Lucas,
That's why I am asking for your advice -- how do we do it here?!
In Tokyo, 600 people -- women from consumer groups, unionists, farmers and hundreds on a spontaneous anti-TPP Facebook group -- rallied (click on the action link to view video).
Fifteen hundred people packed a parliamentary hearing with sixty legislators. Across the country, hundreds of people showed up to teach-ins. Sitting on trains between cities, random people spying "TPP" on English language documents struggled to ask what I thought of it. And, last month, 11 million people signed a petition against TPP.
They are creating a firestorm of informed opposition!
We can, too. But we need your advice.
The Japanese 99% are working overtime to alert their communities to the threats of the so-called "trade" deal and make their message clear:
TPP is not welcomed.
Like here, the press is either shutting out TPP or cheerleading for it. But across amazingly diverse sectors of Japanese society, the public is finding new ways to get informed and send a strong message to their Prime Minister: We will not tolerate this corporate power tool and its foreseeable damage to our lives!
This in a country that hasn't even officially entered the closed-door negotiations now underway between the U.S. (along with the 600 official U.S. corporate "advisors") and eight Pacific Rim countries. The fight-back started when Japan's Prime Minister told President Obama he wanted to join the talks -- and it is building by the week.
But here, after two years of official TPP talks, many Americans have no idea what TPP is.
How can we wake Americans up to the TPP threat and gear up our fight-back?
The U.S. media isn't exposing TPP for what it is -- a tool to expand corporate power. It's up to all of us to do the job, but how?
What can we all do to inspire our communities to fight TPP? How can we all put the public spotlight on this corporate power grab? What do you think is the best action to derail TPP? The next round of secret negotiation is in Dallas: What do you think we can all do to show the rest of the country what's going on?
We want to hear from YOU.
Sincerely,Lori Wallach
Director, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
P.S. Before I went to Japan, I spent a week lurking around the margins of the 11th session of TPP negotiations in Australia, and what I learned was chilling. Imagine NAFTA with Vietnam and later China -- job offshoring, unsafe imported food, higher medicine prices, financial deregulation. The only good news is that the proposals are so extreme that if we can expose them to the sunlight, they cannot survive.