For hundreds of millions of people all over the world, generic drugs are a cheaper alternative to the more expensive drugs sold by Big Pharma. If the TPP goes through, real live breathing people (Doctors Without Borders estimates about half a billion of them) will effectively lose affordable access to the medicine they need to survive. (Image: Money Pills via Shutterstock)
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP as it’s more commonly known, is a public health disaster waiting to happen.
According to leaked documents, the proposed trade deal, which I like to call the Southern Hemisphere Asian Free Trade Agreement – SHAFTA – would extend patent protections for drugs made by Big Pharma to prevent rival companies from making generic version of those same drugs.
This a huge deal.
For hundreds of millions of people all over the world, generic drugs are a cheaper alternative to the more expensive drugs sold by Big Pharma.
So if the TPP goes through, real live breathing people (Doctors Without Borders estimates about half a billion of them) will effectively lose affordable access to the medicine they need to survive.
And that’s just one small provision of SHAFTA – pretty much every major industry in the world has their own little honeypot in there.
See more news and opinion from Thom Hartmann at Truthout here.
The TPP would also let corporations sue countries in international courts owned and run by corporations, with judges handpicked from corporate law firms. In other words, if a corporation doesn’t like a regulation, or thinks it’ll diminish their profits, they can sue your town, state, or our federal government over it – and that would gut environmental and financial rules without any input from “We the People” or our elected representatives in Congress.
Considering what’s at stake here, you’d think that the media would want to fill its broadcasts with wall-to-wall TPP coverage. I mean, half a billion people losing access to life-saving drugs just so Big Pharma can boost its profit margins? Corporate controlled courts? That’s ripe material for a primetime special!
Apparently, though, the mainstream media could care less about the TPP or its disastrous effects on public health, the economy, and the environment.
According to Media Matters for America, during the 17 month period between August 2013 and February 2015, only one nightly network news show, PBS Newshour, mentioned the trade deal – and they only mentioned it just eight times. ABC, CBS, and NBC didn’t mention the TPP once.
Cable news stations did a little better when it comes to TPP coverage than their network counterparts.
According to Media Matters, Fox So-Called News and CNN each talked about the trade deal once and MSNBC talked about it 71 times.
But those 71 mentions were mostly on one show, The Ed Show, and because MSNBC is only available by premium subscription, most Americans never watched Ed Schultz talk about the TPP.
The mainstream media’s complete and utter silence on one of the biggest stories of the year, maybe even the decade, is shocking but not all that surprising.
That’s because when it comes down to it, the mainstream media – which is really just the corporate media – want the TPP to happen.
They want the TPP to happen because the TPP tightens the screws over copyrights so that they can have profitable controls over content.
And they want the TPP to happen because, as giant transnational corporations, they want to be able to sue governments over regulations they don’t like.
This is one of the great ironies of American society.
For all the very real protections our Constitution provides for freedom of speech and freedom of the press, the actual media aren’t all that good at telling us what’s really going on. Profits and ad revenue get in the way of that, you know.
What does this mean? It means that we need to look towards independent and alternative media sources for news, especially when it comes to issues like the TPP that affect the bottom line of the giant corporations that own CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox, or any of the other big media players.
The mainstream media will always stay silent on stories that interfere with their ability to make money, but that doesn’t mean we have to.
So call your two senators and your member of the House of Representatives and tell them to just say “No” to SHAFTA/TPP and to the Fast Track authority that’ll be necessary to shove this terrible deal through congress.
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.