Jun 21, 2012 - 03:58 PM
On June 12, a leaked copy of the investment chapter for the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was made public. This copy was analyzed
by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and has been
verified
as authentic. This agreement has been negotiated IN SECRET for 2-1/2
years and no information has ever been released until this leak. So
why have the details of this negotiation been so secret? This
agreement has been framed as a “free trade” agreement and yet out of
26 chapters only two have anything to do with trade. The other 24
chapters grant new corporate privileges and rights, while limiting
governments and protective regulations.
If implemented, this agreement will hard code corporate dominance
over sovereign governments into international law that will supercede
any federal, state, or local laws of any member country. This
document alone should set alarm bells ringing, but if one steps back
and looks at the larger picture, the future ramifications look even
more ominous. After completing this reading, see what your conclusions
are.
This video
is a must see for anyone who wishes to more fully understand the
implications of this secretly negotiated agreement. This article will
also show how if this agreement is considered in the context of other
recently passed legislation and developments, and the “dots are
connected”, the results would be total
corporate global governance
with an accompanying police state. In this new system the role of
elected governments would be to serve as subservient agents for the
transnational corporations, while the armies, police, and courts would
serve the interests of these transnational corporations. The status
of the member states would be locked-in, similar to countries once
they are inside the Eurozone.
The TPP is being negotiated by some of the same characters that
brought us NAFTA, CAFTA and other so called free trade agreements. Some
of the provisions in this document include the establishment of a
parallel system of justice to be administered by 3 attorneys
with no conflict of interest limitations.
This 3 attorney tribunal could order sovereign governments to use
taxpayer money to pay these transnational corporations for any
environmental or regulatory costs that these corporations expended to
meet local standards. Many existing laws would need to be rewritten
and no new regulatory laws could be passed.
Governments that tried to pass regulations such as limits on the
financial industry using risky bets such as derivatives would have the
burden of proof to defend such regulations in a court system
controlled by the corporations. The taxpayers would pay should a
corporation prevail in one of these “private courts”. In fact over
$350 million of taxpayer money has already been paid out to corporations
under the NAFTA style deals, because of zoning laws, toxic bans,
timber rules and other regulations. This TPP agreement is like NAFTA
on steroids. This corporate tribunal bears a resemblance to the
private US Supreme Court approved
binding arbitration
that corporations use to severely limit an individual’s or a group’s
right to sue for damages. With binding arbitration we essentially have
a “private corporate court system” outside of any government
judicial system where the corporations choose the arbitrators and pay
for their services. This creates an apparent conflict of interest
because the arbitrators know that if they do not rule favorably to
the corporations in the majority of cases, they will not be hired back.
(CONTINUE READING)
