Catholic Groups, Vatican Charge: the TPP Violates “the Common Good” and Human Dignity

A number of Catholic organizations, including most prominently the Vatican, are mobilized against Obama’s murderous Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), warning that it violates the concept of the common good and threatens human life.

In an article published in The Huffington Post April 28, Stephen Seufert, of Keystone Catholics, reports on the breadth of the Catholic mobilization in an article entitled “President Obama: Catholics Oppose Fast-Tracking the TPP.” While not all the attacks reported are recent, they nonetheless make the crucial point that the TPP will kill people.

Impressive is the attack on the TPP by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the UN in Geneva, delivered on Dec. 5, 2013 at the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization in Bali, Indonesia. Addressing the widening wealth gap, Tomasi warned that “this imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the market place and of financial speculation. Consequently, there is an outright rejection of the right of States, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.” Tomasi particularly warned of the dangers posed by pharmaceutical monopolies and their control over life-saving medicines.

Lyndon LaRouche remarked today that Tomasi’s statement is an “excellent” one, and reflects “the South American influence”—of Pope Francis, who is Argentine, and became Pope in March of 2013. This, said LaRouche, “is the best political expression of the Papacy.”

A July 19, 2013, letter from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, addresses its concerns on the TPP by quoting Pope Francis: “the goal of economics and politics is to serve humanity … every economic and political theory or action must set about providing each inhabitant of the planet with the minimum wherewithal to live in dignity in freedom.”

A direct challenge to the Democratic Party came from author Michael Sean Winters, writing in the April 23 National Catholic Reporter under the headline “Dems Need To Oppose TPP & Fast-Track Trade Authority.” It’s time for the Democratic Party “to cut itself loose from the insanity of liberal trade policies,” Winters warns, referencing Elizabeth Warren’s and Martin O’Malley’s opposition to the TPP. “This is a crucial moment for Democrats: either they will follow Sen. Warren’s and Gov. O’Malley’s lead and return to their Rooseveltian roots as the party that chases the moneychangers out of the temple of our democracy and defend the economic interests of the average American, or they will join their Republican friends in worshiping at the altar of the market. It should be an easy choice.”