Jim Hightower: PR Flacks Are Trying To Convince You the TPP Will Benefit Workers

Corporate PR Flacks Are Trying To Convince You the Trans-Pacific Partnership Will Benefit Workers
BY Jim Hightower


The basic problem facing the corporate and political powers that 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, pitching their "salad" as good and good for you! For example, a recent article touted a study blaring the happy news that TPP will increase real incomes in the U.S. by $133 billion a year. Even if that were 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 U.S. income, which every worker helps produce, now gushes up to the richest 1 percent, with millionaires and billionaires (the richest 10 percent 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 U.S. manufacturers to ship more of our middle-class jobs to places such as Vietnam with wages under 65 cents an hour (or around $155 a month). ...............(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18854/Trans-pacific-parntership_free-trade_income-inquality