GET INTO CORPORATE AFFAIRS

Lucas,

The Corporate Coalition for a NAFTA with Asia decided to send U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk a special Valentine's Day gift. Check out this ad on Facebook .

Meanwhile, in front of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Valentine's Day was celebrated with buff models tattooed as the SEC, Chevron and Exxon frolicking in a king-sized bed parked on the curb.

These "special relationships" between corporations and our government officials need to end. U.S. trade officials may try to keep their affairs secret with closed door talks in Malaysia and private meetings in Beverly Hills. But the draft texts of a treaty that could drastically affect all of our lives in many ways are NOT private love letters.

Tell your members of Congress that the office of the U.S. Trade Representative needs to release the secret draft texts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

More than 600 corporations serving as U.S. trade advisors have full access to these draft texts. So do hundreds of government officials from Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Only the public, press and Congress are left out in the cold.

Under the framework now being negotiated, U.S. states and the federal government would be obliged to bring our existing and future domestic policies into compliance with expansive new regulatory limits and new corporate privileges that would be established in 26 chapters of this deal, mostly not covering trade issues at all.

The 1% may want to undermine financial regulation, ban Buy America policies, increase medicine prices, and allow a flood of unsafe imported food and products. But that's not in the interest of the 99%.

Alert your members of Congress to this most heartbreaking corporate power tool.

The deal would also empower corporations to attack our environmental and health safeguards before tribunals of corporate lawyers and demand taxpayer compensation. And, there are special privileges and benefits for firms that offshore investment and jobs away from the U.S.

We know this much only because of rare leaks of the secret texts and because groups like us have been hounding negotiators as they run to their private meetings with the corporate advisors.

We still have a window of opportunity to expose this love affair between corporations and trade negotiators, and make sure that the TPP is either a fair deal or there is no deal.

Make out this Valentine's Day card to your members of Congress--send them the gift of knowledge.