Now That I’ve Primed the Pump…
By 
After a couple of Bernie Sanders post that are currently at something like 750 comments, I’m sure I’ve prepared readers for an in depth discussion of the problems with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, about which everything is terrible.
But the worst feature is an international tribunal of lawyers from a variety of countries that’s empowered to override some laws of member countries and even to overrule the U.S. Supreme Court.
This means attorneys from Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Chile, New Zealand, Peru and Brunei might someday help strike down United States — and California — laws on anything from clean air to labor conditions and movie copyrights.
This has happened before and it’s happening right now. The most prominent previous case involved a Canadian company called Methanex, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, which made and marketed a gasoline additive called MTBE that aimed to cut smog. But MTBE turned out to have noxious odors and taste when it leached from gas station storage tanks into ground water. It also was associated with a higher risk of some cancers.
When California, under ex-Gov. Gray Davis, banned MTBE, Methanex sued in NAFTA’s tribunal and the case was heard in Washington, D.C., far from affected Californians. It took years, and eventually Methanex lost because of MTBE’s health effects, but that case made it clear the day would come when American environmental laws would be overruled by foreign lawyers in the interests of profits for a foreign company.
Canadian lawyers are at it again now, using NAFTA to challenge President Obama’s right to cancel the planned Keystone XL pipeline project because it might cost jobs in Canada.
All this represents a major loss of sovereignty for the United States, a loss likely to be felt more sharply in California than anywhere else, because this state’s smog rules are the toughest in the world. What happens when Japanese auto companies tire of adhering to California smog standards and take their case for loose rules to the Trans-Pacific judicial panel? If their lawyers don’t care much about lung disease and premature heart attacks — both associated with dirty air — we can guess what might happen.
Say this for Sanders, I would absolutely expect him to veto the TPP if it passed through Congress. And that would be a positive.