US towns and cities will be subservient to UN and World Bank tribunals. "Under the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a member nation would be forbidden from favoring “goods produced in its territory.”"
3/25/15, "Trans-Pacific Partnership Seen as Door for Foreign Suits Against U.S.," NY Times, Jonathan Weisman
"An ambitious 12-nation trade accord pushed by President Obama
would allow foreign corporations to sue the United States government for actions that undermine their investment “expectations” and hurt
their business, according to a classified document.
The
Trans-Pacific Partnership — a cornerstone of Mr. Obama’s remaining
economic agenda — would grant broad powers to multinational companies
operating in North America, South America and Asia. Under the accord,
still under negotiation but nearing completion, companies and investors
would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions
and court rulings — federal, state or local — before tribunals organized
under the World Bank or the United Nations.
Backers
of the emerging trade accord, which is supported by a wide variety of
business groups and favored by most Republicans, say that it is in line
with previous agreements that contain similar provisions. But critics,
including many Democrats in Congress, argue that the planned deal widens
the opening for multinationals to sue in the United States and
elsewhere, giving greater priority to protecting corporate interests
than promoting free trade and competition that benefits consumers.
The
chapter in the draft of the trade deal, dated Jan. 20, 2015, and
obtained by The New York Times in collaboration with the group
WikiLeaks, is certain to kindle opposition from both the political left
and the right. The sensitivity of the issue is reflected in the fact
that the cover mandates that the chapter not be declassified until four
years after the Trans-Pacific Partnership comes into force or trade
negotiations end, should the agreement fail.
Conservatives
are likely to be incensed that even local policy changes could send the
government to a United Nations-sanctioned tribunal. On the left,
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, law professors and a
host of liberal activists have expressed fears the provisions would
infringe on United States sovereignty and impinge on government
regulation involving businesses in banking, tobacco, pharmaceuticals and
other sectors.
Members
of Congress have been reviewing the secret document in secure reading
rooms, but this is the first disclosure to the public since an early
version leaked in 2012.
“This
is really troubling,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the
Senate’s No. 3 Democrat. “It seems to indicate that savvy, deep-pocketed
foreign conglomerates could challenge a broad range of laws we pass at
every level of government, such as made-in-America laws or anti-tobacco
laws. I think people on both sides of the aisle will have trouble with
this.”...
Such
“Investor-State Dispute Settlement” accords exist already in more than
3,000 trade agreements across the globe. The United States is party to
51, including the North American Free Trade Agreement. Administration
officials say they level the playing field for American companies doing
business abroad, protect property from government seizure and ensure
access to international justice.
But
the limited use of trade tribunals, critics argue, is because companies
in those countries do not have the size, legal budgets and market power
to come after governments in the United States. The Trans-Pacific
Partnership could change all that, they say. The agreement would expand
that authority to investors in countries as wealthy as Japan and
Australia, with sophisticated companies deeply invested in the United
States.
“U.S.T.R.
will say the U.S. has never lost a case, but you’re going to see a lot
more challenges in the future,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of
Ohio. “There’s a huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for these
companies.”
One 1999 case gives ammunition to both sides of the debate. Back then, California banned the chemical MTBE from the state’s gasoline,
citing the damage it was doing to its water supply. The Canadian
company Methanex Corporation sued for $970 million under Nafta, claiming
damages on future profits. The case stretched to 2005, when the
tribunal finally dismissed all claims.
To
supporters of the TPP, the Methanex case was proof that regulation for
the “public good” would win out. For opponents, it showed what could
happen when far larger companies from countries like Japan have access
to the same extrajudicial tribunals....
Civil
courts in the United States are already open to action by foreign
investors and companies. Since 1993, while the federal government was
defending itself against those 17 cases brought through extrajudicial
trade tribunals, it was sued 700,000 times in domestic courts.
In
all, according to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, about 9,000
foreign-owned firms operating in the United States would be empowered to
bring cases against governments here. Those are as diverse as timber
and mining companies in Australia and investment conglomerates from
China whose subsidiaries in Trans-Pacific Partnership countries like
Vietnam and New Zealand also have ventures in the United States.
More than 18,000 companies based in the United States would gain new powers to go after the other 11 countries in the accord.
Senator
Brown contended that the overall accord, not just the investment
provisions, was troubling.
“This continues the great American tradition
of corporations writing trade agreements, sharing them with almost
nobody, so often at the expense of consumers, public health and
workers,” he said.
Under
the terms of the Pacific trade chapter, foreign investors could demand
cash compensation if member nations “expropriate or nationalize a
covered investment either directly or indirectly.”
Opponents fear
“indirect expropriation” will be interpreted broadly, especially by
deep-pocketed multinational companies opposing regulatory or legal
changes that diminish the value of their investments.
Included
in the definition of “indirect expropriation” is government action that
“interferes with distinct, reasonable investment-backed expectations,”
according to the leaked document.
The
cost can be high. In 2012, one such tribunal, under the auspices of the
World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment
Disputes, ordered Ecuador to pay Occidental Petroleum a record $2.3
billion for expropriating oil drilling rights.
Critics
say the text’s definition of an investment is so broad that it could
open enormous avenues of legal challenge. An investment includes “every
asset that an investor owns or controls, directly or indirectly, that
has the characteristic of an investment,” including “regulatory permits;
intellectual property rights; financial instruments such as stocks and
derivatives”; construction, management, production, concession,
revenue-sharing and other similar contracts; and “licenses,
authorizations, permits and similar rights conferred pursuant to
domestic law.”
“This
is not about expropriation; it’s about regulatory changes,” said Lori
Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch and a fierce opponent of the
Pacific accord. “You now have specialized law firms being set up. You go
to them, tell them what country you’re in, what regulation you want to
go after, and they say ‘We’ll do it on contingency.’”
In
2013, Eli Lilly took advantage of a similar provision under Nafta to
sue Canada for $500 million, accusing Ottawa of violating its
obligations to foreign investors by allowing its courts to invalidate
patents for two of its drugs.
All
of those disputes would be adjudicated under rules set by either the
International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes or the United
Nations Commission on International Trade Law....
There
are other mitigating provisions, but many have catches. For instance,
one article states that “nothing in this chapter” should prevent a
member country from regulating investment activity for “environmental,
health or other regulatory objectives.” But that safety valve says such
regulation must be “consistent” with the other strictures of the
chapter, a provision even administration officials said rendered the
clause more political than legal.
One
of the chapter’s annexes states that regulatory actions meant “to
protect legitimate public welfare objectives, such as public health,
safety and the environment” do not constitute indirect expropriation,
“except in rare circumstances.” That final exception could open such
regulations to legal second-guessing, critics say."
"Correction: March 27, 2015
An article on Thursday about provisions in the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, as outlined in a classified document, that would allow
foreign corporations to sue the United States over actions that hurt
their business or investment expectations misstated when the document
was made available to members of Congress. Drafts were available for
review soon after being written; it is not the case that the latest
document was not made available until last week."
"A version of this article appears in print on [Thurs.] March 26, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition."...
========================
"For TPP, the main concerns are Vietnam and Mexico."
3/17/15, "Putting the TPP on the Right Track," Politico, "There is a real choice to be made between two different approaches to international trade." by Simon Johnson and Ohio Rep. Sander Levin
p.1 of 2: "Here are some of the salient challenges to getting TPP right.
First, on the incorporation of international labor standards, recent
experience in Guatemala, Honduras and Colombia illustrates how
important oversight and enforcement are — and how difficult progress can
be when enforcement is weak and follow-through is slow. For TPP, the
main concerns are Vietnam and Mexico.
(p. 2) Vietnam represents the first time the U.S. is negotiating a broad
trade agreement with a command economy. As a country that has never
allowed workers to choose their own representatives and where the single
labor union is part of the Communist Party, Vietnam will require not
only major changes to its laws and practices, but also regular
monitoring of compliance by a panel of experts.
And if TPP is to serve as a renegotiation of the North
American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico willl need to change its labor laws and practices, to properly implement its TPP obligations....
Third, we must preserve the sovereign right of governments to
develop legitimate regulations under the TPP’s investment rules.
The
investor-state dispute settlement mechanism creates an arbitration
process, through which companies can claim that a country has broken
those rules and seek monetary compensation — and a proliferation of such
cases in recent years serves as a wake-up call.
One of several important changes would be to ensure that, in the
event of a dispute, both governments involved — the host and the home
country for the company — can jointly agree that a case is inappropriate
and should be dismissed....
Fifth, we must meaningfully address currency manipulation — direct
government intervention in the currency markets to weaken one’s currency
for the purpose of boosting exports and limiting imports. Currency
manipulation has cost the United States millions of jobs over the past
decade and a half.
China manipulated its currency most dramatically in
this time period — accumulating the largest stock of foreign exchange
reserves the world has ever known. In earlier episodes, Japan, South
Korea and others manipulated their currencies."...
..............
=====================
1/13/14, "Noam Chomsky: Obama Trade Deal A 'Neoliberal Assault' To Further Corporate 'Domination'," Huffington Post, Zach Carter, Ryan Grim
"The Obama administration's Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal is an
"assault," on working people intended to further corporate
"domination," according to author and activist Noam Chomsky.
“It’s
designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximize profit and
domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition
with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity,” Chomsky
said during an interview with HuffPost Live.
The
Obama administration has been negotiating the TPP pact with 11 other
Pacific nations for years.
While the deal has not been finalized and
much of it has been classified, American corporate interest groups,
including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have already voiced strong
support for the TPP, describing it as a free trade deal that will
encourage economic growth. The Office of U.S. Trade Representative has
also defended the talks, saying the TPP will include robust regulatory
protections.
But labor unions and a host of traditionally liberal
interest groups, including environmentalists and public health
advocates, have sharply criticized the deal.
Chomsky argues that
much of the negotiations concern issues outside of what many consider
trade, and are focused instead on limiting the activities governments
can regulate, imposing new intellectual property standards abroad and
boosting corporate political power.
..
“It’s called free trade, but that’s just a joke," Chomsky said.
"These
are extreme, highly protectionist measures designed to undermine freedom
of trade. In fact, much of what's leaked about the TPP indicates that
it's not about trade at all, it’s about investor rights.”
The
Obama administration is treating the precise terms of the deal as
classified information, blocking many Congressional staffers from
viewing the negotiation texts and limiting the information available to
members of Congress themselves. The deal's only publicly available
negotiation documents have come to light through document leaks. Recent
documents have been published by WikiLeaks and HuffPost.
According
to these leaked documents, the TPP would empower corporations to
directly challenge laws and regulations set by foreign nations before an
international tribunal. The tribunal would be given the authority to
not only overrule that nation's legal standards but also impose economic
penalties on it. Under World Trade Organization treaties, corporations
must convince a sovereign nation to bring trade cases before an
international court. Chomsky said the deal is an escalation of
neoliberal political goals previously advanced by the WTO and the North
American Free Trade Agreement.
"It's very hard to make anything of
the TPP because it's been kept very secret," Chomsky told HuffPost
Live. "A half-secret, I should say. It's not secret from the hundreds of
corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing the legislation. To
them, it's perfectly public. They're, in fact, writing it. It's being
kept secret from the population. Which of course raises obvious
questions."
Several members of Congress, including Obama's fellow Democrats,
have attacked the intense secrecy surrounding the talks. But others
want to give the TPP the "fast track" to passage; Sens. Max Baucus
(D-Mont.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced legislation on Thursday
that would prevent members of Congress from offering legislative
amendments to whatever final trade deal Obama reaches.
But the move to fast track the TPP hit headwinds in the House,
where no Democrat has agreed to co-sponsor the legislation. Speaker
John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the fast track bill cannot pass without
Democratic support. Chomsky quipped that of course the
administration and lawmakers would want to speed up a sweeping trade
deal that may be more in the interest of corporations than the public.
“It’s very understandable that it should be kept secret from the
public," Chomsky said, "why should people know what’s happening to
them?”"
=====================
TPP to be followed by US-EU version, TTIP:
3/28/15, "A new US-EU free trade agreement could make countries subservient to corporations," Business Insider, Don Quijones, Wolf St.
"After eight rounds of secret negotiations, Washington and Brussels
are still struggling to breathe life into the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP). According to current European Union
President, Latvia, the chances of the agreement being signed by the
year-end target are growing perilously slim.
The potentially game-changing trade deal is aimed at radically
reconfiguring the legal and regulatory superstructures of the world’s
two largest markets, the United States and the European Union – for the
almost exclusive benefit of the world’s biggest multinational
corporations.
However, resistance continues to mount on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the U.S. Wikileaks’ perfectly timed exposé of the investment chapter
of TTIP’s sister treaty, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), could
derail White House efforts to gain fast track approval to bulldoze the
treaty through Congress.
This time, even the mainstream media seems to
be paying an interest, with the New York Times in particular publishing a broadly critical report.
On the other side of the Atlantic, things seem to be going from bad
to worse — at least for the treaty’s supporters. Even the U.S.’s
ever-faithful ally and fellow Five-Eye member, the United Kingdom, is
beginning to express reservations about TTIP. Earlier this week an
all-party committee of Members of Parliament released a scathing report
on the trade agreement. The Business, Innovation and Skills
committee said the government needed “stronger evidence” to back up its
claim that TTIP would bring a boost of £100bn a year to the UK.
The report also warned that the
case had yet to be made for the highly controversial investor-state
dispute settlement (ISDS), a provision that elevates individual foreign
corporations and investors to equal (or arguably superior) status with a
sovereign nation’s government. If signed, it would allow companies to
skirt domestic courts and directly “sue” signatory governments for
compensation in foreign extrajudicial tribunals."...
