General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Elizabeth Warren Fires Back at Obama: [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Hypothetically, (meaning we are talking about a situation that could happen but has not) let's say the drought becomes worse. California declares an emergency and orders that all water in the state be accounted for and be allocated by the state for the needs of the people of California.
But, let's say that an international corporation incorporated in Switzerland is drawing water from springs or wells or other resources in the state either to sell as bottled water around the world or to inject into oil wells and into the aquifers through the wells. Just two examples.
The State of California as I understand it in an effort to manage its water resources could well cause the corporations, both the bottled water corporation and the oil company to lose money with the state's program to identify and allocate the water the corporations claim is theirs.
Under this trade agreement, hypothetically, the corporations would sue California under the trade agreement in the trade court and California could be forced to pay the corporations for money they lost because of California's emergency measures to take control of the water and keep extremely thirsty people alive.
Now, the likelihood of that happening is small. And it is possible that the trade agreement permits countries, states, cities, to pass emergency laws that cannot be the basis for a law suit in the trade court. We don't know what the TPP says.
But in my opinion, the fast track provision should not be approved until we know what the TPP says. (And even then I opposee for among others the reasons set forth below.)
Knowing what is in the trade agreement should be our right long before even the fast track law is considered.
Further, even if there is a provision that permits emergency measures or environmental laws to be protected, the cost of having to defend against huge corporations in an international trade court is not one that corporations should be able to impose on the citizens of any country.
International trade court cases involve the most elite, expensive firms and droves and droves of lawyers. It costs a fortune to defend against a corporate lawsuit of that kind.
In Los Angeles we can barely find the money to repair our sidewalks, and we are a big city. The trade courts are an expensive punishment that will be imposed on government entities and populations that cannot afford the lawyers to defend themselves.
If that is true in the US, think of poor Viet Nam. It would be almost criminal just for some huge corporation to sue some of the poorer countries and force them to hire legal armies to defend their interests. (I know. Not a crime in a technical sense. But should any country be forced to pay expensive lawyers when its people earn under a dollar an hour. These countries will agree to anything to avoid that expense.)
The trade courts are unnecessary and will be an intimidating bar to many a good law that would protect the environment and ordinary people.
And, yes, trade courts will rob us of our sovereignty and deprive the parties in lawsuits of their rights under our Constitution. They will influence our laws both directly and indirectly and deprive our government entities and us of the jury trials to which we are entitled.
If corporations among themselves prefer arbitration courts without juries for their disputes, fine. But we the people deserve to have our differences about environmental issues, copyrights, patents and all sorts of other issues decided pursuant to our Constitution in courts appointed by our elected officials that follow our laws and with juries of our peers if we wish.
Of course, corporations and proponents of the TPP will argue that no individuals appear in trade courts and that they therefore will not be deprived of a jury trial. But that is not the case. It is especially a potential problem in cases involving products that might cause environmental damage or damage to our health. In addition, if our federal, state or local governments are called upon to pay a huge damages award by a trade court, who will be paying that sum? Us of course, and the sum, the penalty will have been imposed by a team of corporate attorneys with no jury of our peers.
And I'm not even talking about the impact on labor standards and disputes that is inevitable in our country in which our standards and laws are more protective of labor than the standards and laws in other countries. That is a huge problem. It would affect many of our lives very directly.
I wish I could explain all the reasons that the TPP courts are heinous and must be rejected. We will ultimately have to decide which precedent in a case is to be followed: the international court's decision that a company had to be compensated for some environmentally detrimental project it planned or some labor practice or the homeowners whose environment was degraded by that or a very similar project or the working people whose workplace rules are affected.
The international courts will have undue influence on what happens here domestically and will threaten and probably to some hopefully small extent destroy our legal system and maybe even our security.
I know this sounds like hyperbole, but it is not. We won't notice the problem at first, and most Americans will not recognize what is happening. But this TPP is a corporate coup. A corporate coup.
Already, our Justice Department cannot take on the banks and prosecute fraud because of our laws protecting them and because they are "too big to fail." We do not need to implicate ourselves even more in the international mesh of "too big to fail" with this TPP agreement.
And above all, before we sign any more trade agreements, we need to make the ones we have work. We need to drastically cut back our trade deficit. For that purpose, I believe that bilateral trade agreements would be more effective.
We need to export closer to as much as we import. And let's try to export some industrial products that are not weapons as well as agricultural products.
Further, we need to make sure that the US Treasury receives more tax revenue from the enormous profits, the gains from these trade agreements. In the past, the trade agreements have facilitated the hiding of corporate profits overseas and impoverished our government.