Since this article was written, Donald Trump has been elected President! Love him or hate him, he has put the brakes on the TPP. Please read the article and get informed about WHY the TPP is such a BAD IDEA!
It never changes. It’s the classic scene of a bad guy hashing an evil plan in secret. While he caresses his mustache, he plots to plunder and enslave the rest of mankind. Luckily this is normally a scene in a movie, something fictional; made up. Government, Corporate, and Special Interest representatives have been meeting in secret for several decades now, hashing their plan. Their goal is to impose their demented vision on the world, reaping in big profits along the way. The name of their plot is the Trans Pacific Partnership.
This story begins with something called “Fast-Track” which the congress granted to President Obama at the end of Spring. This gave the President the power to deal with the TPP treaty directly and have more control in negotiating and designing the terms of the deal. Hence the name “Fast Track”, it’s designed to speed up the process, so that this bad trade deal can get rammed through before Americans hit the ballot boxes in 2016.
To be clear, trade is a good thing. Most of the time open and free trade are great things for the average person in the world. The TPP is NOT free trade, rather it is trade… with strings attached. What sort of strings? In this article we will cover the ISDS, only one aspect of their tangled web.
So, there is ISDS. It doesn’t sound all that intimidating. ISDS stands for Investor State Dispute Settlement. Let’s say that you’re a big chemical company in the United States and there is a law in Canada that prevents, you from selling a chemical product into their country. It has been banned in their country due to environmental and health concerns. What can you do? Utilize the ISDS of course! Under this provision, which is part of the TPP and was part of the NAFTA Treaty in the 90’s, your company can actually sue the Canadian Government for negatively impacting “expected future profits”. You as a foreigner, have the right to take that government to court and have their law overturned, and the best part, seek legal damages for the profits that you POSSIBLY missed out on while your product was illegal to sell in Canada. This “hypothetical case” actually occurred. In 1997 an American company called Ethyl, sued the Canadian government over a gasoline additive called MMT. Ethyl won the case, Canada was forced to overturn their law, and paid Ethyl around $13 million in damages for those “expected profits” that they missed out on (This is only one of many ISDS related cases FYI).
Whats the big deal? The big deal is that we, in theory, are supposed to govern ourselves. The basic expectation of self-government, that English speaking people have come to expect. The constitution begins with “We the people…”, not “We the world…”, or “We the multi-national companies…”. This is a pretty clear attack on our way of life that every American should take very seriously.
“Fast Track gives these ball-less statesmen the ability to ram the TPP through before they have to buckle to the will of the people at the ballot box.” The TPP is an all-you-can-eat buffet for every crooked western multi-national industry.
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