We Can Still Defeat TPP

 “When the inexcusable and anti-democratic veil of secrecy surrounding the TPP is finally lifted, and the American people see what is actually in the agreement, they are going to force their representatives in Washington to vote that deal down.”                    Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen

We lost the Fast Track fight, (because of the 13 traitorous Senate Democrats above who sided with Republicans to end debate) but TPP is far from a done deal. Once the text is released, Congress will be debating it for 90 days and the ugly truth the "corporate trade advisors" have been hiding for years will be in open view.  

TPP's unprecedented secrecy
The little we know about TPP, is thanks to Wikileaks. Members of Congress have only recently been able to see portions of the text and are not allowed to take notes, copy pages or even talk about what they read!

We will not be able to see TPP's negotiating texts until four years after it is passed, or is voted down. With TISA we will not be able to see them for five years. What are they hiding?

It is already clear from leaked texts that this is not just a trade deal (only 5 chapters out of 29 are specifically about trade) but it is rather a global power grab by multinational corporations intent on profits at the expense of the earth and our rights. 

Here is what corporate tyranny looks like
I think most Americans would shudder at the thought that multinational corporations could sue US taxpayers for laws and policies that a corporation says could reduce their "expected future profits". Under the ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) provision of TPP, these cases would be decided by international tribunals and the judges would be corporate lawyers whose decision would be final. No US court could override them! 

Want clean air, safe food, drinkable water, fair working conditions, labels on GMOs, fracking bans, or bank regulations to prevent another 2008 economic meltdown? TPP will give foreign corporations the right to retaliate against any such laws or regulations and sue us for billions of dollars. Think it can't happen? Unfortunately, under NAFTA and other trade agreements, corporations are already suing nations and winning ($3.5 billion has been paid out and another $14.7 billion in corporate suits are awaiting decision). TPP goes a step further than granting corporations personhood- it makes them more powerful than countries. It gives them nationhood!

"In a threat to our sovereignty and solvency, the TPP would expand the scope of policies that could be attacked. And, there would be 15,000 new foreign corporations empowered by TPP to attack US laws." Expose the TPP 


To me this is the most egregious part of TPP, but there are many other disastrous results of TPP passing- the loss of millions of American jobs (hard for us to compete with Vietnam wages at 29 cents an hour), a race to the bottom for wages and worker safety, increased costs for medicines (Big Pharma made sure patents on drugs would be extended and generics will be at risk), loss of internet freedom,  the end of Buy American policies, the forced importation of foods that do not meet our safety standards, increased environmentally destructive fracking (see the video below) and more. 



The unbridled corporate greed of "Free Trade", or a "Fair Trade" bright future? 
The good news is that a slumbering America has been awakened! Environmental groups, workers, family farmers, internet freedom advocates, people of faith and organizations for food safety and public health have all come together to fight this corporate takeover. It's about time that we started to marshal all our forces to restore democracy and to protect what is dear to us and makes America great. 

This is just the beginning of a movement to create a new paradigm of trade that protects our earth and ensures our basic human rights- our ability to live in freedom, safety and dignity. Fair Trade lifts all people to a better standard of living and ensures a viable and sustainable future for all of our children. 

TPP and its partners TISA* (Trade in Services Agreement) and TTIP (the European version of TPP) do just the opposite. They benefit the very few, the plutocratic elite, at the expense of the rest of us. This unholy triumvirate would make our lives less safe, more polluted, miserable and eventually unlivable as measures to deal with climate change would be seen as barriers to trade. We are already seeing the effects from NAFTA and TPP is NAFTA on steroids.

Expect more of this w/ #TPP House scraps meat labeling under threat of retaliation http://t.co/TAtvOZV4gL #StopTPP pic.twitter.com/j9zVmDjP8N

— Barbara Upton (@upton1144) June 30, 2015

So let's roll up our sleeves and "Get to work!" as Ed Schultz of MSNBC says. By the way, he deserves kudos for being practically the only journalist who has covered these terrible, plutocratic deals from the beginning. We need to exert more pressure for others to follow his lead.


There are many organizations leading this fight- join them! Public Citizen, Flush the TPP, Progressive Democrats of America- TPP Media March, MoveOn, Sierra Club and more. 

Remember, Fast Track only won in the House by two votes- we can defeat final passage of TPP there. Pledge to keep up the fight here! We can do this. We have to do this!

*Please note this article "Leaked TISA Documents Reveal Privacy Threat" was in Forbes magazine -  hardly a bastion of left-wing thinking. It's time for the "left" and "right" to come together on this! We have to go beyond labels to save our democracy. 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Death of the Republic

Photo from Our Hudson Valley Rally against TPP       B Upton

Ellen Brown,
Author Web of Debt, Public Bank Solution, President, Public Banking Institute
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/the-transpacific-partnership_b_7136112.html

"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." -- Article IV, Section 4, US Constitution

A republican form of government is one in which power resides in elected officials representing the citizens, and government leaders exercise power according to the rule of law. In The Federalist Papers, James Madison defined a republic as "a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people . . . ."

On April 22, 2015, the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive trade agreement that would override our republican form of government and hand judicial and legislative authority to a foreign three-person panel of corporate lawyers.

The secretive TPP is an agreement with Mexico, Canada, Japan, Singapore and seven other countries that affects 40 percent of global markets. Fast-track authority could now go to the full Senate for a vote as early as next week. Fast-track means Congress will be prohibited from amending the trade deal, which will be put to a simple up or down majority vote. Negotiating the TPP in secret and fast-tracking it through Congress is considered necessary to secure its passage, since if the public had time to review its onerous provisions, opposition would mount and defeat it.

Abdicating the Judicial Function to Corporate Lawyers

James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers:

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. . . . "Were the power of judging joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control, for the judge would then be the legislator. . . ."

And that, from what we now know of the TPP's secret provisions, will be its dire effect.

The most controversial provision of the TPP is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) section, which strengthens existing ISDS  procedures. ISDS first appeared in a bilateral trade agreement in 1959. According to The Economist, ISDS gives foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever the government passes a law to do things that hurt corporate profits -- such things as discouraging smoking, protecting the environment or preventing a nuclear catastrophe.

Arbitrators are paid $600-700 an hour, giving them little incentive to dismiss cases; and the secretive nature of the arbitration process and the lack of any requirement to consider precedent gives wide scope for creative judgments.

To date, the highest ISDS award has been for $2.3 billion to Occidental Oil Company against the government of Ecuador over its termination of an oil-concession contract, this although the termination was apparently legal. Still in arbitration is a demand by Vattenfall, a Swedish utility that operates two nuclear plants in Germany, for compensation of €3.7 billion ($4.7 billion) under the ISDS clause of a treaty on energy investments, after the German government decided to shut down its nuclear power industry following the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.

Under the TPP, however, even larger judgments can be anticipated, since the sort of "investment" it protects includes not just "the commitment of capital or other resources" but "the expectation of gain or profit." That means the rights of corporations in other countries extend not just to their factories and other "capital" but to the profits they expect to receive there.

In an article posted by Yves Smith, Joe Firestone poses some interesting hypotheticals:

Under the TPP, could the US government be sued and be held liable if it decided to stop issuing Treasury debt and financed deficit spending in some other way (perhaps by quantitative easing or by issuing trillion dollar coins)? Why not, since some private companies would lose profits as a result?

Under the TPP or the TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership under negotiation with the European Union), would the Federal Reserve be sued if it failed to bail out banks that were too big to fail?

Firestone notes that under the Netherlands-Czech trade agreement, the Czech Republic was sued in an investor-state dispute for failing to bail out an insolvent bank in which the complainant had an interest. The investor company was awarded $236 million in the dispute settlement. What might the damages be, asks Firestone, if the Fed decided to let the Bank of America fail, and a Saudi-based investment company decided to sue?

Abdicating the Legislative Function to Multinational Corporations

Just the threat of this sort of massive damage award could be enough to block prospective legislation. But the TPP goes further and takes on the legislative function directly, by forbidding specific forms of regulation.

Public Citizen observes that the TPP would provide big banks with a backdoor means of watering down efforts to re-regulate Wall Street, after deregulation triggered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression:

The TPP would forbid countries from banning particularly risky financial products, such as the toxic derivatives that led to the $183 billion government bailout of AIG. It would prohibit policies to prevent banks from becoming "too big to fail," and threaten the use of "firewalls" to prevent banks that keep our savings accounts from taking hedge-fund-style bets.

The TPP would also restrict capital controls, an essential policy tool to counter destabilizing flows of speculative money. . . . And the deal would prohibit taxes on Wall Street speculation, such as the proposed Robin Hood Tax that would generate billions of dollars' worth of revenue for social, health, or environmental causes.

Clauses on dispute settlement in earlier free trade agreements have been invoked to challenge efforts to regulate big business. The fossil fuel industry is seeking to overturn Quebec's ban on the ecologically destructive practice of fracking. Veolia, the French behemoth known for building a tram network to serve Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, is contesting increases in Egypt's minimum wage. The tobacco maker Philip Morris is suing against anti-smoking initiatives in Uruguay and Australia.

The TPP would empower not just foreign manufacturers but foreign financial firms to attack financial policies in foreign tribunals, demanding taxpayer compensation for regulations that they claim frustrate their expectations and inhibit their profits.

Preempting Government Sovereignty

What is the justification for this encroachment on the sovereign rights of government? Allegedly, ISDS is necessary in order to increase foreign investment. But as noted inThe Economist, investors can protect themselves by purchasing political-risk insurance. Moreover, Brazil continues to receive sizable foreign investment despite its long-standing refusal to sign any treaty with an ISDS mechanism. Other countries are beginning to follow Brazil's lead.

In an April 22nd report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, gains from multilateral trade liberalization were shown to be very small, equal to only about 0.014% of consumption, or about $.43 per person per month. And that assumes that any benefits are distributed uniformly across the economic spectrum. In fact, transnational corporations get the bulk of the benefits, at the expense of most of the world's population.

Something else besides attracting investment money and encouraging foreign trade seems to be going on. The TPP would destroy our republican form of government under the rule of law, by elevating the rights of investors -- also called the rights of "capital" -- above the rights of the citizens.

That means that TPP is blatantly unconstitutional. But as Joe Firestone observes, neo-liberalism and corporate contributions seem to have blinded the deal's proponents so much that they cannot see they are selling out the sovereignty of the United States to foreign and multinational corporations.

For more information and to get involved, visit:

Flush the TPP

The Citizens Trade Campaign

Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch

Eyes on Trade