NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | July 1, 2016 | PAGE 7
Who benefits from private courts in the TPP?
We’ll Give You One Guess
By Ian Kaplan
The Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP) sets up private “corpo-
rate courts,” with few rules, that
are only open for multinational
companies to sue countries.
Nearly all the winnings in these
“corporate courts” go to the
world’s biggest corporations
and richest people—and most of
the rest goes to the lawyers who
work in these tribunals, accord-
ing to a study published by York
University’s Osgoode Hall Law
School in Toronto.
Investor-state dispute settle-
ment (ISDS) is the official name
of these corporate courts, which
have been included in trade and
investment treaties for more
than 20 years.
A history of bizarre decisions
and outrageous payouts has
convinced many countries to re-
ject the system. Now re-
searchers Gus Van Harten and
Pavel Malysheuski have ana-
lyzed the rulings of those courts.
It turns out that most of the wins
— and 95 percent of the money
awarded — went to the world’s
biggest corporations and to in-
dividuals worth more than $100
million in net worth. They won
more than $8.5 billion in the
cases studied.
Small companies and even
not-quite-super-rich people al-
most never used ISDS courts —
and usually lost when they did.
The big winners are oil and
gas companies, international
banks and the people who own
them, and the very small group
of lawyers and judges who work
on these cases and collect hun-
dreds of millions of dollars in le-
gal fees.
The Osgoode study reports
corporations of $10 billion or
more in revenue won 70.8 per-
cent of the time, while others
were only successful 42.2 per-
cent of the time. They won in the
“merits” stage of their hearings
82.9 percent of the time, versus
a 57.9 percent success rate.
The authors also found that
ISDS “lawyers, arbitrators, ex-
perts and other actors” had
earned an estimated $1.7 billion
from these hearings by the
spring of 2015.
The big losers, of course, are
the working people who think
they have the right to decide the
laws in their own countries and
have them judged in their own
courts, and find they have to pay
out billions of dollars instead.
TPP supporters say that ISDS
is a way of protecting “in-
vestors” from governments that
might abuse them. It turns out a
look at the cases shows that the
investors are who we need to be
protected from.
(Editor’s Note: Ian Kaplan
writes for the AFL-CIO NOW
blog.)
Letter Carriers’ food drive sets national
record with 80 million pounds collected
Responding to the needs of the
hungry, Americans set a new
record by donating 80 million
pounds of food to the National
Association of Letter Carriers’
(NALC) annual Stamp Out
Hunger Food Drive, the union
announced June 20.
In Oregon and Southwest
Washington, Letter Carriers col-
lected 970,000 pounds of nonper-
ishable food.
The food is distributed to lo-
cal food banks, charities, soup
kitchens, pantries and other en-
terprises that feed the needy.
Many of those enterprises had
exhausted the food they had col-
lected during the winter, union
President Fredric Rolando said.
“These results are gratifying,
because they mean that even
more people will be helped,”
Rolando said. “As Letter Carri-
ers, we are honored to be able to
assist people in need. On a daily
basis we see the struggles in the
communities we serve, and we
believe it's important to do all
we can to help.
He praised the organizations
that help with the annual food
drive, held the second Saturday
each May. The food drive’s old
yearly donation record was 77
million pounds.
Federal data show that ap-
proximately one of every seven
U.S. residents — 50 million
people — go to bed hungry each
day. They include millions of
children, veterans, and the eld-
erly, NALC said.
Preliminary collections data
show that eight NALC branches
collected more than 1 million
pounds of food each. Tops on
the list was Branch 1091 in Or-
lando, Florida. The 1,613-mem-
ber local collected 2.233 million
pounds of food.
SWANSON, THOMAS,
COON & NEWTON
will soon become
THOMAS, COON,
NEWTON & FROST
as we welcome our new
partner CHRIS FROST.
Make your union-made sundae using these products made by members of
United Food & Commercial Workers; the Machinists Union; Teamsters; the
Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union; and the
United Auto Workers.