A powerful legal tool designed to protect foreign investors could undermine commitments made in Paris last month to reign in climate warming emissions. 

Global corporations are engaged in a series of elaborately planned moves to take away our democratic rights, and currently, nowhere is that more evident than in the promotion of multinational trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Alliance for Democracy’s TPP-Free Zone campaign encourages communities to organize proactively against the TPP.  This campaign also provides a basis for establishing strong local rights as part of a global movement for economic and environmental justice.

The TPP threatens laws and regulation designed to protect public health, financial transparency, food safety, workers rights, the climate and the environment. It allows governments to be sued by corporations for lost profit as a result of these ordinances. Yet labor, environmental, health care, internet/free press, climate justice, green energy and democracy organizations were excluded from negotiations, and, under fast track, can't work with legislators to amend the text of the agreement.

“The major waves of teach-ins of the past 50 years have gone beyond the choir to inspire large numbers of people to expand their sense of the necessary and the possible.”

I apologize for "de-democratizes" in the title. I wrestled with "un-democratizes," "hurts every good cause," and "cuts a swath down the sail of American democracy like Errol Flynn," and none of them seemed to work. I decided to go with a word that represents curtailment, undermining, moving away from. American political and economic life certainly isn't democratic enough, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership makes it all less so, because it undermines an entire category of democratic policymaking.

Note: This article was originally published in the Liberty Tree Journal in 2007