06/10/15 – Kevin Zeese – The Scott Horton Show

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Next up, it's our old friend Kevin Zeese.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
How are you?
Welcome back.
Doing great.
Happy to be on the show.
I was going to say from, and then I started thinking of this flood of URLs, and I wasn't sure which order to put them in, so I started stuttering.
The one to emphasize at this point for this show, for this issue, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and these rigged corporate trade agreements, is Popular Resistance, popularresistance.org.
And I'm actually talking to you from Capitol Hill.
We're in the process of an occupation where we'll be staying the night up here and staying up here until a critical vote this Friday.
It'll be over by 3.
It's a vote on whether or not to fast-track these rigged corporate trade deals that are really crony capitalism on steroids.
And it's going to be a really close vote.
It's going to be really interesting to see how it plays out.
We're hearing such different reports from different news sources on how the votes are lining up.
It's really interesting.
So people need to take action.
They don't want to stop this corporate coup, this big business coup.
They should go to stopfasttrack.com.
You can, from that, just put in your zip code, and they'll connect you with your member of Congress so you can talk to them.
And then I'd urge you to call other members of Congress as well nearby.
Just let them know to vote no on fast-track.
There's a big revolt going in the grassroots and the elites in Washington are trying to ignore it.
But it's coming from both the right and the left.
Breitbart has some great stories about the right side of this, the Republican grassroots, the libertarian grassroots, the conservative grassroots that are just enraged over what they're calling Obama trade.
And it's a whole secret deal where we don't get to see what he's negotiating.
They want to fast-track it through Congress so Congress can't hold any hearings.
They can't make any amendments.
They have to vote up or down in a very short amount of time and really undermine democracy in order to pass a secret trade deal.
That is secret to all of us, but hundreds of Obama's friends who donate to his campaign, big business interests, have been helping to write it.
So it's a pre-written buy-in for the big business interests and it's definitely being against the people's interests.
So we're trying to stop it.
Well, I think this is a great clarifying issue here.
It really just goes to show the people on one side and power on the other side.
And it doesn't matter if you're left or right or a grassroots conservative, a grassroots liberal.
And I know you guys tend to be kind of protectionist, but a libertarian 1,000 percent free trader like myself would be just as opposed to it as you, because this is fascism.
Come on, man.
This has nothing to do with democracy and it has nothing to do really with free trade either.
That's why it's 10 million words long is because it's all a bunch of corruption.
Exactly.
Flee is not what this does.
This is not free trade.
This is rigged trade.
Yeah, I even read an article in the American Prospect, which is, I guess, kind of the center-left Democratic Party liberal line, right?
And they were saying, yeah, no, we'd support free trade, but this isn't that.
So they're even, I guess, what you'd call neoliberals.
And they're like, no, but not this.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It really is a clarifier.
You can see who the populists are.
You can see who the elites are.
You can see who answers the big business.
You can see answers to the people.
It gets really clear with this.
This is a really great opportunity to see what your elected official really stands for.
As you were saying with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs and those kinds of Halliburton-type corporations who are pushing this so aggressively, they've never seen up here.
I mean, some of the members of Congress who oppose these rigged trade deals have never seen Obama work so hard to pass something.
He is working hard, and Paul Ryan, too.
And as I said, check out these Breitbart articles.
There's three of them now.
Two came up yesterday.
One came up today that just described how the Republican support on this is collapsing because the grassroots is pushing so hard.
And I think one reason that the leadership pushed for the vote this Friday, even though they're not sure if they have the votes, is because they're afraid of the grassroots.
They don't want members going home for the weekend and talking to people.
They don't want another week of telephone calls.
We did a phone call day last week.
One day, this is from the left side, one day we had 60,000 phone calls into the U.S. House of Representatives, 60,000.
Our friends who are working on the right side of this, the Republican side of this, they did a Twitter storm on Monday.
It was a trending Twitter, not only nationally but globally.
The grassroots is outraged by this idea of a secret trade agreement rushed through Congress with no real hearings, no hearings at all.
They're outraged.
And yet the elites ignore us.
And this is a really great opportunity to put them in their place.
I think we can win this vote, but people have to mobilize.
Yeah, man, I'm with you.
So two things here real quick, and we've still got four or five minutes.
So if you could, please give me a real crash course in the kinds of cronyism that are in here.
Really teach me some stuff about what the hell is in this thing, not just you know it's corrupt because Goldman supports it.
I mean, that's simple enough.
You know, march right to Capitol Hill based on that alone, obviously.
But why do they support it, really?
And then secondly, convince me that my congressman gives a damn if I call him, too.
Well, the first funny question is the most important one.
They do give a damn.
You know, when NAFTA passed, that's when the Democrats lost control of the House.
That's when Democrats lost their seats.
This is an issue that cost them their jobs.
And they are afraid of this massive grassroots tsunami.
It definitely has an impact.
There are many members of Congress who are coming out against this.
You know, we just didn't know whether they would or not, and they're coming out against it.
Others, we have a place on Capitol Hill we're occupying where they have to walk back and forth between the House office buildings and the Capitol building.
Some of them are just like, we ask them, where do you stand?
They won't say.
What's your name?
They won't say.
They don't want anyone knowing.
They're so embarrassed by what they're doing and so afraid of it, they won't even want to talk about it in public.
They just don't want the pressure.
They're afraid of people, so I do think it makes a difference.
I know it's hard to believe in our oligarchic government, but there is a power in people who are mobilized the way that this movement is.
We have the largest ever grassroots movement on the left on this, covering food and water and banking and labor and environment.
I mean, every issue that you care about is affected by these trade unions because they're so broad.
Basically what these trade unions are so bad about them is, you know, things that they can't get through the front door of Congress, as corrupt as Congress is, things they can't get through the corrupt Congress, through the front door, these big business interests, are shoving in the back door here, and that's why they're keeping it secret.
The fact that it's secret is a clue as to why you know the people on the wrong side of this, on this agreement.
It seems like creating these evergreen patents so that pharmaceuticals can keep their prices high, a 20-year patent, and if you just change the formula, you know, by going from a gel to a liquid or saying it's not only for just a headache, but it's also for a stomachache, you get another 20-year patent.
And any generic drug that wants to come on the market has to redo all the research.
They cannot rely on the research done by the pharmaceutical companies.
They want to keep prices of drugs artificially high just to create profits for an orally way too, you know, abusive of their clout pharmaceutical industry.
That's just one example how it will affect our pocketbooks.
They're expanding the patents not just to pharmaceuticals.
They also want to change patents to cover surgical and other medical procedures.
So if you want to use a procedure, you have to pay for it now.
Now there's no such thing as paying for a procedure, a patent on a procedure.
They want to change it to do that.
I mean, they want copyrights of books to last 120 years for a textbook.
I mean, so it's insane.
I mean, they're just doing everything that corporate, plus they have these trade tribunals that will basically destroy our court system.
A trade tribunal where the judges are three judges from corporate, you know, corporations, on leave from their corporate job, they make a decision, then they go back to their corporate job.
These decisions by trade tribunals can't be overturned by our Supreme Court.
They are more powerful than our Supreme Court.
So they are undermining the third branch of government completely with this.
And, of course, Fast Track itself, I think, undermines the constitutional responsibility of Congress, which under the Commerce Clause, Article I of the Constitution, Congress is said to be responsible for regulating trade between nations.
They are giving that power to President Obama.
And so that, to me, is undermining the separation of powers and the requirement that trade between nations be regulated by Congress, not by the president.
So those are just a few examples.
I find this to be a total transformation of an already weak democracy to a much weaker one.
These are all anti-democratic provisions, anti-constitutional, you know, really undermine the whole judicial system.
Right.
PopularResistance.org, StopFastTrack.com.
Okay, I can keep interviewing you for a second.
I want to make sure the live audience got to hear that one more time before we went on a break there.
All right.
We appreciate it.
Sorry to cut you off so soon there.
But thanks very much for coming back on the show.
Thank you very much.
We appreciate you, Kevin.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Okay, that's Kevin Zeese.
Y'all, PopularResistance.org.
And, again, StopFastTrack.com.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe.
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