FastTrack, the TPP and the TPP international court.
I oppose the TPP and here are a few of the reasons why I oppose it.
California is suffering from a terrible drought.
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. It's dictatorial, but in an emergency could possibly be necessary and permitted. We don't know how bad the lack of water could hurt us. FDR rationed food, including sugar, during WWII, so it is not preposterous to think that California could ration water.
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 of California through the wells. Just two examples of threats to California's ability to ration its water.
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 a program to identify and allocate the water the corporations claim is theirs.
Under this TPP trade agreement, hypothetically, the corporations could sue California in the TPP trade court, and California could be forced to pay the corporations for their hypothetical (remember that means it's all in maybe, maybe land) losses 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 prohibits corporations from suing in the trade courts regarding emergency laws. We don't know what the TPP says although we need to know, and our members of Congress need to know before they even think about passing fast track. They need to have analyzed the proposed TPP, and that is nearly impossible because of the restrictions on the ability of their staff members to see and copy and digest the proposed agreement.
In my opinion, the fast track provision should not be approved until we the people know what the TPP says and have had the time to read it carefully and fully understand the risks and advantages of it. (And even then I oppose for among others the reasons set forth below.)
To summarize this point: 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.
Who do you think appears and argues and researches cases in international trade courts? The most elite, expensive firms and droves and droves of lawyers. It costs a fortune to defend against a corporate lawsuit of that kind. And which countries do you think are going to get sued? THE RICHEST. And our country, Australia and Canada will be at the top of the list.
What is a big corporation going to sue a country with no money for? To change its laws, that's what. We will be sued for money damages, and poor countries will be sued for settlements in which they give up their right to their sovereignty and are coerced into changing their laws. The cases against poor countries will not be decided in the international courts. They will be decided in backrooms where a corporate lawyer, paid megabucks, browbeats some other corporate lawyer representing a penniless people into submitting to reprehensible accommodations just to avoid the cost of a lawsuit.
In Los Angeles we can barely find the money to repair our sidewalks, much less defend our environmental and other laws in a trade court, and we are a big city. What is Viet Nam or some other poor country to do? The trade courts are an expensive punishment that will be imposed on governments and populations that cannot afford the lawyers to defend themselves.
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.