Tobacco: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

There was a great John Oliver segment on the tobacco industry and how it's evolved to become even more profitable worldwide than it ever was in the US. Highly recommended to watch it. [VIDEO]

A great deal of the Chamber's funding comes from Tobacco companies. In fact there are conference rooms named for them. If you haven't seen Last Week Tonight's take on the international bad behavior of the Tobacco companies I really encourage you to check it out. It's about 18min long, but well worth it: [VIDEO] They've responded to a shrinking market in the US and other highly developed nations, by doubling down on their efforts to sell to everyone in the rest of the world. And woe to the country with a smaller GDP than Phillip Morris who decides to try to put restrictions on a pack of smokes.

Keep watching - the corporate stuff starts a few minutes in, with the tobacco industry throwing around threats to various countries legislatures to stop those legislatures from passing Australian-style packaging laws and other public-health regulations. edit: if you're in a hurry, try starting at about 5:55 [VIDEO]

Those pre-TPP cases are nothing compared to the future combined scope of TPP (Pacific), TTIP (Europe) and RCEP (China, Korea, India, and other Asian countries). Never say there is nothing you can do. Tell other people about ISDS. Share the videos [1][2][3][4]. Jon Oliver's video [4] about the Philip Morris tobacco ISDS lawsuit against Australia (for brown paper packaging) caused such an outcry that TPP negotiators were forced to exclude the entire tobacco industry from ISDS. This is the first time such an industry-specific carve-out has appeared in a trade agreement. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO]

Not a fan of Trump but this is a good thing. See this exert from John Oliver on the effect of such trade deals; [VIDEO] And that's the existing trade deals, TPP would have made it much worse. There is a reason why democratically elected governments need to protect their sovereignty. The scope of the legal provisions along with the requirement to use easily corruptible mediation is superfluous to free trade. In addition, I don't understand those that think boxing out Russia and China from the rest of Europe and Asia is a good thing.

Most countries in the EU are taking steps to combat this and the number of smokers is steadily diminishing, even if too slowly. I'm more worried about the non smoker countries which the tobacco companies are seeing as new territories to conquer. John Oliver did a good segment about that two years ago [VIDEO]

The comic[1] that I posted in the previous thread has a nice overview about the situation. The specific issue the EFF article is pointing out is how the ISDS is designed to trumps national sovereignty, so business can strong-arm countries into removing any law they don't like. It works more or less like this: 1) pass TPP as a treaty , which by definition has the same power as a constitutional amendment. (this is probably a serious bug in the constitution). This means TPP trums congress. 2) TPP sets up an international tribunal (ISDS) that hears complaints from businesses. (i.e. "Australia is hurting our tobacco sales with their plain packaging laws"[2]) 3) The tribunal, as mentioned in this article, would be staffed by, "three private-sector attorneys who take turns being the judge and the corporate advocate." This conflict of interest would be a serious violation of ethics requirements in most legal systems. 4) The tribunal rules that your local law violates some foreign requirement, as determined by the ISDS and their business-assigned judges, and the local legislature is forced to repeal the law. ("Australia's plain packaging laws is seizing the trademarks of Philip Moriss, in violation of a 1993 trade agreement if we carefully abuse the agreement's language") That's the short version, and I'm leaving out some details, of course. It should work as a decent overview of ISDS is a threat to national sovereignty. [1] [LINK] [2] this example is covered well by John Oliver: [VID

They adjust their strategies to local conditions. In EU they can do little. Elsewhere, they actually sue countries [0] to keep their rights to advertise death. [0] - [VIDEO]