How the Media Misrepresent Obama’s “Fast Track” “Secret” International Trade Deals [View all]

[RiverLover]

TPP, TTIP and TISA: How the Media Misrepresent Obama’s “Fast Track” “Secret” International Trade Deals
5/7/2015

Both conservative and liberal ‘news’ media misrepresent U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed international trade-deals as if they were about only such things as lowering tariffs and reducing national trade-protectionism — which are relatively minor surface-features of these huge proposed treaties: TTIP with Europe, TPP with Asia, and TISA (Trade in Services Agreement). All of these proposed Obama trade-deals are actually about transferring to panels of international corporations the powers that currently reside in the various individual nations’ regulatory and legal authorities — i.e., that reside in the democratic governments that are accountable to the population that elected them instead of to the few global billionaires who control the international corporations.

...For example, if you will google-seach in one-and-the-same search the two phrases together “fast track was passed” “bill was defeated” you will get the following: “No results found for ‘fast track was passed’ ‘bill was defeated’.”

The reason why this is the case is laid out in the book by Public Citizen, The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority. It explains that Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) was created by President Nixon in order to get around something: to get around the U.S. Constitution’s having placed America’s treaty-making authority in a balance-of-powers framework with Congress, something that the Constitution did in order to prevent the emergence of dictatorship by excessive power in the hands of the federal Executive, the President (which dictatorship was Nixon’s goal to achieve.

Only 16 times since Nixon was in the White House has his Fast-Track TPA been applied, and yet hundreds of free-trade agreements have passed Congress without any need for (or application of) Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority during that time. How and why has this been so, and why does the public not know these crucially important things?

TPA, or “Fast Track,” is the device that is used only when a President wants to ram through Congress a trade-deal that would never be able to pass Congress under the traditional, and fully Constitutional, method, because these are the few trade-deals that have provisions in them that, for the typical member of Congress, would cause him or her to lose the congressional seat if he or she didn’t at least try to get the bill amended before it was passed. In other words: only fascistic, or outrageously pro mega-corporate, trade deals, need TPA in order for them to pass Congress. That’s why Nixon initiated TPA. It works as he intended it would.

In Congress, to vote for TPA is to vote for the trade-deal that’s about to be fast-tracked; and to vote against TPA is to vote against that trade-deal....


http://www.globalresearch.ca/obamas-tpp-and-ttip-how-the-media-misrepresent-fast-track-secret-international-trade-deals/5447839