8 Terrible Things About the Trans-Pacific Partnership

[marmar]

from In These Times:


8 Terrible Things About the Trans-Pacific Partnership
It’s no wonder the Obama administration tried to keep this secret—the corporate-friendly trade agreement, decoded.

BY DAVID MOBERG


In October, President Obama hailed the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as “the most progressive trade deal in history.”

But progressive public-interest organizations say that the final text, the fruit of seven years of secretive trade talks between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, dashed even their low expectations. The deal not only continues most of the troubling features of trade agreements since NAFTA but also breaks worrisome new ground.

Like most recent international economic agreements, the TPP only glancingly resembles a classic trade deal, concerned mainly with tariffs and quotas. Rather, like the WTO agreements or NAFTA, it is an attempt to set the rules of the global economy to favor multinational corporations over everything else, trampling on democracy, national sovereignty and the public good. The more than 600 corporate lobbyists who had access to the draft texts used their insider status to shape the deal, while labor unions, environmentalists and others offered testimony from outside, with little impact.

....(snip)....

#1 IT GIVES 9,200 FOREIGN FIRMS THE RIGHT TO CIRCUMVENT OUR COURTS AND ATTACK THE LAWS WE RELY ON FOR A CLEAN ENVIRONMENT, SAFE FOOD AND DECENT JOBS.

Foreign corporations would be empowered to drag the U.S. government in front of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals composed of three private arbitrators. Many ISDS arbitrators are lawyers who rotate between suing governments for corporations and acting as the “judges.”

There is no limit on the amount of our tax dollars the government can be ordered to pay when foreign corporations successfully argue that their TPP rights have been undermined. Compensation orders could include a corporation’s estimate of the future profits it would have earned in the absence of the public policy it is attacking. Even when governments win, under TPP rules they can be ordered to pay for the tribunals’ costs and legal fees, which average $8 million per case.

The TPP’s expansion of the ISDS system would come just as a surge in ISDS cases elevating corporate profits over the public interest has led other countries, such as South Africa and Indonesia, to begin revoking their ISDSenforced treaties. Recent cases include Eli Lilly’s attack on Canada’s cost-saving medicine patent system, Philip Morris’ attack on Australia’s public health policies regulating tobacco, Chevron’s attack on an Ecuadorian court ruling that ordered payment for mass toxic contamination in the Amazon, and Vattenfall’s attack on Germany’s phase-out of nuclear power. ................(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18695/TPP_Free-Trade_Globalization_Obama

[KG]

1. c'mon mar, it's gonna be great, y'know, because Obama, from what I read on DU.

[Scuba]

2. Where's the list of eight good things?

Five good things?

Three?

One?

[haikugal]

3. I was wondering if anyone else remembered the months long examination period.

Interesting how the TPP has fallen off the page.

Thanks marmar.

[Populist_Prole]

7. It's just being buried under a pile of manufactured terror fears

When it comes back up, it will be a bum's rush to push it through, with no actual discussion. Oh, we'll hear the usual talking heads, the minions of the PTB spouting the same boilerplate BS about trade that was past its sell date 15 years ago as though this is the first time we've ever heard it.

[haikugal]

8. That's what I think too...so predictable.

[Elwood P Dowd]

9. I wouldn't doubt that they sneak in the votes late one night, and it will probably take place

during a so called "terrorist" event.

[2naSalit]

4. K&R!!

[WillyT]

5. K & R !!!

[DirkGently]

6. Putting business in charge of government

is an old problem, and one that Democrats used to be good at fighting.