General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIf You Want To Know Why The TPP Is A Terrible Idea, Look At NAFTA's Chapter 11 Here:
BILL MOYERS: This is the story of how a trade agreement supported by two Presidents and ratified by the Congress became an end-run around the Constitution. The terms were influenced by Washington lawyers and lobbyists and the companies who employ them. It is now played out in rooms like this.
Chapter 11 is only one provision in the five hundred and fifty-five page North American Free Trade Agreement negotiated to promote business among the US, Canada and Mexico. It was supposedly written to protect investors if foreign governments tried to seize their property.
But corporations have stretched NAFTA's Chapter 11 to undermine environmental decisions the decisions of local communities even the verdict of an American jury. The cases brought so far total almost four billion dollars.
The claims are being decided not in open court, but in what has become a system of private justice, in secret tribunals. That's exactly the way the authors of Chapter 11 designed it.
WILLIAM GREIDER (NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT, THE NATION): What offends me most is that these lawyers understood that public laws were gonna come under attack in this system, and they just walked right past the question of where's the American public in this?
BILL MOYERS: William Greider has covered economics and politics, both national and global, for 35 years first for The Washington Post and now for The Nation magazine. But even William Greider was taken aback by the broad new powers given foreign corporations under NAFTA's Chapter Eleven.
BILL MOYERS: They now have the right to sue governments?
WILLIAM GREIDER: Right, and sue them directly, without having to get the approval of their own government. And that's one of the features of NAFTA which is distinctively different from all previous trade agreements.
BILL MOYERS: Chapter Eleven gives corporations the right to sue for damages if they believe they have been hurt by the action of a government. The case is treated as if it were a simple trade dispute and argued in this room at the World Bank in Washington or in others in cities like New York and Toronto.
The parties in the case the company and the government it is suing choose a three-man tribunal, drawn mostly from a select pool of experts in international law. Nothing is open to the public.
WILLIAM GREIDER: I think of it actually as kind of an exclusive court for capital. American citizens not admitted, even American legislators not admitted. And if that doesn't up-end democracy, I don't know what does.
Full Transcript Here: http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_tdfull.html
Video Here: http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/tradingdemocracy.html
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)should push for.
K&R
djean111
(14,255 posts)or we should have known he was not really what we think of as a democrat.
How this excuses this travesty eludes me.
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)Enough already, they work for us.
whathehell
(29,151 posts)This is COMPLETELY unacceptable.
jsr
(7,712 posts)Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)voted for him over McCain in '08.
A president can change a lot, or not. He can have the obstacles of the insane Republicans
to battle with and they are obstructionists, but his administration is too often ineffective, regardless.
Then there is the Obama who leans towards an economic view that has nothing to do with placing
blame on the insane Republicans. He has his own slant, we saw that when he surrounded himself
with failures like Geithner..can't blame the Republicans for everything.
He owns this TPP.
That Democratic president.
cali
(114,904 posts)Dustlawyer
(10,502 posts)nenagh
(1,925 posts)I'm bookmarking for later.
WillyT
(72,631 posts)Snotcicles
(9,089 posts)Snotcicles
(9,089 posts)hfojvt
(37,573 posts)He PUSHED for its passage.
I was arguing with a guy whether NAFTA came from Democrats or Republicans. Well, it was passed by a majority of Republicans in Congress, but yeah, without Clinton it never would have passed. Still I would blame Republicans and NEW Democrats, rather than blaming Democrats.
solarhydrocan
(551 posts)Snotcicles
(9,089 posts)other unions screaming against it from the beginning.
treestar
(82,383 posts)we are always asked to accept that the agreements are bad.
I've tried to study these things and they are not simple.
WillyT
(72,631 posts)kelliekat44
(7,759 posts)Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)NAFTA is a terrible deal for everyone that isn't a part of or working for the corporations for whom it was written, period, EOF. There is no bright side to it, no OTOH, it is a very long, complicated, paper laying out a system of "heads I win, tails you lose" to profit companies at the expense of workers.
IOW, another very bad republican idea made reality by a nominally Democratic government.
whathehell
(29,151 posts)why it's being negotiated in secret.
We should all check out TradeWatch.org...I first learned of the truly awful TPP from an attorney
from that organization
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)LMAO
cali
(114,904 posts)Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)we have a shitload of precedent under NAFTA and and other FTAs.
You can keep falsely saying we don't know anything, but we do know some things and they suck.
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)Well that makes it a fact!
cali
(114,904 posts)Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)the people who think speculation is Fact!
Who is HoneyPie?
fasttense
(17,301 posts)That's why Clinton was so willing to repeal Glass-Steagall. It was already a requirement in a WTO amendment that the US agreed to back in Raygun's watch.
The tribunals are already in place, the corporations suing government arbitrarily and willy nilly are already in place in WTO agreements. It just makes me wonder why they even need the TPeePee when the WTO has taken on most all of these neocon fantasy rules that fascist so want.
Maybe Obama just wanted one agreement that spelled each of these anti-democracy neocon trade rules. Or maybe the neocons fear some liberal US president will back out of the WTO and wanted another agreement to permanently enshrine fascism through out the US. Who knows?
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)I object to those who oppose arguing using speculation as Fact.
I also find it amusing that many who oppose never post any objections to what our "real" enemy is doing to try and destroy this country!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014599553#post21
bvar22
(39,909 posts)fabricated postulates, Strawmen, and low bar Shameless Sophistry being passed off as "discussion" or "debate" at DU,
,,,,,,,but that doesn't stop it from happening.
,,,,Does it?
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)geez
WillyT
(72,631 posts)WillyT
(72,631 posts)rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)you cant compare them."
Or better yet, "I have nothing intelligent to say so I will just add LMAO and that will show them."
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)LMAO,,,,,,,,,
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)I dont understand your use of the LMAO. If it is intended as some form of ridicule, it's lost on me.
Cryptoad
(8,254 posts)I have never said i supported Obama position on TPP.......... please cite your source!
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)A lot of the opposition to TPP has centered on its insane copyright provisions (leaked TPP drafts have included things like mandatory border-searches of laptops and phones for pirated music and movies; as well as "three-strikes" rules like the failed French HADOPI system, whereby whole families would be disconnected from the Internet if their router was linked to unsubstantiated claims of piracy).
But increasingly, the participating countries are growing nervous with the whole premise of TPP.
For example, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia published a post where he called TPP "a partnership of the unequal, of the strong to take advantage of the weak." And Chile's former chief TPP negotiator wrote a newspaper editorial where he said, "It is a threat to our countries. It will restrict our options for development in health and education, in biological and cultural diversity, design of public policies and the transformation of our economies."
http://boingboing.net/2013/07/31/prominent-politicians-and-nego.html
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130727/05443723968/discontent-with-secrecy-one-sided-nature-tpp-spreads-among-participating-nations.shtml
WillyT
(72,631 posts)octoberlib
(14,971 posts)woo me with science
(32,139 posts)rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)weaker countries? Outrageous, simple outrageous. Why, I bet you cant come up with more than a thousand examples of this happening in the past.
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)You can have the world bank help you get your money back instead of having to deal with the factory.
cali
(114,904 posts)Sunlei
(22,651 posts)KG
(28,755 posts)of major multinational corps.
whathehell
(29,151 posts)in our food and in the environment...It will also undermine our entire democracy.
its stipulations are really quite shocking. I don't know what's in PBO's head, and
I don't much care, I just know we have to kill this thing.
I just listened to trade attorney, Lori Wallach, from Tradewatch.org, at Public Citizen on The Ed Show.
She advises us all to act quickly as the president want to FAST TRACK it!
She tells us to go to this site: Expose The TPP.
http://www.exposethetpp.org/TPPImpactsYou.html
It's a ONE page site that explains the TPP.
cali
(114,904 posts)The NAFTA investor arbitration system (the same is true for all other U.S. FTAs) allows investors to sue over the laws of nations and municipalities in binding tribunals that heavily favor corporations/investors These include environmental laws, copyright laws, etc. For instance the ongoing Philip Morris NAFTA case against Uruguay.
Philip Morris v. Uruguay: Will investor-State arbitration send restrictions on tobacco marketing up in smoke?
http://www.iisd.org/itn/2011/07/12/philip-morris-v-uruguay-will-investor-state-arbitration-send-restrictions-on-tobacco-marketing-up-in-smoke/
There are many, many more Investor-State cases like this. This isn't even the most outrageous.
Here's another. It's a humdinger. It's pending
<snip>
However, as we discussed earlier, the public crossing would create competition for the privately-owned Ambassador Bridge, which also connects Detroit to Windsor and generates an estimated $60 million in annual toll revenues.
Bridge owner Matty Moroun has been pursuing approval for a second span of his own, but as Granholm said this morning, "Canada only supports the Detroit River International Crossing" and believes the proposed location of the second Ambassador span would be "too disruptive in Windsor."
In a statement released earlier today, Detroit International Bridge Co. attorney Patrick Moran explained the company will file a NAFTA claim against the Canadian government, suggesting the publicly-backed bridge would unfairly punish the private company.
The Canadian government is using its power inappropriately to coerce the Michigan Legislature into adopting legislation necessary to ensure the implementation of the DRIC project to the detriment of necessary infrastructure projects in Canada and the U.S. , Moran said. Not only is it clear that the DRIC project is not needed at this time, the Canadian government is trying to use its authority to steal a viable for-profit business from an American businessman.
<snip>
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2010/04/ambassador_bridge_company_file.html
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)Say a country elects someone who raises the minimum wage from 35¢ a day to 75¢ a day. This law will make it possible for some pencil pusher to calculate the drop in profits and then some t-shirt maker can sue that country for the difference.
whathehell
(29,151 posts)Last edited Fri Sep 20, 2013, 03:44 PM - Edit history (1)
right now.
If you can't access it now, go to their site. Public Citizen, Global Trade Watch. It's a horrible "deal"
for the citizens of ANY country and we really NEED to know about it.
This is the site Ms. Wallach advises us to go to...it's a ONE pager that explains it all:
http://www.exposethetpp.org/TPPImpactsYou.html
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)which is why they are trying so hard to keep the negotiations secret.
whathehell
(29,151 posts)trying to "fast track" it through congress!!
She says the entire thing, the TPP, can be explained in a ONE page handout at:
http://www.exposethetpp.org/TPPImpactsYou.html
Please, people...This bill is Dangerous -- Among many OTHER "new rules", it mandates that
the US import food with LESS safety regulations and NO required labels.
It quite literally replaces national sovereignty with CORPORATE sovereignty.
On top of this, there is yet ANOTHER secret "trade" deal in the making targeting
Europe and it's just like the TPP. We must all get on top of this!
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)whathehell
(29,151 posts)safety regulations in imported food while requiring no labels, the environment and God Knows What Else.
Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch for Public Citizen was just explaining it on the Ed Schultz
radio show...She will be on The Ed Show Tonight on MSNBC. She says it is QUITE dangerous and that we must
get involved with stopping it asap as the president is trying to "fast track" it!
Her advise is to go to this link: ExposeTheTpp.org. It explains the TPP in only ONE Page,
which would make it good for handouts, etc.
truedelphi
(32,324 posts)over 500 millions of dollars for NOT buying a product.
The product was MTBE, a gas additive proven to be harmful, and there was no way around the enforcement provisions of Chapter 11, NAFTA. The money went off to a MTBE supplier up in Canada.
The state of California could sure use that money right about now.
WillyT
(72,631 posts)Faryn Balyncd
(5,125 posts)The answer is pretty obvious.
But it's going to be a tough row for democracy and the constitution to defeat the forces of evil and their corrupt collaborators.
The lobbyists who wrote this into the law, and the puppets in Congress who voted to give them their way(in most cases without even reading the bill) deserve to be put in stocks on the National Mall until the Supreme Court does their sworn duty (& declares this travesty unconstitutional) [fat chance], or until a decent Congress repeal the law.