Wall Street and the big corporations don’t like to lose. It looks like The Money has told the Republicans to try again to get fast track through and they are preparing to vote before we can rally and organize people to try to stop it again. News reports say the House plans to vote today!
Call your representative in Congress right now. You can use ClickToCallCongress.org if you don’t know the number to call.
In this week’s post “Sea Change: Citizens Beat Wall Street And Multinationals In Congress,” I wrote about how Wall Street and the big corporations use these rigged “trade” deals to get around democracy, and use the rigged “fast track” process to get the trade deals through. Now they are trying again to get this past the pesky “democracy problem” that keeps getting in their way,
The Wall Street/multinational corporation “trade” deals are about getting around democracy so they can lower the wages they have to pay, not pay for environmental protection and get government out of the way of their profits with their meddlesome regulations that protect health and safety and citizens.
Fast-tracking these agreements is a way around democracy to get the Wall Street/multinational corporation “trade” deals enacted.
This pesky “democracy” problem – “government interference” getting in the way of profits – was the reason corporations put together our rigged trade processes in the first place. If open, transparent debate in Congress won’t give you what you want, then slip it into secret, corporate-negotiated “trade” agreements and use a rigged “fast track” process to tie Congress’s hands and keep our representatives from being able to “meddle” with the result. (“You can’t get a trade deal done if Congress can change it.”)
It looks like they are trying again, scheduling another vote without giving the pubic time to see what is going on.
If this passes, they are preapproving the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and future trade deals before We the People even know what is in them.
So help get the word out, call your representative, call your family, call your friends, call your neighbors and let them know they have to weigh in right now before the Wall Street-corporate cabal gets a chance to slide this through. We beat them once; we can keep them again from sneaking it past us.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.