How Trade Agreements Amount to a Secret Corporate Takeover - Joseph Stiglitz/HuffPo...

[rhett o rick]

42. I will give you credit for speaking out. Rarely see TPP supporters speaking out.

But your attempt to paint the many, many good people that are against the TPP as "like GOP swiftboat(ers)" is not really a good tactic to win the argument. Here is a list of concerns raised that NO ONE has attempted to rectify:

From what we've seen the TPP will:
1. make it easier to offshore more jobs now performed in the United States.
2. generate downward pressure on wages.
3. empower another 25,000 foreign corporations to use Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) tribunals to gut our net neutrality, environmental, health, labor and safety laws and regulations.
4. give big pharma new monopoly patent rights.
5. provide for rolling back financial regulations put in place after the crash of 2008.
6. provide for banning buy local and buy domestic policies.
7. undermine climate change and energy policies by constraining the permissible policies governments can use to implement them.
8. potentially prevent the Treasury from replacing the practice of issuing Treasury debt to fund deficit spending with alternative funding methods.
9. potentially prevent the Fed from using negative interest rate policies if it chooses to do so.
10. potentially force the US to bail out insolvent banks through ISDS settlements.
11. constitute ISDS tribunals as criminogenic environments with corporate advocates who play the roles of both judges and corporate attorneys at different times and who have substantial incentives to both drag out and sustain corporate suits against governments at all levels.
12. turn over the legislative power of the Federal government to the investor state dispute settlement courts and the corporations buying their loyalty.
13. paralyze action by future Congresses that might reduce corporate “expectations of profits,”.
14. create a permanent political fight over repealing the horror of the TPP while the US economy declines year after year.
15. create an unconstrained and unconstitutional trade agreement fusing judicial and legislative authority whose overnight judicial undoing would create international instability.
16. demand that the American public ought to ensure them against the business risks they take abroad.
17. insist on classification of the TPP drafts, hiding them from the public and making it an impossible burden for Congresspeople to evaluate them, and then on keeping the proposed or actual agreement secret so that the American people can’t even know what the law is that may result in international levies of many billions of dollars upon them, for four years after the TPP is either passed or defeated.
18. create the possibility that one ISDS case, decided by a biased three-judge panel dominated by attorneys who primarily work for corporate clients could deliver a financial crisis to an American State or local government.
19. provide multinationals protections against risk that would not be accorded to domestic corporations.
20. define “investment” so broadly that it applies to any asset that is either owned or controlled and therefore to any new regulation that may be passed by any democratic government placing chains on all of them and defeating the requirement of the consent of the governed.
21. prohibit “Buy American” laws and regulations.
22. fail to provide a clear legal provision allowing regulating investments for public purpose through laws and regulations that would not be subject to the interpretations of ISDS tribunals dominated by representatives of corporations making decisions in accord with the principle that national level rule making must not interfere with the “expectations of profits” held by multinational private corporations, or to any other tribunals not subject to the consent of the governed.
From: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2015/04/indicting-the-trans-pacific-partnership-even-one-of-these-counts-is-sufficient-to-vote-to-kill-it.html