Friday, November 15, 2013

(lenghty) UN TREATIES THREATEN OUR VERY EXISTENCE

Submitted by: Nancy Battle


 This is the BIG one!


This is a long email but the issue will be devastating if we do not understand the implications and do something to help stop TPP/TIPPS.  Please takes some time to read the information below and then call your US Rep and Senators and let then know WE THE PEOPLE demand they stand against this scheme.  PLEASE SHARE.



This is the big one

 Clinton brought us the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which opened our borders for outsourcing, as Ross Perot warned, with the passing of NAFTA, you’ll hear a big sucking sound from the production and jobs leaving America and heading abroad.  Bush brought us Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which regulates all products sold, right down to the mega grams in your vitamin pills.  And Obama’s bringing us the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which regulates EVERYTHING you see, hear and touch. 


As I said in my book and a number of articles, Treaties trump the U.S. Constitution.  All treaties contain agreements that bind and obligate countries to, or not to, perform certain acts.  Notice the words “free trade” and “partnership”, when it should read “controlled trade” and “opposition”.  You’ll always be right on target if you accept everything they say through their news media pendants to mean the exact opposite.

We are living in a George Orwell’s, 1984, nightmare.  This current president and his administration has transformed into a totalitarian government in total control, while demanding complete subjugation of the people. In 1984, there’s an Orwellian Newspeak, where the Ministry of Love (Miniluv) oversees torture and brainwashing, the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty) oversees shortage and famine, the Ministry of Peace (Minipax) oversees war and atrocity, and the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue) oversees propaganda and historical revisionism. The Ministry of Defense is really the Ministry of Attack, WAR, perpetual war, is PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, and THOUGHTCRIME is death. The telescreens in every public area, have hidden microphones and cameras. These devices, alongside informers, permit the Thought Police to spy upon everyone and so identify anyone who might endanger the government’s régime; children, most of all, are indoctrinated to spy and inform on suspected thought-criminals – especially their parents.

Who wants to live and a world like this?  Yet, aren’t we there today?


Every president since J.F. Kennedy was controlled by the same powers-that-be that control everything we think (magazines, books, TV and radio), everything we say (we’re already into restricted speech and we’re quickly moving into any independent thinking of the corporate news media is committing a “thoughtcrime”), everything we wear (it’s the corporate powers-that-be that present the latest styles and dress that wield such peer-pressure that when our kids aren’t wearing the latest trend, they’re ostracized and bullied suicide by their peers) and very soon everything we do—thanks to Obama’s TPP and Obama-don’t-care Act—will be closely monitored and tightly regulated, IF WE DON’T KICK ALL THE BUMS OUT AND TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK from these gangster, bankster, criminal thugs.

Trans-Pacific Partnership Ready for Christmas Delivery?

Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
New American
November 14, 2013
As the end of 2013 approaches, so does President Obama’s deadline for approving the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Trans Pacific Partnership Ready for Christmas Delivery? 141113tpp2
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
The TPP is a direct and deadly attack on sovereignty and representative government masquerading as a Pacific Rim trade pact.
Currently, there are 12 countries negotiating in secret to create this regional trade agreement that some have called NAFTA on steroids. The number of participants could rise to a baker’s dozen should China be welcomed on board by the United States (President Obama has signaled that he would recognize the Chinese communist government’s partnership in the bloc).

President Obama’s fascination with intertwining the economic welfare of the United States with China is perhaps one reason a recent commentator called the TPP “another disaster from a proven liar.”

Writing in an op-ed for the Washington Times, Judson Phillips lists several of the principal criticisms of the TPP:

Barack Obama is asking for fast track authority for the Trans Pacific Partnership. Consider that to be another version of “you have to pass this to see what is in it.” With fast track authority, there will be no hearings on this treaty. It will be negotiated then sent to the Senate for a simple up or down vote. The Senate will not be able to provide advice and consent because they cannot offer amendments under fast track.

Less than one fifth of the Trans Pacific Partnership deals with trade. The remainder of the treaty governs a myriad of things, including regulating the price of medicines. A few months ago, a mix of conservative and liberal groups stopped the “Stop Online Piracy Act” or SOPA. Most of the provisions of SOPA are included in the Trans Pacific Partnership.

Under the proposals of the TPP, American sovereignty would be eroded. American courts would be inferior to foreign trade courts and disputes between American citizens and foreign corporations would not be litigated in American courts but in these trade tribunals.

The TPP is guilty of each of those charges, and the evidence is overwhelming.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all the roster of frightening things about the TPP is the secrecy surrounding the details of the agreement.
A few federal lawmakers have tried in vain to bring into the light the frightening compromises being made by our trade representatives at the TPP negotiations.
Zach Carter of the online Huffington Post reported that Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs and Global Competitiveness, was stonewalled by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) when he attempted to see any of the draft documents related to the governance of the TPP.

In response to this rebuff, Wyden proposed a measure in the Senate that would force transparency on the process, and that was enough to convince the USTR to grant the senator a peek at the documents, though his staff was not permitted to peruse them.

Wyden spokeswoman Jennifer Hoelzer told the Huffington Post that such accommodations were “better than nothing” but not ideal in light of the well-known fact that on Capitol Hill the real work of drafting and evaluating legislation is performed by the representatives’ staff members who are often experts in particular areas of domestic and foreign policy.

“I would point out how insulting it is for them to argue that members of Congress are to personally go over to USTR to view the trade documents,” Hoelzer said. “An advisor at Halliburton or the MPAA is given a password that allows him or her to go on the USTR website and view the TPP agreement anytime he or she wants.”

It is instructive that a duly elected senator of the United States has to beg and plead and threaten legislation in order to see the TPP trade agreement negotiations, but corporate interests are given a password by the USTR that grants them full, unrestricted access to those same documents.

U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) issued a statement criticizing the Obama administration for the lack of oversight into an agreement with devastating potential:
After more than a decade of broken promises from NAFTA, CAFTA, and normalized trade relations with China, we can now add a credibility deficit to the trade deficits we’ve seen. The leaked documents surfacing today only underscore the secrecy surrounding TPP negotiations and confirm worst suspicions about the direction trade negotiations are heading. It’s telling that it is easier for the CEO of a major corporation to access information about the negotiations than the American people’s elected representatives.

The negotiations must involve more transparency and bring more voices to the table.
Apart from the secrecy, a few drafts of key provisions of the TPP have been leaked to the Internet. One thing all the leaks reveal is that large corporations would be allowed to assume powers that constitutionally belong to Congress and to the states.

Notably, in both statements announcing the hemispheric enlargement of the trade bloc, former U.S. Trade Representative Kirk places the approval of “domestic stakeholders” (read: large corporations) on a level with that of Congress. It is precisely this exalting of big business, as well as the as-yet-impenetrable wall of secrecy surrounding the drafting of the TPP treaty, that has troubled many of the people’s representatives in Congress.

Although the treaty negotiations are being kept under a thick veil of secrecy, a draft document leaked to the Internet discloses that as part of its membership in the TPP, the United States would agree to exempt foreign corporations from our laws and regulations, placing the resolution of any disputes as to the applicability of those matters to foreign business in the hands of an international arbitration tribunal overseen by the secretary-general of the United Nations.

The leaked information also confirms the fears of many who from the beginning have opposed the entry of the United States into this trade agreement. The alarms sounded by several groups on the Left and the Right warning of the wholesale damage that the TPP could cause to commerce, copyrights, and the Constitution now seem vindicated.

An organization actively protecting the sovereignty of the United States is Americans for Limited Government (ALG). In June 2012, ALG released a statement drawing attention to critical provisions of the leaked TPP agreement, as well as ably pointing out some of the most noxious aspects of the proposed agreement:

These new trade agreements will place domestic U.S. firms that do not do business overseas at a competitive disadvantage. Based on these leaked documents, foreign firms under this trade pact could conceivably appeal federal regulatory and court rulings against them to an international tribunal with the apparent authority to overrule our sovereignty. If foreign companies want to do business in America, they should have to follow the same rules as everyone else. No special favors.

It is telling that the only apparent way these Pacific nations will enter a free trade agreement with the U.S. is if they are exempt from our onerous environmental and financial regulations that make it cost-ineffective to do business here. Instead of making these foreign firms exempt from these burdensome rules, they should just repeal the regulations and make it cheaper to do business here.

This poses an even wider problem, though. Obama is negotiating a trade pact that would constitute a judicial authority higher than even the U.S. Supreme Court that could overrule federal court rulings applying U.S. law to foreign companies. That is unconstitutional….

This tribunal needs to be removed from this agreement, and no foreign company doing business on our soil should have a competitive advantage, created by some dumb agreement, over American companies. What is Obama thinking? He is placing international organizations above the interests of our own country.

Just days after the proposed provisions of the TPP appeared online, The New American interviewed ALG President Bill Wilson. Wilson was asked what he believes Americans have to fear should the United States enter the TPP and why he thinks the negotiations have been conducted in secret.

“These trade pacts, starting with NAFTA and before [GATT], strike at the heart of national sovereignty, ours and that of the other member nations,” Wilson warned. “At their core they diminish the prerogatives and powers of a specific country and surrender them to international bodies or corporations.”

Other observers agree. In fact, an organization calling itself “Just Foreign Policy” has created a crowd-sourced bounty on the TPP agreement. On the group’s website, individuals interested in exposing the secret TPP agreement and the pro-corporate corruption included in it can donate money to increase the potential reward for the pact’s revelation. The project explains:

At this very moment, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) — a trade agreement that could affect the health and welfare of billions of people worldwide — is being negotiated behind closed doors. While 600 corporate lobbyists have access to the text, the press, the public, and even members of the US Congress are being kept in the dark.

But we don’t have to stand meekly by as corporate cronies decide our futures. Concerned citizens from around the world are pooling together their resources as a reward to WikiLeaks if it makes the negotiating text of the TPP public. Our pledge, as individuals, is to donate this money to WikiLeaks should it leak the document we seek.

As WikiLeaks likes to say, information wants to be free. The negotiating text for the TPP wants to be free. Someone just needs to release it.
Unfortunately, the balance seems to be tipping in favor of finishing the TPP in time for Christmas. In a November 5 editorial, theNew York Times came out in favor of the secret surrender of sovereignty, describing the agreement as “a trade agreement … that could help all of our economies and strengthen relations between the United States and several important Asian allies.”

Leading opponent of the TPP, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), senses a couple of sinister explanations for the Old Gray Lady’s support of the secret attempt at economic integration of a dozen economies. EFF’s Maira Sutton writes:

That raises two distressing possibilities: either in an act of extraordinary subservience, the Times has endorsed an agreement that neither the public nor its editors have the ability to read. Or, in an act of extraordinary cowardice, it has obtained a copy of the secret text and hasn’t fulfilled its duty to the public interest to publish it.

Regardless, President Obama is determined to get approval from Congress to fast-track the TPP negotiations. Not surprisingly, senators from both major parties are ready to make it a Merry Christmas for the president. The Hill reports:

Senate Finance Committee leaders called on Wednesday for Congress to pass fast-track legislation aimed at smoothing the passage of any future trade deals.
Panel Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and ranking member Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said during a trade hearing that they are working on crafting trade promotion authority (TPA) legislation and are expecting the Obama administration to work with them toward gaining its approval in Congress.

Baucus said it is time to “pass TPA and do it soon.”
There is still time for Americans to contact their senators and encourage them to refuse to ratify any agreement that is worked out in secret, grants corporations lawmaking power that the Constitution gives exclusively to Congress, and ties the future financial well-being of the United States to countries ruled by communists, dictators, and with economies that will adversely affect nearly every aspect of American manufacturing and agriculture.

Related posts:
  1. Trans Pacific Partnership: Corporate Escape From Accountability
  2. Deepening the U.S.-EU Transatlantic Trade Partnership
  3. Obama Pushing Trans-Atlantic Union with EU
  4. Mexico and Canada Invited to Join the Secret TPP Negotiations
  5. Canada Formally Joins TPP; Goal of Secret Pact Is Integration

Leaked Treaty: Worse Than SOPA and ACTA

Washington’s Blog
November 14, 2013
We noted last year:
Leaked Treaty: Worse Than SOPA and ACTA 141113tpp3
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
An international treaty being negotiated in secret which would not only crack down on Internet privacy much more than SOPA or ACTA, but would actually destroy the sovereignty of the U.S. and all other signatories.

It is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
We also noted that even Congressmen are furious that the bill was being kept secret from the American public.


Wikileaks has now leaked the intellectual property chapter of the secret treaty … and it’s as bad as we feared.
Public Citizen explains how the TPP would limit people’s access to affordable medicine.

And International Business Times explains:

The TPP’s chapter on IP deals with a host of issues, but its potential impacts on basic Internet freedom and usage are perhaps the ones that would directly impact the most people in the short term. One of the biggest concerns about the agreement raised by the Internet freedom advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation centers around the concept of “temporary copies.” Here’s the text of the relevant section of the TPP’s intellectual property chapter leaked Wednesday:

“Each Party shall provide that authors, performers, and producers of phonograms have the right to authorize or prohibit all reproductions of their works, performances, and phonograms, in any manner or form, permanent or temporary (including temporary storage in electronic form).”

The EFF wrote in a July analysis of the language – which has not been amended in the intervening months — that the provision “reveals a profound disconnect with the reality of the modern computer,” which relies on temporary copies to perform routine operations, during which it must create temporary copies of programs and files in order to carry out basic functions. This is particularly so while a computer is connected to the Internet, when it will use temporary copies to buffer videos, store cache files to ensure websites load quickly and more.

“Since it’s technically necessary to download a temporary version of everything we see on our devices, does that mean—under the US proposed language—that anyone who ever views content on their device could potentially be found liable of infringement?” the EFF wrote. “For other countries signing on to the TPP, the answer would be most likely yes.”

And see this.

TPP would literally act to destroy the sovereignty of the U.S. and the  other nations (Preview) which sign the bill.

Postscript: Will the powers-that-be renew their labeling of Wikileaks as criminals for leaking an anti-American bill which would gut our nation’s sovereignty?

Related posts:
  1. ACTA is worse than SOPA, here’s what you need to know
  2. Obama Signs Global Internet Treaty Worse Than SOPA
  3. EU signs ACTA, global internet censorship treaty
  4. Alex Jones: Obama Signs Global Internet Treaty Worse Than SOPA
  5. ACTA treaty aims to deputize ISPs on copyrights
Obama poised to fast-track secret agreement
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
November 13, 2013
c1
Wikileaks has released a 95 page, 30,000 word document spelling out details on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The secret globalist agreement will have a significant effect on a wide range of issues including internet freedom, medicine, patents, and civil liberties. The cabal will meet in Salt Lake, Utah, between November 19 and 24.

The draft text for the TPP Intellectual Property Rights Chapter spells out provisions for implementing a transnational “enforcement regime” designed to supplant national laws and sovereignty with a globalist construct. The TPP is by far the largest and most oppressive economic treaty devised thus far. It will have an impact on a staggering 40 percent of worldwide GDP. The TPP is the forerunner to the equally secret US-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Both treaties combined will cover 60 percent of world GDP and exclude China.

Enforcement will be accomplished by “supranational litigation tribunals to which sovereign national courts are expected to defer.” According to the document, the globalist courts can conduct hearings with secret evidence.

In addition, aspects of the treaty resemble SOPA and ACTA treaties with draconian surveillance mechanisms. In early 2013, thousands of websites “went black” to show solidarity in opposition to SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, legislation that seriously threatened the functionality of the internet. “SOPA was an attempt to put the power of information back in the hands of an elite few who are rapidly losing the ability to control what the masses are reading, hearing and seeing,Mac Slavo wrote in January, 2012.

“Since the beginning of the TPP negotiations, the process of drafting and negotiating the treaty’s chapters has been shrouded in an unprecedented level of secrecy,” Wikileaks notes in a statement on the release of the TPP draft. “Access to drafts of the TPP chapters is shielded from the general public. Members of the US Congress are only able to view selected portions of treaty-related documents in highly restrictive conditions and under strict supervision. It has been previously revealed that only three individuals in each TPP nation have access to the full text of the agreement, while 600 ’trade advisers’ – lobbyists guarding the interests of large US corporations such as Chevron, Halliburton, Monsanto and Walmart – are granted privileged access to crucial sections of the treaty text.”

Obama is poised to fast-track the secret agreement. “The US administration is aggressively pushing the TPP through the US legislative process on the sly,” said Wikileaks editor Julian Assange.

“If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs,” Assange added.

This article was posted: Wednesday, November 13, 2013 at 11:20 am


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