Posted on 02/05/2002 11:06:20 PM PST by quietolong
Everyone's heard about NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — and all the talk about jobs. But almost no one heard about one obscure section of NAFTA — Chapter 11 — except for multinational corporations who are using it to challenge democracy.
Chapter 11 is only one provision in the 555-page North American Free Trade Agreement — negotiated to promote business among the US, Canada and Mexico. It was supposedly written to protect investors if foreign governments tried to seize their property.
But corporations have stretched NAFTA's Chapter 11 to undermine environmental decisions — the decisions of local communities — even the verdict of an American jury. The cases brought so far total almost four billion dollars.
WILLIAM GREIDER: What offends me most is that these lawyers understood that public laws were gonna come under attack in this system, and they just walked right past the question of where's the American public in this?
BILL MOYERS: They now have the right to sue governments? WILLIAM GREIDER: Right, and sue them directly, without having to get the approval of their own government. And that's one of the features of NAFTA which is distinctively different from all previous trade agreements.
SEN. SHEILA KUEHL: (Chair, California International Trade Policy Committee): First, I was astounded because I really knew nothing about Chapter Eleven. And you know the kind of reaction that you get from people when you say, did you know that one investor in a foreign company can sue the United States because of an environmental protection law in California? People are astounded once they kind of grasp it. BILL MOYERS: Senator Sheila Kuehl chairs a committee examining the impact of US trade agreements on California laws.
SEN. SHEILA KUEHL: I think it's just the tip of the iceberg because, in a way, it opens the idea to foreign investors that wherever they might suffer, as they imagine, under some regulation, under some law, statute passed by a state, all they have to do is file a claim and, you know, it's taken seriously and the United States has to defend itself and the state has to defend itself.
The California case in point began with a chemical — MTBE — that was added to gasoline to help the state clean up its air. But MTBE was found to cause cancer in laboratory animals. And in 1995, it began to show up in drinking water. Soon MTBE investigations were underway. MTBE was found in water around the state — in groundwater for a trailer park 20 miles north of San Francisco, in groundwells of homes, even in famously clear South Lake Tahoe.
BILL MOYERS: But that order didn't sit well with Methanex — a Canadian company that is the world's largest producer of the key ingredient in MTBE. Within months, Methanex invoked Chapter Eleven and claimed that its market share, and therefore its future profits, were being taken away — expropriated — by the governor's action. Allow us to sell MTBE for gasoline in California, the company argued — or pay us $970 million dollars in compensation. MARTIN WAGNER (ATTORNEY, EARTHJUSTICE LEGAL DEFENSE FUND): This is incredible. This is a foreign corporation coming in and saying first of all, that a regulation that the government of California, through normal democratic processes, has decided is important to protect health and the environment — they're saying that California either can't implement this protection or that they get a billion dollars. People should be outraged by that.
Link to NOVA web sight on this story and much more
More reasons to get out of NAFTA No GATT. And NO Fast Track !!!
New Link to show
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/tradingdemocracy.html
This is the kind of thing that makes me hate our sloppily run legislature. Senators are more concerned with getting elected than properly reviewing the Bills before they go to the floor.
We need them to sign a form saying that they have read and fully understand what each Bill contains before they should be permitted to vote on it.
Who says some don't
The lobbyist who wrote the Bill understands all of it and the senator only cares which way he is told to vote on it.
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