The barnstorming charge here rushing to defend the deplorable TPP

[eridani]

192. From Ellen Brown on Investor-State Dispute Settlement

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic

Fuck investors. If Mickey D's in Denmark can pay $21/hr, then investors can just be satisfied with lower profits and be grateful for any profits they may make. The purpose of ISDS if to put investors over everyone. How come you're in favor of that even though you haven't read it either? Explain why ANY ISDS if a good idea, please.

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/04/26/the-trans-pacific-partnership-and-the-death-of-the-republic/

The most controversial provision of the TPP is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) section, which strengthens existing ISDS procedures. ISDS first appeared in a bilateral trade agreement in 1959. According to The Economist, ISDS gives foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever the government passes a law to do things that hurt corporate profits — such things as discouraging smoking, protecting the environment or preventing a nuclear catastrophe.

Arbitrators are paid $600-700 an hour, giving them little incentive to dismiss cases, and the secretive nature of the arbitration process and the lack of any requirement to consider precedent gives wide scope for creative judgments.

To date, the highest ISDS award has been for $2.3 billion to Occidental Oil Company against the government of Ecuador over its termination of an oil-concession contract, this although the termination was apparently legal. Still in arbitration is a demand by Vattenfall, a Swedish utility that operates two nuclear plants in Germany, for compensation of €3.7 billion ($4.7 billion) under the ISDS clause of a treaty on energy investments, after the German government decided to shut down its nuclear power industry following the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.

Under the TPP, however, even larger judgments can be anticipated, since the sort of “investment” it protects includes not just “the commitment of capital or other resources” but “the expectation of gain or profit.” That means the rights of corporations in other countries extend not just to their factories and other “cap