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Corporations Reveal What They Want in New NAFTA: Expanded Protections to Make It Less Risky to Outsource Jobs and More Power to Attack Public Interest Laws

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The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) gave vast new powers to corporations that make it easier to outsource jobs and attack the environmental and health laws on which we all rely. Deals like NAFTA granted multinational corporations the power to sue the U.S. government in front of a tribunal of three corporate lawyers. These lawyers can order U.S. taxpayers to pay the corporations unlimited sums of money, including for the loss of expected future profits. Under NAFTA, investors have grabbed $392 million in attacks on natural resource
policies and environmental and health safeguards. The demand to eliminate this controversial system — formally known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) — during NAFTA renegotiations is a rare point of unity across the political spectrum, but a powerful coalition of corporate interests is desperately trying to salvage the alarming powers they were able to insert into NAFTA.