Elizabeth Warren has a blog post I have serious concerns about ISDS. She included a list of actual cases brought under previous trade policies to show that her concern is not merely hypothetical.

ISDS isn’t a one-time, hypothetical problem – we’ve seen it in past trade agreements. Just in the past few years:

• A French company sued Egypt after Egypt raised its minimum wage.
• A Swedish company sued Germany because Germany wanted to phase out nuclear power for safety reasons.
• A Dutch company sued the Czech Republic because the Czech Republic didn’t bail out a bank that the Dutch company partially owned.
• Philip Morris is using ISDS right now to try to stop countries like Australia and Uruguay from implementing new rules that are intended to cut smoking rates – because the new laws might eat into the tobacco giant’s profits.

The Obama Administration has said that they have fixed all the problems, and nothing like that will happen here. They just won’t show you how.

The Obama administration will not show you how by simply showing you the clauses in the TPP that fix these problems. Even worse, they make no attempt to explain how they have fixed it even if they won’t show you the agreement itself. You have to wonder why President Obama is making it so difficult to believe what he says. Perhaps he feeling such intense pressure to negotiate the deal, that he hasn’t got the strength to resist. He may be hoping the American public will be incensed enough to stop it.