Giant corporations are crafty. Or maybe devious is a better word.

Giant corporations are crafty.

Or maybe devious is a better word.

Years ago, they realized that a pesky little thing called democracy might prevent them from getting what they wanted — essentially unlimited power — no matter how much they spent engineering elections and buying off politicians.

So they came up with a fallback plan:

Exploit obscure international trade pacts — which were being negotiated with little public or press oversight — to get what they could not achieve openly and democratically: weaker food and medicine safety standards, corporate-friendly energy and environmental policies, limits on Internet free speech, new privileges to raise medicine prices and offshore jobs, and more.

And they call these backdoor schemes “free trade agreements.”

Well, the deals do leave corporations “free” to undermine the policies that protect all of us from being casualties in their global race to the bottom.

Add your name if you don’t want the public safeguards we all rely on negotiated away as part of “trade” deals hijacked by multinational corporations.

We know all too well how disastrously NAFTA worked out.

Now there’s an even worse deal in the works, which has been described as “NAFTA on steroids.”

It’s called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.

The TPP currently involves the United States and these 11 other countries: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

Other countries could join in later — including China.

One of the most outrageous things these deals do is let corporations demand compensation from taxpayers — in secretive, foreign tribunals — for any policy or government action they claim interferes with their expected profits.

Really.

For example, tobacco giant Philip Morris is attacking Australia’s rules on cigarette packaging in one of these corporate tribunals under a similar pact, insisting on hundreds of millions from Australian taxpayers.

Ecuador was recently ordered to pay Occidental Petroleum billions after the oil behemoth, not the country, broke the terms of a contract.

Pharmaceutical titan Eli Lilly is demanding $500 million from the people of Canada, where courts invalidated patents on medicines that did not perform as promised.

These corporate tribunals are one-sided. Corporations alone decide if and when to attack. Governments can’t make claims against corporate culprits. Consumers and workers can’t either.

The only reason to sign international trade deals is if they can help people in every country involved live better, healthier and safer lives.

We can’t afford more “trade” agreements that offshore our jobs, flood us with unsafe food and products, and erode the principles and practice of democracy.

Add your name if you agree: http://action.citizen.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=12360

Earlier this month, Public Citizen was key to two developments that could help derail the TPP:

We worked with Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives to sign letters to President Obama opposing “Fast Track” — an anti-democratic, Nixon-era scheme that transfers Congress’ constitutional trade authority to the president. Obama wants fast track so that he can railroad the TPP through. After hundreds of grassroots meetings, rallies, lobby visits and more, 190 House members said no to Fast Track.
We partnered with WikiLeaks to expose some of the language in the draft TPP agreement, which is being negotiated in secret with the input of 600 official corporate trade “advisors” from the U.S. while the public, the press and most members of Congress have been locked out. We did the analysis that let the world know the text would mean higher medicine prices and a sneak attack on Internet freedom.
Tens of thousands of Public Citizen supporters took action with us over the past year and deserve credit for helping to uncover the TPP and turn the tide against Fast Track.

A fast-tracked TPP would be nothing less than a corporate end run around laws and policies that are the result of years, decades and even lifetimes of work to protect people from the insatiable greed of giant corporations.

This could be the beginning of the end for the TPP. I need you to take action today so that we can stop this runaway train in its tracks.

This is our moment — right now.

Onward,

Robert Weissman
President, Public Citizen