Obama intends to exempt multinational corporations from US laws
A leaked document reflects that the Obama administration is negotiating an international agreement to allow multinational corporations, operating inside the U.S., to be exempt from many US laws. And it gets worse. The agreement sets up an international tribunal to decide which U.S. laws the multinational corporations can ignore. The agreement is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (“TPP”).
The negotiations surrounding the TPP have been shrouded in extreme secrecy. That’s outraged members of Congress from both sides of the aisle:
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has been so incensed by the lack of access as to introduce legislation requiring further disclosure. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has gone so far as to leak a separate document from the talks on his website. Other Senators are considering writing a letter to Ron Kirk, the top trade negotiator under Obama, demanding more disclosure.
The leaked text from one of the trade documents may reflect why there’s been such an effort to keep the TPP discussions under wraps. Lori Wallich, head of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch stated yesterday that
Via closed-door negotiations, U.S. officials are rewriting swaths of U.S. law that have nothing to do with trade and in a move that will infuriate left and right alike have agreed to submit the U.S. government to the jurisdiction of foreign tribunals that can order unlimited payments of our tax dollars to foreign corporations that don’t want to comply with the same laws our domestic firms do.
She maintains that the TPP would
Limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S. boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms;
Extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries;
Establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges; and
Allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.
As many of you know, I have been sounding the alarm about multinational corporations for several years. The multinational corporation’s goal is profit and profit is inhibited by national boundaries with their varying political and legal systems. It may come as a shock to some of you, but the multinational corporation does not support the U.S. Constitution. Rather, its aim is uniform legal systems. It would celebrate the death of the nation-state.
The fact that the Obama administration has been secretly negotiating with multinational corporations to enter into an agreement that undercuts US sovereignty should outrage every red-blooded Patriot.
[Author’s note: In fairness to Obama, his support for the TPP is no different from the internationalist presidents that preceded him. But it should come as no shock to anyone that Obama attacked Bush over his support for the TPP in 2008.]
