The secretive sovereignty-subverting Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead - but TISA and CETA still threaten

Under the accord, still under negotiation but nearing completion, companies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings — federal, state or local — before tribunals organized under the World Bank or the United Nations... critics, including many Democrats in Congress, argue that the planned deal widens the opening for multinationals to sue in the United States and elsewhere, giving greater priority to protecting corporate interests than promoting free trade and competition that benefits consumers.¹²

TPP raises significant concerns about citizens’ freedom of expression, due process, innovation, the future of the Internet’s global infrastructure, and the right of sovereign nations to develop policies and laws that best meet their domestic priorities. In sum, the TPP puts at risk some of the most fundamental rights that enable access to knowledge for the world’s citizens."¹

Under the accord, still under negotiation but nearing completion, companies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings -- federal, state or local -- before tribunals organized under the World Bank or the United Nations.¹³

Let that sink in for a moment: "[C]ompanies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings -- federal, state or local -- before tribunals...." And they can collect not just for lost property or seized assets; they can collect if laws or regulations interfere with these giant companies' ability to collect what they claim are "expected future profits."¹⁶

In all, according to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, about 9,000 foreign-owned firms operating in the United States would be empowered to bring cases against governments here. Those are as diverse as timber and mining companies in Australia and investment conglomerates from China whose subsidiaries in Trans-Pacific Partnership countries like Vietnam and New Zealand also have ventures in the United States.

More than 18,000 companies based in the United States would gain new powers to go after the other 11 countries in the accord…

Under the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a member nation would be forbidden from favoring “goods produced in its territory.”¹⁴

This is really troubling,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the Senate’s No. 3 Democrat. “It seems to indicate that savvy, deep-pocketed foreign conglomerates could challenge a broad range of laws we pass at every level of government, such as made-in-America laws or anti-tobacco laws. I think people on both sides of the aisle will have trouble with this.”¹⁴

Resolved, That it is the sense of the Senate that

(1) trade agreements are not the appropriate vehicle for enacting immigration-related laws or modifying current immigration policy; and

(2) future trade agreements to which the United States is a party and the legislation implementing the agreements should not contain immigration-related provisions.¹⁷

TPP's provisions are largely secret but, according to Curtis Ellis of the American Jobs Alliance, the U.S. Trade Representative revealed that "temporary entry" guest worker visas are a "key feature" of the pact. Ellis said that Obama Administration previously used the U.S.-South Korea trade pact to expand the length of time a L-1 visa holder can work in the U.S. That pact is viewed as a model for negotiating the TPP.¹⁷

Despite a U.S. labor force participation rate that is at its lowest level since 1978, President Obama wants to use the TPP to further reduce the jobs available to U.S. workers and instead reserve certain jobs for foreign workers under the agreement. It is indefensible that Congress would now consider surrendering even more of its authority over immigration to this President in order to fast track a trade agreement that will harm American workers, and the text of which Congress has not even seen.¹⁷

The leaked text would empower foreign firms to directly “sue” signatory governments in extrajudicial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals over domestic policies that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms that foreign firms claim violate their new substantive investor rights. There they could demand taxpayer compensation for domestic financial, health, environmental, land use and other policies and government actions they claim undermine TPP foreign investor privileges, such as the “right” to a regulatory framework that conforms to their “expectations.”¹⁹

Many jurisdictions have policies to promote opportunity and ameliorate the severity of market forces. These include minimum wage laws, laws requiring employers to offer health insurance, regulations covering product safety, work-place safety, environmental protection, and more. All of these protections are at risk under the TPP. For example, the pact would prevent communities from deciding whether or not they want fracking in their area.¹⁸

Following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, we threw open America’s doors to a flood of immigrants, legal and illegal. Some 40-50 million have poured in, an unprecedented expansion of the labor force.

Thus, “free-trade” Republicans and their collaborators in the Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce decided to drop the U.S. labor force into a worldwide labor pool where the average wage was but a tiny fraction of an American living wage.

Like NAFTA and GATT, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is an enabling act for multinationals to move freely to where it is cheapest to produce while securing access to where it is most profitable to sell.

The TPP Investment Chapter is dated 20 January 2015. The document is classified and supposed to be kept secret for four years after the entry into force of the TPP agreement or, if no agreement is reached, for four years from the close of the negotiations.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor said: "The TPP has developed in secret an unaccountable supranational court for multinationals to sue states. This system is a challenge to parliamentary and judicial sovereignty. Similar tribunals have already been shown to chill the adoption of sane environmental protection, public health and public transport policies."

Current TPP negotiation member states are the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei. The TPP is the largest economic treaty in history, including countries that represent more than 40 per cent of the world´s GDP.

“This means the President could update the agreement ‘as appropriate to address trade issues that emerge in the future as well as new issues that arise with the expansion of the agreement to include new countries,’” Sessions wrote about the living agreement in his “critical alert” to members across Capitol Hill about concerns with the deal last week. “The ‘living agreement’ provision means that participating nations could both add countries to the TPP without Congress’ approval (like China), and could also change any of the terms of the agreement, including in controversial areas such as the entry of foreign workers and foreign employees. Again: these changes would not be subject to congressional approval.

Sessions notes that specific language, and other language throughout the TPA, “offers an obvious way for the Administration to expand the number and duration of foreign worker entries under the concept that the movement of foreign workers into U.S. jobs constitutes ‘trade in services.’”

...“Language already present in both TPA and TPP provide the basis for admitting more foreign workers, and for longer periods of time, and language could later be added to TPP or any future trade deal to further increase such admissions.”

...Fast-tracking the TPP, meaning its passage through Congress without having its contents available for debate or amendments, was only possible after lots of corporate money exchanged hands with senators. The US Senate passed Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) – the fast-tracking bill – by a 65-33 margin on 14 May. Last Thursday, the Senate voted 62-38 to bring the debate on TPA to a close.

Those impressive majorities follow months of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing by the world’s most well-heeled multinational corporations with just a handful of holdouts.

Using data from the Federal Election Commission, this chart shows all donations that corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP made to US Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate:

    - Out of the total $1,148,971 given, an average of $17,676.48 was donated to each of the 65 &ldq

    - The average Republican member received $19,673.28 from corporate TPP supporters.

    - The average Democrat received $9,689.23 from those same donors...

   -  In just 24 hours, Wyden and five of those Democratic holdouts – Michael Bennet of Colorado, Dianne Feinstein of California, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Patty Murray of Washington, and Bill Nelson of Florida – caved and voted for fast-track.

    - Bennet, Murray, and Wyden – all running for re-election in 2016 – received $105,900 between the three of them. Bennet, who comes from the more purple state of Colorado, got $53,700 in corporate campaign donations between January and March 2015, according to Channing’s research...

...The result: it took a paltry $1.15 million in bribes to get everyone in the Senate on the same page. And the biggest shocker: with a total of $195,550 in "donations", or more than double the second largest donor UPS, was none other than Goldman Sachs...

Negotiators in Atlanta have reached an agreement on the 12-nation global trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), meaning the trade deal is likely to come up for a vote early next year.

Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) of Alabama – who led the populist revolt against fast-track and TPP – wants Americans to understand TPP can still be killed.

Obamatrade collectively refers to Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), which is the controversial fast-track mechanism for ramming bills through Congress with minimum scrutiny, and the three major trade deals that would be guaranteed these ‘fast-track’ protections before a page of them had been made public: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) and Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). Sessions has previously pointed out that these three trade deals collectively encompass 90 percent of global GDP...

Under fast track authority (TPA), which passed in June of this year, Congress cedes its ability to amend the trade deals negotiated by Obama, and lowers the 67 vote treaty threshold to a mere simple majority. The Senate even surrenders its 60 vote filibuster. After the passage of fast track, the only off-ramp that exists to block Obama’s trade deals is controlled by Paul Ryan, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), and Congressional leadership– depriving individual members of their ability to exercise control.

Historically, no trade deal moved through Congress with the fast track mechanism has ever been blocked...

A recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request also revealed that there is a chapter in TPP that addresses temporary entry provisions of foreign workers. Additionally, because TPP is a “living agreement,” it can be changed subsequent to its adoption. This means that a group of twelve nations– and any new nation member that gets added to the partnership– would be able to advance changes to America’s immigration policies.

As Breitbart News has previously reported, Sen. Sessions has highlighted how TPP “would give the Sultan of Brunei—who has implemented Sharia Law in his nation and banned Christmas, literally—an ‘equal vote to that of the United States.'”...'

A major cause of contemporary political ills in the world is the misnomers that help hide what the strong and rich aspire to and already control. A perfect example of this is the ubiquitous term ‘trade’ in what the media are telling us these days about the TPP and the TTIP – the transpacific and transatlantic treaties that seek to organize business activity under one monumental umbrella of new rules. These have been peddled as trade treaties, and hence as being great for growth and jobs, happiness and social well-being. But neither the TPP, tying the United States, a bit of Latin America and a series of East Asian countries together, nor its TTIP companion that is meant to shape American-European business relations, is primarily about trade, if stimulating genuine trade comes into it at all. It is primarily about power. Two kinds of it.

One is aimed at creating global disadvantages for China’s industrial power and putting brakes on what the two formerly communist giants on the Eurasian continent are developing together. The other is power of a collectivity of large politically well-connected corporations to engage in conduct unchecked by national rules, which seen by eyes unaffected by neoliberal dogma would be recognized as predation...

Powerful corporations have been allowed to swallow the state; they have as the power sensitive economist James Galbraith calls it, created a ‘predator state’, which they of course exploit for their own expansion. There is no frame of reference with which we can more convincingly define the TPP.

...Ultimately, the TPP is a complex series of rules and regulations intended to manage the economic relations between the 12 nations party to the agreement. And its meticulous design serves to benefit each country’s “national champion” companies and industries, with the big winners in the U.S. being the major Wall Street banks, insurance companies, and multinational manufacturer-outsourcers.
 
One big example of this complex hypocrisy: The TPP has, in addition to 30 main chapters, a total of 58 side agreements (called “side letters.”) And Japan alone possesses 14 of these side letters, with each one laying out special conditions for Japanese participation and special deals for Japanese economic sectors. Free trade? Hardly!...

“The text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership runs 5,554 pages,” Sessions said in a statement provided to Breitbart News.

This is, by definition, anti-democratic. No individual American has the resources to ensure his or her economic and political interests are safeguarded within this vast global regulatory structure. The predictable and surely desired result of the TPP is to put greater distance between the governed and those who govern. It puts those who make the rules out of reach of those who live under them, empowering unelected regulators who cannot be recalled or voted out of office. In turn, it diminishes the power of the people’s bulwark: their constitutionally-formed Congress.

In the next part of the detailed statement calling for the TPP’s annihilation, Sessions walks through several troubling rules and regulations contained throughout its thousands of pages.

Among the TPP’s endless pages are rules for labor, environment, immigration and every aspect of global commerce – and a new international regulatory structure to promulgate, implement, and enforce these rules,” Sessions said. “This new structure is known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission – a Pacific Union – which meets, appoints unelected bureaucrats, adopts rules, and changes the agreement after adoption.

Sessions added that the text of this deal—which is actually bigger than Obamacare and the Senate “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill combined—“confirms” Americans’ “fears” about it, specifically the creation of a new global governance structure similar to the European Union...

Sessions says:

“The text of the TPP confirms our fears, plainly asserting: ‘The Parties hereby establish a Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission which shall meet at the level of Ministers or senior officials, as mutually determined by the Parties,’ and that ‘the Commission shall’:

• ‘consider any matter relating to the implementation or operation of this Agreement’;
• ‘consider any proposal to amend or modify this Agreement’;
• ‘supervise the work of all committees and working groups established under this Agreement’;
• ‘merge or dissolve any subsidiary bodies established under this Agreement in order to improve the functioning of this Agreement’;
• ‘seek the advice of non-governmental persons or groups on any matter falling within the Commission’s functions’; and
• ‘take such other action as the Parties may agree’.
• Further, the text explains that ‘the Commission shall take into account’:
• ‘the work of all committees, working groups and any other subsidiary bodies established under this Agreement’;
• ‘relevant developments in international fora’; and
• ‘input from non-governmental persons or groups of the Parties’.

Sessions goes on to note that the new global governance structure is “open-ended” and has no bounds.

Sessions says:

This global governance authority is open-ended: “The Commission and any subsidiary body established under this Agreement may establish rules of procedures for the conduct of its work.”  It covers everything from the movement of foreign nationals: “No Party shall adopt or maintain…measures that impose limitations on the total number of natural persons that may be employed in a particular service sector. . . in the form of numerical quotas or the requirement of an economic needs test”; to climate regulation: “The Parties acknowledge that transition to a low emissions economy requires collective action.”...

“These 5,554 pages are like the Lilliputians binding down Gulliver,” Sessions said.

They will enmesh our great country, and economy, in a global commission where bureaucrats from Brunei have the same vote as the United States. Clearly, powerful forces will have their voices heard and find ways to profit immensely from this conglomeration. But what of everyday wage-earning Americans? By nearly a 5:1 margin, they believe such deals reduce wages – not increase them.  Because this deal lacks currency protections, it will further the bleeding of U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas, allowing our mercantilist trading partners to take advantage of our continued refusal to protect our own workers.

Sessions said this isn’t just a “trade agreement” or even a full-fledged treaty. It’s the creation of a new global governing structure akin to the European Union—one that cedes U.S. sovereignty to a yet-to-be-created international governing body....

Soon after President Donald Trump was sworn in, his administration announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact championed by former President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The White House on Friday also wasted no time in declaring a renegotiation of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA...