If you need a good, doable New Year’s resolution, try this: “I resolve to do my part this year to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
The what? Most people have never heard of the TPP, but everyone who cares about good American jobs, an unpolluted environment, food safety and other fundamentals — especially including our basic right to be a sovereign, self-governing people — should take a peek at this big nasty of a global trade scam. You’d find that the so-called 12-nation “partnership” actually has little to do with trade and everything to do with enthroning a plutocracy of global corporations over us. Rep. Keith Ellison has warned that TPP is the “largest corporate power grab you never heard of.”
One reason we commoners don’t know about it is that the corporate and governmental elites of the 12 nations have been negotiating this momentous deal in strict secrecy, not only keeping us in the dark, but also Congress. Another reason, however, is that the mass media has been shockingly silent, apparently even incurious about what clearly is a huge story with historic consequences.
FAIR, the excellent watchdog group that tracks media coverage, found that ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC have offered the American public practically zero news stories about TPP. Even though the looming power grab has now spawned protests around the world, generated a major coalition of some 500 grassroots groups in our country loudly opposing the ripoff deal, and has produced an odd-bedfellow, a rare bipartisan alignment of opponents in Congress, there’s been a TV blackout. Could it possibly be that the global conglomerates that own our so-called “news” networks don’t want us knowing what’s up behind TPP’s closed doors? Surely not.
To learn what the corporate powers are up to… and what we can do about it, go to www.StopTheTPP.org.
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This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
