The Trade in Services Agreement, or TISA, is yet another proposed "free" trade "deal" among the United States, the European Union, and 21 other nations, and it, too, would be negotiated completely in secret if not for another fortuitous document dump from Wikileaks. We learn from Wikileaks that TISA would, imagine that, hamstring governments from regulating financial sectors, because when has such a hands-off approach ever led to disaster? Seriously, it's like they think we don't remember what happened not even six years ago. We learn, also, that TISA aims to put foreign corporations on equal footing with domestic ones, as far as competing in domestic markets. It's not jingoistic, though, to suggest that local communities know what they need better than distant actors in faraway communities do; in fact, I'd call that conservative. So Friends of the Earth helps you tell President Obama to reject TISA and other "free" trade agreements that put corporations first and people second. It's his job to put people first, after all. Real people, I mean.
But that's not the only place where the Obama Administration fails to put people first! The Obama Administration continues to push its proposal to count certain goods as "factoryless goods," even though they're actually made in factories, just not in U.S. factories. The proposal, in fact, would call the actual factories overseas that make certain goods "manufacturing service providers." Get it? That factory that makes iPhones in China? It would provide "services," not stuff! Even if the service is, you know, making stuff. It gets better: when the iPhone comes back to America to be sold in America, the Obama Administration wouldn't call it an "import" -- and if the iPhone went to, say, Brazil to be sold, the Obama Administration would count it as an American export! This may remind you of the halcyon days when the Clinton Administration rejiggered the Consumer Price Index so that official inflation would forever be lower than actual inflation. Public Citizen helps you tell the Obama Administration to reject hifalutin "formulas" designed only to make our trade deficit look better than it really is.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the SEC to make publicly-traded corporations disclose their campaign spending, then People for the American Way provides one more. Why are corporations fighting this common-sense proposal tooth and nail? What do they have to be afraid of? The same thing big agricultural corporations are afraid of when they fight laws mandating labeling of genetically-modified food products -- that people will be so disgusted with what they're doing that they'll stop spending money on them, and rightfully so. With corporations trying to disguise their campaign spending, it's worse -- they have shareholders who might well be disgusted with their attempts to elect the worst sort of fool to public office. No, shareholders aren't only concerned about making more money -- shareholders are also concerned about doing right by their customers and their society, and the SEC exists to protect shareholders from harm. The SEC could force corporations to tell their shareholders what they're doing, and then let shareholders decide how to proceed. This, too, sounds awfully conservative to me.
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