What if renegade states across both sides of the Atlantic decided to disregard the treaty and the fines that will follow immediately? What will the WTO do then? Sanction them?
Those treaties are a way of creating a legal framework that can't be altered by national governments. This is not happening against the governments but it's done by the governments to their populations.
This is not US against EU but corporations against people. The idea is to be sure that national governments can't vote against the interest of international business.
Please don't tell me about how a treaty should be voted on by the people, because I already agree about this part.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor-state_dispute_settlem... )
Not at all. The only time the WTO interacted with my native country it was to "gently" push for privitisation of state assets all of which have turned out to be disastrous deals for our country. Not even the economic liberals I know think highly of the WTO.
1) If the consumption of mood-altering prescription drugs is any indicator, then indeed, we are not happier.
2) Correlation is not causation.
Direct democracy in diplomacy and trade negotiation sounds like a really terrible idea. It would just be constant protectionism, xenophobia and probably ruin economic growth and everyone will be the worse of for it. Sometimes giving more people a voice does not result in positive outcomes.
WTO was about import tariffs.
TTIP seems to be mostly about de-regulation and legal harmonisation.
PR flaks are counting on the good will that people have towards free trade to allow them to squeeze through a treaty that surrenders democratic sovereignty to multi-national corporation stuffed courts and tribunals.
We may or may not get to vote on the treaty - I don't know. But I do know that if we vote yes then that will be one of the last meaningful things that we do vote on. Pretty much any law you might want to pass post-TTIP would be blocked by the TTIP ISDS process.