How Corporate Bamboozlers Intend to Widen Inequality in America

Jim Hightower Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist

The basic problem facing the corporate and political powers who want you and me to swallow their Trans-Pacific Partnership deal is that they can't make chicken salad out of chicken manure.

But that reality hasn't stopped their PR campaign, which pitches their "salad" as good and good for you! For example, a corporate front group called the Peterson Institute for International Economics recently issued a study blaring the happy news that TPP will increase real incomes in the US by $131 billion a year. Even if that was true (and plenty of other studies show that it's not), it's a statistic meant to dazzle rather than enlighten, for it skates around the real bottom line for the American Public: An increase in income for whom?

In the past 15 years or so, and especially since 2008, it's been made perfectly clear to the workaday majority of people that the corporate mantra of "income growth" benefitting everyone is a deliberate lie. Practically all of the massive annual increases in US income, which every worker helps produce, now gushes up to the richest one-percent, with millionaires and billionaires (the 1/10th of 1-percenters) grabbing the bulk of it.

Economists have a technical term for this: "Stealing." TPP is written specifically to sanction and increase the robbery of the many by the world's moneyed few, including provisions that give additional incentives to US manufacturers to ship more of our middle-class jobs to places like Vietnam, with minimum wages under 65-cents an hour!

Don't be bamboozled by glittery studies. TPP is a manure salad tossed together by the superrich to further enrich themselves at our expense – and it would intentionally exacerbatie the widening gulf of inequality in America. For information and action tips, go to Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch at www.citizen.org/trade.

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This has been reposted from Jim Hightower's website.

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks. Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top. He publishes a populist political newsletter, “The Hightower Lowdown.” He is a New York Times best-selling author, and has written seven books including, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There’s Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

Posted In: Allied Approaches, From Jim Hightower

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