We are destroying our own country.

From Crooks and Liars
(Click on the link for more)

Corporations Colonize Us With Trade Deals, Wall Street Wants In

After 237 years, we're becoming a colony again. Our nation's losing the right to self-determination it fought so hard to win, and it's happening on a scale unseen since the days of George III.

As is so often the case these days, this wholesale loss of our rights is being underwritten by corporate interests.

And, as usual, it's being called "bipartisan" - by corporations who "buy" both Republican and Democratic "partisans."

Terms of Surrender

Republicans cheered George W. Bush for saying, "I will never place U.S. troops under U.N. command." Democrats cheered Barack Obama for saying, "I want us to control our own energy destiny."

But both leaders pushed trade agreements that surrender our sovereign rights to faceless bureaucrats in international bodies - bodies that are dominated by multinational corporations.

Where are those cheering crowds now? Republicans backed a president who supported a agreements which put Americans' rights - and their environment - "under the command" of foreign bodies. And unless something changes Democratic voters will soon see their president give up even more control of our economic destiny.

WTO Stands For "We're Taking Over"

Public Citizen, which has been doing excellent work on this issue, reports on three U.S. laws that were nullified by the World Trade Organization (WTO): country-of-origin labels on meat, dolphin-safe labels on tuna, and the ban on sweet-flavored cigarettes designed to get kids addicted to the tobacco companies' carcinogenic products. (What's next: cherry-flavored crack?)

The WTO and the WTO "Appellate Body" - two bodies most Americans don't even know exist - overruled these laws in a preemptory manner that would have outraged the Continental Congress.

We didn't elect them. We can't communicate with them. But they've issued three decrees which we must obey:

1) We are not to know where the meat we're eating comes from.
2) We must accept the fact that we may unknowingly wind up eating the flesh of dolphins, arguably the most intelligent nonhuman species on the planet. And,
3) We must continue to allow the distribution of products designed to addict our children to a deadly and habit-forming substance.

How's that for "controlling our own destiny"