I have called.

Feels good, don't it

People would provide better subject lines and avoid the whole swearing aspect of it. Seems like every day we're rallied to calling congress "RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!1!!!1!!" and the way it's presented is just so amateurish and juvenile. It's the epitome of a keyboard warrior.

The subject line of this OP is an old DU joke. Years ago a DUer posted a the thread title:

CALL CONGRESS RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
with little or no message in the body about what we need to call Congress about. The thread evolved (or devolved) into a meta thead and is a thing of local legend.

And I hated it then. I've been here since the place opened, though I rarely post and tend to read more than anything else. It's an old and just plain annoying joke that just makes the place look bad to the new people - and to a number of the older ones.

"Call congress right fucking now" alludes to a very old famous episode on DU.
Its a kind of dumb inside joke. Sorry.

But Welcome to DU! It can get a little wild here.
I hope you will not be as put off by the message as you were by the subject line.

Here is a handy guide for contacting Congress!

http://www.house.gov/representatives/

is he playing with this issue, I wonder.

k&r

The ttp is going to kill jobs, what little jobs are left. Look at what NAFTA did.

But hey Obama, second son of GOD will protect the weak and make the world a better place again. Just don't pay attention to the TTP!

-p

but the rep for our area is a Republican toady. I do however manage to talk to someone about the TTP everyday.

-p

here's what they said about the drug part of the partnership and the issues. Looks to me like the rx drug lobby wants to charge as much as they can for drugs and keep out cheap generics.

For example the cost in some 3rd world countries is about $100 a year to treat aids, vs $2500 a year- only a couple years ago before the cheaper generics started freely being sold.

looks to me like the rx drug lobby want to bring back huge profits from humanitarian efforts for health treatment.

MSF Urges Countries Not to Trade Away Health as Trans-Pacific Trade Pact Negotiations Intensify

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/press/release.cfm?id=7028&cat=press-release

note- "While the data is locked up, competitors with affordable versions of drugs in the pipeline would be forced to repeat clinical trials in order to get them approved—a costly step that is also unethical, as safety and efficacy has already been established by the originator company. The World Health Organization and other UN agencies have warned countries against implementing data exclusivity because of its harmful effects on access to medicines. Furthermore, a twelve-year demand would be at odds with the Obama administration’s own domestic proposal, which would shorten data exclusivity on biologics in the U.S. to seven years"

I hope President Obama doesn't let the rx drug lobby get away with this price gouging and blocking of cheap generics. It's not right! but it seems like a bunch of countries are involved, including the usa.

TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP TALKING POINTS

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “Free Trade” Agreement: Talking Points
Have you heard about the stealthy new policy being pushed by corporate America, a dream of the 1 percent? In one blow, it could:
• Offshore millions of American jobs
• Flood us with unsafe imported food and products
• Free the Banksters from oversight
• Ban Buy America & “buy local” policies used to create green jobs & rebuild our economy
• Jack up medicines prices
• Undermine Internet freedom
• Empower corporations to attack our environmental and health safeguards before tribunals of corporate lawyers, and demand unlimited taxpayer dollars as compensation

• Meet the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “trade” deal: Warning: it’s not really mainly about trade. Rather the usual gang of American job offshorers, Banksters, oil, gas and mining giants, and agribusiness monopolists that got us into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has a new, stealthy Trojan horse strategy. They’re using negotiations that they have branded as “trade talks” to impose many non-trade policies that could undermine our basic needs and rights.

• Job Loss, Greater Income Inequality: This deal is slated to include the extreme foreign investor protections that help corporations offshore American jobs to low wage countries. These NAFTA-style terms give special benefits to firms that relocate investment and jobs – and this deal includes Vietnam, the low-cost offshoring alternative to even China. Since NAFTA and the global WTO, the U.S. has lost more than 5 million (1 out of every 4) of its manufacturing jobs while 54,000 manufacturing plants have closed. (You can check trade jobs loss in your state at www.tradewatch.org – go to the “Trade Data Center.”) At the same time, we are offshoring service sector jobs in computer programming, engineering, accounting, medical diagnostics and more. Government data shows that when workers lose manufacturing jobs to trade, or professional service sector jobs are offshored, then wages across the economy are pushed down. The result, real median wages are barely above 1970s levels, even as American worker productivity has soared.

• Ban on “Buy America”: The draft TPP text would give all firms operating in any signatory country equal access to U.S. procurement contracts – rather than us recycling our tax dollars here to create American jobs. That means Chinese government-owned firms in Vietnam would get equal treatment with American firms in getting contracts for goods and service bought by the government paid for with our tax dollars. And, the pact would limit the sorts of terms these contracts could use, basically turning what is now an important policy tool to create jobs and develop new green technologies into a new corporate offshoring opportunity. For instance, specifications like “renewable/recycled” or “sweat free” and obligations for firms to meet prevailing wages could be challenged. Corporations could not be barred because of the horrible human rights conditions of their home countries or the firms’ record.

• Benefits for Banksters, More Financial Crises for Us: Wall Street is turning the TPP into a backdoor way to roll back new safeguards that many nations have implemented to get banks and securities firms under control and restore financial stability. Governments would be forbidden from banning risky financial services or products, imposing limits on the size of firms so they cannot get too-big-to-fail, or using “capital controls” to avoid future crises by forestalling floods of hot money speculation. Translated out of technical jargon: this deal would be a get-out-of-regulation-free card for the financial firms that wrecked our economy.

and

This is appalling.

• U.S. Environmental, Health Laws Attacked: The pact would expand the notorious “investor-state” enforcement system. This empowers corporations to use World Bank and UN tribunals staffed by private corporate lawyers to skirt domestic laws and courts and sue our governments to demand unlimited taxpayer compensation -- if they think our laws limit their “expected future profits.” Really! Under NAFTA alone, over $350 million already has been paid to foreign investors in investor-state attacks on toxic bans, land use rules and timber policies. And, over $12 billion more in claims is pending against environmental, safety, public health policy under NAFTA-style deals. Under the TPP, foreign firms could even challenge changes to government procurement contracts outside the national administrative and court system – a privilege local firms don’t get.

• Higher Medicine Prices: Big PhRMA would get extreme new privileges that would jack up prices and cut consumers’ access to life-saving medicines. This is not only about the big drug companies getting long monopoly patent terms to charge whatever they want, but also it would set new limits on access to drug safety test data so that even when patents ended, generics drugs could not be produced to bring down costs. Plus, there is even a proposal to establish new restrictions on cost-saving drug formularies. This attack is aimed at the successful medicine cost savings programs in New Zealand and Australia, but it could boomerang back to undermine similar programs used for Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Administration.

• Attack on Internet Freedom – a Backdoor SOPA: U.S. negotiators have pushed terms for the TPP copyright chapter that would replicate the worst of SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act that public outcry killed when it came to Congress earlier this year. This includes requiring that each country put into its domestic law large fines to be paid by consumers – for things we do on-line everyday: non-commercial, small-scale copying (from the buffer copy that is made when you view a legit video to sending your buddy an image or song) and “breaking” a digital lock (for instance to use software you have purchased on a Linux platform).

• That’s just the surface of it… A lot more is at stake with this TPP corporate power grab dressed up as a trade agreement.
 Weaker labor rights, worse labor conditions, more displacement and migration pressures
 Public services privatization; deregulation of essential services: energy, health, education
 New corporate oil, gas and mining rights over natural resources and land
 Food safety and inspection standards gutted as “trade barriers”: we must accept imports that do not meet our standards, while labeling systems are weakened.

• What exactly is happening? Trade officials from the U.S. and ten Pacific Rim nations—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam – are in intensive, closed door negotiations to sign on to the TPP by October 2013. This is truly NAFTA-on-steroids, since Mexico and Canada joined the talks in July 2012. Every Pacific Rim nation from China and Russia to Indonesia and the Philippines could eventually be included.

• There are draft texts for this pact’s 29 chapters, most of which have nothing to do with trade. 5 chapters address traditional trade issues, 4 are administrative, and 17 chapters deal with non-trade issues and impose limits on domestic food safety, health, environmental, and other policies. There are 3 mystery chapters. Not even the names of these chapters will be released.

• After years of calling for release of the secretive draft text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), we have finally achieved an interim victory. In early June 2013, Congressman Alan Grayson (FL-09) got a peek at the controversial pact after requesting access from the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). After similar requests from many members of Congress, including some who received ‘no’ answers from the administration, it appears that Grayson is the FIRST member of Congress to see some of the text. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still shut out. Upon granting Congressman Grayson a glimpse at the text, USTR apparently instructed him in no uncertain terms to keep mum about what he saw. He was only permitted to see three chapters, his staff was not allowed to see the text, he was not allowed to take notes or make copies of the text, and he is forbidden from telling anyone what he read. The public, state legislatures, civil society, and press are still not allowed to see the text. BUT, over 600 U.S. corporate “trade advisors” not only have full access to the TPP text, they are influencing what is in the pact.

• America’s worst job-offshoring corporations, global banks, agribusiness, and pharmaceutical giants want this deal to be another corporate power tool like NAFTA. Consumer, labor, environmental, and other public interest advocates want transparency in the process and a “Fair Deal or No Deal.” A few texts have leaked. U.S. negotiators are pushing proposals that not only replicate the worst of past damaging trade deals on offshoring and more, but have championed outrageous new corporate-favored terms that would jack up drug prices and limit Internet freedom.

Welcome to DU blue14u. We have to stay on top of this.

or just a tool. Hmm.. mentally ill or tool, maybe both. Maybe he only gives in on the issues that don't bother his handlers. I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they have threatened his family or cloned him.

-Laelth

right fucking now!