Last edited Mon Jun 20, 2016, 12:00 PM - Edit history (1)
Not really.
Let's just ignore the official propaganda you cited, and find a better analysis of the TPP:
https://www.citizen.org/documents/tpp-investment-leak-2015.pdf
The leaked text would empower foreign firms to directly “sue” signatory governments in extrajudicial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals over domestic policies that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms that foreign firms claim violate their new substantive investor rights. There they could demand taxpayer compensation for domestic financial, health, environmental, land use and other policies and government actions they claim undermine TPP foreign investor privileges, such as the “right” to a regulatory framework that conforms to their “expectations.”
The leaked text reveals the TPP would expand the parallel ISDS legal system by elevating tens of
thousands of foreign-owned firms to the same status as sovereign governments, empowering them to privately enforce a public treaty by skirting domestic courts and laws to directly challenge TPP governments in foreign tribunals.
Existing ISDS-enforced agreements of the United States, and of other developed TPP countries, have been almost exclusively with developing countries whose firms have few investments in the developed nations. However, the enactment of the leaked chapter would dramatically expand each TPP government’s ISDS liability. The TPP would newly empower about 9,000 foreign-owned firms in the United States to launch ISDS cases against the U.S. government, while empowering more than 18,000 additional U.S.-owned firms to launch ISDS cases against other signatory governments. (These are firms not already covered by an ISDS-enforced pact between the United States and other TPP negotiating governments.)
snip
Contrary to claims from the Obama administration that the TPP’s investment chapter would somehow limit the uses and abuses of the controversial ISDS regime, much of the leaked text would replicate, often word-for-word, the terms found in past U.S. ISDS-enforced agreements. However, some terms would widen the scope of domestic policies and government actions that could be challenged before extrajudicial tribunals, without offering meaningful new safeguards for those policies. For example, the leaked text could newly allow pharmaceutical firms to use TPP ISDS tribunals to demand cash compensation for claimed violations of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) rules regarding the creation, limitation or revocation of intellectual property rights. Currently, WTO rules are not privately enforceable by investors.
Got that? The ISDS terms within the TPP grant foreign investors (aka, very wealthy foreigners) with far more power than ever before to successfully sue the US government. I have to laugh at the specious reasoning of the propaganda piece you cited: "the U.S. has never lost an ISDS case", as though prior rulings would in any way affect the outcomes of future cases.
Classic avenue of legal lying: if it's possible to lie by not telling the whole truth, and if there's no way for the liar to ever suffer any personal consequences for the lying -- by all means, lie away. You can always get away with it!
Here's another doozy from your neo-Pravda apologetic: "No government measure (federal, state, or local) can be blocked or reversed under the ISDS provisions or any other part of TPP."
What Obama and the corporate lawyers and lobbyists around him aren't exactly going out of their way to make abundantly clear to the public is that much of the TPP ISDS provisions' purpose is to act as a deterrent to future Congress' and administrations' willingness to enact or even enforce important regulations that might stifle some billionaire investors' profits. A new safety regulation that might prevent people from turning green and dying after taking some new pharmaceutical? Won't get off the ground because Congress and the Executive branch don't want to run afoul of the TPP provisions. Some strengthened provision of Dodd-Frank so that the American public won't yet again be fleeced by Wall Street? Forget about it: Congress will take one look at the TPP's provisions, know that government can be sued, and now have a brand-new excuse not pass such legislation.
That's your TPP "safeguards", for you.
As a variation from what I pointed out earlier: there are those who learn early on in life that if it's possible to lie and not to suffer personal consequences for it, they'll always lie. Depressing to know that we have to deal with such people.
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