The Powers That Be are very unhappy with you and me. They’re also unhappy with senators like Elizabeth Warren, activist groups like Public Citizen, unions like the Communications Workers, and… well, with the majority of us Americans who oppose the establishment’s latest free trade scam.
Despite its benign name, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a cluster-bomb of legalized “gotchas.” TPP empowers global corporations from Brunei, Japan, Vietnam and eight other nations to circumvent and even overturn our local, state and national laws. Those moneyed elites are upset that rabble like us oppose their latest effort to enthrone corporate power over citizen power, and they’re particularly peeved that we’ve found TPP’s trigger mechanism — something called “Investor-State Dispute Settlements.”
That’s a mouthful of wonky gobbledygook, isn’t it? Indeed, ISDS is an intentionally arcane phrase meant to hide its democracy-destroying impact from us. It would create a system of private, international tribunals through which corporations (i.e., “investors”) could sue our sovereign governments to overturn laws that might trim the level of corporate profits that — get this — they “expected” to make.
These tribunals are not part of our public courts of justice but are totally privatized, inherently biased corporate “courts” set up by the UN and the World Bank. A tribunal’s “judges” are corporate lawyers, and they unilaterally decide whether the protections we’ve enacted for workers, consumers, our environment, etc. might pinch the profits of some foreign corporation.
Jefferson, Madison, Adams and the other revolutionaries of 1776 would upchuck at this desecration of our nation’s democratic ideals — and so should we. To join today’s rebellion against the aristocracy of corporate elites, go to www.StopTheTPP.org.
This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
