I love lawyers.
shouldnt ever kill any of them.
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by zangtang » Mon Jul 06, 2015 9:58 am
by coffin_dodger » Mon Aug 24, 2015 7:01 am
by Pele'sDaughter » Wed Sep 09, 2015 7:08 pm
by Harvey » Tue Sep 29, 2015 6:34 pm
If you're worried about TTIP, then you need to know about CETA
It will be the first trade deal of its kind to come before the British and European parliaments, and if it passes the consequences will be disastrous
Nick Dearden Independent, Tuesday 29 September 2015 14:54 BST
Canada and the EU signed a deal last year. It had been kept a secret from the public right until the final stages. Once passed into law, it will allow the British government to be sued in secret tribunals by multinational Canadian and American businesses, under a system so arcane that even those who negotiated the deal have admitted that it needs to change.
Despite this, the deal is about to start being pushed through the European Parliament, and then our own parliament, where our representatives are not even allowed to amend it. But they will have a yes or no vote. And they need to vote no.
What is CETA?
CETA – or the Comprehensive Economic & Trade Agreement – is a trade deal between Canada and Europe.
It’s part of a new generation of deals, which includes the controversial TTIP. The thing is, it’s not really a trade deal at all. It's more of an investor’s charter, which gives big business and big finance huge new powers and rights.
The one positive thing about CETA is that it’s no longer secret. It’s already been signed and that means that we’re allowed to see it. Its 1,500 pages of text show us that it's not only a threat to our food standards, but also our battle against climate change, and ability to regulate big banks. What's more, it could even threaten our our power to renationalise industries, such as the railways.
At the heart of CETA is a new legal system, open to foreign corporations but not ordinary people. Let’s say the British government makes a decision. This could be to outlaw dangerous chemicals, improve food safety, put cigarettes in plain packaging, or protect a place of natural beauty from fracking. Under the deal, a Canadian company, or any company with a Canadian subsidiary, can sue the British government if it thinks that the decision is unfair. And by unfair we simply mean they can’t make as much profit as they expected to make. The trial would be held as a secret tribunal, overseen by corporate lawyers, and without any right of appeal.
Canadian companies are already doing this all over the world. A company called Gabriel Resources recently announced it was suing the Romanian government for damages, after parliament blocked the development of one of their gold mines over environmental fears. They now face a compensation claim for possibly billions of pounds. CETA would open this system to thousands more companies, including US companies with subsidiaries in Canada, like Wal-Mart, Chevron, Coca Cola and Monsanto. It is inconceivable that Britain wouldn’t face a case.
Such a furore has been created around these “corporate courts” that the European Commission itself has said they are outdated and need to be reformed. In a consultation last year, 97 per cent of the 150,000 respondents to a consultation exercise said they didn’t want such a system. Yet it’s in CETA – and there’s nothing we can do to remove it short of rejecting the whole thing. And rejecting the whole thing is exactly what we need to do. Here are some of the reasons why:
It will allow toxic tar sands to flow into Europe
Tar sands oil is one of the most environmentally destructive fossil fuels in the world, and the majority of this oil is extracted in Alberta, Canada. The impact on the climate of tar sands is much higher than conventional oil, not to mention the complete devastation it leaves when it’s extracted.
There is currently little tar sands in use in the EU, but that’s changing. When the EU proposed prohibitive new regulations to effectively stop tar sands flowing into Europe, Canada used CETA as a bargaining chip to block the proposal. Now, if CETA passes, that decision will be locked in. Any attempt by the EU to revisit the question would undoubtedly see the EU facing a massive compensation claim from the tar sands industry.
CETA does have a sustainable development chapter, which is a positive move for a trade agreement. But this chapter focuses on fisheries and forests, and doesn’t cover mining, energy or transportation. No wonder the campaign group Council for Canadians says the chapter is “largely aspirational and lacks any effective enforcement mechanism.”
Financial regulation will be weakened, and workers' rights threatened
The whole purpose of CETA is to reduce regulation on business. The idea is that will make it easier to export. But it will do far more than that.
Through the pleasant sounding “regulatory cooperation”, standards would be reduced across the board on the basis that they are “obstacles to trade”. We’re looking at a race to the bottom in areas such as food safety, workers’ rights and environmental regulation.
The ability of governments to regulate financial services would be impaired. Limiting the growth of banks that have become “too big to fail” could land a government in a secret tribunal.
Through something called a “ratchet clause” current levels of privatisation would be “locked in” on any services not specifically exempted. If Canadian or EU governments want to bring certain services back into public ownership, they could be breaking the terms of the agreement...
CETA is expected to be ratified by the European parliament in 2016. It’s by no means a done deal, with significant numbers of MEPs baulking at agreeing to such a deal. Nearly three million people across Europe have signed a petition calling on the EU to halt CETA, and the better-known TTIP. In Canada, a campaign has been waged by trade unionists and environmentalists for several years to stop the deal, because it threatens to bring their own country under similar attack from European corporations. A looming election could change the balance of forces for the better there.
CETA will be the first trade deal of its kind to come before the European and British parliaments. A no vote would also make sure it was the last, as it would deal a fatal blow to the corporate lobby’s offensive. Let’s make sure that happens.
by coffin_dodger » Tue Oct 06, 2015 9:39 am
TTIP Negotiations Fall Apart As EU Big Hitters Abandons US 5th October 2015 TruePublica.org.uk
Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron is accusing those who oppose the expansive trade deal with the United States of making up horror stories about the agreement in order to poison the pact.
That agreement is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and critics all along the political spectrum are exposing the enormous dangers of the deal — all without having to invent a single scary story.
Back in January the EU Commission published their response to the consultation on TTIP and it was found that 97% of the 150,000 responses opposed the trade deal. These respondents represented the general public. The biggest petition in the EU’s history was then presented that contained the signatures of 2 million citizens (now nearly 3 million) opposed to TTIP. Both were rejected as were proposals even for a simple hearing of the European Citizens Initiative.
Then in April this year, thousands of protestors took to the streets of cities all over Europe as unelected officials of the EU Commission continue to ignore the concerns of its citizens.
cont - http://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/ttip-negotiations-fall-apart-as-eu-big-hitters-abandons-us/
by DrEvil » Tue Oct 06, 2015 10:16 am
Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership accord reached—will IP law change?
Member nations thought it better to negotiate in secret than in public.
by David Kravets - Oct 5, 2015 5:26pm CEST
Eleven Pacific Rim nations and the US agreed Monday to the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership pact—a secret trade accord backed by nations from Australia to Vietnam.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "The TPP contains a chapter on intellectual property covering copyright, trademarks, and patents. Since the draft text of the agreement has never been officially released to the public, we know from leaked documents, such as the May 2014 [PDF] draft of the TPP Intellectual Property Chapter [PDF], that US negotiators are pushing for the adoption of copyright measures far more restrictive than currently required by international treaties, including the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) [PDF]."
Negotiating nations include the US, Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei Darussalam. Combined, the nations represent about 40 percent of the global economy. The secret accord took more than five years to produce and must be approved by the US Congress. In all, there are 30 chapters, and they won't be made public for at least a month. Negotiating nations thought it would be better to bargain in secret than in public. There have been leaks, but the citizens of the countries negotiating the pact have deliberately been kept in the dark about it.
Knowledge Ecology International's director James Love said that "the agreement was reached under rules set by the Obama Administration that allowed hundreds of corporate representatives to have access to the negotiating text, while freezing out the public."
The EFF said the accord "raises significant concerns about citizens’ freedom of expression, due process, innovation, the future of the Internet’s global infrastructure, and the right of sovereign nations to develop policies and laws that best meet their domestic priorities. In sum, the TPP puts at risk some of the most fundamental rights that enable access to knowledge for the world’s citizens." The group notes that the deal might "require signatory counties to adopt heightened copyright protection that advances the agenda of the US entertainment and pharmaceutical industries agendas but omits the flexibilities and exceptions that protect Internet users and technology innovators."
The member nations released this statement:
TPP brings higher standards to nearly 40 percent of the global economy. In addition to liberalizing trade and investment between us, the agreement addresses the challenges our stakeholders face in the 21st century, while taking into account the diversity of our levels of development. We expect this historic agreement to promote economic growth, support higher-paying jobs; enhance innovation, productivity and competitiveness; raise living standards; reduce poverty in our countries; and to promote transparency, good governance, and strong labor and environmental protections.
Here are copies of previous leaked TPP chapters.
by slimmouse » Tue Oct 06, 2015 12:32 pm
TPP brings higher standards to nearly 40 percent of the global economy. In addition to liberalizing trade and investment between us, the agreement addresses the challenges our stakeholders face in the 21st century, while taking into account the diversity of our levels of development. We expect this historic agreement to promote economic growth, support higher-paying jobs; enhance innovation, productivity and competitiveness; raise living standards; reduce poverty in our countries; and to promote transparency, good governance, and strong labor and environmental protections.
. Right.by Iamwhomiam » Tue Oct 06, 2015 7:34 pm
by Harvey » Thu Oct 15, 2015 3:57 pm
by Nordic » Thu Oct 15, 2015 6:49 pm
by Harvey » Fri Oct 16, 2015 6:39 am
by zangtang » Fri Oct 16, 2015 11:10 am
by parel » Thu Nov 05, 2015 5:57 pm
by Luther Blissett » Thu Nov 12, 2015 10:45 am
The Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History
Posted on Nov 6, 2015
By Chris Hedges
The release Thursday of the 5,544-page text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade and investment agreement involving 12 countries comprising nearly 40 percent of global output—confirms what even its most apocalyptic critics feared.
“The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”
The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy. The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.
These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup d’état along with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional democratic institutions. The agreements—filled with jargon, convoluted technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse phrasing—can be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.
The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.
The Sierra Club issued a statement after the release of the TPP text saying that the “deal is rife with polluter giveaways that would undermine decades of environmental progress, threaten our climate, and fail to adequately protect wildlife because big polluters helped write the deal.”
If there is no sustained popular uprising to prevent the passage of the TPP in Congress this spring we will be shackled by corporate power. Wages will decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault. Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in compensation from offending governments for impeding their “right” to further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace the common good.
Given the bankruptcy of our political class—including amoral politicians such as Hillary Clinton, who is denouncing the TPP during the presidential campaign but whose unwavering service to corporate capitalism assures her fealty to her corporate backers—the trade agreement has a good chance of becoming law. And because the Obama administration won fast-track authority, a tactic designed by the Nixon administration to subvert democratic debate, President Obama will be able to sign the agreement before it goes to Congress.
The TPP, because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.
There will be a mass mobilization Nov. 14 through 18 in Washington to begin the push to block the TPP. Rising up to stop the TPP is a far, far better investment of our time and energy than engaging in the empty political theater that passes for a presidential campaign.
“The TPP creates a web of corporate laws that will dominate the global economy,” attorney Kevin Zeese of the group Popular Resistance, which has mounted a long fight against the trade agreement, told me from Baltimore by telephone. “It is a global corporate coup d’état. Corporations will become more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised, which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.”
The agreement is the product of six years of work by global capitalists from banks, insurance companies, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and other corporations.
“It was written by them [the corporations], it is for them and it will serve them,” Zeese said of the TPP. “It will hurt domestic businesses and small businesses. The buy-American provisions will disappear. Local communities will not be allowed to build buy-local campaigns. The thrust of the agreement is the privatization and commodification of everything. The agreement has built within it a deep antipathy to state-supported or state-owned enterprises. It gives away what is left of our democracy to the World Trade Organization.”
The economist David Rosnick, in a report on the TPP by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), estimated that under the trade agreement only the top 10 percent of U.S. workers would see their wages increase. Rosnick wrote that the real wages of middle-income U.S. workers (from the 35th percentile to the 80th percentile) would decline under the TPP. NAFTA, contributing to a decline in manufacturing jobs (now only 9 percent of the economy), has forced workers into lower-paying service jobs and resulted in a decline in real wages of between 12 and 17 percent. The TPP would only accelerate this process, Rosnick concluded.
“This is a continuation of the global race to the bottom,” Dr. Margaret Flowers, also from Popular Resistance and a candidate for the U.S. Senate, said from Baltimore in a telephone conversation with me. “Corporations are free to move to countries that have the lowest labor standards. This drives down high labor standards here. It means a decimation of industries and unions. It means an accelerated race to the bottom, which we must rise up to stop.”
“In Malaysia one-third of tech workers are essentially slaves,” Zeese said. “In Vietnam the minimum wage is 35 cents an hour. Once these countries are part of the trade agreement U.S. workers are put in a very difficult position.”
Fifty-one percent of working Americans now make less than $30,000 a year, a new study by the Social Security Administration reported. Forty percent are making less than $20,000 a year. The federal government considers a family of four living on an income of less than $24,250 to be in poverty.
“Half of American workers earn essentially the poverty level,” Zeese said. “This agreement only accelerates this trend. I don’t see how American workers are going to cope.”
The assault on the American workforce by NAFTA—which was established under the Clinton administration in 1994 and which at the time promised creation of 200,000 net jobs a year in the United States—has been devastating. NAFTA has led to a $181 billion trade deficit with Mexico and Canada and the loss of at least 1 million U.S. jobs, according to a report by Public Citizen. The flooding of the Mexican market with cheap corn by U.S. agro-businesses drove down the price of Mexican corn and saw 1 million to 3 million poor Mexican farmers go bankrupt and lose their small farms. Many of them crossed the border into the United States in a desperate effort to find work.
“Obama has misled the public throughout this process,” Dr. Flowers said. “He claimed that environmental groups were supportive of the agreement because it provided environmental protections, and this has now been proven false. He told us that it would create 650,000 jobs, and this has now been proven false. He calls this a 21st century trade agreement, but it actually rolls back progress made in Bush-era trade agreements. The most recent model of a 21st century trade agreement is the Korean free trade agreement. That was supposed to create 140,000 U.S. jobs. But what we saw within a couple years was a loss of about 70,000 jobs and a larger trade deficit with Korea. This agreement [the TPP] is sold to us with the same deceits that were used to sell us NAFTA and other trade agreements.”
The agreement, in essence, becomes global law. Any agreements over carbon emissions by countries made through the United Nations are effectively rendered null and void by the TPP.
“Trade agreements are binding,” Flowers said. “They supersede any of the nonbinding agreements made by the United Nations Climate Change Conference that might come out of Paris.”
There is more than enough evidence from past trade agreements to indicate where the TPP—often called “NAFTA on steroids”—will lead. It is part of the inexorable march by corporations to wrest from us the ability to use government to defend the public and to build social and political organizations that promote the common good. Our corporate masters seek to turn the natural world and human beings into malleable commodities that will be used and exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Trade agreements are the tools being used to achieve this subjugation. The only response left is open, sustained and defiant popular revolt.
by Nordic » Tue May 10, 2016 10:16 pm
TTIP is just one of several phony “trade” deals written by corporate lawyers and lobbyists, and negotiated in secret between the Obama administration and various world leaders. This particular scam involves the U.S. and Europe, and it has seen increased public resistance and attention as of late, something I highlighted in the post, Leaked Documents Expose the TTIP Trade Deal as a Subversive Imperial Scam.
Now watch what happened when a MEP (member of European parliament) tried to read the thing. It’s very blurry, but you’ll get the point.
Democracy this is not.
Noam Chomsky recently summarized the true purpose of these so-called “trade” deals eloquently in the following paragraph:
In the contemporary global order, the institutions of the masters hold enormous power, not only in the international arena but also within their home states, on which they rely to protect their power and to provide economic support by a wide variety of means. When we consider the role of the masters of mankind, we turn to such state policy priorities of the moment as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the investor-rights agreements mislabeled “free-trade agreements” in propaganda and commentary. They are negotiated in secret, apart from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists writing the crucial details. The intention is to have them adopted in good Stalinist style with “fast track” procedures designed to block discussion and allow only the choice of yes or no (hence yes). The designers regularly do quite well, not surprisingly. People are incidental, with the consequences one might anticipate.
Thanks for playin’ everyone.
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