Saturday 18 April 2015

A Massive Shift of Power

Mark Dearn writes:

From Pakistan to the Philippines, Fiji to Hawaii, and all across Britain, people are taking to the streets today to fight the “free trade” deals threatening the foundations of democratic government.

In Britain, this burgeoning movement is coalescing around the secretive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

TTIP is one of a number of deals which together seek to achieve completion of the “world market”: a world dictated to by corporations and their political handmaidens.

Although nominally a free trade deal, in reality TTIP ushers in a massive shift of power to transnational capital.

This will lead to job losses, the privatisation of our public services (and the blocking of any attempts at renationalisation), the erosion of social, health and environmental protections and the eradication of equality before the law through a system of corporate courts for suing states.

The European Commission (EC) is negotiating the deal on behalf of all 28 EU national governments. It is propagating a series of myths in its attempt to secure TTIP.

The British government is matching it step for step, repeatedly articulating bogus claims of growth, jobs and more money in every family’s pocket.

Both have been forced onto the defensive.

TTIP was first announced in 2013 by Barack Obama.

Since then, assertive campaigning by trade unions, grassroots activists and a small clutch of NGOs — aided by a series of leaks of key texts — has dismantled the shallow propaganda shrouding the deal.

The framing of TTIP as a free trade deal is false.

Tariffs between the EU and USA do not apply on 70 per cent of traded goods. Average tariffs are around 3 per cent.

TTIP is not about trade at the border, it is about reaching behind the border to adjust the standards that have been crafted to protect our labour rights, food safety, our health and the functioning of the economy.

On growth, we are told that TTIP will make us all wealthier. In the words of Tory Party chairman Grant Shapps, “free trade is magic.”

More magical are the assertions of the largely discredited economic model repeatedly relied on to conjure growth projections which even neoliberal economists dismiss as “mere opinion.”

Just this week, German economy minister Sigmar Gabriel said he doesn’t believe these “wondrous calculations.”

His words echo Ken Clarke’s admission in a private meeting with NGOs that TTIP’s growth claims are “not credible.”

Yet, if you write a letter to your MP, the likely response you will receive is that TTIP will make you better off. The Lib Dems think Britain will be £10 billion a year better off.

On jobs, we are told that TTIP will save the day.

Yet dig in to the depths of the flawed studies commissioned by TTIP’s advocates, and it becomes clear that TTIP will cost at least 600,000 jobs across the EU.

No wonder all British trade unions are opposed to the deal.

On standards and regulations, we are told that TTIP will set a “new global standard.”

Yet TTIP’s deregulation agenda, which lies at the core of the deal, seeks to “harmonise” wildly divergent standards, which in corporate parlance represent “barriers to profit.”

Take, for example, the stricter US regulations on derivatives trading and bank size, which the European Commission (EC), cheered on by Britain, wants removed; the 1,377 ingredients banned in cosmetics in the EU against the 11 banned in the US; the rampant non-medicinal use in the US of antibiotics to promote the growth of cattle, a key factor in the global health crisis of antibiotic resistance and the 82 pesticide ingredients banned in the EU but allowed in the US, variously linked to cancer, birth defects and negative impacts on childhood development.

The US approach favours business through prioritising the costs it faces from regulation above the benefits to society.

Consequently, no chemical has been banned in the US since 1991 and there is no ban at all on asbestos.

At the outset, TTIP was written by big business.

The EC engaged in 119 secret meetings with big business ahead of TTIP’s announcement. It then placed a 30-year ban on public access to key documents.

The prominence of the interests of capital over people was made abundantly clear.

After being chided by EC ombudsman Emily O’Reilly in January, the EC began to release some negotiating texts, but didn’t adhere to the demand to publish a full list of all public and non-public documents and the consolidated texts that will form the final treaty.

But we have already learned enough to demonstrate the pre-eminence of business interests in TTIP.

A “regulatory co-operation council” will take an agenda-setting role within the EU’s processes for drafting regulations.

The “stakeholders” with close access to this council will be primarily formed of big business interests.

Business will have an “early warning” of regulations before they see the light of day.

As the European Consumer Organisation BEUC states, this will create a “surreal form of institutionalised lobbying.”

The huge increase in investor rights through a parallel corporate court system known as “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) is perhaps the most controversial element of TTIP, so much so that to allay mass public outcry talks on ISDS have been temporarily suspended.

It is via ISDS that Slovakia has been sued for renationalising its healthcare.

It is how Egypt has been sued by Veolia for the costs of an increased minimum wage and how Canada has faced repeated litigation for everything from passing moratoriums against fracking to revoking patents for drugs with unproven benefits.

To fight against this power grab by transnational capital, a group of #NoTTIP campaigners launched a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), the sole channel of democratic accountability available to ordinary people within the EU’s structures.

For such an initiative to be successful, one million supportive signatures must be recorded in the space of a year while meeting a national quota in at least seven EU member states.

The EC blocked the initiative before it started.

According to the bureaucrats of Brussels, EU citizens have no right to challenge an ongoing trade deal — they can only approve.

So campaigners launched a self-organised ECI regardless, and within the record time of just two months had passed the one million signature mark.

National quotas were rapidly passed in seven countries: Germany, Britain, France, Austria, Finland, Luxembourg, and Slovenia.

The total number of signatures now stands at over 1.65 million, with national quotas met in 12 countries.

We are also appealing against the European Commission’s rejection of the initiative before the European Court of Justice.

Parallel to this, people across Europe are coming out to turn their people power into political power — to withdraw their consent where it was never sought.

We are fighting to retain some control over the fundamentals of our own lives: what we eat, whether corporations can control and profit from our education, healthcare and the commons, our working conditions and the ability of democratic government to enact social, health and environmental legislation without the sanction of litigation in corporate courts.

We have defeated such corporate agreements before, and we will do so again.

But to win will require the growing #NoTTIP movement to maintain its momentum — and that means the public coming together to say no to the domination of our lives by the interests of transnational capital.

Join the #NoTTIP campaign, and help us win this fight.

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