Nobel-Prize Economist Condemns Obama’s ‘Trade’ Deals
The Nobel-Prize-winning former chief economist of the World Bank, and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the U.S. President, Joseph Stiglitz, went to England to warn the British public, and Parliament, that “no democracy” can support U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed trade-deals, because all of these have a feature built into them, called Investor State Dispute Resolution, or ISDS, which will establish a supra-national authority that gives international corporations the power to sue any signatory nation that introduces new or increased economic regulations regarding product-safety, the environment, workers’ rights, or anything else that the corporation alleges lowers the corporation’s profits; and because these cases will be tried not in courts that are subject to the given nation’s constitution and laws, but instead by private three-person panels of mainly corporate lawyers, and their rulings will not be subject to being appealed within the given nation’s court system — the panel’s decison will be final. There will be no democratic accountability at all, regarding regulations and laws that are designed to protect the public: environmental, product-safety, and workers’ rights. The existing regulations will be, in effect, locked in stone, or else decreased — never increased, no matter how much the latest scientific findings might indicate they ought to be. That’s because the international corporations’ panels will have powers above and beyond any signatory nation’s constitution and laws. ISDS gives international corporations the right to sue taxpayers; it does not give any government the right to sue an international corporation (and that also means no right to sue such a corporation for having filed a frivolous lawsuit against the taspayers). It’s a new profit-center for international corporations, in which those profits are coming from the taxpayers of nations that lose these lawsuits — and these cases will explode in volume if Obama’s deals get passed.
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