Please, Mr President - no stinkin' Trans Pacific Plan!
As a small business person who helps run a small and sometimes struggling publishing firm, can I say this?
First of all, some 18 to 33% of our current monthly business is from the "free markets" of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China.
One of the biggest reassurances our small business needs is to know that the United States Postal Service continues to operate as it has in the past.
However because of the legislation that forces the USPS to "pre-pay" its pension plan, the service is often bleeding red ink. Any business would be bleeding red ink - if required to pre-pay for an item 75 years in advance!
Although Saturday delivery is nice, what really concerns me is the idea that soon many Americans will be required to visit their local post office in order to have mail delivered, and to pick their mail up.
This would be a huge inconvenience and huge expense. This would cost us about 1100 dollars a year. Since we make under $ 30,000 you can see what an impact this would have. It would also deprive the business of one of the two people that spend eight hours a day 'working the business." Each trip into town takes a minimum of two hours.
Other than the issue f the mail and Post Office, our fulfillment of our "export mission" to the international scene doesn't require anything else. No TPP is needed. We are good, on the ground, with everything as it is.
Just help keep the USPS up and running.
Also, the whole discussion of the TPP has been in secrecy. What I do have figured out, especially on account of my friends on FB (If you need to know who they are, your buddy Mr Clapper probably can tell you quite quickly!) -- it is widely believed that Monsanto had quite an impact on how this legislation will be written.
Perhaps you could discuss Monsanto with your wife. I am sure she has some sinister facts and figures, as any good organic gardener would have, of how often the GM crops in the USA are contaminated with fusarium and vomitoxins. Sometimes a crop is now so badly contaminated that a farmer must take a lower price; other times the farmer cannot sell the crop at all.
Of course, a farmer can remedy this situation by adding nutrients back into the soil - but the whole point of paying Monsanto the big bucks is so that each crop is a one till operation. If repeated tilling is needed to be done, people here will finally opt out of this Agri-Franken Business' business model. And at that time, our farmers might secure organic seed less expensively if there are international sources of conventional and organic seed. Should the TPP wipe out that resource, the entire human race might be facing famine.
Anyway, I also want to remind you of a pledge you made to my household at the time we were advocating for your election and sending your campaign money. You promised transparency. But people are saying that this entire TPP legislation is, like the ACA before it, being hidden from view while being created, and the American people will not really understand what it is all about until it is being implemented. I remind you here and now of that pledge of transparency. I feel that to break that pledge is a very serious matter.
I would also like to point you to the decent website with link to a TPP article, from our Union brothers and sisters:
http://teamsternation.blogspot.com/2013/07/corporations-want-to-hide-dangers-of-tpp.html
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