Stephen Lendman

The so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), like its Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) counterpart, isn’t about growth-promoting trade benefitting everyone equitably.

Just the opposite!! Both assault personal freedoms. They’re anti-consumer, anti-public welfare, anti-ecosanity business sweetheart deals, giving corporate predators control over the lives of populations in all countries agreeing to these deals.

It lets them operate unaccountably, overriding sovereign legal restraints at the expense of societies fit to live in.

Greenpeace leaked 248 pages of classified documents being negotiated, saying TTIP “threaten(s) to have far-reaching implications for the environment and the lives of more than 800 million citizens in the EU and US.”

At stake is “a huge transfer of power from people to big business.” Personal freedoms, consumer protections and environmental safeguards are threatened.

TTIP rules empower profit-making above human health, welfare, labor rights, digital freedom and virtually all other consumer safeguards.

They prevent nations from “protect(ing) human, animal and plant life or health.” They fail to “conserv(e) exhaustible natural resources.”

Corporate empowerment under TTIP and TTP assures dismantling vital safety standards protecting human health and welfare.

Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch lists the top TTIP threats as follows:

“Wall Street: Roll Back Financial Reforms

Agribusiness: Weaken Food Safety Standards

Oil and Gas Corporations: Halt Green Energy Policies

Monsanto, et al: Remove GMO Labels and Limits

Chemical Corporations: Allow Exposure to Untested Chemicals

Transnational Corporations: Empower Investor Attacks on Safeguards

Chronic Job Offshorers: Ban Buy American, Buy Local and Buy Green Policies

Corporate think tanks: Debunking Bogus Claims of TTIP Economic Gains”

TPP and TTIP will thirdworldize participating nations, benefitting business and investor interests at the expense of most others.

War on Want’s executive director John Hillary believes leaking TTIP’s hellish anti-consumer, anti-public safety and welfare details means “the beginning of the end for this much hated deal.”

He’s right if sustained mass actions against it refuse to tolerate its enactment. He’s wrong if people complain and do little or nothing.

It’s up to us to kill this monster and its TPP counterpart!! At stake is freedom or slavery!!

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III".

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

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Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.