crimes such as adultery and sodomy.”
While Hollywood might be bringing attention to the TPP because of Brunei’s laws, their colleagues in the television news aren’t being quite so vocal.
A survey of television news coverage of the TPP by the liberal group MediaMatters found that a:
transcript search of CBS Evening News with Scott Pelly, ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer, and NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams from August 1, 2013 through January 31, 2014 found no mention of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP received one mention on PBS’ Newshour, when Doug Paal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued that approving the TPP would improve relations with Asian nations.
The 24-hour cable news channels have been almost as silent. The report indicates that “the three largest cable networks — CNN, MSNBC, Fox News — covered the ongoing negotiations 33 times during their evening programming. The overwhelming majority of these mentions (32) originated on MSNBC and aired during The Ed Show.”
It is a bit disingenuous for these progressives who claim to be so open-minded and accepting of all lifestyles, to deny to others the right to live their life the way their consciences dictate.
That isn’t to say that Sharia Law, particularly some of the aspects singled out by the protesters, isn’t reprehensible, it’s just that it seems so incongruous for the enmity to come from those who insist their all-inclusive attitude is evidence of their evolved sensibilities.
The truth behind the naked emperor is that it’s Islam’s prohibitions on homosexuality that underlies the TPP protest. Consider this evidence from the Huffington Post story:
Ellen DeGenneres, Jay Leno and other Hollywood celebrities have joined the Human Rights Campaign, the Feminist Majority Foundation and the city of Beverly Hills in blasting Brunei and calling for a boycott of properties owned by the government of Brunei, including the Beverly Hills Hotel. Virgin Airlines founder Richard Branson announced his companies will boycott all hotels owned by Brunei worldwide. These government-owned investments provide financial support to the medieval brutality in Brunei.
The radical “gay” lobby and the headline-grabbing glitterati that carries its water has little concern for the destruction of sovereignty, the surrender of legislative power to an extraconstitutional committee, and the subordination of the U.S. Constitution to international integration pacts masquerading as trade agreements. The TPP doesn’t appear on the radar of these groups when it infringes upon fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, but it is “deplorable” when it infringes on the “rights” of homosexuals to commit acts regarded as sinful to most of the world’s religions.
Here again, the source of the celebrities’ anger as reported by the Huffington Post:
While human rights groups, religious freedom advocates, LGBT and women’s rights groups protest a regime that supports the public flogging of women who have abortions, the jailing of women who become pregnant outside of marriage, the stoning to death of gay men and lesbians and the outlawing of Bibles and Christian missionaries, the Obama administration seems to be seeking deeper ties with the Islamic Sultanate of Brunei.
The real problem with the TPP is much more malign, however.
Secret Surrender of Sovereignty
In November 2013, portions of the TPP draft agreement published by WikiLeaks contained sketches of President Obama’s plans to surrender American sovereignty to international tribunals.
Another WikiLeaks disclosure in January revealed that the president was attempting to surrender sovereignty over U.S. environmental policy to international bureaucrats interested in lowering those standards to mirror those of our TPP partner nations.
U.S. copyright laws, Internet freedom, and Web-based publishing would also be obliterated by the TPP, and, although it hasn’t been widely reported, the TPP would give the global government sweeping surveillance powers, as well.
Although the American people (and the people of all nations involved in the pact) are prevented from seeing or commenting on the treaty being ostensibly negotiated on their behalf, multinational corporations have seats at the trading table.
While the TPP grants corporate giants such as Walmart and Monsanto the power to bypass Congress and the courts, the elected representatives of the American people are kept from even seeing the draft version of the agreement.
As with the multitude of similar trade pacts the United States has formed, the ultimate aim of the TPP is the creation of a regional super government, thus the stonewalling of federal lawmakers who dare seek to assert some sort of oversight.
Economic and Political Integration as a Step Toward Global Government
In the case of the TPP, the zone would be called the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP). Members of the proposed “free trade” bloc include all the current TPP participants: Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Vietnam, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Mexico, Chile, Canada, and the United States. The regional trading partnership is intended to establish “a comprehensive free trade agreement across the region.”
The ultimate goal of the TPP isn’t just the creation of an FTAAP, though. Supporters of the deal insist that the TPP is a “trade agreement designed to achieve broad liberalization and a high degree of economic integration among the parties.”
“Integration” is a word that is painful to the ears of constitutionalists and those unwilling to surrender U.S. sovereignty to a committee of globalists who are unelected by the American people and unaccountable to them. Integration is an internationalist tool for subordinating American law to the globalist bureaucracy at the United Nations.
Economic and political integration will push the once-independent United States of America into yet another collectivist bloc that will facilitate the complete dissolution of our country and our states into no more than subordinate outposts of a one-world government.
In an article examining the devastating effects of the TPP, William F. Jasper, senior editor of The New American, identified the end game for these globalists and their secretly planned trade pacts. Wrote Jasper:
The architects and promoters of the TPP and FTAAP frequently point with admiration to the “integration” process of the European Union (EU) as the model they would like to see implemented for the Asia-Pacific rim nations. As with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Trans-Pacific Partnership has been designed to follow the EU example of relentless widening and deepening, constantly eroding national sovereignty, while building “transnational governance” that is not restrained by the checks and balances of national constitutions.
Equally significant is that 600 industry lobbyists and “advisors,” as well as unelected trade representatives, are at the table, while representatives from the public at large and businesses other than huge monopolies are conspicuously absent.
Each of the “partners” to the pact, including foreign corporations, would be exempted from abiding by American laws governing trade disputes. Moreover, the sovereignty of the United States and the Constitution’s enumeration of powers would once again be sacrificed on the altar of global government by subordinating U.S. laws passed by duly elected representatives of the people to a code of regulations created by a team of transnational bureaucrats.
“The barbarism in Brunei shows us everything that’s wrong with the TransPacific Partnership,” the author of the Huffington Post piece claims.
Americans who study the subject realize, however, that the redrawing of national boundaries and domestic legal processes being carried out in secret by the globalists sitting around the TPP negotiating table is an attack on American laws, American courts, American freedom of expression, American sovereignty, and the American Constitution, and that’s what’s really wrong with the TPP.
Related articles:
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): Bigger and More Dangerous Than ObamaCare (Video)
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): Assault on Our Sovereignty, Our Constitution, Our Liberty (Video)
Members of Congress Call for TPP Transparency
WikiLeaks Publishes Key Chapter of Secret TPP Agreement
Trans-Pacific Partnership Takes Legal Authority Away from Domestic Courts
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels nationwide speaking on nullification, the Second Amendment, the surveillance state, and other constitutional issues. Follow him on Twitter @TNAJoeWolverton and he can be reached at [email protected].
