| Two years ago, conventional wisdom said that in the epic fight between corporate-backed trade deals and regular citizens, stopping these dangerous deals would be nearly impossible.In one corner, there are hundreds of corporate lobbyists and government officials doing everything they can to increase corporations’ power over our lives through two massive trade deals called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
In the other corner, there’s all of us regular people, joined by thousands of other organisations banding together to stop these sneaky deals.
Against all expectations, we are actually winning.
How do we know?
These are the top 5 signs that trade negotiations are way off track:
- Last week, we had some really good news. In the US, politicians were voting on legislation that would “fast track” the process for agreeing to trade deals, making it easier for Obama to sign the US up to TPP and TTIP and push the deal ahead. They thought they’d win.Shocking everyone, those backing the trade deal lost the crucial vote — throwing a wrench into the process and potentially delaying negotiations by weeks. Debate now moves to the other chamber, where SumOfUs members in the US have been hard at work overwhelming the email boxes, offices, and Facebook pages of key legislators like Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi with calls to stop “fast track” and the TPP:
Comments left on US Democratic Leader Pelosi’s Facebook wall.
- TTIP is being negotiated under a cloak of secrecy with special access for corporate lobbyists: from Monsanto to Nestlé, corporations are scuttling around Brussels to get their agenda into the deal.European citizens, on the other hand, have been faced with shut doors wherever they turn. So we made sure European leaders and TTIP trade negotiators would get our message anyway: SumOfUs members chipped in to place ads in two top Brussels newspapers and made sure EU politicians and negotiators can no longer turn a blind eye to where we stand on TTIP. Check them out:
Splashy ads funded by all of us in two major European papers.
- Thousands of SumOfUs members in New Zealand and Australia, along with our partners at Action Station and It’s Our Future raised over $15,000 to blanket over 140 radio stations across New Zealand with our hard-hitting radio ads. The ads got loads of play, reaching hundreds of thousands of people — including key decision-makers involved in TPP and other trade deal negotiations:
Click here to listen to the ads.
- SumOfUs has teamed up with more than 400 partner organisations to form a EU-wide, self-organised Citizens’ Initiative against TTIP. Already a whopping 1.8 million of us have signed on to stop the deal — and the number is rising by the minute. Exploding opposition against the TTIP has European leaders terrified. They’re scrambling to save the deal by proposing superficial changes to appease the public.
Click here to sign the petition if you haven’t yet.
- TPP negotiators keep picking isolated, far-away places (increasingly, at gorgeous tropical resorts) to hold their talks. Maybe they don’t want to be bothered with people marching and chanting, disturbing their rounds of golf? Well too bad, because at every turn, we’ve been following them and making sure they know we want this disastrous deal stopped. Here’s a video of a crew of awesome SumOfUs members in Hawaii making their presence known:
Click here to watch the video.
If these deals pass, here’s just a bit of what we could be in store for: Corporate power grabs that span the world and could change the way we live forever. Deals that set some of the worst global inequalities in stone and make them almost impossible to fix. And a blank cheque for multinationals to draw down the world’s resources, without any rules and regulations to protect future generations.
Does this sound nasty to you? Then you’re on the right team. Together, we’re standing up against big companies that have hundreds of high-paid lobbyists and slick advertising campaigns, big ad budgets and fancy spin doctors.
But all of that can’t beat what SumOfUs has to offer: millions of committed members, ready to take on corporate trade deals wherever they show up.
These campaigns aren’t over yet, and we still have a lot of fight ahead of us, but we are proving that people power can do amazing things.
Just over a year ago, the odds of stopping the TPP and TTIP seemed bleak — but now public opinion is shifting. These deals are no longer a sure bet, thanks to the work that all of us, and our partners across the globe, have been doing.
Thanks for all your support. We know we’re powerful when we work together to stop these dangerous deals. SumOfUs members are the reason this campaign is working — and together, there’s no doubt we can win.
Thanks for all you do,
Kaytee, Emma, Wiebke and the rest of us
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