Secret TPP Negotiaons: UCA immunized against governments

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TTIP Enters New and Dangerous Stage As Democracy is Dismantled in Secret


TTIP negotiations continue in the shadows in both America and the EU and they enter a new and dangerous stage as existing legal barriers that would inhibit certain types of (harmful) trade are dismantled in favour of a new set of rules termed ‘regulatory cooperation’. It sounds collaborative, it is, but just not in the public interest.

What this really means is that decades of regulations passed by governments, legislated upon for public interest and safety reasons are being swept aside. These new regulations that the public and journalists are barred from being a party to include the demolition of environmental protections, safety at work regulations, food safety and other laws designed to protect and defend public safety.

Any new regulations that EU states would want to impose in future are now facing considerable barriers and hurdles that could take years to negotiate and the system is clearly being designed to be onerous and just plain difficult to favour corporate interests above public interest.

Corporate Observatory, whose raison d’être is exposing the power of corporate lobbying in the EU has recently published its latest report “Dangerous Regulatory Duet” which exposes how a new framework being implemented under regulatory cooperation through TTIP will allow bureaucrats and big business to attack the public interest.

The report highlights some examples of how big business and the governments of America and the EU have conspired to destroy these safeguards. Here are some excerpts from this lengthly and enlightening report;

Recently, the European Court of Justice struck down the so-called Safe Harbour agreement, which was concocted under what is termed “regulatory cooperation”. The Court argued that the agreement did not safeguard citizens’ rights to data privacy.

In 2004, big US financial ins utions managed to secure an agreement that would allow them to operate in the EU while being monitored by US supervisory authorities. As a consequence, when the financial crisis reached its peak in 2008, it was revealed that neither US nor EU financial authorities had any idea what assets the US insurance giant AIG had on its books. The collapse of this corporation marked a key drama in the crisis, and led to a bailout of 186 billion dollars.

A proposal on ‘electroscrap’ chemical waste was watered down in 2002. It can be argued that the precautionary principle was sidelined in this case, as the final version made it impossible for member states to adopt a ban even when a substance is deemed dangerous.
A proposal to move faster on ozone-depleting substances was struck down in 2000.

etc etc

http://truepublica.org.uk/united-kin...led-in-secret/

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Trade Agreement Trumps Climate Accord: WTO Rules Against India Solar Program

WASHINGTON - Today in a lawsuit brought by the United States, a World Trade Organization tribunal ruled that India’s national solar energy program violates international trade law because it provides incentives for creation of local green jobs. Many U.S. states have similar programs.

Bill Waren, senior trade analyst at Friends of the Earth had this statement:

Friends of the Earth is dismayed that climate policy is being made by an international trade tribunal. The government of India reasonably provided some preferences for local producers of solar energy in order to convert from a carbon economy to a green economy. The WTO decision, finding India’s solar energy program a violation of international trade law, is an outrage. Trade law trumps the Paris climate accord.

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire...-solar-program

Corporate trade policies trump sovereign nations' laws and regulaitons.

BigCorp is gonna (continue) to us and everything.

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Bill Black: The Lie That “China Wins” if the TPP Kangaroo Tribunals are Stopped

CEOs, however, have not given up on their dream of being able to rig the international system through the creation of kangaroo tribunals that can, effectively, destroy effective regulation and the enforcement of rules to protect the public. As I explained in my most recent column on this subject, “trade” is simply the pretext for this assault on the rule of law and national sovereignty. President Obama plans to try to get the TPP approved by the lame duck Senate after the November elections.

The “serious people” of the lame stream media are encouraging the lame ducks to vote for the CEOs’ dream deal. One of their principal claims is “If T.P.P. falls apart, China wins. It’s as simple as that.” TPP is deliberately opaque, complex, and crafted in secrecy by the CEOs’ lobbyists to be the opposite of “simple.”

It has nothing to do with China winning or losing.

TPP is all about Article 9 of the TPP, which allows CEOs to rig the system so that the CEOs win and the people and nations lose. If the TPP becomes law Chinese CEOs win because the kangaroo tribunals of Article 9 will intensify the global “race to the bottom” that is eviscerating what remains of the rule of law even in nations that are not parties to the TPP.

Article 9 is the “rule of law” only in the sense that it specifies that the “rule of law” does not apply to the kangaroo tribunals that can impose billions of dollars in penalties on a nation for the high crime of trying to discourage smoking. Article 9 is designed to bypass one of the most important requisites of national sovereignty – a nation’s laws and judicial system.

Article 9 is authoritarian diktat – by the CEOs of multinational corporations. CEOs share a community of interest to block effective regulation and enforcement against corporate crimes and abuses.

Article 9, by contrast, was drafted by the CEOs’ lobbyists to be enforceable.

It allows CEOs to sue before kangaroo tribunals to issue massive (enforceable) financial penalties against any signatory nation that adopts rules to protect its people from even life-threatening criminal acts by corporate officials as long as the kangaroo tribunal decides the rules are “arbitrary.”

The kangaroo tribunal decisions and penalties are subject to no meaningful right of appeal, so any supposed “legal standard” is simply Potemkin propaganda.

Article 9 creates a new profit center for the CEOs of multinational corporations – suing the nations that sign the TPP and similar deals. That puts the Treasury and the general public at risk, but it will maximize the CEOs’ bonuses at our expense.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/bill-black-the-lie-that-china-wins-if-the-tpp-kangaroo-tribunals-are-stopped.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed &utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+cap italism%29

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Sanders’ TPP stance shot down by Democrat platform committee

A trade deal fight led by U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Saturday failed to fully materialize as rival and presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton announced a compromise to expand mandatory healthcare funding over the next decade.

At a meeting of the Democratic Party draft platform committee in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday, supporters of Sanders were unable to influence the committee to adopt strong language opposing the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact, marking a powerful blow to the efforts by the U.S. senator from Vermont to push the party further to the left.

“We did everything we could to win that vote,” said Sanders policy adviser Warren Gunnels. “It was very disappointing.”

Instead of a condemnation specific to the TPP, the committee reached language saying they would oppose “trade agreements that do not support good American jobs.”

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/sand...e+Raw+Story%29

Wasserman-Shultz and her sycophants are pro-TPP and no doubt Hillary will sign it.

[Winehole23]

Buzzfeed has a six-part series on ISDS:

The crisis was setting off alarms at the highest levels of Bill Clinton’s White House. If the administration got this wrong, it could lose hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and spark a backlash against one of the president’s hard-won achievements, the North American Free Trade Agreement.


The Justice Department even warned that failure “could severely undermine our system of justice.”


All of this over a small-time spat in Mississippi between funeral home companies.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/homegrown-disaster

[Winehole23]

The facts of the Mississippi case read like a farce — complete with a bombastic plaintiff’s attorney who called himself the “Giant Killer” and traveled in a private jet he named Wings of Justice.

But there was nothing remotely humorous about the demand for $725 million that the US suddenly faced.


As government lawyers traded anxious memos, groping for some way to make the case go away, the Justice Department offered a blunt assessment of ISDS — one that flatly contradicts what the trade representative has told the American public.


“NAFTA does not simply protect foreign investors from discrimination,” the department concluded. “It provides foreign investors and foreign companies with more rights than Americans have and arguably gives foreign companies an advantage over domestic companies.”


Since the Mississippi funeral home case ended in 2004, the stakes have only grown. The US is staring at a new ISDS suit demanding more than $15 billion. If the US loses major cases — which ISDS lawyers told BuzzFeed News is only a matter of time — then it could find itself grappling with the same grim choice other nations hit with massive ISDS judgments have faced: pay out tens of billions of dollars to private companies or roll back democratically enacted laws.


“I think the US fooled itself into thinking that it wouldn’t be sued because its laws were so investor-friendly,” said José Alvarez, a former State Department lawyer. “The US didn’t anticipate just how creative investment lawyers can be.”

[Winehole23]

legacy of NAFTA:

But just this year, TransCanada filed a $15 billion ISDS claim against the US, arguing that the Obama administration’s rejection of the company’s controversial Keystone XL pipeline was unfair and discriminatory. The massive project would have a “minimal environmental impact,” a company spokesperson said, and the denial actually was motivated by politics.


In January, another Canadian company accused the United States of violating NAFTA and threatened to hit the US with a separate ISDS suit. Northern Dynasty Minerals had proposed digging out gold and copper from the Pebble Mine, which sparked fierce opposition because it’s located in one of Alaska’s biggest salmon-spawning grounds. After the Environmental Protection Agency said it planned to veto the project, the company’s DC-based lawyer dispatched a letter to the State Department warning, “Since the NAFTA’s entry into force over 21 years ago, the United States — in contrast to its Mexican and Canadian partners — has never lost” an ISDS claim. “I am writing with regard to a case that we believe would change that result, should it go to arbitration.”


In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a Northern Dynasty spokesperson said the EPA’s attempt to block the mine before the company even got to apply for permits was “premature” and “unprecedented.”


These companies don’t allege that they built a pipeline or excavated a mine, only to see it stolen by the US government — the kind of outright expropriation that ISDS was originally set up to check. Instead, these suits strike at US environmental policies, which these companies say have been applied in ways that unfairly harm their businesses.

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NAFTA / TPP / TTIP were written by BigCorp lawyers to protect/enable/enrich BigCorp (and BigCapital with its $100Bs, if not $Ts, sloshing around the planet in an eyeblink chasing gains, extracting wealth).

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No Law Is Above BigCorp

More Than 200 Prominent Scholars Decry TPP’s ‘Frontal Attack’ on Law and Democracy

More than 200 legal and economic scholars—including President Barack Obama’s Harvard Law School mentor Laurence Tribe—have penned a letter to Congress warning that the pro-corporate Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) regime enshrined in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) “threatens the rule of law and undermines our nation’s democratic ins utions.”

As ISDS “threatens to dilute cons utional protections, weaken the judicial branch, and outsource our domestic legal system to a system of private arbitration that is isolated from essential checks and balances,” the academics urge (pdf) lawmakers to reject the TPP, despite the Obama administration’s full-court press to pass the trade agreement during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress.

The signatories—who also include Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, and Columbia University Professor and UN Senior Adviser Jeffrey Sachs—note that concerns they outlined in a March 2015 letter opposing the inclusion of ISDS provisions in the TPP and other multinational trade deals were ignored.

In fact, they write, “the final TPP text simply replicates nearly word for word many of the problematic provisions from past agreements, and indeed would vastly expand the U.S. government’s potential liability under the ISDS system.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...+the+Headlines

With a Repug Congress and a Repug President, TPP/TTIP would already be international law.

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TTIP 2.0? New Leak Exposes Threats of Lesser-Known TISA Trade Deal

'The deal, a spiritual and practical sibling of the much-maligned TTIP and TPP free trade agreements, is designed to drive deregulation across the vast global services sector'

"It's a sad day for democracy when ordinary people are dependent on leaks to learn about the far-reaching consequences of toxic trade deals that are being cooked up behind closed doors,"

"Somehow TISA is also even more secret than the notoriously covert CETA, TTIP and TPP deals, with

parties unable to release details of negotiations until five years after it has taken effect,"

TISA is a turbo-charged privatization and deregulation deal that will enormously benefit corporations at the expense of ordinary people and democracy itself,"

the highly secretive deal—currently being negotiated by 50 nations around the world—affirm that with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on the ropes, other such "democracy-wrecking" deals are looming.

Countries that sign up to TISA will be required to lock-in liberalization and could be prevented from rolling back failed policies due of two key clauses—the 'standstill' and 'ratchet' clauses.

The standstill clause freezes the extent of liberalization in certain sectors, which means the markets of TISA state can never be less liberalized than they were at the time they signed the deal.

Meanwhile the ratchet clause — which sometimes appears in other trade agreements—stops countries from reintroducing trade barriers that had been previously and unilaterally removed.

Together these two clauses

undermine the ability of governments to ever reverse the liberalization of services, even if elected on a mandate to do it.

That means they could be stopped from testing liberalizing policies, since there would be no way to reversing them if things went awry.

In order to make the objectives of the Paris Agreement a reality and in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions to the point where the worst impacts of climate change can be avoided, governments must be allowed to interfere and use all policy tools available to them.

Arbitrarily locking governments into deregulation could have hugely negative impacts on their capacity to implement the kind of climate policies we need to stay within 1.5 degrees.

"We now know that TISA will undermine COP21, further deregulate the financial sector, stop failed privatizations being brought back into public hands, and undermine data privacy laws,"

http://www.commondreams.org/news/201...isa-trade-deal

The power and wealth of planetary, mulit-national, supra-national BigCorp now vastly exceed the countervailing power of any one country or any grouping of countries.

BigCorp intends to the planet, to its citizens into un able edness.

[Winehole23]

Techdirt on third party funding for ISDS cases:

two countries, Colombia and Romania, are being sued using ISDS clauses because of their refusal to issue mining permits:

Both mines would require huge quan ies of cyanide and threaten watersheds used by millions of people for drinking water. One would damage a unique, legally protected ecosystem and the other would destroy an ancient, UNESCO-nominated settlement. Both have been opposed by scientific bodies, protested by tens of thousands of people, and restricted by domestic courts.

The use of corporate sovereignty to trump health and environmental concerns is nothing new. What is noteworthy here is the following:

Both ISDS claims are being funded by the same Wall Street hedge fund -- Tenor Capital Management. Tenor helps cover the companies' legal costs in exchange for a cut of any award. These speculative ISDS bets have already paid off for Tenor. The hedge fund won big in April 2016 when it secured 35 percent of a $1.4 billion ISDS ruling against Venezuela, a return of over 1,000 percent on the $36 million that Tenor had provided for the legal costs of the company that brought the case.

That is, the rewards of winning a corporate sovereignty case are so great that hedge funds are starting to fund them speculatively with no direct connection to the ISDS dispute other than providing money to initiate and pursue the claim. As the Sierra Club points out:

The risks of such arrangements, known as "third-party funding," are clear: When Wall Street speculates on the outcome of ISDS cases, it inflates the number of corporate suits against governments, leading to higher costs for taxpayers and higher risks for policymakers that challenge harmful investments.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...e-spoils.shtml

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Techdirt on third party funding for ISDS cases:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...e-spoils.shtml

Unstoppable, irreversible, as capital s everybody and everything forever, for more capital, used to s everybody and everything forever.

[Winehole23]

forever? nah.

all civilizations eventually poot themselves out.

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forever? nah.

all civilizations eventually poot themselves out.

"forever" until the "end of time" of America's Experiment, an approach accelerated by the Repugs.

[Winehole23]

since you think all resistance is futile, I'm unsure why you don't laud the destructiveness of GOP policy for hastening its own end and the end of our misery.

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since you think all resistance is futile, I'm unsure why you don't laud the destructiveness of GOP policy for hastening its own end and the end of our misery.

Yes, resistance is futile.

Red and slave states will not vote non-repug, so Congress remains in repug control, either total like now or enough seats to block progress

Then look at the total control of 2/3 of states by Repugs


The wealth (power) of the corporatocracy, 1%, capitalists will not be relinquished voluntarily, it will be increased horribly as the repugs permit the powers to fleece the people and pillage the country

Still waiting for anybody to show where I'm wrong


Waiting...

[Winehole23]

Hong Kong newspaper Biden to rejoin TPP?

Joe Biden’s digital trade deal could see US rejoin Asia-Pacific pact ditched by Donald Trump

• Donald Trump withdrew the United States from negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2017
• It has since been replaced by the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)