Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Trans-Pacific Partnership: Under Cover of Darkness, a Corporate Coup Is Underway

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Trans-Pacific Partnership: Under Cover of Darkness, a Corporate Coup Is Underway

Click here to access article by Lori Wallach from AlterNet.

...signatory countries would be obliged to conform all their domestic laws and regulations to TPP’s rules, effecting a quiet corporate coup d’état. And, regardless of election outcomes or changes in public opinion, these extreme rules could not be altered without the consent of all signatory countries. Failure to conform to these rules would subject countries to indefinite trade sanctions.

Another illustration of the seamless transition from the Bush administration to the Obama administration: the ongoing secret attempts to establish transnational corporate rule that surrenders all vestiges of bourgeois democracy to a new world order under the direct rule of the One Percent unhampered by their parliamentary and electoral procedures that have served this class so well in the past.