Submitted by Marvin Miller

Almost all Americans have heard of ISIS, the self-declared Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Almost no one here has heard of ISDS, the Investor-State Dispute Settlement part of TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement now being secretly negotiated by officials of twelve countries — Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. (As I type this, “spell-check” underlines TPP and ISDS.) But ISDS could do more harm than ISIS.

Profit has been justified as reward for assuming the risk of loss. No longer. A key part of ISDS is the enshrining of corporate profit as a “right”. If a government (State) enacts a law, such as an environmental protection law, a consumer protection law, or a worker protection law, that reduces the expected profits of transnational corporation, the corporation could, under TPP, “sue” the State, in a special tribunal outside the jurisdiction of any government responsible to the people of any country, which could order the State to pay any amount of “compensation” to the corporation. For example, the law that subjects BP to a fine for the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting from the explosion that killed some of the workers on the oil drilling rig, would reduce BP’s profits somewhat. Under TPP, a State could not have such a law. If it did, it could be “sued”.

Governments make laws that make it a crime for an individual to do something that harms or kills someone else. Under TPP, if such things were done by a corporation, they couldn’t be “crimes”. They would just be “disputes” between States and the investors of the corporation. Note that the masters of deceptive language who wrote the title of this part of TPP didn’t call it a dispute between a State and a corporation. In this context it wouldn’t serve the interests of public relations to claim corporate personhood. That would make the two parties the State, to which we all pledged allegiance every day in school, and an abstract entity, a transnational corporation whose interest is to profit as much as possible at our expense.

TPP would, in practice, make corporate profit the supreme ethical value in the world. Any conflict between this “value” and the values of human welfare, held by humanists and people of all religious views, would have to be resolved in favor of profit.

TPP is promoted as having the potential to create jobs in the United States due to increased exports. These will certainly be more than counterbalanced by job losses due to increased imports, as happened with NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) twenty years ago.

General ignorance about TPP is not surprising. Most of our information comes to us from giant corporate media.

The executive branch of our government wants Congress to give it “fast-track” authority on TPP, under which both houses of Congress would have to vote yes or no on the entire agreement, without any amendments, within 90 days after the agreement is sent to them. This would minimize public debate and discussion on a large complex agreement and eliminate the opportunity to determine whether some parts of it are and others are not acceptable as presented.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has spoken out against this proposal. She and our other representatives and senator need to hear people’s views on this subject.