Admit it readers, the Obamatron has become more than a mere disappointment to the millions of Americans that voted for him. He promised change to people fed up with the business of America being business and not it's citizens. We asked for socialized medicine and we got another complex and expensive subsidization of the insurance industry. We asked for an end to foreign wars and we got an invasion of Libya, two wars in the Near East that seem to never end, and high-tech terror from the skies that creates more enemies than it kills. We asked that Wall Street be held accountable for its rampant fraud and we got more bureaucracy. But he is not done yet. The last blow to our crumbling democracy is yet to come--in the form of a "trade" agreement with eleven Pacific Rim countries being negotiated in secret and nearing completion. The sensitivity of the proposed treaty is so great that it contains a clause keeping negotiations secret until four years after agreement is reached or negotiations end.Fortunately for the rest of us, a draft chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been leaked on-line. It is worse than what was feared would come out of an agreement written for multi-national corporations by their attorneys. What has been agreed to already by negotiators is truly stunning in its scope. The leaked text of the investment chapter would allow foreign corporations to sue governments which have signed the treaty in extra-judicial tribunals over domestic policy that the companies claim damage their "expected future profits". This agreement elevates private companies to the status of sovereign states enable to enforce a public treaty without resort to the United States' legal system. In essence TPP would circumvent the US Constitution, our fundamental law. Incredibly this treaty has been negotiated in secret because even the people involved in the negotiations know that public knowledge of its contents would create a huge amount of adverse reaction, making its ratification by Congress much more difficult.
Image a foreign company, say Chinese, mining minerals adjacent to an Alaskan wilderness area that is to be protected under US environmental laws. The foreign company could challenge the legal protection of the nearby wilderness area as impinging on it's "expected profits" from it's mining interests. The foreign corporation would not do this in US federal or state courts but before a tribunal staffed by corporate lawyers unaccountable to any electorate, system of legal precedent, or substantive appeal. These private corporate lawyers would rotate between acting as tribunal members and representing corporations with claims against a government. Obviously this incestuous arrangement poses severe conflicts of interest. No tribunal member is required to disclose the inevitable conflicts. This new, corporate, star chamber of commerce would have the power to order cash compensation paid by US taxpayers to foreign investors for profits they expect. The agreement reaches new heights of extra-judicial power in the unrestrained hands of an international corporate elite.
Previous trade tribunals have been established in other "trade" treaties, but they usually involve developing countries whose firms have few investments in the United States. TPP involves developed nations like China, Japan, and Canada which have very large companies operating in the United States. So far, other tribunals already established in 51 trade agreements (including NAFTA) have cost the United States $3.6 billion in compensation to foreign investors, and another $38 billion in claims remain pending. Almost all of these claims relate to domestic environmental, energy, finance, public health, transportation regulations and laws. Just defending against one of these claims cost on average $8 million. A NAFTA case from 1999 provides an actual, albeit smaller example, of what will occur under TPP. California banned the gasoline additive MTBE, saying it was damaging its water supplies. Mexico's Methanex Corporation sued under NAFTA for $970 million claiming damages to future profits. It took until 2005 for the tribunal to dismiss the claim. So far the United States has been successful in 13 tribunal cases since NAFTA went into effect. That record is admirable, but our civil courts are also open to foreign investors and companies. Over 9,000 foreign companies would have the power to haul the US into a corporate-dominated, secret trade tribunal and circumvent federal courts under TPP.
TPP is the betrayal of what remains of "American Democracy". When even the laws passed by a government ostensibly representing the consent of the governed can be overturned by a few wealthy plutocrats from another country, it can hardly be termed democratic any longer. If you learned one thing about the War of Independence from the British Crown, it was that Americans wanted a say in the laws to which they were subjected. Is the new Crown to be the Chinese Communist Party? Apparently, if the Obamtron achieves his final betrayal.