Alright boys and girls, gather ‘round me, and I’ll tell you the story of the “Investor State Dispute Resolution” clause. Wait children… where’re you going? Don’t run away. Don’t cry!
Okay, the wonkish gibberish used by the Powers That Be to write those corporate boondoggles they call the “trade deals” is toothachingly-boring and incomprehensible. Could that be on purpose? Of course! If they wrote these wage-destroying, environment-killing, sovereignty-sucking scams in plain English so we commoners could understand what they’re doing to us, they couldn’t get away with it.
So here comes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, by far the largest trade flim-flam in history. Written in gobbledygook, it was negotiated in secret by corporate lobbyists and government lawyers. Even Congress doesn’t know what’s in it, but TPP is to be hustled into law through a super-rushed, rubber-stamp process called “Fast Track”.
No need to be suspicious, though, for an upstanding new group called Progressive Coalition for American Jobs now assures us that this global deal “will support hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the United States.” Hello – do we have sucker wrappers around our heads? That’s the exact same claim that Bill Clinton made for NAFTA, which siphoned hundreds of thousands of jobs and entire industries out of the US.
By the way, who are the members of this “coalition”? Every progressive group I know of is adamantly against the TPP, and no progressive has stepped forward to claim ownership of this PR push for corporatizing the people’s democratic rights. Is there a coalition? Who’s in it? Who funds it?
Nobody’s answering because nobody’s there. The coalition is a fraud, just like TPP. For a real coalition of progressives who’re standing tall against the whole TPP fraud, go to 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.

The KBParty of plutocratic rule

Shouldn’t America have at least one major party that isn’t beholden to the corporate elite?
Well look here – just such a party has popped up, raring to roar into the 2016 presidential race. Called the KBParty, it has the funding and political punch to bypass the establishment’s control of the election system. But don’t rush to sign-up: KB stands for Koch Brothers.
Yes, Charlie and David – the multibillionaire, right-wing industrial barons who already own several congress critters, governors, think tanks, astroturf campaign machines, front groups, etc. – now have their very own, private political party. And it’s not beholden to the corporate elite, since it is the elite. The Koch boys have rallied roughly 300 like-minded opponents of democracy to their brotherhood of plutocrats, intent on purchasing a president and Congress that will impose their vision of corporate rule over America.
At a secretive retreat in January for KBParty funders, the 300 barons ponied up $900 million for their campaign. That’s nearly $200 million more than the combined expenditures of the Republican and Democratic parties in last year’s elections, and it’s way more than either of those parties will have for 2016.
This means that, in our nation of 350 million people, a cabal of only 300 of the wealthiest will have the wherewithal to narrow the choice of candidates presented to the rest of us, restrict the range of policy ideas that are proposed to voters, imbue the overall campaign with a negative tone, and – most important – shape the governing agenda of those who get elected.
The Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United edict created this mess. To help ban the corporate cash that’s clogging our elections and killing our people’s democratic rights, go to www.DemocracyIsForPeople.org.

Why are we taxpayers subsidizing corporate crime?

“Do the crime, do the time,” goes the old saying. Unless of course, the criminals are corporate executives. In those cases, the culprits are practically always given a “Get out of jail free” card.
Even the corporate crimes that produce horrible injuries, illnesses, death, etc. are routinely settled by fines and payoffs from the corporate treasury, with no punishment of the honchos who oversee what amount to crime-for-profit syndicates. The only bit of justice in these money settlements is that some of them have become quite large, with multibillion-dollar “punitive damages” meant to deter the perpetrators from doing it again. Yet, the same bad corporate actors seem to keep at it.
What’s going on here is a game of winkin’ & noddin’ in which corporate criminals know that those headline-grabbing assessments come with a secret escape hatch. Congress has generously written the law so corporations can deduct much of their punitive payments from their income taxes! As Sen. Pat Leahy points out, “This tax loophole allows corporations to wreak havoc and then write it off as a cost of doing business.”
For example, oil giant BP certainly wreaked havoc with its careless oil rig explosion in 2010, killing 11 workers, deeply contaminating the Gulf of Mexico, and devastating the livelihoods of millions of people along the Gulf coast. So, BP was socked with a punishing payout topping $42 billion. But – shhhh – 80 percent of that is eligible for a tax deduction, a little fact that was effectively covered up by the bosses and politicians.
Sen. Leahy has introduced legislation to lock down this escape hatch for thieves, killers, and executive-suite villains. For more information on the moral outrage of ordinary taxpayers being forced to subsidize corporate criminals, contact U.S. PIRG at www.uspirg.org.

“When Company Is Fined, Taxpayers Often Share Bill,” The New York Times, February 4, 2015.