re: #98 Eric The Fruit Bat

Remember when Gore was debating Perot over NAFTA and how Perot said that NAFTA would lead to a giant sucking sound of jobs leaving?

Now let’s fast forward to Last Week Tonight when Jon Oliver did his segment on Big Tobacco using a treaty to usurp Australia’s plain packaging laws.

So, assuming that TPA and TTIP survive the 60-day review period and get signed into law, nothing prevents any of these multinationals from pulling the same kind of shenanigans that Phillip Morris did and move IP from country to country in order to get around countries laws-including the US.

So when the Obama Administration claims that TPA and TTIP won’t result in our surrendering our laws and sovereignty-well, history is very cruel teacher. Just ask Germany and their dealings with Vattenfall when Germany announced they were going to retire nuclear plants in 20 years-Vettenfall sued the German government for lost profits (I shit you not).

So are we to assume nothing has been learned from mistakes of treaties dating back more than 20 years?

Also, that trade agreement was between Australia and Hong Kong. Have our laws in the USA been directly and successfully challenged by another country?