Being against TPP because of NAFTA is fighting the last battle again. There are no jobs to lose with

[ljm2002]

45. Are you sure you've been following trade issues at all?

Companies are ALREADY suing countries for lost future profits, under the provisions of NAFTA. TPP is worse.

Links, we got 'em:

http://action.sumofus.org/a/eli-lilly/3/6/?sub=homepage

Last month, Eli Lilly, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in North America, filed a lawsuit against Canadian taxpayers for $500 million dollars. On what basis is an American corporation suing us for such an outrageous sum you ask? The $4.3 billion dollars Eli Lilly earned in profit in 2011 was not enough for the pharmaceutical giant.

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a company can sue another NAFTA country if that nation’s laws affect its expected future profit. In this case, Eli Lilly is “losing profit” because Canadian regulators dared to act within Canadian laws and rightly denied patents on two of Eli Lilly’s expensive drugs.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/11/27-8

A US company is taking advantage of a corporate-friendly NAFTA provision in suing the Canadian government for over $250 million due to lost profits from Quebec's moratorium on fracking.

The company, Lone Pine Resources Inc., which is incorporated in the state of Delaware and headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, held mining permits in the Saint Lawrence Valley and has already spent "millions of dollars" to get the permits and approvals, according to the company, but the moratorium passed in 2011 by the province to study environmental risk revoked those permits.

http://justinvestment.org/2013/12/tobacco-giant-philip-morris-is-suing-australia-for-billions-of-dollars-in-lost-profits/

Tobacco giant Philip Morris is suing Australia for billions of dollars in lost profits because the government took action to reduce teenage smoking. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly is suing Canada for $500 million, just because Canada has laws to keep essential drugs affordable.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/another-reason-hate-tpp-it-gives-big-content-new-tools-undermine-sane-digital

Like the rest of the TPP, we only know what has been leaked. Based on that, it seems the negotiators are poised to give private corporations new tools to undermine national sovereignty and democratic processes. Specifically, TPP would give multinational companies the power to sue countries over laws that that might diminish the value of their company or cut into their expected future profits.

The provision that gives them this power is called “investor-state dispute settlement” (or ISDS for short). The policy was originally intended to ensure that investments in developing countries were not illegally expropriated by “rogue” governments, thereby encouraging foreign investment. But what began as a remedy to a specific problem has since been co-opted to serve very different purposes. Under investor-state, if a regulation gets in the way of a foreign investor’s ability to profit from its investment, the investor can sue a country for monetary damages based on both alleged lost profits and “expected future profits.” There are no monetary limits to the potential award.

Apparently a country’s own courts can’t be trusted to administer this kind of lawsuit, so investor-state also requires the creation of a new court. It would be comprised of three private-sector attorneys who take turns being judge and/or corporate advocate.

Now, given the above examples, will you admit that your claim that "the mere speculative loss of profits is not a case" is, quite simply, wrong?

As for your claim that my argument is based on American exceptionalism: wrong. I don't want Canada's environmental laws to be dragged down by this corporatist-led BS any more than I want America's environmental laws dragged down. I don't want Australia's government to be sued for trying to get fewer teenagers to start smoking, anymore than I want to see that in the US. The point is, deals like the TPP are DESIGNED to drag down wages and environmental standards and they are DESIGNED to give multinationals more power. But without governments to constrain their powers, they will become even more out of control than they already are.

We are watching the plutocrats take over on an international scale. Given their intransigence on global climate change, theirs will be a pyrrhic victory -- but that is cold comfort indeed for the rest of us.