2016 Postmortem

the negotiations were negotiated in secret, with only lobbyists, corporate interests, participating in drawing this thing up.

A huge, huge problem with it is the structure for investor-state dispute settlements -- if the TPP passed, it would mean that businesses can sue governments in other countries if those businesses think that the practices of those countries are costing them even POSSIBLE revenue.

see: http://www.citizen.org/investorcases

Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) Attacks: Empowering Multinational Corporations to Attack our Domestic Laws, Demand Taxpayer Compensation


At the heart of today's "trade" agreements are provisions that grant multinational corporations extraordinary new rights and powers. This system – called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) – empowers individual foreign corporations to skirt domestic courts and sue governments before a panel of three corporate lawyers.

ISDS cases are decided by tribunals composed of three corporate lawyers that are authorized to order governments to pay unlimited sums of taxpayer money to corporations that claim our domestic laws or government decisions violate special new rights provided in ISDS agreements. Payments include what the three corporate lawyers deciding the case surmise are the "expected future profits" that the corporation would have earned in the absence of the public policy it is attacking. There is no outside appeal. Many of these lawyers rotate between acting as tribunal "judges" and as the lawyers launching cases against the government on behalf of the corporations. Under ISDS, multinational corporations are provided greater rights than residents of the countries signing these ISDS agreements or domestic firms.