Sign the Petition! Tell the Congressional Black Caucus to Resist President Obama’s “Race Card” Appeal to Accept Fast Track for TPP and TTIP!
Two decades ago, Bill Clinton did what his Republican predecessors could not — he passed NAFTA with a Republican congressional majority and a handful of Democrat votes. Now President Obama hopes to do the same, and is reportedly demanding that the Congressional Black Caucus support the first black president in privileging investor rights over human rights. We demand the CBC reject him on this one.
President Obama is pulling out all the stops to achieve fast-track authority to ram TPP and TTIP through Congress without amendment or debate. These are easily the biggest corporate power grabs in US history.
As Eric Zuesse explains in this week’s Black Agenda Report, TPP and TTIP are investor rights agreements which supersede state and federal laws. TPP and TTIP will strip local governments of the ability to make environmental, wage and hour, local content and other legislation, and explicitly give transnational corporations economic rights that individual humans have never enjoyed, like the right to sustained profits, the right to pollute and even, as a secret trade panel has ruled, the right to murder union activists if local officials fail to prosecute. TPP and TTIP will make it even easier for employers to move their investment to wherever in the world the lowest wages can be found.
The actual contents of these agreements, which Congress is being asked to consider are secret, even from those who will vote on it. Members of Congress must view a selection of their content in a secret location without staff, are forbidden to take notes or discuss what they see. The only excerpts the public has seen have been provided by Wikileaks and whistleblowers whom the Obama administration is prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law and beyond.
We understand that the First Black President is now leaning heavily upon members of the Congressional Black Caucus to provide the handful of Democratic votes in the House needed to achieve fast track status for TPP and TTIP. To their credit so far, many CBC members are quietly resisting the president, and a few dare to say so out loud.
It’s time to let the Congressional Black Caucus know that this is a time and a place when they MUST resist narrow appeals to racial solidarity, when they MUST refuse to line up behind the president. President Obama will demand their support in the name of racial solidarity, if nothing else, but they must refuse.
For more information on these investor rights agreements, check these links…
http://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/
we’ll add more tomorrow.
But for the next 10 days, we want to gather as many online signatures to present to the Congressional Black Caucus as possible demanding that they stand up for their constituents, to stand up to the president and SAY NO TO FAST TRACK, NO TO TPP AND TTIP.
Sign the petition and forward widely please. We will arrange for signatures to be presented to the Congressional Black Caucus ten days from the publication of this item, on or around May 30.
We the undersigned demand that members of the Congressional Black Caucus adamantly oppose both the Fast Tracking and the contents, so far as they are known, of the TPP and TTIP. These secretive and anti-democratic investor rights privilege corporate profits over people and private profit over the public interest, and must not be enacted into law.
