Who determined that the NSA and TPP are the most important issues?

[ronnie624]

398. Your post suggests

that you're unaware of the history of the working class struggle for social justice. It's as if there was never a labor movement in your own country. How very odd for someone who presumably identifies with the principles of equality and democracy.

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): Job Loss, Lower Wages and Higher Drug Prices

The TPP would even elevate individual foreign firms to equal status with sovereign nations, empowering them to privately enforce new rights and privileges, provided by the pact, by dragging governments to foreign tribunals to demand taxpayer compensation over policies that they claim undermine their expected future profits.

We only know about the TPP’s threats thanks to leaks – the public is not allowed to see the draft TPP text. Even members of Congress, after being denied the text for years, are now only provided limited access. Meanwhile, more than 600 official corporate “trade advisors” have special access. The TPP has been under negotiation for five years, and the Obama administration wants to sign the deal by early 2014. Opposition to the TPP is growing at home and in many of the other countries involved.

http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=3129

More Power to Corporations to Attack Nations

A major goal of U.S. multinational corporations for the TPP is to impose on more countries a set of extreme foreign investor privileges and rights and their private enforcement through the notorious “investor-state” system. This system elevates individual corporations and investors to equal standing with each TPP signatory country's government- and above all of us citizens.

Under this regime, foreign investors can skirt domestic courts and laws, and sue governments directly before tribunals of three private sector lawyers operating under World Bank and UN rules to demand taxpayer compensation for any domestic law that investors believe will diminish their "expected future profits." Over $3 billion has been paid to foreign investors under U.S. trade and investment pacts, while over $14 billion in claims are pending under such deals, primarily targeting environmental, energy, and public health policies.

http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=5411&frcrld=1

DELAURO: FOOD SAFETY CRITICAL ISSUE IN UPCOMING TRADE TALKS

As the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recent report on the safety of imported food emphasizes, the increasing globalization of America’s food supply is posing difficult challenges to both our regulatory system and public health. In 1994, the year Congress voted for United States membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), half of the seafood consumed by Americans was imported. Today that figure is 84 percent.

Yet, our regulatory capacity has not kept up with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently concluding in a report that the FDA currently has only limited oversight, a reliance on the review of paper and not actual production facilities, and an “ineffectively implemented” sampling program that looks for only 16 drugs, compared to other countries that look for up to 57 drug residues. According to the GAO, FDA tests only 0.1 percent of all imported seafood products for only a few drug residues. Simultaneously, the food-safety related provisions of past U.S. trade agreements have imposed constraints on signatory countries’ domestic food safety standards and import protocols.

Accordingly, a TPP FTA has the potential to undermine the broadly supported public health goal that the food Americans consume must be safe. The FDA, for example, has already issued 25 import alerts for Vietnam this year with Vietnamese seafood detained for misbranding, E. coli and more. Seafood imports from Vietnam are plagued by unusually high levels of antibiotic residues, microbial contamination, and other serious food safety concerns confirmed by FDA laboratory testing. Between 2003 and 2006, more than one-fifth of all veterinary drug residues that FDA identified in imported seafood were in imports from Vietnam even as less than 4 percent of all imported seafood in the time period was shipped from that country.

http://delauro.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=406:-delauro-food-safety-critical-issue-in-upcoming-trade-talks&catid=7:2011-press-releases&Itemid=23