Isn't that special?
by Tom Sullivan
Re: Trans-Pacific Partnership investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals.
Query: If corporations can sue over loss of "expected future profits" they didn't earn, can people get food over loss of "expected future work"?
It has always seemed to me that people should be holding the corporate leash, not wearing the collar. "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all." Yet we seem ready to hand mega-corporations a new and improved leash.
TPP is a "sellout of democracy" by "well-intentioned, sophisticated, realistic people ... used to disregarding democracy when they want to accomplish something important," writes Duke law school's Jedediah Purdy at Huffington Post (emphasis mine):
From what we know of the TPP, it works as an economic policy straitjacket, locking its members into a shared set of market rules. It even brings in "investor-state dispute settlement" -- a fancy term for allowing foreign corporations to sue governments whose lawmaking interferes with their profits, outside the courts of law, in suits resolved by private arbitrators. All of that is fundamentally anti-democratic. It reverses the basic and proper relationship between a political community and its economy. But plenty of Americans are seeking just that reversal. Not all of them believe the market is perfect and magical; but they believe it works, more or less, and that democracy does not. They are more than half right that this democracy, "our democracy" (a phrase that's hard to say without irony), does not work. And that is the reality that makes their anti-democratic agreement so plausible.
I just said it in plain English. That extra-legal process violates not only democratic principles, but all the "Makers" and "personal responsibility" bullshit our corporate Brahmins spew to keep the rest of us in line — especially the poorest among us. But when you are that special, living your hypocrisy is just another of the perks.