Dracula trade deal underway in D.C. this week
TPP will sabotage environmental protections without ever seeing daylight
WASHINGTON, D.C. – This week, the United States is hosting trade negotiations in Washington D.C. on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In response, environmental, labor, consumer, faith, public health, community organizations and concerned citizens rallied at the front door of United States Trade Representative Michael Froman to protest his pro-corporate polluter scheme and object to the secret TPP negotiations ongoing this week at USTR offices.
Opposition groups have called the Trans-Pacific Partnership a colossal, job-destroying trade deal, negotiated among nations bordering the Pacific. If successful, It could trigger rollbacks of environmental, public health, food safety and other public interest safeguards. At the behest of Wall Street financiers, Big Oil, bio-tech giants and other global corporations, the Obama Administration aims to ram the TPP through Congress using Fast Track trade promotion authority legislation.
Fast Track would undercut Congress’s Constitutional duty to regulate trade by allowing the TPP to be ratified on an expedited schedule with little debate, no amendments and an up or down vote.
Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica made the following statement:
President Obama and the architects of the TPP are less concerned with promoting trade than they are with rolling back environmental and public interest protections. There is nothing free or fair about this trade deal. The president knows how destructive this deal will be – why else would he allow the deal to be brokered behind closed doors, keep the negotiating text secret, obscure information from the press and public and then push for expedited congressional “fast track” review.
The obsessive secrecy of this week’s TPP negotiations can be explained by the Dracula principle. If daylight were allowed to shine on the secret text and the secret talks, then the Trans-Pacific trade deal, like a vampire, would wither and die.
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Expert Contact: Bill Waren, (202) 222-0746, [email protected]
Communications Contact: EA Dyson, (202) 222-0730, [email protected]