The Administration’s Dishonest Response to Elizabeth Warren’s Attack on Secret Investor Arbitration Panels in Trade Deals
Naked Capitalism has the article The Administration’s Dishonest Response to Elizabeth Warren’s Attack on Secret Investor Arbitration Panels in Trade Deals by Yves Smith. You have to read the article to fully understand the depths of depravity that the TPP represents. I’ll just quote some final remarks from the article.
And finally, for the Administration to insinuate that the TPP will result in greater transparency is dubious, given that it’s made it well-nigh impossible for anyone in Congress to do a proper review of the text. While the US Trade Representative technically allows access, in practice, that right is empty. The Congressman himself must read the text; no sending staffers or bringing experts allowed, and only staffers from the committees with direct oversight of trade bills (the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee) are allowed to join their bosses. The USTR insists that the Congressman specify what chapter he wants to review in advance. The USTR then insists that the negotiator of those chapters be present. Since those negotiators travel, it usually takes three or four weeks to find a convenient time.
No note-taking is allowed. The text is full of bracketed sections where if language is disputed, the revisions suggested by other countries are in the brackets, with the country initials listed but then redacted, making it difficult to read (as in you can’t even read this dense text straight through; the flow of the document is interrupted by the various suggested changes). Having people from the USTR staring over your shoulder is distracting. And it’s an open question as to whether asking them questions is prudent, since it gives the USTR insight into what the Congressman is concerned about.
Perhaps these Congressmen have exceptional powers of concentration. But I read cases and legally dense material with some regularity, and I find my concentration starts going after an hour to an hour and a half. And I also find it is well nigh impossible to get much more than a general sense of a contract of any length in one pass. You need to go over it again and again to see how the various sections tie together to even have an approximate grasp of what it means. There’s simply no way that any Congressman has anything more than a very fuzzy idea of what is in the TPP and the TTIP.
They very fact that the Administration is going to such absurd lengths to prevent informed Congressional review should be sufficient reason in and of itself to turn down the Administration’s request for fast-track authority.
I’ll take this a step farther. The very fact that President Obama would risk whatever credibility he has by going on a national campaign tour to tell us lies about TPP shows you how high the stakes must be.
Furthermore, the article puts the lie to the argument that we cannot allow a Republican to be elected President in 2016 because of the President’s power to nominate Supreme Court justices. What these “trade” deals do is to put the arbitration panels higher than the Supreme Court. Suits against the country brought by investors will bypass the U.S. court system and all our rules for judicial hearings. There will be no appeal to any court of the results which will require the country’s taxpayers to give billions of dollars to foreign investors. In issues that really matter, the U.S. Supreme Court will be made irrelevant by these treaties. It won’t matter who gets appointed to the Supreme Court.
Lest you think that these arbitration rulings are only about investor issues, let me give you the following excerpt from Elizabeth Warren’s article in The Washington Post. In that article she explains that there are already arbitration agreements in some trade pacts that have been put into effect.
Recent cases include a French company that sued Egypt because Egypt raised its minimum wage, a Swedish company that sued Germany because Germany decided to phase out nuclear power after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, and a Dutch company that sued the Czech Republic because the Czechs didn’t bail out a bank that the company partially owned. U.S. corporations have also gotten in on the action: Philip Morris is trying to use ISDS to stop Uruguay from implementing new tobacco regulations intended to cut smoking rates.
So you can get your Hillary Clinton instead of John Ellis Bush (JEB) as the next President, but it won’t matter at all. Where is Hillary right now on this important issue to dispute my obvious claim?
