The 18th round of secretive negotiations on the formation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a massive so-called free trade treaty — is about to begin in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia. In advance of that confab, one group has announced the creation of a campaign to stop the TPP from becoming the law in the United States.
The campaign, called Flush the TPP, is being sponsored by PopularResistance.org. According to the web page promoting the effort, “a movement to stop the TPP is expanding rapidly. Every Tuesday, people across North America are holding actions against the TPP, from education events to civil disobedience.”
Part of the latter prong of the program involves handing out pre-printed cards opposing the TPP and “holding a sign in a public place on #TPPTuesday, or a more complicated and creative action such as light projection or highway bannering.”
PopularResistance.org’s Flush the TPP website rightly reports that “this massive trade agreement is a high priority for transnational corporations, and they are working fast to make it law.”
As The New American reported just after the start of President Obama’s second term:
In an article published by World Politics Review, for example, Edward Alden writes that the Obama administration’s acceptance and acceleration of the TPP is the “biggest swerve” away from a global Great Depression.
Alden writes:
The global financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed produced the first steep decline in world trade since the Great Depression. Yet rather than falling down, the United States and other countries have managed to swerve and keep going.
The biggest swerve was the embrace of regional trade liberalization, starting with Asia.
Identifying the TPP as the president’s “top trade priority,” Alden suggests that the “embrace of regional trade liberalization” will keep the United States from falling down the steep decline toward economic devastation.
Next, the Flush the TPP website informs readers, “The TPP affects many issues, including worker’s rights and wages, environmental collapse and climate change, sovereignty of nations and democratic rule of law, Internet freedom and online creativity, food safety and agriculture, healthcare and financial regulation (including controls over the flow of capital), and much more.”
With the exception of some overt socialist and green gobbledygook, the group’s take on the tragic toll the TPP would exact from American sovereignty and individual liberty is accurate, as well.
The ultimate aim of the TPP is the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP). Members of the proposed “free trade” bloc include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. The regional trading partnership is intended to establish “a comprehensive free trade agreement across the region.”
An article in the Georgetown Journal of International Law says that the TPP negotiations “are designed to culminate in a ‘gold standard’ free trade agreement (FTA).” The article continues:
The TPP negotiations are among the more recent of a large number of FTAs and Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) that have been or are being negotiated between the member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Since the APEC Leaders’ Bogor Declaration in November 1994, the member economies have been committed on some level to the objective of achieving an environment for “free and open” trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region.
In the argot of globalism, “free and open trade” translates as “economic and political integration.” Later in the Georgetown piece, former United States Trade Representative (USTR) Ron Kirk is quoted as calling for the TPP to be “more than a broad concept.”
Additional evidence of the “ambitious” goal of the TPP discussions is found in a press release issued by representatives of the member nations attending an APEC meeting in Honolulu in 2011:
We are delighted to have achieved this milestone in our common vision to establish a comprehensive, next-generation regional agreement that liberalizes trade and investment and addresses new and traditional trade issues and 21st-century challenges. We are confident that this agreement will be a model for ambition for other free trade agreements in the future.
In fact, the authors of the Georgetown review state that the ultimate goal of the TPP isn’t just the creation of an FTAAP. They insist that the TPP is a “trade agreement designed to achieve broad liberalization and a high degree of economic integration among the parties.” There’s that word “integration” again.
At the G20 Leading Economies Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, former USTR Kirk announced that Mexico would soon join the TPP. At a press conference after that announcement, former Mexican President Felipe Calderón described the the TPP as “one of the free trade initiatives that’s most ambitious in the world” and one that would “foster integration of the Asia Pacific region, one of the regions with the greatest dynamism in the world.”
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 nation and our states into no more than impotent members of a one-world government.
Although 11 countries are currently included within the coterie of TPP participants, in April, President Obama notified Congress of his plan to bring Japan into the TPP area and include it in all upcoming negotiations. This notification follows an announcement on April 12, 2013 that the United States and Japan had completed bilateral TPP consultations, as well as an announcement by TPP countries on April 21, 2013 that they welcome Japan as a new participant in the TPP negotiations, pending the successful completion of domestic procedures by each TPP country.
On July 24, the 90-day consultation period with Congress and the public on U.S. negotiating objectives with respect to Japan is set to expire. That gives Americans only two weeks to contact their congressmen and senators and demand that U.S. control of trade not be surrendered to an unelected body of globalist bureaucrats.
Existing U.S. law would also be supplanted by the TPP if the agreement is adopted.
All “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 trans-national bureaucrats.
If you’re as fond of NAFTA and what it did for our economy and our sovereignty as Mexico and Canada are, then you’ll love what the TPP has in store.
In June, recently sworn-in USTR Michael Froman met with NAFTA and TPP partner, Canadian Trade Minister Ed Fast, and the pair reaffirmed their commitment to concluding the TPP this year and mapped out plans for doing so.
In June 2012, portions of the TPP draft agreement that were leaked to the Internet contained sketches of President Obama’s plans to surrender American sovereignty to international tribunals. This is just one of many frightening provisions of the TPP that are being negotiated in secret by American and international trade representatives.
U.S. copyright laws, Internet freedom, and web-based publishing would all be obliterated by the TPP and the global government would be granted sweeping surveillance powers, as well.
Americans who study the subject realize 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.
Nonetheless, the TPP cannot have these bad effects on America unless Congress approves a final TPP agreement. However, if the American people do not rise up in firm opposition to the TPP and convince Congress to tear down the wall of secrecy built by globalists seeking to shield their attack on our law and liberty from congressional oversight, and ultimately to reject any TPP agreement, then an approved TPP might finish the integration — economic and political — begun by NAFTA and it may be the last straw in the already weakened broom of American sovereignty.
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at [email protected]
