If there is a US law forbidding disclosure, name the law.
Can you recall anything in the Constitution that establishes secret treaties?
Is there a prior treaty that states the text of all treaties can be hidden from the people?
To Congressmen who say they cannot reveal what is in a treaty that will adversely affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, Rappoport says:
Wrong. You're lying. You can reveal secret text. In fact, it's your duty. Otherwise, you're guilty of cooperating in a RICO criminal conspiracy.
A Corporate Coup d'Ã"degreestat
What is going on was predicted by David Korten in his 1995 blockbuster, When Corporations Rule The World. Catherine Austin Fitts calls it a "corporate coup d'etat."
This corporate coup includes the privatization and offshoring of the judicial function delegated to the US court system in the Constitution, through Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions that strengthen existing ISDS procedures.
As explained in The Economist, ISDS gives foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever the government passes a law to do things that hurt corporate profits -- such things as discouraging smoking, protecting the environment or preventing a nuclear catastrophe. Arbitrators are paid $600-700 an hour, giving them little incentive to dismiss cases. The secretive nature of the arbitration process and the lack of any requirement to consider precedent give wide scope for creative judgments -- the sort of arbitrary edicts satirized by Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
To date, the highest ISDS award has been for $2.3 billion to Occidental Oil Company against the government of Ecuador over its termination of an oil-concession contract, although the termination was apparently legal. Under the TPP, however, even larger and more unpredictable judgments can be anticipated, since the sort of "investment" it protects includes not just "the commitment of capital or other resources" but "the expectation of gain or profit." That means the rights of corporations extend not merely to their factories and other "capital" but to the profits they expect to receive. Just the threat of a massive damage award for impairing "expected corporate profits" could be enough to discourage prospective legislation by lawmakers.
The Trade in Services Agreement adds additional barriers to proposed legislation. TiSA involves 51 countries, including every advanced economy except the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The deal would liberalize global trade in services covering close to 80% of the US economy, including financial services, healthcare, education, engineering, telecommunications, and many more. It would restrict how governments can manage their public laws, and it could dismantle and privatize state-owned enterprises, turning those services over to the private sector. It would also block the emerging trend to return privatized services to the public sector, by limiting or prohibiting governments from creating or reestablishing public utilities and other "uncompetitive" forms of service delivery.
It seems that the TPP, TTIP and TiSA are not about the sort of "free trade" that would free local businesses to sell abroad. They are about freeing international corporations from the government regulation necessary to protect the economy, the people, and the environment. They are about preserving privatized monopolies and preventing competition from the public sector. And they are about moving litigation offshore into private arbitrary tribunals -- the sort of tribunal that might have lost Alice her head, if she had not awakened from her bizarre dream.
Urge your local representative to vote "no" on Fast Track. For more information, see --
Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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