David Sirota: How the Trans-Pacific Partnership Will Hand Corporations the Reins to Our Government

from In These Times:


How the Trans-Pacific Partnership Will Hand Corporations the Reins to Our Government
Provisions of the trade agreement could provide corporations with even greater influence over domestic policy decisions.

BY DAVID SIROTA


In promoting a proposed trade pact covering 12 Pacific Rim nations, President Obama has cast the initiative as an instrument of equity. The Trans-Pacific Partnership would, in his words, “level the playing field” and “give our workers a fair shot.” But critics argue that within the hundreds of pages of esoteric provisions, the deal—like similar ones before it—includes a glaring double standard: It provides legal rights to corporations and investors that it does not extend to unions, public interest groups and individuals.

Recently leaked drafts of the agreement show the pact includes the kind of “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” (ISDS) provisions written into most major trade deals passed since the North American Free Trade Agreement. Those provisions allow companies to use secretive international tribunals to sue sovereign governments for damages when those governments pass public-interest policies that threaten to cut into a corporation’s profits or seize a company’s property.

But also like past trade deals, the TPP is not expected to allow unions and public-interest groups to bring their own suits in the same tribunals to compel governments to enforce labor, environmental and human rights laws.

The discrepancy is a deliberate effort to make sure trade policy includes a “tilt toward giant corporations,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, said.

“If a Vietnamese company with U.S. operations wanted to challenge an increase in the U.S. minimum wage, it could use ISDS,” Warren wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in February. “But if an American labor union believed Vietnam was allowing Vietnamese companies to pay slave wages in violation of trade commitments, the union would have to make its case in the Vietnamese courts.” .....................(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18111/how-the-trans-pacific-partnership-hands-corporations-the-reins-to-our-gover