Unpacking the ISDS: Why the ISDS actually is a threat to us here

[fasttense]

22. It's a monster waiting to crash our economy like it did before.

The WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the financial service
chapters of U.S. “Free Trade” Agreements (FTAs) limit the regulation of financial service
sectors subject to these agreements. The United States bound most banking and securities services
to comply with these rules and made sizeable commitments in insurance. The “trade” pact rules
simply ban many common forms of financial regulation, even if such policies apply to domestic and
foreign firms equally. U.S. government and corporate efforts in trade negotiations complemented
domestic lobbying to weaken and eventually repeal the New Deal’s system of banking regulation. For
instance, the Glass-Steagall Act created a firewall between commercial and investment banks to
prevent the former from speculating with consumers’ savings. But the 1997 U.S. WTO commitments
noted an intent to change Glass-Steagall to conform with WTO rules. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act,
which did so, passed in 1999 – the year the WTO’s Financial Services Agreement (FSA) took effect.


Many people still assume “trade” pacts are about traditional matters, such as tariff cuts. In fact, the
WTO, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other U.S. FTAs require signatories –
including the United States – to conform domestic policies to a broad non-trade deregulatory agenda.
Few in Congress read the legislation implementing the WTO in 1994 or NAFTA in 1993, much less
the pacts’ actual 900-page texts. Congress didn’t even get a vote on the expanded U.S. financial service
deregulation commitments contained in the subsequent WTO FSA. But if any country’s laws fail to
comply with WTO, NAFTA or FTA rules, the laws can be challenged before foreign tribunals, and
the country can be subjected to indefinite trade sanctions until its laws meet “trade” pact dictate

https://www.citizen.org/documents/FinanceReregulationFactSheetFINAL.pdf

If TPP passes, you can bet in about 3 to 5 years there will be another economic crash in the US. (The 2nd time around it always crashes faster.)