July 2-10, San Diego: Stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Visit StopTPP.org for more information!

We are waking up. The fog is lifting. We are sweeping away the lies and secrecy.

From July 2 to July 10, the political leaders of the Pacific Rim nations are meeting in San Diego to turn the Pacific Ocean and its peoples into a giant privatized corporate lake characterized by non-union workers, Wal-Mart supply chain feeders, poisoned, landless agricultural laborers, a dying biodiversity, and rising, drowning sea levels. We cannot and will not let this happen.

The TPP meeting is officially referred to as the 13th Round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Talks. The nations involved are the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile, and Peru. Japan, Mexico and Canada have indicated a desire to join. The economic power of this group is more than 40% larger than the 27-nation European Union. The claimed purpose of TPP is to promote development and create jobs. However, this meeting is in fact one of the final conclaves to secretly negotiate the economic structural adjustments necessary to appease the world’s largest multinational banks and multi-unit corporations. Make no mistake, these talks have nothing to do with free trade between equal nations. Rather, they are negotiations being conducted on behalf of these corporations and banks by their willing and highly-paid governments (supported by their militaries and police departments) to systematize the exploitation of the Pacific Rim peoples and increase the capital acquisition rates of the 1%.

The essence of these talks is to privatize natural resources (despite the wishes of the world’s indigenous peoples;) restructure each country’s trade, labor, environmental, and finance laws; and reduce or eradicate social services to the people. These policies are known the world over as neoliberalism. Historically, they have been instituted around the world ever since the brutal taking of power in Chile, on September 11, 1973, by the fascist regime of General Augusto Pinochet. These policies, thus experimented with, spread to countries as widespread as the U.K., the U.S., Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, Russia, Poland, Sri Lanka, and now Greece. They have been implemented by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, a plethora of “Free Trade” treaties (such as NAFTA), and various militaries. Enough is enough! ¡Ya basta!

The General Assemblies of Occupy San Diego and Occupy City Heights hereby invites our communities, our regional neighbors, and our co-inhabitants of Earth, in general, to join us in both protesting the TPP and also in creating a new world. We will march with pots and pans, and drums. (Can you hear me now?) We will sponsor an international weeklong conference and roundtables on what is wrong with the TPP Pact and what are the people’s alternatives.

Something Is Cooking In San Diego. Get Out Your Pots and Pans and March. Come Exchange Knowledge at Our OSD Conference and Roundtables.