TPP: Shifting the Balance of Power — Medium
The
American people are increasingly realizing the perils of the pending
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement between the U.S. and eleven
other countries. After decades of NAFTA-style deals costing millions of
jobs and devastating entire industries, workers across America are
speaking out against this dramatic expansion of failed trade policy. But
because of a little-known provision tucked into this deal, the TPP
would actually stack the deck even further against our workers and
innovative companies across the country.
As
the representative for Rochester, New York, I have never seen a trade
agreement that benefited the American manufacturer or American worker.
There
are hundreds of reasons why the TPP would be a particularly bad deal
for our country. It would force our workers into unfair competition with
countries like Vietnam, where the minimum wage is less than 65 cents an
hour, and it has no effective provisions to address foreign currency
manipulation — the single-most pressing trade issue facing U.S.
manufacturers. For American families, the TPP would open the door to a
flood of unsafe food imports and threaten to raise prices for vital
drugs. It would encourage environmentally destructive practices and do
nothing to address climate change. This
deal would also represent a dramatic step in the wrong direction by
tying the U.S. to countries that do not value the rights of women.
But
worse still is that the TPP would pave the way for an unprecedented
attack on our nation’s sovereign right to protect the health and welfare
of our people, all in the name of corporate profits. This
process, called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), would allow
multinational corporations to challenge U.S. laws they don’t like
outside of the standard judicial system. This could leave laws
on everything from requiring stringent drinking water standards to
raising a state’s minimum wage in the hands of three unelected and
unaccountable arbitrators. It’s blatantly undemocratic, and would
represent a major victory for foreign corporations.
There
are only a handful of these arbitrators in the world, and some are even
allowed to go back and forth between serving as a judge and doing the
bidding of corporations by bringing cases against governments. This
dynamic is ripe for conflicts of interest and would be seen as unethical
in almost any legal system.
