I don't know what the excuse is for left wing American politicians who support that thing.
Here's some more info on ISDS. The bit about Phillip Morris already suing Australia via a trade agreement with Hong Kong is a hint of what will happen:
There have been more than 550 ISDS claims made against governments, the vast majority of them made in the past decade. Possibly the most famous of these is the ISDS claim brought by tobacco company Philip Morris against the Australian government’s plain packaging legislation.
Philip Morris is suing Australia under an ISDS provision in a Hong Kong-Australia investment agreement. It’s just one of 28 agreements Australia has signed that include an ISDS provision. Deals with countries like China, India, Peru, Chile and Singapore contain the provision.
However, when the Howard government signed a free trade agreement with the United States in 2004, both parties agreed to leave ISDS out of it. Now, as trade negotiators draw closer to signing the Trans Pacific Partnership, Australia could be about to sign up for ISDS with the United States for the first time.
That worries critics like ANU Law Professor Thomas Faunce because America is not just Australia’s largest source of foreign investment, it’s also the nation whose corporations are the most frequent users of ISDS.
‘If we create investor state disputes settlement with established democracies and developed countries with very powerful corporations, that’s a new thing. That’s what we’re concerned about,’ he says.
For his part, the head of trade and international policy at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Bryan Clark, can’t understand what all the fuss is about.
‘The Australian Government has had ISDS provisions, or very similar ones, in free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties since the 1950s,’ he says. ‘They have been in place for a very long time, and they haven’t created any risk to the Australian economy. I fundamentally don’t see why that circumstance would change now.’
Faunce insists this is different, however, and people only need to look to Canada to see what an ISDS agreement with the United States could mean for Australia. ‘If you think that all this discussion of ISDS is scare-mongering, just have a look at what’s happened to Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States. It’s all there ready and waiting to happen to us.’
When NAFTA was signed in the ‘90s, the United States and Canada wanted to include an ISDS provision in the agreement to protect their investors in Mexico, where they considered the justice system suspect. What they didn’t anticipate was that the ISDS provision would be used against them.
There have been dozens of ISDS claims launched under NAFTA, many of them against the United States and Canada. The United States has never lost a case, but Canada has been sued nearly 20 times and has lost or settled seven times, paying American corporations at least $US158 million in compensation.
One of the earliest cases, launched in the late 1990s, was about a fuel additive called MMT, which the Canadian government decided to ban after it concluded that it could be a threat to human health and the environment. After being sued by Ethyl, the American corporation that manufactured MMT, the Canadian government settled the case for $US13 million. To settle, it had to agree to overturn the ban and, to add insult to injury, publish a statement declaring MMT to be safe.
There are eight cases pending against Canada, with damages claims totalling almost $6 billion. One of those cases has particular resonance for Australia. It’s a claim made by an American resources company against the moratorium on oil and gas exploration in Quebec.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/isds-the-devil-in-the-trade-deal/5734490
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