La Oroya, Peru. Wikicommons\/Maurice Chedel. Some rights reserved.Here in the
\nUnited States, debate over whether to grant the President Fast Track authority
\nfor the Trans-Pacific Partnership is currently causing much inner-party strife,
\nand fortunately, it is an\u00a0uphill battle
\nfor TPP advocates. <\/i><\/p>\n
Strangely Obviously, The most A scary So, who is The ISDS is Basically, The United So, while \u201cISDS has At the \u201cRecognizing This is It is scary La Oroya, Peru. Wikicommons\/Maurice Chedel. Some rights reserved.Here in the United States, debate over whether to grant the President Fast Track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership is currently causing much inner-party strife, and fortunately, it is an\u00a0uphill battle for TPP advocates. Strangely enough, President Obama has teamed up with the Republican establishment for this massive…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nenough, President Obama has teamed up with the Republican establishment for
\nthis massive trade deal, showing how un-socialist he really is, and how
\nRepublican\u2019s aren\u2019t\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0opposed to executive power, as long
\nas it is in support of their policies.<\/p>\n
\ncontroversy over the TPP has made it a tough sell for the President, one that
\nliberals are not buying. The TPP is full of corporate handouts, most
\nnotoriously\u00a0for the pharmaceutical
\nindustry<\/strong>, which will be granted patent term extensions, and
\nstrengthen monopoly power on important medicines around the world, making them
\nunaffordable in many areas. It will also\u00a0strengthen intellectual property laws<\/strong>\u00a0in
\nother industries, specifically in the digital sphere.<\/p>\n
\nnotorious part of the TPP, however, is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement
\n(ISDS) provision, which Elizabeth Warren wrote about a few months back in the\u00a0Washington Post<\/strong>,
\nsaying: \u201cISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws \u2014 and
\npotentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers \u2014 without ever stepping foot
\nin a U.S. court.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nthought indeed, but is it true? Well, it depends who you ask. If, for example,
\nyou were to ask the Obama administration, they would vehemently deny that the ISDS
\ncould challenge U.S. laws – and shortly after the Warren editorial, they did
\njust this, with a\u00a0Q&A blog for
\nthe ISDS<\/strong>. \u201cIt is an often repeated, but inaccurate, claim that
\nISDS gives companies the right to weaken labor or environmental standards, for
\nexample, suggesting that a trade agreement could result in the United States
\nhaving to lower its minimum wage. The reality is that ISDS does not and cannot
\nrequire countries to change any law or regulation,\u201d wrote Director of National
\nEconomic Council and economic advisor to the president, Jeffrey Zients.<\/p>\n
\ncorrect? Both, actually; but Warren is much more intellectually honest. While
\nthe ISDS cannot actually \u201crequire countries to change any law or regulation,\u201d
\nit can and has been used by corporations as a bargaining tool, pushing
\nsovereign governments to back down on regulations, or fork out taxpayer money
\nin arbitration, and possibly millions in damages.<\/p>\n
\nbarely a new instrument; it has been around since first being introduced in
\n1959, in a trade deal between Germany and Pakistan, but has become an
\nincreasingly popular mechanism of international law since the nineties. The
\noriginal intent of the ISDS was to increase foreign investment in countries
\nwhere business was risky, by providing a bit of security for investors. While
\nthe ISDS has been included in many trade deals, it was barely used before the
\nnineties. This changed towards the end of the century, and\u00a0its use rapidly
\nincreased during the 2000s<\/strong>, going from just a few cases filed in
\nthe early nineties, to nearly sixty annual cases filed by 2012.<\/p>\n
\nbig corporations discovered how valuable the ISDS could be when dealing with
\nforeign governments who were a bit too ambitious in the regulatory domain. In
\nmany cases, the lawsuit is brought after a government regulates an industry for
\nenvironmental or health reasons. This is currently happening in Australia,
\nwhere tobacco company Phillip Morris is\u00a0suing the government<\/strong>\u00a0after
\nthey passed a law requiring cigarettes to be \u201cplain-packaged\u201d without branding.
\nThis has been shown to reduce smoking, especially in youth, and so Phillip
\nMorris is suing for \u201cexpropriation,\u201d or lost profit.<\/p>\n
\nStates has many trade agreements with the ISDS provision, most notably in
\nNAFTA. In once case, the extraction company, Lone Pine, has\u00a0sued the
\nCanadian government<\/strong>\u00a0after they filed a moratorium on
\nhydraulic fracturing for environmental reasons. In one notable case, US
\ncompany, The Renco Group, owned by billionaire Ira Rennert, has used the ISDS
\nprovision to bully the Peruvian government, after they shut down a metal
\nsmelter in the town of La Oroya, which is one of the most\u00a0polluted towns
\nin the world<\/strong>, when the company delayed environmental
\nimprovements. The Renco Group pressured the Peruvian government into restarting the
\nzinc smelting operations<\/strong>\u00a0in 2012.<\/p>\n
\nthe ISDS cannot literally overturn a regulation or law, it can be used to bully
\na country\u2019s government into doing so. Of course, the White House has said that
\nit will be different under the TPP. In the same blog, Zients writes:<\/p>\n
\ncome under criticism because of some legitimate complaints about poorly written
\nagreements. The U.S. shares some of those concerns, and agrees with the need
\nfor new, higher standards, stronger safeguards and better transparency
\nprovisions. Through TPP and other agreements, that is exactly what we are
\nputting in place.\u201d<\/p>\n
\ntime, we had to take his word, with the great secrecy surrounding the TPP; but
\ntoday, we know a bit more, thanks to Wikileaks, who released the\u00a0TPP Investing chapter<\/strong>\u00a0last
\nMarch, dated January 20, 2015. So, is the TPP\u2019s ISDS provision different from
\nthat of NAFTA or the other trade agreements? Are there higher standards and
\nstronger safeguards to prevent a company like Phillip Morris from using the
\nISDS to sue for lost profit? Maybe a little, but not nearly enough. There is
\nsome wording in the chapter that does try to prevent the ISDS from being used
\nas a corporate tool to sue governments over environmental, health, or other
\npublic safety regulations. In the preamble, it is written:<\/p>\n
\nthe inherent right to regulate and resolving to preserve the flexibility of the
\nParties to protect legitimate public welfare objectives, such as public health,
\nsafety, the environment, the conservation of living or non-living exhaustible
\nnatural resources, and public morals.\u201d<\/p>\n
\ngood, but NAFTA has similar wording in its\u00a0investment
\nchapter<\/strong>, and corporations could easily argue over what a
\n\u201clegitimate public welfare objective\u201d is. Is a moratorium on fracking a
\nlegitimate public welfare objective, for example?\u00a0Trade experts
\naren\u2019t convinced<\/strong>\u00a0that the TPP\u2019s ISDS chapter is much
\ndifferent from previous ones, either, while the arbitration process, which has
\nbeen one of the most criticized aspects of ISDS, has remained unchanged, with
\nthree highly paid lawyers selected, one by the defendant, one by the plaintiff,
\nand one agreed upon by both. The same lawyers also tend to alternate between
\nthe \u201csuing\u201d and \u201cjudging\u201d positions, which critics have said creates conflict
\nof interest.<\/p>\n
\nto think about this provision, largely unchanged from what we know, being
\nincluded in the TPP, which covers about 40 percent of the worlds economy.
\nWarren was correct when she said that \u201cagreeing to ISDS in this enormous new
\ntreaty would tilt the playing field in the United States further in favor of
\nbig multinational corporations. Worse, it would undermine U.S. sovereignty.\u201d
\nISDS was an international trade mechanism that was created in earnest, to
\nincrease foreign trade by providing investors with a sort of insurance policy.
\nBut today, it has become a dangerous weapon for multi-national corporations who
\ndo not want to play by the rules, especially if it costs them some profit. This
\nendangers the safety of populations, the environment, and the sovereignty of
\nnations, and it should be eliminated from any future trade agreements if our
\ngovernments cannot agree on real changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"