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TPP and Corporate Power Over You

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« on: March 27, 2015, 05:31:07 pm »

This was copied completely from Hullabaloo's website (Digby)

TPP To Be Declassified "Four Years After Entry into Force"

by Gaius Publius

 We've been writing lately about TPP and the new leaked chapter dealing with extra-judicial "trade courts." These would allow any corporation to sue any foreign government for lost future profit due to, for example, regulation, or "buy local" programs, or ... anything really that would cost them money. For example, did you know that much of our fish is literally processed by slaves (my emphasis)?
 A year-long AP investigation reveals the global fish market feeds off a robust slave fishing trade benefitting everyone involved except the slaves, who are reportedly kept in cages and whipped with toxic fish when they get tired. Sounds pretty bad!

 So how does the free-labor fish get into your cat food and onto your dinner table? The AP managed to get inside one fishing operation, where the slaves—usually Burmese citizens—are forced to live in cages on a "tiny tropical island" in Indonesia called Benjina. Despite days spent catching food, they are not allowed to eat the fish, for it is apparently deemed too valuable for them.
 This is a perfect example. If a country that processed fish in this way were to sign TPP — and Indonesia is considering it — their fish processing corporations could sue any TPP-signing government that banned slave-labor seafood. Would the corporations win? That's for the TPP "trade court" (not the national court) to decide. But if the nation being sued were small enough (poor enough), it might not even mount a defense. And if a large nation's government were wealth-captured enough, they might not either.

 This is what extra-judicial "trade courts" — "tribunals" that operate outside any nations legal system — do; this is what they make taxpayers in every signing nation liable for. There are "trade courts" already; NAFTA and CAFTA have them, for example, as well as a great many bilateral (two-country) trade agreements.

Four Years Into the Agreement, Its Text Will Remain Secret

 Here's page two of the WikiLeaks PDF — page one of the original (source here) — which specifies document handling and declassification (click to enlarge):
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