No, they aren't going to take your job, crash the economy and rape your daughter.

There's a lot of hot air circulating about those two trade deals, at the moment. Most of it (well, probably all of it actually) being utter bullshit. So, let's dispel some badecon.

"ISDS will allow companies to sue for lost profits":

First and foremost we'll have to deal with the implementation of ISDS, which has everybody's cock and balls in a knot because they think it'll mean companies can sue governments for "lost profits". This isn't true; the case usually held up to defend this line of reasoning is the cigarette company in Australia, Philip Morris, which sued the government following the implementation of plain packaging laws. Philip Morris is not suing for lost profit, but for the expropriation of intellectual property without compensation--which, as it stands, is a fairly solid reason to sue the government.

ISDS is fairly routine when it comes to trade disputes, and most cases revolve around domestic governments discriminating against foreign firms or companies suing against arbitrary and politically-motivated regulation. One of the earliest instances was when Ethyl Corp sued the Canadian government for banning an additive that only Ethyl Corp (a foreign company) used. It was played out in the media as if Ethyl Corp was fighting a government concerned with consumers' health for the sake of their wallets, but when the case came to court Ethyl Corp presented the government's own documents from just a year prior which categorically stated the additive used posted no danger.

When it comes to the second sort of ISDS case, the best example is probably the Hamburg-Vattenfall case. Vattenfall signed a contract with the city of Hamburg to construct a new coal-fire power plant, while the Green Party (ruling Hamburg in coalition at the time) kept arbitrarily raising and creating regulatory standards to stop the creation of the plant. There was practically no empirical basis for their regulations, and they were completely politically-motivated, and Vattenfall finally went through the ISDS proceedings after altering their plans several times to accommodate the regulatory changes. Germany lost the dispute, because it was a pretty clear example of discriminatory regulation.

"Free trade only benefits the one-percent!":

Yeah, bullshit. Consumers benefit the most from free trade, even as a result of things like outsourcing and increasing foreign competition for numerous economic reasons like comparative advantage. But let's just look at the empirics, and we'll be done with this claim pretty quickly. It's well-established that free trade boosts innovation, and from that Nordhaus's paper on Schumpeterian profits estimates that ~2pc of the surplus value created by innovations is captured by the innovators, with the rest being passed on to consumers. And then of course you have respectable labour economists like David Autor elucidating the probable benefits of TPP for American workers.

"TTIP will result in the irreversible privatisation of the NHS":

This is probably the worst, exemplifying the Cult of National Health at its finest. Articles like this one are fairly common with quotes like:

The debate took place on the first day of the British Medical Association's (BMA) annual representative meeting in Liverpool, where doctors argued that the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was designed to meet the interest of private corporations and will open up the health service to privatisation by US firms. [...]

"It will have a deleterious effect on public health and make privatisation of the NHS not only possible but probable. The least we can expect is the exclusion of health and social care and public health policy from the process." [...]

"The correct motion is to kill this treaty dead, not to tolerate it sneaking in and mugging us."

And that's pretty much the extent of the detail in the article. Not only should it be blindingly obvious that no evidence for their assertions is being presented, but doctors are not trade economists. There's nothing revolutionary about TTIP; the things it is implemented and the procedures it is undergoing are tried and tested. It's possible that state monopolies may have to be abolished, but you'd be hard-pressed to call the NHS a monopoly in the first place (and, if you could, you'd be even harder pressed to justify it). And, finally, the EU has clearly said that CETA (the trade deal with Canada) will serve as a template for TTIP, and CETA allows for exemptions for public services which go insofar as to allow certain public monopolies to remain. So shut the fuck up already.

BUT TTP IS EVIL, I READ ABOUT IT ON TUMBLR