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Trade Deals and the Environmental Crisis

May 14, 2016

Trade Deals and the Environmental Crisis

With the release of leaked documents from the TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) ‘trade’ deal Greenpeace framed its conclusions more diplomatically than I will: the actions of the U.S. political leadership undertaken at the behest of American corporate ‘leaders’ and their masters in the capitalist class make it among the most profoundly destructive forces in human history. At a time when environmental milestones pointing to irreversible global warming are being reached on a daily basis, the U.S. political leadership’s response is to pronounce publicly that it favors environmental resolution while using ‘trade’ negotiations to assure that effective resolution never takes place.

Those representing the U.S. in these negotiations are mainly business lobbyists who have been given the frame of state power to promote policies that benefit the businesses they represent. The thrust of the agreements is to enhance corporate power through legal mechanisms including patents, intellectual property rights and ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) provisions that create supranational judiciaries run by corporate lawyers for the benefit of corporations. Shifting the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions to the corporations producing them precludes effective regulation in the public interest. The position that environmental harms must be proven before regulations are implemented leaves a dead planet as the admissible evidence.

U.S. President Barack Obama is both the most articulate American politician urging action on climate change and the central Liberal proponent of the trade agreements. The apparent paradox isn’t difficult to understand— the trade agreements will be legally binding on signatory states while Mr. Obama’s statement of the problem won’t be. As evidence of global warming mounts the Republican tactic of denial is looking more and more delusional. By articulating the problem Mr. Obama poses Democrats as the solution while handing the power to curtail greenhouse gas emissions to business lobbyists and corporate lawyers.

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Nobel-Prize Economist Condemns Obama’s ‘Trade’ Deals

March 4, 2016

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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Current trade treaties: “a revolution against law”

October 28, 2015

Current trade treaties: “a revolution against law”

trade cartoon snippetA respected human-rights expert at the United Nations, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, has joined the global movement opposing trade treaties like TPP and TTIP. And he has novel and powerful legal arguments.

In international law, de Zayas says, there is a hierarchy of agreements, and at the top is the UN Charter: “in case of conflict between the provisions of the UN Charter and any other treaty, the Charter prevails.” In other words, trade treaties that lead to a violation of human rights — or breach any other obligation set out in the UN Charter — are legally invalid. Most countries have signed onto human rights treaties, but “they have also entered into trade and investment agreements that hinder, delay or render impossible the fulfillment of their human rights treaty obligations.”

De Zayas is especially concerned about Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses, which allow corporations to sue governments over laws or regulations that might diminish expected profits. Such mechanisms, he says, “actually constitute an attack on the very essence of sovereignty and self-determination, which are founding principles of the United Nations.” In fact, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requires these kinds of disputes to be decided by independent, transparent and accountable tribunals. “Allowing three private arbitrators to disregard international and national law … is tantamount to a revolution against law.”

De Zayas notes that of the 608 known arbitration awards, many “have overridden national law and hindered States in the sovereign determination of fiscal and budgetary policy, labour, health and environmental regulation, and have had adverse human rights impacts… including a ‘chilling effect’ with regard to the exercise of democratic governance.”

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How Obama’s “Trade” Deals Are Designed To End Democracy

June 15, 2015

How Obama’s “Trade” Deals Are Designed To End Democracy

U.S. President Barack Obama has for years been negotiating with European and Asian nations — but excluding Russia and China, since he is aiming to defeat them in his war to extend the American empire (i.e, to extend the global control by America’s aristocracy) — three international ‘trade’ deals (TTP, TTIP, & TISA), each one of which contains a section (called ISDS) that would end important aspects of the sovereignty of each signatory nation, by setting up an international panel composed solely of corporate lawyers to serve as ‘arbitrators’ deciding cases brought before this panel to hear lawsuits by international corporations accusing a given signatory nation of violating that corporation’s ‘rights’ by its trying to legislate regulations that are prohibited under the ’trade’ agreement, such as by increasing the given nation’s penalties for fraud, or by lowering the amount of a given toxic substance that the nation allows in its foods, or by increasing the percentage of the nation’s energy that comes from renewable sources, or by penalizing corporations for hiring people to kill labor union organizers — i.e., by any regulatory change that benefits the public at the expense of the given corporations’ profits. (No similar and countervailing power for nations to sue international corporations is included in this: the ‘rights’ of ‘investors’ — but really of only the top stockholders in international corporations — are placed higher than the rights of any signatory nation.)

This provision, whose full name is “Investor State Dispute Resolution” grants a one-sided benefit to the controlling stockholders in international corporations, by enabling them to bring these lawsuits to this panel of lawyers, whose careers will consist of their serving international corporations, sometimes as ‘arbitrators’ in these panels, and sometimes as lawyers who more-overtly represent one or more of those corporations, but also serving these corporations in other capacities, such as via being appointed by them to head a tax-exempt foundation to which international corporations ‘donate’ and so to turn what would otherwise be PR expenses into corporate tax-deductions. In other words: to be an ‘arbitrator’ on these panels can produce an extremely lucrative career.

 

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Olduvai II: Exodus
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