I'm not ok with secret tribunals that make those decisions. [1]
I'm not ok with governments not making provisions for the workers that lost their jobs because Vietnamese shrimp flooded their country's market. [2]
[0] https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/o...
[1] http://billmoyers.com/story/shadow-courts-secret-tribunals-t...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-08/more-shoe...
[0] https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_by_countr...
1. Any decision that you think has resolved unfairly?
2. Agreed, but redistribution and retraining are domestic issues such as NAFTA-TAA.
Isn't it up to a country to make itself attractive to investors, i.e. by not pulling all that shit?
Yes, but it would defeat the purpose of a trade agreement.
Moreover, if country ABC signs the agreement, indicating 'they won'd do this BS' - and then they actually do do it - then they get access to other markets while cheating.
The agreement is supposed to prevent countries from cheating.
It has a side effect of preventing governments from doing things they ought to do - for example, punishing international companies from polluting etc..
It's a tricky problem.
There should be clauses that allow governments to make laws to stop companies from polluting etc.
Why should a foreign company decide what is and isn't legal in my country? Why should a democratic country, whose government is beholden to the people, have to kneel before a corporation, beholden to foreign wealth? Why does a corporation have rights that override the democratically-determined laws of a foreign country?
Not to mention your spin doctoring - 'investor confidence' is the good guys, and 'court systems and political systems' are just corruption and nepotism (because as we know, corps don't have either of those in abundance...)
Cool. You and the TPP are in agreement then.
>Why should a foreign company decide what is and isn't legal in my country?
It shouldn't, beyond the general representation it's due. I'm not sure where you're getting this idea that corporations would have carte blanche to dictate laws from. Certainly not from reading the actual agreement.
What is covered by the mechanism is pretty simple. You can't regulate foreign owned companies differently from domestic ones. You can't appropriate funds or capital or freeze accounts without due process. You can't deny access to local courts.
And that's about it. What's more, your suit can be thrown out if there is a public health, art, indigenous culture or a number of other concerns (this is dependent on country). Tobacco companies are banned wholesale.
You are indeed correct in that I haven't read the 2700-page document. And to be frank, I highly doubt your own claims that you read it twice. I also doubt the characterisation of this extraordinarily lengthy document argued between multiple countries for the better part of a decade as "pretty simple".
Regarding the tobacco exclusions, it seems punitive to me, they were definitely being bad actors under previous ISDS mechanisms. You're right, though, the public health interest carveouts in the TPP's ISDS implementation (based on a recent Canadian BIT) would provide sufficient tools to allow unfettered regulation without needing to ban them wholesale. These carveouts were not present in the BIT in the PM vs Australia case, for example.
So why were tobacco bad actors? In the Australian case, they launched a suit claiming that by enforcing plain packaging Australia was in essence, appropriating their brand, packaging and associated goodwill. You may think they shouldn't win this argument, I may think they shouldn't win this argument, but regardless, they deserved to have their case heard fairly. They of course lost with costs.
The problem was that PM also quite likely believed that they wouldn't win, and was instead using the process to delay plain packaging legislation in other countries such as Ireland who were waiting on the case results. This would be a clear cut case of abuse, and participating in poor faith.
As per what would prevent other companies from attempting the same thing? Fear that the same thing would happen to them. Because of likely abuse of the ISDS system, tobacco would now have no international recourse whatsoever if governments flat out nationalize their factories.
while this is true there are already mechanisms built to counter this uncertainty, i.e. you can get insurance for operating in "dangerous" countries.
Without a body that can invoke broad sanctions, countries can play chicken with each other. Regimes can simply decide to seize company assets, and hope the offending parties don't cause enough of a real ruckus.
Of course this lowers investor confidence long-term. But governments that do that are rarely interested in this. They're more interested in lining their own pockets with personal wealth.
These sort of trade frameworks build a mutually-assured-destruction setup, so that any BS can get swiftly acted upon by a "neutral" party. And at the end of the day, it allows for stronger rule of law, which is better for most parties. The ones that end up the worst off are the kleptocrats.
Airliners can buy insurance for plane crashes. But most of them would rather planes just not crash.
Sure, ISDS can help a country build more trust, and lower the cost of foreign investments, but it's not a panacea.
Plus, countries would still play chicken with each other. If China decides to seize Apple's plants, what should the US do, declare war? Should France and EU terminate all foreign deals with Egypt due to it not wanting to pay for the Veolia ISDS decision?
There's less debate and uncertainty about the legitimacy of the retaliation, and its better understood than the advanced kremlinology required to decipher some other things.
Not many things are panacea, but things like the WTO have been pretty useful at avoiding trade wars IMO.
> Regimes can simply decide to seize company assets
And they can ignore the provisions in a treaty they sign, too. If a country is willing to start seizing assets and taking the usual penalties in business for doing so, the TPP isn't going to mean much.
Treaties are only as powerful as their ability to be enforced (whether that's militarily, politically, or economically). Have a look at the state of the 19th C treaties between the USA and various Indian nations for a crystal-clear example of this.
And it does it with a far lower cost to sovereignty.
This misunderstands what incentives are at play for politicians with low accountability in developing countries. The cost of corruption is borne by these investors and domestic consumers, but the benefit of it is entirely concentrated in the political class. Therefore the opposite incentive exists, and the system becomes more resistant to any changes towards more inclusive institutions.
>sovereignty.
Meaningless buzzword. If a nation no longer favours the basket of benefits and obligations, it is entirely free to leave.
Do you think government agencies and leaders should be above the law in general, or only with respect to companies?
ISDR (investor state dispute resolution) is usually arranged as a private arbitration, with arbitrators who conspicuously do not meet conflict of interest or probity rules of even a hicksville kangaroo court. ISDR has the power to force judgements which are strongly not in the public interest, under the pretence of 'market interference'. The most obvious case is the tobacco lobby trying to prevent plain packaging legislation.
This idea that trade deals can guarantee commercial justice for large multinationals in authoritarian countries, but we shouldn't expect any such improvement for citizens, is quite abhorrent.
Why shouldn't we? Does TPP prohibit that? No. Are you saying that countries with poor rule of law should not make any improvement to the Trent tho for the rule of law unless it does it all completely in one go? Are incremental improvements undesirable or actively bad? That's a pretty extreme absolutist position to take.
At the moment governments are pressured by other governments and multinationals to have stronger rule of law. The cost of capital is higher in more corrupt countries. The threat of capital flight is a significant disincentive to government crackdowns on democratic movements -- building stops, bond returns skyrocket, lines of credit disappear, arms sales stumble.
TPP is the promise that your foreign capital is safe, even though locals are screwed. Even better, companies sue governments for raising the minimum wage, or enforcing OH&S.
This isn't 'give a little, get a little', this is 'we're taking your rights'.
In particular, a government that changed the law because certain behaviour was found to be harmful would potentially be required to pay huge amounts of compensation to a company whose business model relied on doing those harmful things. This is particularly relevant in fields like public health, environmental protection and sustainable exploitation of natural resources.
The problem with this is that the same governments that might genuinely legislate to, say, protect public health by banning smoking in restaurants or protect the environment by banning diesel-powered vehicles with unacceptable levels of particulate emissions can also legislate for protectionist purposes in ways that really do screw over foreign companies. This makes countries with such governments, or the fear that their government go down this path, much less attractive for foreign investors. And so those investors look for safeguards that will ensure governments can't arbitrarily take advantage of them once they've put their money in.
Which brings us back to step 1 in the case of foreign investors whose investments turn out to be in harmful things, whether or not anyone realised that in advance, and so the cycle continues.
That doesn't mean we should fear the bogeyman, since in reality such provisions have not been unusual in previous free trade agreements and the most notable ISDS cases were ultimately failures for plaintiffs like Big Tobacco. But even though results have usually gone the right way in the past, they have still cost the governments involved a lot of time and money to fight the case, and that alone is grounds for asking whether the ISDS provisions are a good idea.
No foreign nation or individual should be able to override what a country has decided to do via the democratic process. There is no absolute higher authority to appeal to in a true democracy.
In this case - it's not about suing the government for doing anything outside the law.
Company ABC decides to extract tons from freshwater from country XYZ.
Country ZYZ realizes this is damaging the environment, and puts in some regulations.
Company ABC can now sue country XYZ - just for having good governance.
There are many reasons that company ABC should be able to sue country XYZ ... but the it's so broad that it can lead to problems.
https://www.pressprogress.ca/5_times_canada_got_sued_under_n...
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/01/14/canada-sued-investor...
Canada banned a fuel additive that was only used by one company (foreign) called Ethyl Corp on the basis of health reasons. Ethyl Corp sued, saying the additive was actually banned for political reasons rather than on any scientific grounds, and the Canadian government chose to settle - paying them some $20 million dollars and withdrawing the law they were implementing.
On the face of it, it seems like Ethyl Corp was the bad guy and the Canadian government was pursuing legitimate policy in the public interest, and this is certainly how it was played out in the media. In actual fact, Ethyl Corp presented the Canadian governments own documents coming from the Health and Environmental departments, dating to about a year prior that unequivocally stated that there was absolutely zero danger from using the additive in fuel. In fact, the party that tried to get the law through had had strong historical links with the domestic companies competing with Ethyl Corp.
In all the papers, it was portrayed as 'Company sues government over environmental protections/health protections', and that's how all ISDS cases get presented in mainstream newspapers. 'Company screwing with our laws' sells way more papers than 'company disputes unfair government policies', I guess. I don't know about you, but I don't think it's fair that foreign investors should be unfairly discriminated against in this way. ISDS prevents political parties from favouring their contributors over foreigners by enacting biased laws such as these. Why should Joe Public lose out because one of the parties is trying to cozy up to their largest donors, and why is it fair that international investors get screwed just because they're foreigners? In actual fact, ISDS is a great way of keeping governments accountable by limiting the political favours they can hand out whilst in office.
Regulations aren't grounds for an ISDS suit, unless they're implemented discriminatorily.
[0] http://www.economia-snci.gob.mx/sic_php/pages/importa/sol_co... (p.4 onwards)
If a company believes they can sue, and convince a judge ... well, they'll sue.
I get that it's nuanced, but it's a problem, is my point.
And its their right to have their case heard if that's the case, no?
I'm willing to hear an argument for why TPP would be good for working people in the US. I've never heard anything even close to that. I've heard plenty of hard evidence that it's horrible for working people (and people in general) in the US, while being great for large corporate interests. Sometimes unpopular things are unpopular because they are bad, it's not always a communication problem.
[0] https://www.usitc.gov/press_room/news_release/2016/er0518ll5...
It's a free trade agreement like any other.
The benefits of free trade are well understood.
Consumers get access to a larger variety of goods, at better prices.
Companies get easier access to parts/services in their supply chain.
Etc. etc..
When the government has been lying to you for years about domestic spying, among other things, how do you expect them to follow you blindly on another deal made in the dark?
This country is going to go into chaos in the next ~10-25 years as more and more jobs are automated, unemployment skyrockets, and people refuse to give free money to all the "entitled white heroin users in the Rust Belt." Notwithstanding the effects of global warming ramping up.
Except because of the elitism we get to start this period with Donald Trump at the helm instead of someone at least half sane.
You are being distracted by irrelevancies if you think this was the main issue. And probably quite foolish if you think democracy means 100% of people give their input to 100% of decisions.
The only thing that could improve this situation is that deals should be formed in complete secrecy, with no input from Congress or the Senate and should be ratified solely by the President via a treaty process.
You really want to ensure the Great Unwashed and those incompetents they elect indirectly don't get any where near trade deals, otherwise they might possible make "improvements" such as forcing through openness, accountability, fairness and equality! All of which are totally the anathema of good backroom deals.
It's a pretty seminal work, I'd encourage reading it.
(8000+ citations, https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?view_op=view_citatio... )
http://dfat.gov.au/trade/agreements/tpp/official-documents/D...
You don't want to show your cards in a negotiation, right? So how could the President and Congress say to the American people "this is what we're going to offer and accept from China" and pretend that the Chinese aren't going to hear it too?
Secrecy is often a horrible idea but this is a really complicated issue.
"Black crack smokers in Detroit would rather help themselves with welfare instead of getting a job and helping the rest of the country."
Wow, doesn't that really make you think? Maybe we shouldn't target people by their race, and associate them with negative stereotypes? Maybe we shouldn't dismiss their response to struggle as selfish and stupid? Really gets the noggin goin'.
As for stupid, large complex and overarching new legislation taking away tons of rights relating to everything from food to medical treatment from individuals ... and everybody (including the vast majority of Hacker News I might point out) seems to have a problem with this.
This is not a stupid attitude. Why not ?
Start here: https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp
Actually paying higher taxes is so rare and unknown that it baffles anyone you tell that it's actually allowed and that a few people did it.
But in case you don't know, here's how you're supposed to do it: http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html
So, did you pay higher taxes, say, last year, or not ? Or does it "matter to you that others wouldn't be contributing equally" or something along those lines ?
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/11/eg...
And most of the information I have suggested otherwise.
The problem was that all of the things pertaining to the duties of corporations were optional while things falling on individuals were enforced with the full weight of law.
The people putting together the TPP knew EXACTLY what they were doing and tried to tie together a bunch of unpopular stuff with a bunch of important stuff and ram it all through together.
Given how much effort some of this took to hammer out, they can split the TPP provisions apart and try passing them individually.
The EFF has an entire page on why the TPP was bad. The secrecy was only one part of it. https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp
Some HN headlines related to TPP:
"The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared"
"TPP Text Confirms Massive Loss to Canadian Public Domain"
"UN Experts Say TPP and Fast Track Threaten Human Rights"
"TPP could thwart computer security research and tinkering"
I'm going to stop there because people can search the history for themselves. Hate on Trump all you want, but he did the right thing here.
Here's a couple of common criticisms that will easily identify a commenter as having not read the agreement:
"the TPP (or ISDS) allows companies to sue countries for lost profits" (they don't)
"this is a power grab by pharmaceutical companies" (Pharma was second after Tobacco at being upset with the deal)
"it undermines Net Neutrality" (there are specific points allowing net neutrality regulation, NN was an Obama policy plank FFS)
"TPP worsens environmental or labor conditions" (it actually provides minimum standards that will improve these in developing countries specifically around overfishing, trade of endangered animals, and minimum wage. It's why the deal was endorsed by the WWF)
Then again maybe you did read it that way and still found it not that bad. I admit I didn't read it myself, but then again I'm from Europe so it's not my agreement to check. Still I have some faith in the EFF and other organisations which did read it and found it a dangerous agreement. And I really think it's a good thing that it's now harder to negotiate trade agreements in secret. It doesn't matter what the traditional way to negotiate these was, they have a big impact on the countries that implement them, and people deserve more than just a (representative) YES/NO to a huge number of potentially life-changing provisions at once.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/453zzk/what_tpp_means...
It's also worth noting that they were invited to be part of the TPP negotiation process but declined. The agreement itself is not that difficult to read. It's meant to be used as a practical functional document, after all. The one thing that is a little tricky is that carveouts and exceptions to one mechanism or another may be listed in a separate chapter.
You can say that this deal is what's best for them. But whatever harm killing this deal may have done is much less than the harm from letting the elites decide what's best for them without the courtesy of even an explanation.
I think there were a lot of people that voted for Trump simply because the elites told everyone that they had to vote for Clinton. It's a way to remind the government that the people are in charge.
[1] http://www.marketplace.org/2015/10/06/economy/president-obam...
Whatever your viewpoint on the TPP itself, to negate criticism of it as lacking any "logical legs" is intellectually dishonest at best.
The EFF has a long list of reasons to oppose it here: https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp
This is a good fight -- one I applaud and support the EFF for pursuing relentlessly -- but this is just one issue in a gigantic compromise legislation that has to attain broad legislative support inside the US [3][4] as well as support from the other signatories, of which there are many.
It was in fact a failure of messaging to not get out ahead of, or in response to these vocal oppositions, as the public's ire was allowed to foment.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11893512#11894446 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/world/asia/trans-pacific-... [3] http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/trade-trans-pacific-pa... [4] http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/293344-mcconnel...
I think that, with the exception of environmental policy on the part of the poorer counties, I'd prefer the other countries' notiations. (Other than IP I have no evidence though, as others have said it's hard to come by.)
Sure, but at least they made this cartoon to help the plebs see the light:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_mass_surveilla...
Actually, one might have some (small) hope that Trump is actually libertarian enough to tone the surveillance state down. Not hoping for much though.
Treaties, free trade treaties foremost among them, are almost never public before the final text is available, because if they were they'd never get that far. Too many interests.
Look, it's a free trade agreement. It says, basically, "no tariffs at all for trade between the signatories". Except of course that every signatory has a list of a thousand "but..." clauses to protect whatever proprietary interests have their ear. So the end results is a big mess of exceptions and clarifications, which is why everyone hates it. There is literally something in there in there that everyone will hate! By design!
I mean, look: it's hardly the most important bill of the decade, and I'm not crying that it failed. But to pretend that this was some collusion of the global illuminati to stick it to the hippies, or white nationalists, or whoever you happen to identify with is just insane.
It's a ?!@#!$ trade treaty, for god's sake.
The TPP was full of provisions that would have made profits higher for corporations and very little that would genuinely protect workers and the environment. This is understandable given that most the voices in the room were representing corporations.
"That's a feature, not a bug. Whence this argument that trade negotiations are somehow different from every single other aspect of good governance? For all other mechanisms of government, everyone agrees that transparency is a vital mechanism for preventing corruption, and that whatever inefficiencies it introduces into the system are a necessary evil. Yet somehow free trade agreements operate on a different set of rules; even though time after time it's been shown that this invites boatloads of the exact corruption that government transparency is meant to combat."
(This argument gets trotted out with such reliability in TPP threads that I can just copy-paste my response from a previous one)
Used to be a lot more compromises made in private, to come up with trade offs both sides could live with but the partisan core supporters would shoot down immediately if they knew. Which leads to our current government, where compromise with the other side of any kind is political suicide.
Yeah, because "coalition governments" have worked so well in countries like Italy. Have they hit the 100 mark yet for number of "coalition governments" formed since WWII?
And the Liberal Democrats made out really well in the "coalition government" that was formed in the UK after the 2010 elections. They went from 57 MPs after 2010 to 8 MPs after 2015. Even Charlie Sheen wouldn't call that "winning".
This is a complete strawman argument, and lacks rational coherence.
its ramifications would have affected billions of people just as if it were a new civil and criminal law, that's what was so scary about it. Citizens aren't bound to obey international treaties. That's why we have governments.
A gulf began to widen between the administration and those opposing TPP, and quality independent analysis was much more difficult to come by than fearmongering. A few corporations spoke out in favor of TPP [1], but given their vested interest, they made a poor case of swaying average people. Meanwhile, even mainstream news coverage of TPP tended negative. Hillary Clinton notably had modify her messaging on TPP [2] to be seen as a viable candidate, despite endorsing it before.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11893512#11894446 [2] http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-called-trans-pacific-p...