If You Want To Know Why The TPP Is A Terrible Idea, Look At NAFTA's Chapter 11 Here: [View all]

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Bill Moyers Reports: "Trading Democracy."

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