ISDS: A corporate cluster bomb to obliterate our people's sovereignty

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.

You're currently reading an archived version of Jim Hightower's work.

The latest (and greatest?) observations from Jim Hightower are only now available at our Substack website. Join us there!

Jim Hightower's Radio Lowdown
Jim Hightower's Radio Lowdown
ISDS: A corporate cluster bomb to obliterate our people's sovereignty
Loading
/

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.”

Enjoying Hightower's work? Join us over at our new home on Substack:

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 (ie, “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.

I’m making moves!

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve started a Substack newsletter for all of our content. You’ll still find our older, archived materials here at hightowerlowdown.org, but the latest (and greatest?) observations from Jim Hightower are only now available at our new Substack website.

Check out jimhightower.substack.com »

Send this to a friend