by Dee McLachlan
The Australian Senate is holding an inquiry into the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership — the ominous TPP. This is your last chance to make a submission. Your action is needed!
At Gumshoe we have done several articles on the TPP, but luckily — through a GetUp campaign — money was raised to produce a report on the trade deal. Dr. Kyla Tienhaara (Australian National University) produced a report entitled:
THE CANARY IN THE COALMINE: What Canada’s experience with Investor-State Dispute Settlement tells us about Australia’s future under the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The Secret Dirty Dealings
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement is the largest regional trade deal in history — and perhaps the most controversial. The deal was secretly crafted by corporate specialists over seven years, and the document was under lock and key – with the media and public barred from participation.
Encompassing 11 Pacific Rim nations — of which the United States is one — this deal sets new terms for global business. At the heart of the TPP are expanded powers for multinational corporations — through the highly controversial Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions. These would allow multinational corporations to sue the Australian government in secret extrajudicial tribunals, adjudicated by corporate lawyers.
In these ISDS disputes, these tribunals can award corporations unlimited sums, including for loss of future expected profits — and all paid by Australian taxpayers.
Senate Inquiry
Right now, the Senate is holding an inquiry – and their recommendations are Australia’s last line of defense against the TPP.
Dr Tienhaara’s report illustrates some of the possible costs of ISDS for Australia — this based on available global data and a direct comparison with the experience of Canada under Chapter 11 of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
She suggests the ISDS is a Corporate Assault on Democracy.
Canada is an excellent comparator to Australia, Dr Tienhaara explains, owing to a comparably sized economy, and similar economic and trading activities.
Canada then is Australia’s “canary in the coal mine“, whose experience under NAFTA gives us a preview of the ISDS environment that might emerge in Australia under the TPP.
Despite enormous public concern over the deal in Australia and abroad, the Turnbull Government has flatly refused to undertake an independent cost analysis.
Although it is called a “trade” agreement, the TPP is not about trade. Of its 30 chapters, only six deal with traditional trade issues. Rather, the TPP trades away our democratic right to create laws in the public interest
Dr Tienhaara’s full report here
The video below explains how the Australian government signed the Lima Declaration back in 1975, and how that impacted Australia.
The groupie photo. Were they all told to wear black suits that day?
Won’t find anything in the msm about this informative report and the Lima declaration.
Won”t find anything stated by our shock jokes about this informative report and the Lima declaration.
Won’t find anything reported from our billion a year ABC about this informative report and the Lima declaration.
Won’t find anything from any worker’s unions about this informative report and the Lima declaration.
Won’t find anything from the phoney controlled left wing pretenders about this informative report AND the Lima declaration. (Wake up Get Up!)
Won’t find any report on the truth of this report from any past Prime Minister or cabinet member. What you say now Malcolm?
Not likely to hear about any of our paid politicians raising matters in this informative report and the Lima declaration.
So Pauline, Derryn, Roberts et al. why are you in Parliament?
TIME TO BLACKBALL AUSTRALIA’S TRAITOR MEDIA CON-GLOMERATES WITH THEIR ANTI-AUSTRALIAN, ANTI-DEMOCRATIC GLOBALIST CORPORATE MATE(s) FASCIST AGENDA.
For the uninformed, look up; ‘NWO exposed by insider’ (Dr. Day, 20th March 1969 as reported by Dr, Dunegan)
Also to be found here on Gumshoenews.
The lying traitorous msm and our politicians want to bring in totalitarian states and societies, seriously…. for the plan to enslave you and your heirs to the fascist, Leninist, Hitleristic, communist, collectivist UN agenda.
Trump is awakened to this and that is why the controlled msm globalists are trying to screw him for Clinton.
I hear Trump presented a address on the globalists and it is being referred to as his ‘Gettysberg” (sp) address. I would link it if I presently had the means.
Peasants beware, wake up to the lies and the betrayal of those who suffered for our freedoms in WW11, time to remember them!
Ned, here’s your Gettysburg link.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441458/donald-trump-contract-american-voter-gettysburg-address
You can listen to Trump from about 3.30 talking about Washington corruption and NAFTA.
27 Oct’16
Freedom from what ? If Hitler had won would we really be any more enslaved than we are now?
Berry, you apparently know nothing of the real history of World War II. If Germany had won the war, we may have been rid of the criminal Banksters that now run our lives and are stealing our countries from us.
Sorry Berry, I misread your comment.
Mal, have any of us even got a basic idea of “the real history of WWII”?
Jim and Gerry seem to have nailed it for WWI. I wish they would attend to WWII. Tens of millions of casualties because someone was a smart-ass? That seems to be the way it all goes….
Mary, I had lunch with Jim and gerry in Edinburgh last week. I am happy to tell you that they are indeed working on WW2.
Just like the raft of civilian restrictions “sealed” in the past 20 years, this deal was up and running well before anything was signed: The entire socio-economic system is nothing more than a form of Black Mass.
Gee, Berry, thanks for directing me to Black Mass on youtube which is about Whitey Bulger and his FBI friend.
Now you may think I am nought but a broken record, but poor old Whitey (now in jail, maybe 80-ish) says that he too was turned into a killer by mind-control programming.
He had been in jail before, so maybe that’s where it happened.
I have wondered if our capture and torture of ordinary prisoners is meant so “we” can have a pool of killers to be let out of jail “when needed.”
I promise I will say something more pleasant any day now. Hey, the Hadron collider didn’t collide.
But that means I’ll have to hoover. Drat.
Mary, just because the media tell us a killer is sentenced to jail means that he/she will go there, or even stay there.
OOPS, meant to say, “does not mean that they will go there, or even stay there.
Or even if they say Antony Kidman died, did he die?
Or did he do a Ken Lay? Are they still in the building?
Communism-lite is rapidly metastasizing into Faschism-lite. Heaven help us if we allow them to drift away from the term “lite”.
Dee, there is a reason why Turnbull refuses to have an inquiry, and that is because this agreement has nothing to do with trade. Even the dispute resolution procedures, as objectionable as they are, are not the real reason behind this deal. It is all about the so-called Clinton/Obama “pivot to Asia” by which it is intended that the US will do all in its power to hinder the inevitable rise of China to dominant status in the region.
Australia, as is its habit, meekly goes along with this dangerous policy, notwithstanding that China is our largest trading partner by a considerable margin and any detriment to China inevitably deleteriously affects us.
Clinton has resiled from her earlier support for the T PP, but if elected, a dollar to a doughnut she will switch tack again in a microsecond.
As her election almost inevitably will mean war, the whole issue may become academic anyway.
Her election, or anyone’s elecion can’t mean war as that power rests with Congress.
Yes, James, I know I am being silly, given that Congress has been giving away its warmaking powers since maybe 1952, but hope springs eternal.
Signed,
Hopeful
Mary, you have a touching faith in the restraint powers of Congress ove a warmongering President. Unfortunately as you allude to, history does not bear you out. There is also the not so small problem that Congress is even more willing to go to war than HRC. There is nothing quite so dangerous as a wounded beast, and the US is on the downward slippery slope, unable to adjust to the realities of a multipolar world.
One of my biggest fears, as I discussed in an article in Consortium News of 19 October is that they will take us down with them.
James, who do you think runs Congress? There wouldn’t be 535 persons (or 534 if we exclude Senator Rand Paul, MD) at Capitol Hill who are just bellicose by nature, would there? What is stirring “the US” to war? (Note my quote marks.)
Eisenhower called them the military industrial complex. One needs to add “intelligence” to that. I also like Peter Dale Scott’s term “the deep state” since adopted by a number of writers.
See below re “lunch” with Gerry Docherty and Jim MacGregor.
Yay for their new investigations….
Firm as my native rock
I have withstoof the shock,
of England, Denmark, Rome and the world!