This Is How Little It Cost Goldman To Bribe America's Senators

To Fast Track Obama's TPP Bill

It took just a few days after the stunning defeat of Obama's attempt to fast-track the Trans Pacific Partnership bill in the Senate at the hands of his own Democratic party, before everything returned back to normal and the TPP fast-track was promptly passed. Why? The simple answer: money. Or rather, even more money.

Because while the actual contents of the TPP may be highly confidential, and their public dissemination may lead to prison time for the "perpetrator" of such illegal transparency, we now know just how much it cost corporations to bribe the Senate to do the bidding of the "people." In the Supreme Court sense, of course, in which corporations are "people."

According to an analysis by the Guardian, fast-tracking the TPP, meaning its passage through Congress without having its contents available for debate or amendments, was only possible after lots of corporate money exchanged hands with senators. The US Senate passed Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) – the fast-tracking bill – by a 65-33 margin on 14 May. Last Thursday, the Senate voted 62-38 to bring the debate on TPA to a close.

Those impressive majorities follow months of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing by the world’s most well-heeled multinational corporations with just a handful of holdouts.

Using data from the Federal Election Commission, the chart below (based on data from the following spreadsheet) shows all donations that corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP made to US Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate.

The result: it took a paltry $1.15 million in bribes to get everyone in the Senate on the same page. And the biggest shocker: with a total of $195,550 in "donations", or more than double the second largest donor UPS, was none other than Goldman Sachs.

Continue . . . http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-30/how-little-it-cost-bribe-senates-fast-tracking-obamas-tpp-bill

Full-blown free trade is about total decentralization in trade policy. In a country that enjoys free trade — that is, a country that has implemented unilateral free trade — it is fully up to the individual consumer and entrepreneur as to whether or not he wishes to do business with foreign suppliers. Under such a system, a baker who must buy delivery trucks and flour for his business can choose whether or not he will obtain his supplies from foreign or domestic suppliers. In most cases, he will choose the most economical option, and the marketplace will reflect this reality.

Trade agreements like the TPP and NAFTA, on the other hand, leave these decisions not up to individual citizens, but to government regulators and negotiators who make decisions in the interest of the state and its favored special interests.

Because of this, any agreement that threatened to implement true free trade would pose a significant threat to the status quo which greatly favors powerful special interests over the interests of small business owners and ordinary consumers. As Murray Rothbard pointed out:

Continue . . . https://mises.org/library/we-need-actual-free-trade-not-tpp

 

What a bargain eh?

Q. If prostitution is illegal how can our congress practice it openly and not end up behind bars?