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TPP Investment Map: New Privileges for 29,000 Companies

The controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would grant multinational corporations extraordinary new powers to attack the laws we rely on for a clean environment, essential services, and healthy communities. Corporations would be empowered to bypass domestic courts and directly “sue” the U.S. and other TPP governments before tribunals of three corporate lawyers that sit outside of any domestic legal system. These lawyers would be authorized to order governments to hand unlimited sums of taxpayer dollars to the corporations for laws they say violate their new TPP rights, including compensation for the loss of “expected future profits.”

This extreme “investor-state” system already has been included in a series of U.S. “free trade” agreements, forcing taxpayers to hand more than $475 million to corporations for toxics bans, land-use rules, regulatory permits, water and timber policies and more. Just under U.S. pacts, more than $54 billion remains pending in corporate claims against medicine patent policies, pollution cleanup requirements, climate and energy laws, and other public interest polices.  

The TPP would more than double the United States’ exposure to investor-state attacks against U.S. policies, spelling an unprecedented increase in U.S. investor-state liability. The TPP would newly empower more than 1,000 corporations in TPP countries, which own more than 10,000 additional subsidiaries in the United States, to launch investor-state cases against the U.S. government. No other U.S. pact has subjected the United States to such an increase in investor-state liability. Past ISDS-enforced agreements have been almost exclusively with developing countries with few investments here. The United States has already nearly lost ISDS cases to firms from Canada – the only major capital exporter among our past ISDS-enforced agreements – and we only dodged the ISDS bullet because cases were dismissed on narrow procedural grounds. The TPP would also expose other TPP governments to a potential wave of investor-state cases by newly empowering more than 5,200 U.S. corporations to launch investor-state cases against TPP governments on behalf of more than 19,000 subsidiaries. 

Below are the maps of the locations of multinational corporations that would be empowered with these new rights if Congress were to pass the TPP.  In total, U.S. and foreign corporations with more than 75,000 subsidiaries would be able to use the expansive rights under TPP. These corporations could challenge the local zoning and environmental laws of your community, so zoom in using the “+” button to see which corporations are in your city.  Click on the dots to see the names of the corporations and their industry. The color of the marker indicates the country of the parent company. The red lines on the map are the borders of the districts of the U.S. House of Representatives. Click here for a full list of companies based in TPP countries that operate in the United States, sorted by congressional district.

  = Corporation based in Australia   = Corporation based in Vietnam
  = Corporation based in Canada   = Corporation based in Singapore
  = Corporation based in Japan   = Corporation based in Mexico
  = Corporation based in Malaysia   = Corporation based in New Zealand
   = Corporation based in Peru   = Corporation based in Brunei
  = Corporation based in Chile  
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Below is a map of U.S. corporations operating in the TPP countries. Zoom into a specific country by double clicking on the map to view the corporations located there.

 
 
 
 
 
 
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Each country, with the exception of Brunei, has hundreds of foreign corporate affiliates established in its territory that would gain new rights under the investor-state dispute system of the TPP. The table below lists just the number of U.S.-owned firms in each other TPP country. It also gives the total number of firms in the United States owned by corporations in TPP countries. The TPP countries that are not already covered by U.S. investor-state pacts include: Australia, Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Vietnam. Corporations in those countries own 10,119 of the 18,871 U.S. subsidiaries listed below.

Number of U.S. Corporations in TPP Countries & TPP Corporations in the U.S.

 Australia

 8,298

 Brunei

 44

 Canada

 25,339

 Chile

 1,332

 Japan

 6,509

 Malaysia

 1,996

 Mexico

 7,705

 New Zealand

 1,544

 Peru

 587

 Singapore

 2,556

 United States

 18,871

 Vietnam

 664

This table indicates, for example, that 8,504 U.S. corporate affiliates are established in Australia, while 17,708 corporate affiliates from the other TPP countries are established in the United States.

The source of information on cross-registered firms is Uniworld’s foreign firms database.