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Comment by mimo84 | Hacker News Reader

Giving to a private company the ability to effectively sue a government is the worst idea ever. Imagine a world with no regulations because there are damaging the business. Welcome to a world where you need a mortgage if you are sick because there are royalties to be paid to the pharmaceutical companies. One example is already happening: Phillip Morris Honk Kong is suing the Australian government because the laws to discourage people from smoking are damaging their business (here is the link: https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/29064155/tobacco-giant-s... ). This was going on before the TPP even it is not active yet.

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Citizens have been able to sue the Government for a long time, English law is littered with cases where Citizens have won against the state for hundreds of years.

The whole point of a free state is that the entities within that state, people or groups of people (for example, companies) are able to keep their rulers in check.

Let's remember, the Government is sometimes wrong and needs to be kept in check.

Citizens are people. Companies (regardless of mind-boggling US Supreme Court rulings otherwise) are not people. They are not even groups of equal people. Representative democracies represent people, not companies, and that's precisely how it should be. How companies are expected to behave in our societies should be decided by the people.

You know what, I'm starting to think we should make use of that US Supreme Court decision and the ISDS trade rules. Activists incorporating companies in the fields they are interested in, using them as platforms to sue the government for lack of a fair market (for example, starting a renewable energy company and suing over the subsidies given to the fossil fuel industries). Perhaps that'd be an effective way to get these deals rejected or renegotiated (and that includes the existing deals containing ISDS, such as NAFTA).

The New York Times is a company. Should "the people", through their elected representatives, decide what the Times can and can't print?

Yes, and they do. That includes the First Amendment. :-)

So some companies have First Amendment rights, but others don't?

It's not "the worst idea". It's designed to stop countries commandeering or nationalizing assets that a company owns. (Search for "venezuela expropriations" for some recent cases). For that limited purpose it's fine.

Call me socialist but I actually kinda like the idea that my country can just nationalise whatever if we just so feel like it. Sure, it would ruin our reputation, but I like to think sovereignty means something, right?

I tell you what, if I was PM of my country and, say, a foreign company discovered a significant oil field within our territory, I would want to nationalise the shit out of it, reputation be damned.

Why should sovereignty mean that you can disregard the rights of foreigners any more than owning a home should result in a right to take a guest's wallet at gunpoint? Whether or not either of these situations is morally desirable, I don't see how they would be sustainable, as in, why would everybody else put up with you?

To take your example, if my country nationalizes an oil field found and owned by your country's citizens (assuming that my country originally tricked them into searching for oil by promising it'd be theirs to some extent or other when they find it - otherwise why would they search for it in the first place?), why would your country stop at "tarnishing my country's reputation" when it could apply force, ranging from economic sanctions to an actual war?

Sovereignty means having the power to make or change any law.

And our elected leaders should have that power so that bad laws can be fixed.

Imagine if, in pre-civil-war America a lot of British investors had invested in cotton plantations whose profitability depended on slavery. Should Lincoln have said "gee, I guess my hands are tied, banning slavery would be bad for our foreign investors" and done nothing?

You might argue that in the past we had bad laws, but we don't have bad laws any more and all our laws are perfect. But the fact we still employ legislators rather implies we think we might need some legislating done.

Sovereignty means that you have a monopoly on using force within your borders. When you infringe on the interests of foreigners, the foreign sovereign might have objections, and I don't understand how this fact is inconsistent with your sovereignty.

Whether your infringement upon the foreigners' interest is good or bad is an entirely separate question, all I'm saying is that sovereignty does not grant you the ability to automatically get away with it and I don't understand why this word became so fashionable in this context recently (a similar example is defaulting on sovereign debt.)

There may not necessarily be any 'tricking' going on, perhaps our hypothetical oil company started prospecting under one government and there's been an election/regime change since then...

And I guess if the other country can seriously threaten force without bluffing then we never really had sovereignty all along...

Nothing in ISDS stops the state from leaving the treaty and nationalizing anything it wants. The state and people are still supreme. What they can't do is join a free trade treaty, "trick" companies into investing, and then expropriate assets while still enjoying the benefits of free trade.

The problem with TPP is the ISDS goes far beyond these simple goals (the treaty has been "commandeered by corporations", if you like).

But for simple, limited protection of assets in foreign countries, it's a good thing, encouraging inward investment.

Luckily, we have a 4th amendment to stop people from seizing property with impunity on personal whims.

It is designed to remove power from the people and give it to the big corporations.

Companies are essentially groups of people. I'm not sure that taking away the right to sue from groups of people is such a good idea.

I see this as actually giving power back to the people.

No. By this logic, giving any organization power is giving power to the people, because all organizations are "essentially groups of people". But that's clearly fallacious -- in all but the most bizarre cases, the local warlord's crime organization isn't nearly as representative of the will of the people as a democratically elected local government.

Companies are not democracies. Especially multi-national corporations and the lobbying arms of entire industries are in no sense representative of the will of the general public -- or even of their own employees (see unions)! This is significant because it is categorically not possible to actually choose not to interact with a particular corporation. In fact, the historical truth of that observation is the root cause of environmental, health, and many other regulations.

A defining characteristic of democracy is one person, one vote, and it is that characteristic that safeguards the will of the people. There is no corporate structure (other than unrepresentative radical experimental structures) that even conceits to affording one vote to each person. In fact, there's no provision of the TPP that requires the suing company to be publicly traded, so in some cases it may not even be possible to buy votes.

Your statement fails to represent the reality in that corporations are inherently undemocratic. They are groups of people controlled by a few people with all the money and therefore power.

Business's are amoral entities, designed with just a single charter: to increase the bottom line for it's majority stakeholders. Nothing about that is inherently democratic or good for their customers, for the environment, for the nation that company occupies, for anyone not in the company, or even for any one of their bottom tier employees by default. Any adoption of altruistic practices are either part of the companies branding and therefor good for business, or are core beliefs held by the majority stakeholders and are adopted by force. This also works for adoption of not so altruistic practices as well, and we shouldn't leave it up to chance.

If anything, corporate structure creates a multiplier effect on the influence of single humans or small groups of humans thereby corrupting the one-person one-vote intent of democracy. While I agree with the philosophical kernel of the Supreme Court's citizens united ruling that money is free speech, just like many things, at large scale, it has unintended side effects that need to be thwarted by campaign finance reform so that some people don't have MORE free speech then others.

Companies are absolute dictatorships generally owned by a very tiny class of wealthy elite capitalists. Calling them "groups of people" is deeply dishonest.

I see how a lot of people in this thread are just conservative American thinking "government is bad" and "private is good". Very open minded for HN.

>. One example is already happening: Phillip Morris Honk Kong is suing the Australian government because the laws to discourage people from smoking are damaging their business

And because they did sue, Tobacco companies are specifically excluded from the ISDS procedure in TPP.

Don't you see the fallacy here. Tobacco was carved-out primarily because of their unreasonably aggressive lawsuits and not because tobacco is unhealthy. Using reason, we should ban either all companies, because all companies have the power to abuse the system, or ban all companies that are producing arguably unhealthy products. They did neither of those.

Does the TPP include a provision to stop Oil Companies suing over any future regulation to reduce CO2 emissions ?

This is just a "positive" aspect of the TPP so that you can say it has positive things in it. Surely it has a lot of caveats for other industries, companies/lobbies. Typically corporations have lawyers working for them full time.

> Imagine a world with no regulations because there are damaging the business. Welcome to a world where you need a mortgage if you are sick because there are royalties to be paid to the pharmaceutical companies.

What makes you think companies would win such cases?

Secretive courts are unaccountable courts.

Let's say an arbitration court lawyer made a billion-dollar judgement in a corporation's favour, then the corporation offered the lawyer a position as an "expert legal advisor" paying a million dollars a year for very little work. I wouldn't turn down that offer if I was the lawyer, and I wouldn't hesitate to make that offer if I was the corporation.

Even if they wouldn't - isn't the waste of time and money of courts enough? My government has really more important things to spend money on (like healthcare, social services, basic infrastructure) than beat away foreign corporation lawyers.

And that's even before we even begin to discuss the idiotic idea of making your own companies and citizens accountable to foreign entities past local law.

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