UNITED NATIONS – The Obama
administration’s release
Thursday of the more than 2,000 pages of the text of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership agreement, known more commonly as
Obamatrade, has prompted a rash of criticism from both the political left and
the right.
Critics charge the pact undermines
U.S. sovereignty by establishing a secret,
unaccountable TransPacific Partnership Commission with sweeping regulatory
powers over 40 percent of the world’s economy while sending jobs abroad.
“This trade agreement would allow
foreign corporations to challenge our health, safety and environmental
protections in a foreign tribunal outside our legal system, and it would weaken
those bedrock safeguards in the United States,” said Jake Schmidt,
international program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “While
there are some positive conservation measures, the agreement’s substantial
shortcomings should lead Congress to reject it.”
Chapter 28 of the
TPP agreement, titled “Dispute Settlement,”
specifies that trade disputes will be adjudicated by a three-person panel in
accordance with international law, including any World Trade Organization obligations
that have been written into the various sections of the TPP agreement.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka,
head of a union known for supporting Democratic Party political candidates and
causes, said that from what he and his colleagues have reviewed so far, “we are
deeply disappointed that our policy recommendations and those of our trade
reform allies in the environmental, consumer, public health, global development
and business sectors were largely ignored.”
Rick Manning, president of Americans
for Limited Government, said the TPP “will continue to outsource American jobs
overseas, fail to do anything about currency manipulation, and once adopted,
will create an international, unelected commission with broad authority to
implement and interpret the agreement without any votes of Congress.”
Under the “fast track” authority
Congress granted President Obama last summer, lawmakers can only vote “yes” or
“no” on TPP. Filibusters are disallowed, and no amendments to the treaty can be
introduced, with a simple majority required to vote the FPP trade treaty up or
down.
Should Congress fail to act during a
90-day review period, President Obama, under the fast track authority, would be
free to sign the pact under his own authority.
The
12 nations comprising the TPP are
the United States, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Vietnam, Brunei,
Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand.
China has responded by creating its
own 16-nation compact, the
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership,
a free-trade area including India that is estimated as the world’s largest such
bloc, encompassing some 3.4 billion people.
Expansive new powers to foreign
businesses
Trumka said the trade deals’
investment rules “still provide expansive new legal rights and powers to
foreign businesses to challenge legitimate government actions, the labor
enforcement provisions are still inadequate to address the enormous challenges
posed by this deal and the lack of enforceable currency rules subject to trade
sanctions mean the promised new export markets may never materialize.”
Manning stressed that the regulatory
and judicial powers of the commission, in Article 27.2.2 of the agreement, will
be akin to rogue agencies and activist courts in the U.S. that regularly issue
edicts contrary to the law passed by elected representatives.”
Lori Wallach, director of Public
Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said it appears that the TPP’s proponents “resorted
to such extreme secrecy during negotiations because the text shows TPP would
offshore more American jobs, lower our wages, flood us with unsafe imported
food and expose our laws to attack in foreign tribunals.”
“When the administration says it used
the TPP to renegotiate NAFTA, few expected that meant doubling down on the
worst job-killing, wage-suppressing NAFTA terms, expanding limits on food
safety and rolling back past reforms on environmental standards and access to
affordable drugs,” Wallach said.
Peter Maybarduk, director of Public
Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, noted many in Congress “said they would
support the TPP only if, at a minimum, it included past reforms made to trade
pact intellectual property rules affecting access to affordable medicines.”
“But the TPP rolls back that past
progress by requiring new marketing exclusivities and patent term extensions,
and provides pharmaceutical firms with new monopoly rights for biotech drugs,
including many new and forthcoming cancer treatments,” Maybarduk said.
“The terms in this final TPP text
will contribute to preventable suffering and death abroad, and may constrain
the reforms that Congress can consider to reduce Americans’ medicine prices at
home.”
‘Wish list for special interests’
Evan
Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, said, “Now that we can read the final TPP text, it’s
obvious why it was kept in total secrecy for so long,” He called the agreement
“a wish list for powerful special interests and multinational corporations.”
“The Intellectual Property chapter
confirms our worst fear about the TPP’s impact on our basic right to express
ourselves and access information on the Internet,” he said. “If U.S. Congress
signs this agreement despite its blatant corruption, they’ll be signing a death
warrant for the open Internet and putting the future of free speech in peril.”
Judit Rius Sanjuan, U.S. manager and
legal policy adviser for the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières
(MSF) Access Campaign, said her non-profit “remains gravely concerned about the
effects that the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal will have on access to
affordable medicines for millions of people, if it is enacted.”
“Today’s official release of the
agreed TPP text confirms that the deal will further delay price-lowering
generic competition by extending and strengthening monopoly market protections
for pharmaceutical companies,” Sanjuan emphasized.
“At a time when the high price of
life-saving medicines and vaccines is increasingly recognized as a barrier to
effective medical care, it is very concerning to see that the U.S. government
and pharmaceutical companies have succeeded in locking in rules that will keep
medicine prices high for longer and limit the tools that governments and civil
society have to try to increase generic competition.”
Dispute panel
The pact’s three-person dispute
panel is to be composed of one panelist selected by the complaining party and
one by the responding party. The third is chosen by mutual consent, or failing
mutual consent, by the two initial panelists.
The TPP also incorporates many
provisions of the
Investor-State Dispute Settlement procedure,
ISDS, a common provision in bi-lateral and multi-lateral international
investment agreements and treaties that allows investors to sue national
governments over treaty violations.
The TPP agreement is estimated to
double to 18,000 the number of foreign corporations that could be authorized by
TPP to utilize ISDS procedures to challenge U.S. laws and regulations in favor
of international trade rules and WTO regulations. It allows a demand of
compensation for damages in a wide range of business areas affected by TPP
rules and regulations, including disputes over intellectual property and patent
rights, challenges over financial service regulations and protections such as
safety inspections extended to food and medicine sold in the United States.
While ISDS provisions have existed
in international trade agreements since the 1960s, just 50 known ISDS cases
were launched through the 1990s. Case volume has increased dramatically in
recent years, with 50 known ISDS cases being launched in each of the last three
years. Recent ISDS cases have targeted tobacco, climate, financial stability,
mining, medicine, education, pollution, water, labor, toxins and development
policies, according
to a trade group opposing the TPP.
ISDS tribunals have ordered more
than $3.6 billion in taxpayer compensation to foreign firms to date. More than
$34 billion in ISDS claims are pending under U.S. trade pacts, with disputes
contesting U.S. policy in environmental regulation, energy, financial
regulation, public health, land use and transportation policies.
Alan
Morrison, the Lerner Family Associate Dean for Public Interest and Public
Service at George Washington University Law School, in an article
published in The Atlantic in June,
proposed a scenario of the type of case the TPP is anticipated to allow by
expanding ISDS procedures.
Morrison postulated that should the
TPP become established U.S. law, a Vietnamese company that owns 15 restaurants
in San Francisco could file a lawsuit charging that a minimum wage increase
authorized by the mayor of San Francisco was a violation of the “investor
protection” provisions of TPP. It would authorize the Vietnamese corporation to
bring an ISDS case under TPP before a three-person arbitration tribunal, with
the U.S. government the only defendant and the city of San Francisco participating
only if the U.S. allows it.
Morrison further points out that
under ISDS, the arbitrators are typically lawyers who specialize in
international trade and investment, for whom serving as arbitrators is the only
one source of income. They are paid by the hour and allowed to rotate between
arbitrating cases and representing foreign investors and corporations suing
governments in the United States.
Back door for ‘climate change’
regulations
While the TPP is not intended to be
a “climate change” treaty imposing carbon surcharges, it introduces
environmental regulations in Article 20.15, titled “Transition to a Low
Emissions and Resilient Economy.”
The first paragraph states
“transition to a low emissions economy requires collective action.”
The pact acknowledges “each Party’s
actions to transition to a low emissions economy should reflect domestic
circumstances and capabilities” but says the members “shall cooperate to
address matters of joint or common interest.”
“Areas of cooperation may include,
but are not limited to: energy efficiency; development of cost-effective,
low-emissions technologies and alternative, clean and renewable energy sources;
sustainable transport and sustainable urban infrastructure development;
addressing deforestation and forest degradation; emissions monitoring; market
and non-market mechanisms; low-emissions, resilient development and sharing of
information and experiences in addressing this issue. Further, the Parties
shall, as appropriate, engage in cooperative and capacity-building activities
related to transitioning to a low emissions economy.”
http://www.wnd.com/2015/11/obamatrade-condemned-by-both-left-right/
Comments: Quit the UN.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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