Dear Rep. Peters,

Thank you for your prompt e mail response to my phone call to your office of last week, regarding the proposed secret TPP and it’s twin Fast Track Authority. One of the many questions a voter might ask to a congressional representative would be: how can anyone vote intelligently on this Fast Track Authority when the law itself, the TPP, remains a secret? If you as a legislator wish to read it, you are not allowed to takes notes or even to discuss what you have read with your constituency, in fact you are subject to criminal sanction, if you do so openly. One marvels at the double think that inheres in the very notion of ‘secret legislation’ ! But given the utter failure of NAFTA to deliver on it’s much anticipated and celebrated benefits, should I be surprised at your carefully worded reply, to my statement to your staff member that I don’t support Fast Track or TPP? That failure renders Mr. Ross Poirot prescient rather than as a political spoiler/crank!

The very notion of ‘secret legislation’ is an utter betrayal of republican principal and practice and is anathema, except to the apologists for the predations of the American National Security State, as a model of Corporatism, and it’s political actors, whose loyalty is not to the the notion and practice of the cultivation of civic republican virtue, but to demonstrably bankrupt idea and practice of the ‘Free Market’.

StephenKMackSD