How fighting back against one arcane, Nixon-era trade negotiating procedure could put a stop to a global corporate coup.

Alan Grayson called the TPP "the final nail in the coffin of the middle class in this country." Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), whose husband worked to pass NAFTA and whose tenant-- Rahm Emanuel-- is credited with getting it through the House, said "Enough is enough: no more offshoring, no more NAFTA-style trade deals."

In July, a group of people set off to do a hard thing, but an important thing. They wanted to collect 1 million signatures. Once attained, those 1 million signatures would force the European Commission to discuss an immediate halt to the ongoing trade talks between the EU and U.S. These talks are known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. For short, they are called the TTIP.

Corporate interests may be winning in U.S.-EU trade negotiations, endangering public health and the environment, a new cache of documents (pdf) leaked on Tuesday show.

You’ve probably heard of offshoring: the flow of manufacturing and service functions and jobs to countries outside the United States. Companies seeking to reduce the cost of labor and materials moved factories from Northeastern states to Southeastern states as early as the 1880s; by the 1920s, the New England textile mills had almost all been shut down. After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994, hundreds of operations and as many as 700,000 manufacturing jobs moved to Mexico. During the early 2000s, many thousands more jobs moved to Southeast Asia and India and eventually to China.