Trade Trap: EU as Model for Misnamed TPP, TTIP
Two massive and dangerous “trade” agreements, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) loom on the near horizon. Like icebergs of doom, they lie mostly submerged, threatening to rip asunder the hulls of all sovereign ships of state that dare to sail their waters.
We place the word “trade” in quotation marks because these twin pacts, which the Obama administration has listed as top priority items on its overall agenda, run to thousands of pages and establish international “rules” for hundreds of domestic issues that have nothing to do with traditional notions of trade, ranging from farming, banking, mining, fishing, manufacturing, immigration, migration, and labor, to environment, insurance, intellectual property, textiles, etc. If the federal Fair Packaging and Labeling Act were applied to the TTIP and TPP, then President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, current Secretary of State John Kerry, U.S. Trade Ambassador Michael Froman, and all the rest of the negotiators of these fraudulent and deceptive deals would be arrested for criminal misrepresentation, not to mention the even more serious charges that they could (and should) be hit with for pushing these schemes to destroy our national sovereignty and the constitutional order they have sworn to defend.
The TPP treaty is an incomprehensible labyrinth of legalese running to 5,544 pages (longer than the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy). Negotiated in total secrecy (despite promises of “transparency”), the TPP proposes “integration” that would entangle the United States in the political and economic affairs of 11 Pacific Rim member states: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. That’s the current membership, but there are already plans to “widen” it to include more nations, including Communist China and Russia.
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