One cannot simultaneously want the TPP and economic justice for the 99%

[Zorra]

122. oh, pooh-pooh! The TPP will bring prosperity, opportunity, and bouquets of fresh elderberries

to the 99%, and especially indigenous folks, everywhere.

Just like NAFTA did.


NAFTA at 20: Lori Wallach on U.S. Job Losses, Record Income Inequality, Mass Displacement in Mexico--1/3/14

Mexico: Rural workers and indigenous denounce 20 years of destruction 1/8/14

January 14, 2014
"Failed Everywhere It's Been Tried"
The Deadly Wages of Free Trade
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/14/the-deadly-wages-of-free-trade/

Back in the mid-1990’s, the signatories to the North American Free Trade Agreement promised that the border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico would become the model city for the new “free trade” pact. Indeed, it has become a model city for NAFTA, but not in the way its architects had intended. Thus, rather than becoming a showcase for economic development and prosperity which “free trade” promised to usher in, Ciudad Juarez instead has become a city plagued by murder rates equivalent to nations at war, and has witnessed the bizarre phenomenon of “femicide” which has violently claimed the lives of around 400 girls and young women since the passage of NAFTA. [1]

In a similar vein, the port town of Buenaventura has become the poster child for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Even before the FTA was finally ratified by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in October of 2011, violence began to plague Buenaventura as armed paramilitary groups vied for control of the new ports being built in preparation for the influx of trade which the FTA was to bring. Thus, in September of 2011, acclaimed human rights advocate, Father Javier Giraldo, S.J., wrote to U.S. Ambassador P. Michael McKinley of

the permanent genocide that is being carried out in Buenaventura, where the neighborhoods and the Community Councils around the port are being invaded by paramilitaries supported or tolerated by the armed forces. They cut people in pieces with horrifying cruelty throwing the body parts in to the sea, if any of them dare to resist the megaproject for the new port. This included the expulsion of people living in the poorest areas and it includes the expropriation of the plots of garbage dumps where these people, in the midst of their misery, have over decades tried to survive. [2]

pdf Heading South
U.S.-Mexico trade and
job displacement after NAFTA

Economic integration and deregulation hurt workers in Canada, Mexico, and the United States

http://epi.3cdn.net/fdade52b876e04793b_7fm6ivz2y.pdf