Two Huge New Fake Trade Agreements to Skirt, Stomp Democratic Sovereignty

The way TAFTA and the TPP would skirt democratic sovereignty is by investor-state enforcement. That mechanism lets a foreign corporation skip a member country's courts and sue at an international tribunal for acts by the country's legislature or executive that might have hampered the corporation's planned profits. From such suits under U.S. FTA's, countries have so far paid corporations $400M, much of it for public health and other public interest policies. For instance, S.D. Myers, Inc., got $5.6M from Canada for its ban on exporting PCB's, which the company planned to treat in Ohio. The ban was to comply with the world-wide Basel Convention to control and reduce production of hazardous waste. Today, 15 claims for $14B, all leveled against public health and other public interest policies, are pending. For instance, Lone Pine Resources, Inc., wants $241M from Canada, for Quebec's moratorium on fracking, a gas drilling process that poisons and injects into the ground millions of gallons of water. Lone Pine had permits to frack on 30,000 acres directly beneath the St. Lawrence River. TAFTA and the TPP would offer investor-state enforcement to some 75,000 corporations, and surely bring many more such cases.

The way these two huge FTA's would stomp democratic sovereignty is by overriding certain current, or banning certain future laws. According to released corporate wish-lists and leaked secret documents, corporate agents seek to stuff these pacts with such goodies as:

While the Obama administration does not support all of the corporate goodies, it does support and insist on many of them, and is pushing for rapid conclusion to these treaties. Resistance has come from Congress, as 151 Democratic and 23 Republican congressmen have signed letters against re-instating the fast-track rule, which would enable ramming-through these FTA's without Congressional debate. And steady resistance comes from freedom and public interest organizations such as Public Citizen, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Progressive Democrats of America.