
The Billion-Dollar Ultimatum - dredmorbius
https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/the-billion-dollar-ultimatum
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dredmorbius
Buzzfeed are running a multi-part, long-form set of articles on a massive
secretly-negotiated rewrite of national legal systems under the guise of
"international trade", though the pacts go far beyond this. The TPP, TTIP,
TiSA, and BITS have at their core the Investor-State Dispute System.

This is a binding, no-recourse court, to which only one party may bring cases
(corporations), with the judge and jury stacked by that party's friends and
business associates, and for which there is no appeal.

While prospects for these treaties are dimming, they're not dead yet, and in
the US and elsewhere, politicians, including President Obama, are engaged in a
last-ditch push for approval.

Support for these pacts runs deep throughout the corporate world, including
much of the information-technology sector: Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Cisco,
Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Verizon, among others.

