This speech was delivered at the New Zealand Is Not For Sale teach-in, held in Christchurch on February 20th. The teach-in was held to coincide with the US/NZ Partnership Forum being held in Christchurch. For full details about the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and the campaign against it, go to www.nznotforsale.org, specifically the teach-in report back page at http://nzn4stin.blogspot.com/p/registration.html, where you will find the PowerPoint presentations of the other two speakers, Bill Rosenberg and Jane Kelsey, who spoke on the national and international implications, respectively, of the TPPA. Ed.

My job as the opening act is to speak on behalf of the New Zealand Is Not For Sale Campaign Working Group (how’s that for a mouthful?). Specifically, I have been tasked to speak about the campaign to expose and, hopefully, stop the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), and why building that campaign is important. I will not be speaking about the TPPA itself or its national and international implications, except in the context of the campaign. Bill Rosenberg and Jane Kelsey will do that in detail.

Network

Before going any further a little detail about the New Zealand Is Not For Sale Campaign is necessary by way of introduction. It is a network, not an organisation as such. The groups which endorse the Campaign are: the Alliance Party; the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA – the group for whom I work); Global Peace and Justice Auckland; the Green Party; Manufacturing and Construction Workers Union; Maritime Union; Democrats for Social Credit; National Distribution Union; Our Water Our Vote; Pacific Institute of Resource Management; Safe Food Campaign; Socialist Worker; Unite Union; and the Workers Institute for Scientific Socialist Education (since the teach-in Alcohol Action NZ has also joined. Ed.). Collectively they comprise the Working Group but because they are spread right across the country, and because the initiative for this Campaign came from Christchurch, a much smaller group of Christchurch people actually meets now and again to organise things such as today’s event. Our Secretary and spokesperson is Christine Dann; I am the Convenor of the Working Group and it is in that capacity in which I am speaking today. The Campaign has its own e-mail address, its own Website, its own monthly electronic newsletter the Free Trade Informer and is running an online petition (thanks to Warren Brewer for looking after those three). It even has its own Patron, namely Bryan Gould – author, economic commentator, and former Vice-Chancellor of Waikato University and high profile British Labour MP. It does not have money of its own, relying on its constituent groups for funding; and it has no plans to become a stand alone organisation. Ideally, it will not have a long life, because New Zealand decides to change the suicidal course it is bent on vis a vis getting further enmeshed in the whole web of what are misleadingly called “free trade” agreements. But, sadly, there is no sign of sanity breaking out any time soon, so the Campaign will keep going as long as is necessary.

As you can gather from the list of groups involved there is quite a range of types of organisations and issues represented in the New Zealand Is Not For Sale Campaign. That diversity is impressive in itself and we hope that many more organisations will come aboard as the campaign grows. What we all agree on is the need to alert New Zealanders to the dangers posed by the TPPA (which, like all such agreements, is being negotiated in secret and does not require any Parliamentary vote to be activated, as it is a prerogative of the Executive alone); to mobilise as many people as possible to fight the TPPA, and to defeat it. That is our “mission statement” to borrow the corporate terminology. At this point I need to make a small but vital distinction by way of explanation. My topic is why building the campaign is important. I am speaking on behalf of a Campaign with a capital C but my topic is building the broader campaign (with a small c). So, unless I indicate otherwise I will be speaking about that broader campaign; the Campaign with a capital C is part of that and will grow as that broader campaign grows. I thought it necessary to eliminate any confusion at this point as to what exactly I am referring to when I talk about the campaign.

Election Year Opportunity

The first reason why building the campaign is important is a happy coincidence, namely that this is election year. This issue, and the very beginnings of the Campaign (with a capital C) actually goes back to the last election year in 2008 when the Labour government announced that steps were under way to join the US up to the existing P(acific)4 Free Trade Agreement between NZ, Chile, Singapore and Brunei. In a once in 12 years occurrence both NZ and the US had elections in the same year (within days of each other, in fact) and both changed governments. That meant that the issue went onto the backburner particularly in the US, as the Obama Administration worked out its trade policy. Suddenly it was announced in 2009 that free trade agreements had the green light again in the US and, what’s more, simply joining up to an existing Pacific regional pact was not good enough. There would be a brand new multilateral agreement – the TPPA – which the Americans touted as the best offer on hand as the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Round for a globally binding free trade agreement has remained hopelessly stalled for years. TPPA negotiations started in earnest in 2010 (in secret, as such negotiations always are), including one round in Auckland, and have continued into 2011. Indeed the latest round was in Chile within the past few days (there has since been another round, in Singapore. Ed.). The aim is to have the Agreement signed at the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit in Obama’s home State of Hawaii in November. John Key has announced November 26th as the election date, so there is an almost exact convergence in the timing of the two. This coincidence gives us a chance to make it an election issue, which isn’t usually the case with trade policy issues. This enables us to demand of MPs and candidates of all parties to state where they stand on the TPPA and to enlighten the voting public as to how much they actually know about it (bugger all would be my guess for a lot of them, beyond that their party bosses had told them to say that “free trade is good for New Zealand”).

This gives all of us the opportunity to employ all of the tactics that we have become familiar with, when we’ve used them about any number of other issues in previous elections. Firstly, we need to wage an educational campaign to inform our own members and supporters, and the broader public, about the dangers posed by the TPPA and for them to then lobby the MPs and candidates about it. This is the one year in three that politicians are acutely sensitive to public opinion (or, at least, pretend to be). We need to think of ways to exert pressure on them on this issue, which is one with very broad implications, as Bill and Jane will explain. Sometimes the oldest tried and true tactics can be stunningly effective. For example, during the 2008 election campaign, CAFCA circulated a humble little postcard for people to send to Ministers and MPs urging them to oppose the liberalisation of the Overseas Investment Act. It was a runaway success and even succeeded in becoming a major media story as a result of it getting up the noses of very senior figures of both major parties, who went ballistic about it. We are thinking about doing something similar this election (and by “we” I mean the capital C campaign*). There is the fact that MPs will not get a vote on the TPPA – not until after it has already been signed, anyway, which is NZ’s standard procedure on free trade agreements and treaties in general. But actual and wannabe MPs can’t wriggle out of it that easily by saying that it’s beyond their control, nothing to do with them, they don’t know anything about it. They are asking us to employ them as our representatives in the business of running the country – there is no bigger issue this election year than the TPPA, because it will impact into so many areas of our economy, our society, our culture and our everyday lives. So every politician of every party has to be put on the spot about which side he or she is on. Are they for or against the TPPA? To me it’s an issue comparable in national importance to the 1981 Springbok Tour in that everybody in the country, whether they wanted to or not, had to form an opinion and come down on one side or the other about that. We’re nowhere near that level of public awareness yet about the TPPA but this year presents the perfect opportunity to put it on the political agenda, to make it an election issue and to put all politicians on the spot about it. *The Campaign has now produced two versions of a postcard opposing the TPPA, to be sent to the Prime Minister and an MP of the sender’s choice. One of each postcard is enclosed with this issue. Ed.

TPPA Means A US/NZ Free Trade Agreement

The second major reason why building the campaign (with a small c) is important is precisely because the TPPA involves the US. In fact, it is a proposed multilateral agreement which currently involves nine countries (with the possibility of more joining later). But as far as the NZ government is concerned, all that matters is that this represents the means to effect a Free Trade Agreement with the US. It doesn’t matter whether National or Labour wins this year’s election, because both major parties are uncritical cheerleaders for “free trade”. Both parties have publicly declared a Free Trade Agreement with the US to be the Holy Grail of NZ’s trade policies. The accession of the US to the P4 was originally announced under the last Labour government, in election year. Now, Labour is starting to show some encouraging signs of a rethink about some of the discredited old Rogernomics policies to which it has clung since the 80s and, from CAFCA’s perspective, it is particularly heartening to see Phil Goff announce that, if elected, Labour will tighten up some aspects of the law relating to foreign investment. That does provide a genuine point of difference between National and Labour for voters this year. But Goff and Labour have said nothing about any substantive rethink on free trade policies. Just within the past couple of days (in February. Ed.) Labour has called for wider scrutiny of the TPPA and for a greater range of groups, including unions, to be consulted about it. Labour also criticised the secrecy surrounding the negotiations. It is a start and is commendable, as far as it goes, but “consultation” is not nearly enough. Nor is openness, which may simply mean that we get stabbed in the front rather than in the back. The past quarter of a century has seen lots of “consultation” on all sorts of things and none were stopped or substantially modified because of it. So there is a bipartisan consensus between the two major parties on this subject. Labour under Clark and Goff proclaimed the 2008 Free Trade Agreement with China to be that Government’s greatest achievement in trade policy, and one of its greatest in foreign policy. So MPs and candidates of both National and Labour need to be subjected to our election year lobbying and campaigning.

The fact that this agreement is with the US provides us with a great opportunity, because it allows the campaign to make so many connections and branch out into so many different areas. It involves NZ getting into bed with the world’s biggest economy and only superpower, and we run the real risk of being rolled on and squashed. I am glad that a free trade agreement with the US is the target of this campaign, rather than China – not because I “support” China (I think the media and politicians should really have the decency to routinely call it Capitalist China in exactly the same way they used to call it Communist China) but because we can run this campaign without the distraction of being branded racists and because we can point out the lessons of NZ’s existing Free Trade Agreement with the world’s second biggest economy and ascendant superpower. For example, why is there suddenly a surge in Chinese firms wanting to buy NZ dairy farms, rural land and agricultural businesses? Because the investment agreement embedded in that 2008 Free Trade Agreement with China allows them to and puts them in a privileged position where NZ “can’t discriminate against” Chinese bidders. When the extremely shonky Natural Dairy corporation bid for the bankrupt Crafar Farms empire, Federated Farmers put out a naïve statement saying that this was an “unintended consequence” of the Free Trade Agreement with China. “Unintended”, my arse. This is exactly how these agreements are supposed to work. They are only superficially about trade, “free” or otherwise. They all come with an accompanying embedded foreign investment agreement which is quite often more important than the trade component. We won’t get called “racists” but we will get called “anti-American”. I wouldn’t get worried about that, I’ve been called that for more than 40 years now, and we will get called that no matter how mild our criticism of the TPPA. Calling opponents childish names is par for the course from politicians and Big Business and their PR and media mouthpieces. Better to be called names than to be ignored.

Being Reabsorbed Into The American Empire

Later I intend to detail the various other groups, campaigns and issues that our Campaign (with a capital C) can work with as a result of the TPPA being dominated by the US. But there is the obvious one that it opens us up to working with the great majority of New Zealanders who don’t want to be sucked back into a military alliance with the US, and for our country to be reabsorbed into the American Empire. You don’t need me to spell out the history – NZ being out of ANZUS and nuclear free has gone well beyond being the status quo, it is now part of the political furniture, and virtually part of the DNA of being a New Zealander (it’s used in bloody beer ads, for Christ’s sake). Ironically that also means that there is not a strong organised peace movement in the country, and there hasn’t been since NZ went nuclear free. But there are still some active groups and it doesn’t take much to reactivate wider public opinion. Even in the white hot hysteria of the early post 9/11 years, Helen Clark took great care to keep NZ out of the Iraq invasion and made only a token commitment to the illegal occupation of that country. Afghanistan, of course, is another matter and governments led by both major parties have played shameful roles in the invasion and seemingly permanent war in that country. At least the Alliance had the decency to tear itself to pieces and eject itself out of Parliament as a result of its internal bustup over the issue when it was Labour’s coalition partner.

Throughout the whole period that NZ was officially in bad odour with the US because of the ANZUS Row, the secret intelligence relationship continued undisturbed (and, as we know from Wikileaks, was covertly fully restored on a specific date in 2009 – an action so sensitive that the order was to deny it if it became public). The most important manifestation of that is the Waihopai spybase which dates exactly to the year (1987) that the nuclear free law was passed. It is NZ’s most important contribution to all and any American wars. I work for the Anti-Bases Campaign, which has called for the closure of that spybase from the outset. I won’t go into the details, check us out at www.converge.org.nz/abc.

The TPPA has been presented, quite openly, by its proponents as NZ’s “reward” for being a loyal satellite of the US (we call ourselves an “ally” but in the good old days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union never had allies as far as the West was concerned, only satellites. So “satellite” is good enough for me when it comes to describing NZ’s relationship to the American Empire). In the days of the Vietnam War, when the Holyoake government pretty much disappeared up Uncle Sam’s arse, our policy of sending troops to help fight America’s wars was popularly known as “guns for butter”. Now that both major parties see NZ’s trade policy as being that whatever is good for Fonterra is good for the country, the slogan could be updated to being “guns for milk”. The principle is the same – if little old New Zealand does its bit to serve American military and political interests, it might, just might, get a sniff of a reward in the shape of a free trade agreement. Our campaign (with both a capital and a small c) needs to build links with the great majority of New Zealanders who don’t want a bar of being back in the American Empire, fighting its wars and hosting its spybases, warships and military forces. The secret is to make people see the connection between the two; that, seen in its proper context, the TPPA is not the Holy Grail but a poisoned chalice. This is not wishful thinking – independence from the American nuclear machine is a given as far as the vast majority of Kiwis are concerned. We need to build on that to include getting into bed with the US via trade and investment agreements. I’ve already mentioned Wikileaks. The recent release of the US diplomatic cables relating to NZ was another happy coincidence for our campaign. Several of those cables spell out the American position on the TPPA and reveal the truth behind the lies peddled to the NZ public by our negotiators. Those cables also provide a priceless glimpse into all aspects of the US/NZ relationship, detailing what the Americans really think of us, who their stool pigeons are inside the NZ political Establishment, which NZ journalists they have been cultivating to best present their point of view. They provide an uncensored and fascinating portrait of the Empire in action, of who is shouting “jump” and who is replying “how high?” I recommend that all New Zealanders read them, and that the campaign to defeat the TPPA make maximum use of them. Three cheers for Wikileaks!

TPPA Comes With Embedded Investment Agreement

It is appropriate at this point to spell out the various other groups, campaigns and issues with which our campaign can connect and, hopefully, work together to build a strong campaign to defeat the TPPA. Firstly, as with all so-called “free trade” agreements, it comes with a major foreign investment component, an investment agreement embedded in it which will throw open what remains off limits in the NZ economy to the tender mercies of American transnational corporations working hand in glove with the US government. This means that everybody in this country concerned about its wholesale corporate recolonisation is a potential active supporter of our campaign. That stretches far beyond the ranks of CAFCA members and supporters. It encompasses one Parliamentary party, the Greens – which is why they’re already a leading member of the Campaign (with a capital C). Two other former Parliamentary parties – the Alliance and the Democrats for Social Credit are likewise actively involved. There is also New Zealand First, which may or may not get back into Parliament this year. CAFCA has always been reluctant to work with them, for the very good reason that a lot of their opposition to foreign control is motivated by anti-Asian, anti-immigrant, racism. And true to form, Winston Peters’ recent pronouncements on the subject have emphasised the risk of Chinese taking over NZ. I am unaware of him having said anything about the TPPA but I stand to be corrected. Nevertheless there will be grassroots New Zealand First activists, members and voters who would be fully supportive of the campaign. The trick is to persuade them that it won’t all be made right by the re-election of Winston the Messiah to Parliament, where he will save us from those nasty foreigners.

I want to make it clear that we won’t work with racists, but I don’t see any problem in working with nationalists and by that I include people in the National Party. The issue of land sales to foreigners, which was highlighted by the rejected Natural Dairy bid to buy the Crafar farms, has obviously caused great disquiet within the ranks of National supporters and voters. Indeed it caused an obvious difference of opinion at the highest ranks of the National government, with Key saying that he doesn’t want New Zealanders to become tenants in their own country (language that no senior Labour figure has ever used), and with Bill English and Treasury forced to accept a review of the Overseas Investment Act that did not, as predicted, liberalise it further but tacked on a couple of cosmetic measures to give the appearance of toughening it in relation to land sales.

I am not suggesting that we are going to recruit John Key or any of his cronies but you might be surprised at the number of Tory supporters and voters who could well be sympathetic to this campaign. The very same John Key who doesn’t want us to be tenants in our own country has also announced the partial privatisation of several public assets if National is re-elected. Who would benefit from that? Forget about the “Kiwi mums and dads” that Key extols as the buyers. Very quickly, as with a raft of previous privatisations (including those to “mums and dads”), those assets will fall into the hands of transnational corporations. The TPPA will greatly assist the ability of US transnationals to snap them up. There are an even larger number of people in this country opposed to privatisation of public assets than there are those opposed to foreign control. People remember what happened in the 80s and 90s and the ongoing negative consequences of that failed policy. Combine the two – those opposed to foreign control and those opposed to asset sales; then add those who don’t like NZ being reabsorbed into the American Empire, either military and/or economic, and potentially this campaign should be backed to some degree by a decent majority of the population. Once again, the trick is getting the information out there, making those links and pointing out the consequences.

Let’s look at some of the other consequences of the TPPA. It will push up the price of medicines by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year by attacking Pharmac; make access to digital recordings more expensive and copying more restricted; attack our GE controls and food labelling; and weaken our controls on food imports where they might carry diseases. And the whole process is both secret and fundamentally undemocratic in the way in which it is being negotiated and then ratified by Executive decree.

A Wide Range Of Allies

That gives our campaign an immediate point of reference with a number of others, such as: groups fighting to retain MMP at the referendum accompanying the November 26th election; groups fighting on water and regional democracy issues in Canterbury; groups opposing the Auckland Super City (whose fears have only been partly allayed by the election of Len Brown as Mayor and a Centre-Left Council - that was definitely not in Rodney Hide’s grand plan to corporatise Auckland local government and hock off the juiciest portions to his mates). It gives us common cause with: medical sector unions and health advocacy groups (in relation to Pharmac and US wanting NZ patent laws tightened, specifically in relation to drugs); food safety groups (and the Safe Food Campaign is already a member of our Campaign with a capital C); groups opposing genetic engineering (although neither GE nor food safety laws are mentioned in the 2010 US list of “barriers to trade” with NZ); and Internet freedom advocacy groups, maybe Internet service providers, because of US demands for tougher laws on accessing and copying digital recordings. When the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade called for submissions on the original proposal to expand the P4 Agreement, a number of individuals, groups, institutions and businesses did so, many of them about the issues involving copyright and intellectual property rights. That aspect alone affects the likes of libraries, universities, Internet service providers and the digital technology sector. Already some groups representing people like authors have started to grasp the implications that the TPPA has for their members. People and institutions that don’t normally ever have to think about “free trade” agreements are being forced to do so because this one will affect so many aspects of life in this country.

I’ll single out the very big and extremely important health sector for special mention here, by way of example. I won’t go into the details of the TPPA’s actual implications for NZ’s public health system, as I have no doubt that Bill and/or Jane will do so. There is an excellent fact sheet entitled “TPPA Alert - Hands Off our Public Health System”, which I recommend that you all read and that it be as widely distributed as possible. That makes clear that the TPPA targets not only Pharmac, but also ACC and proposed restrictions on cigarette packaging and sales. It will also have effects in areas such as foreign ownership of aged-care chains; health and safety rules for products; and health qualifications. That opens up the potential for our campaign to link with the existing campaign to keep ACC as a publicly-owned asset (the Government has started the process of privatising it); to link with the various unions and interest groups fighting to retain quality care for residents and decent wages and conditions for staff in retirement homes (it’s worth noting that such chains have featured in the finalists for the annual Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand, including in the latest one. BUPA was the runner up in the 2010 Roger Award); and, most significantly, enable us to link with the powerful and extremely well organised tobacco control campaign. I have worked with them before when a tobacco transnational won the Roger Award and there is another tobacco transnational in the latest one (Imperial Tobacco came third in the 2010 Roger) and I can vouch for the fact that they are a determined and resourceful campaign, with a long history of fearlessly confronting some of the nastiest global corporations of them all, companies that make their money by killing their customers and addicting replacements. I recommend that our Campaign (with a capital C) invite the likes of ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) to join our Working Group. I’m surprised that we haven’t thought of it before.

Learn From 1990s’ Campaign Which Defeated MAI

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel with this campaign (with a small c). We’ve been here before. Many people have commented on the similarities between the proposed TPPA and the aborted MAI of the 1990s. The Multilateral Agreement on Investment was the pinnacle of hubris by the capitalist triumphalists of that decade – it was an attempt to achieve, with one king hit, a binding, globally enforceable, international treaty to subject the world to transnational corporate rule. For the conspiracy theorists that get excited by “one world government” and “the New World Order” this really was an attempt to convert that into reality. The people of the world have grown used to increasingly gigantic corporate takeovers; this was the daddy of them all, an attempt by Big Business to take over the world. And it failed miserably. It was defeated by an inspirational campaign, both in New Zealand and right around the world. That campaign was a model of both national and international campaigning. It was a shining light in a decade where transnational corporate capitalism saw itself as being the status quo for the indefinite future, backed up by the unchallengeable military might of the world’s sole superpower, the US. It was the decade where history was declared to have ended. This was a battle fought and won well before the massive anti-capitalist and anti-World Trade Organisation protests of the late 90s and turn of the century; before the massive international anti-war and anti-imperialist movement of a decade ago; and before the global financial crisis rendered capitalism a rather more shaky proposition than only a few years before.

Political Parties; Maori; Local Government

There were some key features of the New Zealand campaign against the MAI that haven’t yet shown up in our campaign against the TPPA and we need to learn from those. For a start, two Parliamentary parties, one from the Left and one from the Right, namely the Alliance and New Zealand First, campaigned very hard on the issue and ensured that the MAI entered mainstream consciousness and got on the political agenda. When it was defeated, Jim Anderton, God bless him, claimed the credit. In fact, those two parties were only benefitting from the hard work of dedicated campaigners, some of whom are involved in the TPPA campaign, but the fact is that having Parliamentary parties pick up the issue and run with it was invaluable. We have one in the present campaign, namely the Greens. It would be good to have at least one more on our side. Ideally that would be Labour, but Labour has always been missing in action on the whole issue of “free trade”. That was the case with the MAI and remains the case with the TPPA. It strikes me as being a perfect issue for the Maori Party, at least for the flaxroots members, if not for its brown Tory MPs.

And that brings me to the second crucial feature of the MAI campaign that hasn’t yet shown up in the TPPA campaign – Maori played a huge role in defeating it. There was a whole campaign entirely within the Maori movement and the Maori community in general that really got mobilised, educated their own people about the dangers of the MAI and really got stuck in, including a nationwide series of hui and a high profile hikoi that attracted big numbers. Maori are our natural allies in this campaign – not the corporate leadership of iwi and their Big Business structure – but ordinary, working Maori people, who always suffer the most from the transnational corporate agenda, because they are at the bottom of the heap. I reckon that the danger that the TPPA poses to tightening tobacco control in NZ is a reason all in itself why we can build links with Maori to fight the TPPA. Tobacco has a singularly deadly impact on Maori and there has been a uniquely Maori fightback against the tobacco transnationals in recent years; they have led the way with the tobacco control campaign.

And the third crucial difference is that the campaign against the MAI (and the various bilateral trade agreements of the 90s) put in a lot of work with local government, nowhere more so than right here in Christchurch. We lobbied and educated Council officials and Councillors about the MAI’s very negative impacts on their assets and operations. It worked – as a direct result of us lobbying one key committee of the Christchurch City Council, it recommended that the full Council declare itself against the MAI, which it did, and furthermore, the Council wrote to every other council in NZ recommending that they declare themselves against the MAI. A number of them did so. This was repeated in relation to some of the bilateral trade agreements also. That was the high point of our ability to positively influence local government, and things have changed since the 90s (I don’t see Bob Parker being particularly receptive to our campaign; Councils now don’t have the committee structure that they then did; they have been depoliticised and are now run like boards of a corporation. But the bottom line is that they are all comprised of politicians and susceptible to persuasion, particularly if there are votes in it, or the threat of loss of votes. Wouldn’t it be great if Auckland Supercity, whose voters so spectacularly refused to deliver the outcome that Hide and Key had set it up for, came out against the TPPA? What about Wellington’s new Green Mayor? All these trade and investment agreements have major implications for local government; it is the job of our campaign to alert them to it and get them to come out against the TPPA.

This Is About Much More Than “Trade”

To conclude, I think you’ll agree with me that we have a huge number of potential allies for the campaign to both expose and defeat the TPPA. The trick is to convince them that a “trade” issue is also their issue and for them to join the campaign to defeat it. This, of course, is a two way process, and involves us helping them in their specific fight. That simply demonstrates the old adage which is as true as ever – unity is strength. Education and action are the keys to building a broad-based national campaign that, in partnership with our international allies can, and will, enable us to defeat this latest assault on our sovereignty, our democracy, our economic wellbeing and our national identity. Time, as always, is of the essence, so let’s get stuck in. We’re confronting the most powerful institutions in the world, but we’ve beaten them before and we’ll beat them again. They’re the ones who have to hide inside a fortress of secrecy and lies. We have nothing to hide and the truth is on our side. We are many and they are few.