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New Interactive Map Shows TPP Would Expand Power to Attack Texas and Federal Laws

  

Commentary:  El Paso, Texas – A new interactive map shows how enactment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would dramatically expand U.S. exposure to multinational corporate demands for taxpayer compensation using the TPP’s controversial “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) system. Extensive research on where the U.S. subsidiaries of corporations based in TPP countries are located reveals that implementation of the TPP would significantly increase the chances that Texas’s laws, court rulings, regulations or other state government actions would be challenged. 

The ISDS system at the heart of the TPP would grant new rights to thousands of foreign corporations to sue the U.S. government before a panel of three corporate lawyers. These lawyers would be able to award the corporations unlimited sums to be paid by America’s taxpayers, including for the loss of expected future profits. These foreign corporations need only convince the lawyers that federal, state or local policy or action violates the new rights that TPP would grant them. Their decisions would not be subject to appeal, and the amount awarded would have no limit.

Currently under all 50 existing U.S. treaties with ISDS, 805 multinational corporations based in Texas have rights to attack U.S. federal or state laws using ISDS tribunals. The TPP would newly empower more than 842 additional multinational corporate subsidiaries from TPP countries located in Texas to launch investor-state cases against the U.S. government. If ISDS were included in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) now under negotiation with European countries, the number of multinational corporations based in Texas that would be empowered to use the dangerous mechanism would rise to 2,851.

For Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), who has yet to join the vast majority of congressional Democrats and the Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominees in publicly opposing the TPP, these data highlight why many supporters of past trade agreements now oppose the TPP because it would expand the controversial ISDS regime.

Under existing treaties, relatively few foreign investors are empowered to use the ISDS regime against the United States, which is why the United States has come close to losing cases,but to date has not been ordered to pay compensation. Implementation of the TPP would double overall U.S. exposure, an unprecedented increase in U.S. investor-state liability that recent Columbia Law School analyses show would make it highly probable the United States will lose future cases.

As the White House escalates its push for a vote on the TPP in the lame-duck session with Cabinet officials traveling the nation for pro-TPP events, an explosive four-part investigative exposé by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hamby, reveals how the Justice Department, State Department and other government lawyers and even some of the inside players in the ISDS system, view it as a threat to the U.S. justice system. Earlier this week hundreds of prominent pro-free trade law and economics professorscalled on Congress to oppose the TPP because it would greatly expand the extra-judicial tribunal system.

The interactive map released today, shows additional multinational corporations located in every U.S. state that would be able to launch ISDS attacks against the United States were the TPP to be implemented as well as if the TTIP were completed with ISDS included.

Under existing U.S. pacts, nearly $3 billion in taxpayer money has been paid to corporations by other countries for toxics bans, land-use rules, regulatory permits, and water and timber policies, among others. More than $70 billion is pending under U.S. treaties in corporate claims against medicine patent policies, pollution cleanup requirements, climate and energy laws, and other public interest polices.

While the Obama administration is pushing for the TPP and TTIP pacts, some countries have begun to withdraw from the system after facing billions in claims, including South Africa, India, Indonesia and other nations. After Germany was hit with two major ISDS claims against its decision to phase out nuclear power and its new coal-fired electric plants regulations, the government notified the European Union that it could not accept a TTIP pact that expanded the existing ISDS regime.