Obama and Congress surrendered to majorcorporate invasion

Jim Hightower - Last May, the WTO – an oligarchic, autocratic governing entity essentially run by and for multinational corporations – ruled that a US consumer protection law called "COOL" violates one of WTO's obscure trade rules. COOL stands for "Country-Of-Origin Labeling," a straight-forward requirement that meat sold in the US be labeled so consumers can know where it came from.

This was passed by our Congress, signed by our president, upheld by our courts, and is supported by 92 percent of our people. But corporate meat processors in Canada and Mexico (including US meat conglomerates with operations there) do not want us to know this basic information. So they got Canadian and Mexican government officials to do an end run around our sovereign people by filing a claim against COOL in this shadowy corporate trade organization. WTO's May ruling dutifully put the profits of these few global meat purveyors over the democratic will of some 300 million Americans – COOL must go, decreed these faceless, unelected servants of the corporate order.

To enforce this demand, the WTO dictated on December 7th that Canada and Mexico could punish us by imposing a billion dollars a year in export bans – or Washington could give in to corporate greed and gut our people's consumer labeling law.

Sure enough, rather than telling the WTO to take a hike, your congress critters and President Obama meekly swallowed this toad, repealing COOL and signing away your and my sovereignty. To fight this cowardly surrender, go to Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.

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