Here’s

a handy form by EFF
to oppose the secretly-negotiated privacy-deleting corporate-greed-defending
natural gas export pipeline-enabling Trans-Pacific Parternship treaty.

Parker Higgins and Maira Sutton
wrote for the Electronic Frontier Foundation
28 December 2013,

2013 in Review: The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement,

The biggest TPP story this year was the publication by WikiLeaks
in November of the chapter titled “Intellectual Property.” Unfortunately,
its contents confirmed many of our worst fears: from
ratcheting up copyright term lengths
around the world, to
boxing in fair use, to mandating a draconian legal regime around DRM software, section
after section contained clauses plucked from corporate wishlists and
snubbed the public interest altogether.

And then there’s

Ted Poe’s House Subcommittee pushing TPP for LNG exports that would propel
“natural” fracked gas pipelines
such as Spectra Energy’s Sabal Transmission gas pipe
through private property and

public rivers and watersheds and

aquifers.

Here’s what’s up next:

In the U.S., opposition has focused on the Obama administrations
calls for Congress to grant “fast track authority,”
thus waiving its constitutional role of reviewing international
agreements. If it passes fast track, Congress would instead be limited to
a single yes-or-no vote. Under normal circumstances that’s dangerous. But
in a case where the public (and even Congressional staffers) haven’t been
allowed to read the agreement at all yet, that’s reckless behavior.

We’ve set up
a tool to allow people in the U.S. to contact their legislators
asking them to oppose fast track authority for TPP, and people have already used it to send tens of thousands of letters.
You can use it to send a letter today. Lawmakers seem to be taking notice: in the past few months, bipartisan letters from House Republicans and Democrats have
firmly rejected the lack of transparency around the agreement,
casting serious doubt on the possibility of fast track authority.

I used the form, and you can, too.

-jsq