The TPP and the Slow-Motion Corporate Coup By Lori Wallach, Yes! Magazine 09 December 12. http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/14942-the-tpp-and-the-slow-motion-corporate-coup
What Would the TPP Do?
[Excerpted] Eleven countries are now involved-Australia, Brunei
Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru,
Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States-and there is an open
invitation for more to join. Think of the TPP as a NAFTA on steroids,
which could encompass half of the world.
This is the largest, most potentially damaging
agreement since the 1995 establishment of the WTO. And you may never
have heard about it before. That's because the negotiations, which have
been underway for three years, are being conducted in extreme secrecy. The public, Congress, and the press are locked out, but the 600 official corporate advisors have access to the negotiating texts....
Most of the TPP's proposed provisions instead comprise a corporate power grab. The TPP would includeextreme protections
for foreign investors, which would help corporations offshore American
jobs to low-wage countries. These terms would require governments to
provide foreign investors a guaranteed "minimum standard of treatment"
when they relocate, including special privileges and rights that
domestic firms and investors do not enjoy. Foreign firms-or foreign
subsidiaries of U.S. firms-could extract unlimited amounts of taxpayer
money as compensation when investors claim that U.S. government actions
undermine a corporation's expected future profits. Seriously.
Equal Status for Corporations and Country
The investor rules would elevate individual foreign
firms and investors to the same status as the sovereign nations that
would be party to the TPP. Corporations and investors would be empowered
to privately enforce the agreement by suing a signatory government
before the World Bank and other foreign tribunals. In this
"investor-state dispute resolution," three private-sector lawyers, who
rotate between suing governments and acting as "judges," could order
governments to pay large amounts of our tax dollars to investors who do
not want to follow the same laws as domestic firms.
The TPP also would expose to attack green and
sweat-free procurement rules that specify that only recycled paper,
non-old-growth wood products, renewable-source energy, or products made
under fair labor standards can be purchased with government funds. Under
these terms, democracies would no longer be able to decide that we want
to invest our tax dollars to create jobs at home or to create markets
for green energy or morally produced goods. Instead, the TPP would require our governments to send our money offshore and spend it with firms trashing human rights and the environment.
The TPP would limit financial regulation by forbidding bans on risky derivatives and other dangerous financial products, as well as the use of capital controls to
counter wild surges of speculative investments in and out of countries,
which destabilize the global economy. The massive financial firms that
caused the financial crisis could use these terms to roll back the new
financial regulations implemented in the U.S. and around the world.
Read the entire article linked above
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