TPP: The Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History By Chris Hedges

[Demeter]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_most_brazen_corporate_power_grab_in_american_history_20151106

The release Thursday of the 5,544-page text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade and investment agreement involving 12 countries comprising nearly 40 percent of global output—confirms what even its most apocalyptic critics feared.

“The TPP, along with the WTO and NAFTA , is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”

The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy. The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.

These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup d’état along with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional democratic institutions. The agreements—filled with jargon, convoluted technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse phrasing—can be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.

The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.

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[JDPriestly]

1. These trade agreements and the existing ones too are one big corporate coup.

If you have an injury, you have to prove it in court. You don't get damages unless you prove an injury, an existing injury, not one that just might manifest itself next year.

Mere exposure to asbestos, for example, was not enough to qualify a plaintiff for compensation.

But here we, as a nation, are to be potentially liable for damages because some corporation claims that an ordinance or law our legislators passed has cost them profits that they projected they would have made without the passage of that ordinance or law.

That is ridiculous.

And our Constitution grants us the right to a jury trial. The TPP and other trade agreements deprive us of our right to a jurty trial, our right as a people to a jury trial.

[Jack Rabbit]

2. We will not obey

!!

[AgingAmerican]

3. The TPP is a framework for fascism

[Hoyt]

4. Yeah, Ralph, you called my Corvair a cruddy car. Probably summoned in foreign cars.

Countries can sue corporations in the the presumably favorable country's courts.

Would it make you happy if the trade agreement allowed corporations to sue in their home courts? The tribunals -- which have been around for a long time even in Scandinavian trade agreements -- are quite fair if you look at how the arbiters are selected. Not to mention the fact the countries continue to agree to these dispute mechanisms because they help attract foreign investment, jobs, tax revenue, etc.