New Interactive Map Shows TPP Would Expand Multinational Corporations' Power to Attack U.S. Laws Using System That Hundreds of Law Professors, VP Candidate Kaine Cite as Reason to Oppose Pact

A new Public Citizen interactive map shows how enactment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would dramatically expand U.S. exposure to multinational corporate demands for taxpayer compensation using the controversial "investor state dispute settlement" (ISDS) system.

Under existing treaties, relatively few foreign investors are empowered to use the ISDS regime against the United States, which is why the U.S. has come close to losing cases, but to date has not been ordered to pay compensation. Implementation of the TPP would double the U.S. exposure, an unprecedented increase in U.S. investor-state liability that recent Colombia Law School analyses will make it highly probable that the U.S. will lose future cases.

As the White House escalates its push for a vote on the TPP in the lame-duck session, an explosive four-part investigative expose by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hamby revealed how Justice Department, State Department and other government lawyers, and even some of the inside players in the ISDS system, view it as a threat to the U.S. justice system. Earlier this week, hundreds of prominent pro-free trade law and economics professors called on Congress to oppose the TPP because it would greatly expand the extra-judicial tribunal system.

The ISDS system at the heart of the TPP would grant new rights to thousands of foreign corporations to sue the U.S. government before a secret panel of three corporate lawyers. These lawyers would be able to award the corporations unlimited sums to be paid by America's taxpayers, including for the loss of expected future profits. These foreign corporations need only convince the lawyers that a U.S. law or safety regulation violates their TPP rights. Their decisions would not be subject to appeal, and the amount awarded would have no limit.

The interactive map, released today, shows additional multinational corporations located in every U.S. state that would be able to launch ISDS attacks against the United States if the TPP were implemented as well as if the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) (now being negotiated with European countries) were completed with ISDS included. If one counts all corporations in all countries covered by all 50 existing U.S. investor-state pacts, 9,829 U.S. subsidiaries owned by 4,100 foreign corporations from those 50 nations can currently launch investor-state cases against the U.S. government. The TPP alone would double U.S. ISDS exposure, with the additional 10,085 U.S. subsidiaries owned by 3,682 additional corporations in TPP countries not now covered by U.S. ISDS pacts newly able to launch investor-state cases against the U.S. government. The TTIP would newly empower the more than 26,900 U.S. subsidiaries of more than 12,100 European Union parent corporations invested here.

Under existing U.S. pacts, nearly $3 billion in taxpayer money has been paid to corporations by other countries for toxics bans, land-use rules, regulatory permits, and water and timber policies, among others. More than $70 billion is pending under U.S. treaties in corporate claims against medicine patent policies, pollution cleanup requirements, climate and energy laws, and other public interest polices.

While the Obama administration is pushing for the TPP and TTIP pacts, other countries have begun to withdraw from the system after facing billions in claims, including South Africa, India, Indonesia and other nations. After Germany was hit with two major ISDS claims against its decision to phase out nuclear power and its new coal-fired electric plants regulations, the government notified the EU that it could not accept a TTIP pact that expanded the existing ISDS regime.