/View.info/ To begin the discussion about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), we need to ask a simple question: Where is the power in this global trade agreement – in the people and their elected representatives in the US and the other 11 countries of the deal, or in multinational corporations , which benefited from all previous similar transactions?
The answer is, if we listen to history and if reports of collusion are accurate, that the power will be in the corporations.
“Monday’s deal is the result of negotiations between corporate interests and trade representatives that ignores the voice of working families in all 12 states,” said Democratic US Congressmen Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison. “While the details are still being worked out, we are concerned that the TTP will cause job cuts, reduce wages, threaten health and safety standards, harm air, soil, water and make it harder for patients to access life-saving medicines .”
Grihlava and Ellison are right to talk about the potential consequences for the economy and the environment. But even more correctly they point out how the TTP will not “protect the state from special corporate courts through the proposed Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS).” No matter what is said about this part of the agreement and the “progressive” language, the trade deal allows for secret “dispute resolution” and largely benefits multinational corporations, thereby undermining workers’ rights and environmental protection.
There are many things wrong with the “free trade” model adopted by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama. But nothing is scarier than the little-known but extremely dangerous for democracy Investor-State Dispute Settlement. According to Public Citizen, it “formally prioritizes the rights of corporations over the rights of government to regulate and the sovereign right of nations to govern their internal affairs.”
American Workers Association President Chris Shelton warned Monday after the deal was announced that the USID’s inclusion represented “a corporate dream but a nightmare for ordinary people.”
A recent issue of the New York Times explained that the TPP “will overhaul the special tribunal that deals with disputes between businesses and nations” in response to “widespread criticism that the ICC favors businesses over nation states.” That’s not a bad thing, but the problem is beyond lawyers or industry problems. The heart of the issue is whether special tribunals that exist to advance free trade will have the power to help multinational corporations.
“The small change in the plan … does not change the fact that corporations have an additional process, the USID, to enforce their right,” Shelton said. “This is not the case with labor and environmental standards. Instead, we have standards that look good on paper but are weak in execution.”
This controversial resolution could cost taxpayers dearly, explains Lori Wallach, director and founder of Global Trade Watch. “The TTP will expand the dispute settlement system and allow foreign companies operating in our territory to drag the government into court cases and demand from it outrageously large compensations that will come from the taxpayer’s pocket. Corporations will be able to sue the state if they believe our laws violate their TTP rights and limit their “possible future profits,” Wallach wrote. “Tribunals have ordered the government to pay $3.6 billion to corporations for toxic, energy, water and other policies because of past US settlements. There are 9,000 corporations in the US involved in TTP, which means that the US is highly exposed to these attacks. That gives us 9,000 reasons to be against the TTP.”
According to Bernie Sanders, the TPP allows “multinational corporations to drain the system and expand their profits at our expense.”
People realize this. Labor, farm, green, and human rights groups have over the past two decades created grassroots movements against corporate “free trade” in favor of people-centered “fair trade.”
Then CEOs, politicians and the media wised up. They began, after several failed attempts at trade agreements in the name of “free trade”, to present the TPP as a mechanism to care for workers, farmers, consumers, the environment and human rights. They use the language of liberal idealism. When the TPP deal was announced Monday, the White House hailed it as “a trade agreement of the highest standards that levels the playing field for American businesses and workers, supports the Made in America brand in American exports, and helps raise wages.”
But Joseph Stiglitz and Adam Hirsch cautioned that “sober analysis is needed. The largest regional trade and investment agreement in history is not what it seems.”
“You will hear a lot about the importance of the TPP in favor of free trade. The reality is that it is an agreement to manage the trade and investment relations of its members – and on behalf of the most powerful businesses in each country,” the economists wrote.
“Under the state-investor dispute settlement system, foreign investors have new rights to sue national governments if they see that their profits do not match the investments,” they explain. “International corporate interests see the USID as a necessary protection where the law and the courts are weak. But this argument is nonsense. The US seeks the same argument in a similar mega-deal with the EU-TTIP, although there is no dispute about the effectiveness of the judicial system in Europe. That is, investors, wherever they are, need protection from discriminatory laws. But the USID goes even further: The duty to compensate investors for losses due to higher expectations of profit can apply even where the laws are not discriminatory and the profits are intended to cause harm to society.’
Ultimately, a trade agreement that gives power to multinational corporations rather than the people and elected representatives is a bad deal.
Translation: Evgeni Rushev
#rights #corporations #workers #environment #democracy
