3 DAYS TO STOP the Corporate Death Star - the TPP!!!

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ACTION ALERT: Avaaz petition wants half a million to say NO to the Trans-Pacific Partnership

By Stuart Trew, Trade Campaigner

September 13, 2012

An Avaaz petition against the nine-country Trans-Pacific Partnership trade and investment negotiations has reached 250,000 signatures in only 24 hours since it was posted yesterday. The petition reads:

Big business has a new plan to fatten their pockets: a giant global pact, with an international tribunal to enforce it, that is kept top secret for years (even from our lawmakers!) and then brought down like a Death Star on our democracies. Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Walmart and almost 600 other corporate lobbyists are all in on the final draft — including limits on smoking laws, affordable medicines and free speech on the Net.

The latest round of negotiations ends in just 4 days — but outcries in each of our countries could shake the confidence of negotiators and scuttle the talks forever. Let’s get to a million against the global corporate takeover. Sign the petition on the right. Avaaz will project our petition counter on the walls of the conference so negotiators can see the opposition to their plan exploding in real time.

The Leesburg round of TPP talks ends today. Though Canada was not an active participant, Canadian and Mexican negotiators will be there during the next round in December.

Sign the Avaaz petition here:

www.avaaz.org/en/stop_the_corporate_death_star


WHAT IS THE TPP?

The TPP is a broad trans-pacific trade and investment pact which now has 11 members: the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam. Japan has also expressed interest in joining the talks, which would eclipse the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in size and scope. The U.S. government is encouraging other Asian countries to “dock” with the TPP, partly as a way to isolate China economically and geopolitically. China and other Asian countries are also looking to further integrate their economies but not through the TPP model.

The TPP is globally controversial because of how it will entrench a myopic vision of market-based globalization that is the main cause of runaway climate change and which has done little to create good, sustainable jobs or reduce poverty worldwide. The TPP also enhances corporate rights to sue governments when public policies interfere with how, when and where they make profits.

In Canada, concerns with the TPP have included: how it could lead to the dismantling of Canada’s important supply management regimes for dairy, poultry and egg production; the race-to-the-bottom potential in a proposed regulatory harmonization chapter; extreme intellectual-property protections for big drug companies that would limit access to life-saving medicines; investor-state provisions that would allow companies to sue governments over rules to protect the environment; government procurement restrictions, and; copyright rules that undermine internet freedom.

Read more about the TPP, and Canada’s participation in it, here:
www.canadians.org/tpp