Ed, please call home! Edward Snowden, that is: Come quickly, your country needs you.
Once again, the American people are being victimized by a hush-hush blanket of official secrecy. This time it’s not about wholesale spying on us by our government, but a wholesale assault on our jobs, environment, health, and even our people’s sovereignty by a cabal of global corporations and the Obama administration.
Their weapon is a scheme hidden inside a scam called TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The scam is their claim TPP is nothing but another free trade deal – albeit a whopper – one that ties our economy to Brunei, Vietnam, and nine other nations around the Pacific Rim. But of the 29 chapters in this deal, only five are about tariffs and other trade matters.
The real deal is in the 24 other chapters that create a supranational scheme of secretive tribunals that corporations from any TPP nation can use to challenge and overturn our local, state, and national laws. All a corporate power has to do to win in these closed tribunal proceedings is to show that any particular law or regulation might reduce its future profits.
This enthrones a global corporate oligarchy over us, yet it’s been negotiated by the 12 countries in strict secrecy. Even members of Congress have been shut out – but some 500 corporate executives have been allowed inside to shape the “partnership.”
Now that Obama and his corporate team ready are to ram it through Congress, he arranged a briefing to woo House Democrats. But he classified it as a secret session, meaning the lawmakers can’t tell the people anything they learn.
Holy Thomas Paine! Obama is hiding his oligarchic scheme from us because he knows we would overwhelmingly oppose it. This is government by sucker punch – it’s cowardly… and disgraceful.
www.StopFastTrack.com
“A Pro-TPP Campaign Built on Four Pinocchios,” www.huffingtonpost.com, March 12, 2015.
“Elizabeth Warren Says Trade Deal May Force U.S. Payouts to Overseas Firms,” www.bloomberg.com, March 11, 2015.

Big Food trying a big hoax

Near my home in Austin, Texas, there’s an old refurbished motel with a keep-it-real attitude that is expressed right on its iconic marquee: “No additives, No preservatives, Corporate-free since 1938.”
The good news is that more and more businesses across the country are adopting this attitude, providing a buy-local, un-corporate, anti-chain alternative for customers. Food shoppers and restaurant goers, for example, have made a huge shift in recent years away from the likes of McDonald’s, Pepsi, and Taco Bell, preferring upstart, independent outfits with names like “The Corner,” “Caleb’s Kola,” and “US Taco Co.”
But, uh-oh, guess who owns those little alternatives? Right – McDonald’s, PepsiCo, and Taco Bell. Leave it to ethically-challenged, profiteering monopolists to grab such value-laden terms as “genuine” and “honest,” empty them of any authenticity, then hurl them back at consumers as shamefully-deceptive marketing scams.
In Huntington Beach, California, US Taco Co. poses as a hip surfer haunt, with a colorful “Day of the Dead” Mexican skull as its logo. The airy place peddles lobster tacos and other fancifuls at $3 or $4 each – very un-fast-foody. Nowhere is it whispered that this is a Big Chain outlet, created by a group of Taco Bell insiders. They even usurped the enterprising word “entrepreneur,” stripped it of its outsider connotation, and twisted it into a corporate vanity, calling themselves “intrapreneurs.”
The problem with these fabricators of “corporatized authenticity” is that reality will out. Small and local has a genuine feel and flavor that the imitators can’t sustain as they sprawl out into 1,000 and then 10,000 stores. And as they do that, it becomes obvious to customers that they’ve been duped – and that’s not a good marketing strategy.
“Big food marketers trying hipster guises,” Austin American-Statesman, February 28, 2015.

An immigration loophole for rich foreigners

I often wonder about those immigrants who scramble so desperately into the US from across our southern border, enduring killer heat, dodging rattlesnakes and border patrols, and otherwise risking it all so their families might have a chance at a better life. I wonder: Why don’t they just buy their way into our country?
Perhaps they’re unaware that anyone can easily become a legal American resident without endangering their life, getting entangled in endless red tape, or even being made to feel unwelcome. Anyone who’s rich, that is.
You never hear those ranting, anti-immigrant tea party politicos mention it, but the USA has a very special immigration loophole known as “golden visas” for the world’s 1-percenters. Ten thousand of these are handed out each year to the privileged ones who pledge to invest at least $1 million in our country and create 10 jobs. What kind of investment? Buying yourself a house or condo counts. What kind of jobs? Low-wage, part-time, no-benefit jobs are fine. Where did you get this money? Don’t ask.
England does this, too, though its officials are a little picker, requiring $2.8 million for foreigners to buy their way in. But if that’s too much, shop around – for example, you can get immediate citizenship in Cyprus for $1.3 million, which automatically lets you live, work, and travel anywhere in Europe, plus giving you easy access to the US and other Western countries. Or you can have Portugal for a little more than half-a-million bucks, which also buys access to nearly all of Europe without needing additional visas.
But doesn’t this fling open our national gates to all sorts of kleptocrats, oligarchs, thieves, and organized-crime kingpins? Well, yes, but they’re okay, for they are rich... and money is the golden E-Z Pass of global immigration.
“Europe’s Having a Distress Sale on Visas,” The New York Times, February 10, 2015.