ISDS: A Corporate Cluster Bomb to Obliterate Our People's Sovereignty

Jim Hightower Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist

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 (ie, "investors") could sue our sovereign governments to overturn laws that might trim the level of corpotate 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.

This is Jim Hightower saying… 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.StopTPP.org.

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This has been reposted from Jim Hightower's website.

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks. Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top. He publishes a populist political newsletter, “The Hightower Lowdown.” He is a New York Times best-selling author, and has written seven books including, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There’s Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

Posted In: Allied Approaches, From Jim Hightower

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