Forget the DU created issues. How does Hillary not have an opinion on TPP?

[JDPriestly]

114. We should go back to unilateral trade agreements until we get our balance of payments system

under control and until there is some way to appoint judges that gives ordinary people some input, even if remote.

The trade courts are not a democratic institution. Neither is the WTO.

And they are bound to fail America.

Those arbitration courts are inconsistent with American values. I understand the idealism of the Rockefellers and the Roosevelts and Wilsons who wanted world government. I know the history. But the fact is that the trade courts are incompatible with our representative democracy. What is more important? World trade? Or our democratic institutions?

Let's just write the experiment with the international trade courts including the WTO off as a learning experience.

Fact is, that in recent years, corporations have discovered the means to circumvent local, democratically passed laws through the trade courts. They are doing tthis not just in the US and Canada but in countries like El Salvador where a gold-mining company sued to be able to ruin the water the Salvadorians drink.

If we don't end the trade court or limit the trade court authority, we will end up with a world dominated by corporations, rogue corporations who control governments such as our own and bypass democratic institutions.

I realize that is not precisely the case now, tut that is where we are headed.
. . . .
Nearly thirty years ago, the Wisconsin-based Commerce Group Corp. purchased a gold mine near the San Sebastian River in El Salvador and contaminated the water. Now, according to Lita Trejo, a native Salvadoran and school worker in Washington, DC, the once clear river is orange. The people who drink from the arsenic-polluted river, she says, are suffering from kidney failure and other diseases.

. . . .

An Australian-Canadian mining company, OceanaGold, is suing the Salvadoran government for refusing to grant it a gold-mining permit to its subsidiary, Pacific Rim. Manuel Pérez-Rocha, a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies, explained the situation: “OceanaGold is demanding more than $300 million from El Salvador. They are saying, ‘If you do not let us operate in your country the way we want, you must pay us for the profits that you prevented us from making.’”

That sounds absurd, but it’s true: The company is claiming that under the Central American Free Trade Agreement, it has the right to sue the Salvadoran government for passing a law that threatens its bottom line.

El Salvador is now defending its decision to prevent OceanaGold/Pacific Rim from operating the El Dorado mine near the Lempa River before the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes, a little-known World Bank–based tribunal.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/181717/fight-keep-toxic-mining-out-el-salvador

It's a real problem. These courts are now disenfranchising, depriving of local rule, only people in a few countries. But the potential that these courts and that system of resolving disputes between corporations and countries is menacing. We do not need those courts.

The gold mining company in El Salvador, for example, should accept the decision of the Salvadorian people to reject their gold mine endeavor.

The international trade courts have the potential and it is a very real potential to deprive people all over the world of human rights. The trade courts are designed at this time to placer CORPORATE RIGHTS above HUMAN RIGHTS.

And that is why I object to the trade courts.

Corporations should only be able to sue a country when that country allows it. I could understand trade courts in which a country sues a country. But the ability of corporations to bring claims in the trade courts is anti-democratic. That procedural possibility needs to be ended. Corporations are merely legal constructs. They should not be participating, much less, interfering or threatening, democratic institutions and values.