WKOG Op-Ed | TPP – Chickens Coming Home to Roost?

Wrong Kind of Green

November 10, 2015

by Forrest Palmer

HONOLULU, HI – NOVEMBER 12: (AFP OUT) U.S. President Barack Obama (R) speaks with Hassanal Bolkiah, the Sultan of Brunei after meeting with Trans-Pacific Partnership leaders at the Hale Koa Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii on Saturday, November 12, 2011. President Barack Obama said the U.S. and Australia, Chile, Peru and Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Vietnam and Brunei have agreed on the outlines of a free trade accord and negotiations to work out the details will get underway this year. (Photo by Kent Nishimura-Pool/Getty Images)

“We can’t wait for final proof of a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud”

“Drill, baby, drill”

“I am not a scientist”

This is rather puzzling to those TRUE leftists out there (which are few and far between) because those who reside in this group can only have one honest response to the devil in these details, which would be a uniform “It is pretty much what I would expect”. As the TPP is a blatant corporatization of every aspect of human existence and the last salvo of capitalism as it tries to use this as a makeshift life preserver during its spiral to its inevitable demise as a social construct, the description of it being “worse than expected” flies in the face of all reality. Let’s just list a few of the details in terms of where capitalism has us now as a species which should be in survival mode, but Westerners and those who identify with them as a group are too delusional and lazy minded to even know how close they are to the precipice of extinction:

• 90% of the big ocean fish are extinct
• 70% of the global top soil that allows plants to grow has eroded
• Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturers of electronics components used by Apple, Microsoft, Cisco and other high end tech corporations, has installed nets outside of its facilities to keep its modern day slave labor from killing themselves
• 40% of the artisinal (non-mechanized) miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are children
• Breathing the air in Beijing is the equivalent of smoking 40 cigarettes a day
• In Mexico, Coca-Cola is more available than potable water leading to obesity and diabete

and the list goes on and on.

So, if this is the present day representation of capitalism with nary a peep from many of the people in the Western world to any great degree, especially in Amerikkka, who are now espousing outrage at the TPP, then what is the reason for their collective anger? Could it be chickens coming home to roost, to quote the indomitable Malcolm X? As the conversation regarding this agreement is totally surrounding how Amerikkkans will not benefit from it, then it must be asked why these other voluminous issues (ever slightly touched on above) haven’t been addressed in the Western world to the same degree of importance as this legislation?

The reason is that the Amerikkkan will always be acquiescent to the social order of capitalism as long as they collectively benefit from it. Globalization momentarily allowed the Amerikkkan to benefit from this set of living arrangements, through cheaper goods and services by foreign labor. But, a service based economy, which Amerikkka has degenerated to as it no longer produces anything, has left it at the mercy of the producing countries. And depending on the economic and military strength of said producers, they will dictate the terms of conditions of any contractual agreement with Western enterprises. Hence, China, with nuclear weapons as a point of retaliation, can always negotiate from a position of strength before Cambodia, which has no nuclear weapons. Since China houses most of the manufacturing base of much of the multinational corporations, this doesn’t bode well for Amerikkkans in terms of it power relationship.   Therefore, the Western, and specifically, Amerikkkan left is upset at the shifting of the balance of power from one of the nation state to one of multinational corporate power, which is beholden to no nationalist identity.

So, “it is worse than we thought” is really a euphemism for “I can’t believe you would do this to us!!”. The boomerang effect regarding what we have done and are doing to other people and nations for the continuance of a set of living circumstance that is unsustainable by any measure, is coming into play now. Ultimately, the utterly shameful ambivalence by the Amerikkkan citizen as to a Congolese child being lowered into a mine to get the mineral resources to provide him or her any number of extravagancies, ranging from handheld electronic devices to the economic foundation of our communal existences, is being revealed by our responses to the TPP. Point blank, our outrage in the West was fairly dormant up until this moment, be it the Amerikkkan left or any other cultural representative.

Poetic justice, me thinks.

[Forrest Palmer is an electrical engineer residing in Texas.  He is a part-time blogger and writer and can be found on Facebook. You may reach him at forrest_palmer@yahoo.com.]