TTIP explained: The secretive US-EU treaty that undermines democracy
arstechnica.co.uk
arstechnica.co.uk
And that's the best case scenario. With studies which appear to ignore any downside of the trade agreement.
Another choice morsel:
According to CEO's analysis of the leaked document: "as soon as a new regulation is in the pipeline, businesses should be informed through an annual report, and be involved". Specifically, governments wishing to bring in new regulations have to offer companies that may be affected by legislation or regulation an opportunity to provide input, with the rider that this input “shall be taken into account” when finalising the proposal."
Consumers, on the other hand, can just get stuffed, no privileged access for NGOs.
Not to mention the ISDS mechanism, which is pure madness. What democratic government would want to be subject to secret tribunals, especially considering the litigation-happy nature of US business culture? A system which, apparently, is already used to strong-arm Canada into watering down legislation which would endanger US corporate profits...
What am I missing? That's not hard to find, that's a rewording of the same number.
They've quoted 0.4% to make it sound better than it is. This is a standard psychological trick.
Strictly speaking the calculation is the 13th root of 1.04
(In an amount of $1 per year over a million years.)
How you frame a number can count for a lot.
How about just people, the demos, the supposed central element of a democracy.
Neither term is sufficient with respect to the other.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romney-says-corp...
Actually, yes, about half of it is. Cuba, China, North Korea, Viet Nam, almost all the Middle East, two thirds of Africa, Russia, ...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index for an overview
Sorry which democracy? If these talks and their outcomes are already a secret (without discussing matters of national security), then this is one more reason for me not to consider the EU nor the US a democracy. The people have just a tiny fraction of power compared to the corps.
Let's just be fair and teach the next generations that our countries have been hijacked by corps+lobbyists, and that democracy is just a word used to make people accept their totalitarian power.
If you allow the rich to establish treaties that prevent nations from exercising sovereign power to bring those same rich people in to line, and you do it in private preventing the citizens/subjects from even knowing the details of the regime you intend to impose then you're operating well outside anything that can be described as democratic. TTIP seemingly intends to go further still, not only preventing nations from exercising sovereign powers against corporations but allowing the corporations (which are really proxies for the plutocrats) to exercise equivalent powers over those nations.
We've seen these sorts of powers in use by tobacco companies suing countries for trying to improve citizens health.
It's fantastic capitalism - profit above environment, profit above health, profit above morality, profit for the few against rights and freedoms of the many.
2) >It's fantastic capitalism - profit above environment, profit above health, profit above morality, profit for the few against rights and freedoms of the many.
This statement shows that you have 0 understanding of capitalism in regards to society. Capitalism is not about selfishness. It is about self-interest. For example, it is not in the long term self-interest of energy companies that we are experiencing global warming and they know it, and despite what you think they are working on fixing that. It's just not so simple to shift.
3) Having said that, I for one, don't want someone who has such strong feelings about things he understands so little about, to have a say in policy making. He can be swayed so easy by emotions and articles in the NYT and form an opinion about complicated problems he has no clue about. But representative democracy is great, right?
Indeed, democracy is flawed - IMO it's the least worst system we have a chance of implementing effectively and with relative stability. I may not want a particular group's opinions but I'm prepared to accept that system over others.
As for "0 understanding of capitalism in regards to society" - I'm using capitalism as a short form for "Western capitalism" which is epitomised by things which aren't truly "capitalism" per se.
Semantic niceties aside energy companies in my country regularly act against their long term interest as do most businesses. Indeed they usually only act in a way that might be termed moral to fulfil legal obligations and then they tend to find a way to subvert their obligations. But then as the rhetoric here often reminds us "companies are there solely to make profit", shareholders complain if they do anything beyond their obligations. Energy companies are looking at their own goals and not societies needs.
As for 3 ... I'll confess now I didn't read the NYT article [I just assumed it was the same content as has been doing the rounds in the last couple of months - very similar to what's happening with TPP], I've been following TTIP since I learnt about it from ex-colleagues in the IPR community about 18 months ago. 38degrees started their campaign about 14 months ago IIRC. I'm the first to admit I'm ill informed on it, but that's almost the whole point - negotiations and details of the direction and end goal are hidden and actively kept secret even from representatives. There's no way for me to be completely informed. Representative democracy can't work if the representatives aren't even allowed to access the knowledge needed to make decisions for the people and it fails to be democratic when the people aren't able to see if those representatives are acting in their own interest or in the interests of the people they deign to represent.
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You can fight them, you know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction
If anything, the high unemployment in the EU over the past decade would have been a fertile breeding ground for such ideas. I'd say we're doing pretty well so far as a society by not engaging in more drastic measures given how much our rights are trampled on.
We aren't as violent as we used to be in the 1970s-80s (violent crime has dropped precipitously, for instance). Perhaps because we don't use leaded petrol any more.
The far-right consists of anti-immigration people. That's not far-right. That was a normal centre-right opinion just a few decades ago. It's definitely not Fascism despite the implication.
The far-left consists of people wanting to protect their government pension funds, green activists and people who do not like meddling by the likes of the IMF and WB. That's not far-left either. They definitely aren't communists.
It's ridiculous how the media portrays these mostly sane political opinions as extremes held only by extremists.
I agree that there are very few far left parties in Europe with any number of elected politicians.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobbik
[2] >In a newsletter published by a group calling itself "The trade union of Hungarian police officers prepared for action", the following was allegedly printed: "Given our current situation, anti-Semitism is not just our right, but it is the duty of every Hungarian homeland lover, and we must prepare for armed battle against the Jews." The editor of the union, Judit Szima, was a Jobbik candidate in the upcoming election for the European Union parliament. Haaretz alleged Szima "didn't see anything wrong with the content of the article."
I think Golden Dawn waving Swastikas around counts as fascism, even if some of the other right-wing parties in Europe are more tiptoeing around it.
I honestly doubt real fascism will make any great gains until the financial elites feel their masters of the universe positions threatened, at which point some of them will throw their lot (and considerable wealth) in with the far right and ramp up the rhetoric and the violence. That's when things are going to get scary real fast.
We're not there yet, but the potential is growing very quickly. The fusion of a lot of cash, a paranoid elite and a bunch of terminally unemployed very pissed off young people is explosive.
>The far-left consists of people wanting to protect their government pension funds, green activists and people who do not like meddling by the likes of the IMF and WB. That's not far-left either. They definitely aren't communists.
There are communists in Europe, but yes, what is designated far left by the media these days is pathetically middle of the road by historical standards. Syriza's a mildly lefty damp squib.
>It's ridiculous how the media portrays these mostly sane political opinions as extremes held only by extremists.
Of course.
That said, left/right/far left/far right are all relative terms.
The EU is doing that right now, debasing the Euro to reduce the overall massive debt load and fake growth to placate the population and pretend to show things improving. Being able to abuse the currency makes it easy to continue to meet social obligations, but in actuality they're defaulting on those obligations through currency devaluation (ie the net result being citizens of the EU will suffer a lower standard of living, while most people won't realize what's happening until years later).
If Japan couldn't abuse the Yen to fill the huge hole in their budget that their debt is causing, what would happen to their government? It would have already collapsed, unable to pay its bills. It's only the fiat system that enables them to continue. Japanese savers used to pay for the debt accumulation, then their savings rate collapsed; so now the Japanese government is taking wealth from their citizens via currency devaluation instead to keep covering the debt costs.
You can have a "class consciousness" without pulling out the hyperbole and Stalin card.
This consciousness is what afforded us civil rights, granted us a safe work place, an eight hour work day, labor rights and bought us social programs that keep people from dying in the streets.
Somehow these "class conscious" revolutionaries didn't let society devolve into chaos.
It's this consciousness that we need to remind ourselves and those with power of our worth. Otherwise, we'll continue to get fucked over. No one will offer to make us concessions that we never had the power to ask for.
The majority of the third world and anyone who wasn't born into the right religion/race/family in the first world would like to have a word with your first point, though.
I guess we shouldn't realize nor negotiate from our position in society since being run by plutocrats isn't so bad because you say so.
Good plutocrats try to make sure their population has "just enough" that they don't rally in the streets with guns. Relying on the goodwill of these people is an absurd expectation.
This isn't true at all.
So, "corporatocracy" is not a valid word.
It would be like calling a dictatorship a "manocracy."
On the subject of political vs. economic systems: a specific political system implies a specific economic system, and vice versa, so there isn't the distinction here that you think.
To be honest I don't believe anybody really cares about the ideals of democracy. If the same secrecy was being used to push legislation you supported you wouldn't be whining at all, you would probably be defending it instead because you would rationalize that passing the law is more important than the method used to pass it.
Later politicians coopted the term "democracy", as marketing. One source to learn more is Graeber's "The Democracy Project". (http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/democracy-what-is-it-good-...)
Pushing a button every few years for your new corporate-sponsored king isn't meaningful democratic participation.
http://www.opensecrets.org/PRES08/contrib.php?cid=N00009638
Maybe you were thinking about Bernie Sanders?
I'll give you though that the first-past-the-post system is terrible and you would be better off with a proportional system.
And sure, maybe it's voter intelligence or apathy rather than some conspiracy. Doesn't matter. I'm just saying the result isn't representative and shouldn't be framed as the will of the people. I'm not saying anything about the root cause.
Fine, but then you can't really frame anything as being or not the will of the people as there's no point of reference. You can't say that TTIP and TPP and TISA are not the will of the people just because Reddit and a bunch of news sites like to hate on them, for instance.
Often the two do line up. Sometimes they don't. The fact that these officials were elected doesn't automatically indicate either way.
They won't get the exposure. They'll be pigeonholed as the joke candidate by the well-funded machines that have interest in making sure you don't consider leaving the two-party system that's worked well for them.
Needing excessive funding and backing by elites to really be considered a candidate implies that only those who promise to uphold their interests will be portrayed as being a legitimate choice.
The option for a third party is in the specification, but we've purposely implemented it in such a way that power remains in the hands of the few.
I bet a country like that would fall victim to a two-party system virtually over night. I wouldn't even be surprised if it ended up being a single-party system where the two parties were only superficially different.
I think we should try it, like trias-politica and all, by trying to keep our legislative leg free from non-democratic influences. Like those mehhhh lobby organisations.
Neither the people nor corporations are supposed to have any power. "Power," here, means the ability to weild force against others.
The founding ideal of the US was that nobody could do that; in other words, it was supposed to be a system of freedom, as opposed to coercion.
I was not trying to hint on what it is supposed to be.
corps+lobbyists+owners of capital(wealthy)
The final few paragraphs state that if one EU member votes against TTIP then they will be blamed for not facilitating growth. Yeah, by lobbying companies, but not by the people. The EP have generally been the 'good' guys in history, and I highly doubt that they're going to U-turn and go against everything they created in the past few decades by allowing multinational companies to lobby them into lowering standards.
It's all very sensational and the media takes a very jazz hands approach to presenting the happenings to the public, when in actuality if one did a little research, you would find that the documents that exist right now present the opposite case of what the public believes.
If TTIP is horrible, I still have faith that our MEPs will reject it. But we're not anywhere near a final document to vote on, so I don't think we should be running around waving our hands in the air just yet.
There's also another broadcast on 10th June that the BBC will produce: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05ykxrt
Is this anything close to it?
And yes, I do think we should be running around waving our hands, because when the treaty gets approved, it will be too late. "Faith" is the very last think I have in our political parties when they act with their backs turned to the people.
This is a very rose-tinted view of MEPs. Like most of the European machinery, their work is not scrutinised with the same level of detail that applies to national parliaments; you hear about them when something particularly controversial comes up for voting, and at that point, most vote "with the public" just to go back to the quiet life. In some cases, they vote to stick it to the (undemocratically appointed and way too powerful) Commission, with whom there are long standing constitutional conflicts that are far from being settled. The Commission typically represents overall winners at the previous round of national elections (it's appointed by national ministers), whereas the EP is elected with mostly-proportional mechanisms, resulting in smaller (and louder) parties prevailing; that, of course, increases conflicts. In addition, there is the issue of large transnational groups (conservatives and socialists) constantly struggling between national priorities and traditional party discipline.
Obviously that's not always the case -- a lot of MEPs do work hard for the public and just vote with their conscience -- but I'm just saying they are not innately "good", their voting record is the sum of many factors and as far as I know there is no such thing as the will of MEPs "as a whole".
> If TTIP is horrible, I still have faith that our MEPs will reject it.
That would be interesting, and it would create a big constitutional mess. The Commission could technically soldier on and just push it down to national parliaments; would it be OK for them to ratify such a significant treaty after the (theoretically superior) EP rejected it? I'm not a scholar, there might be precedents in this area, but the EU is not a "common law" institution anyway...
And we had a state where wealth was rather evenly divided and with many people that did well. Also we had rather low crime and view people had to worry that they could be poor when they are old.
Than came globalization and the notion that the "free market" will be always right and will make things (automatically) perfect. (That was promoted by Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan, to name two early adopters). Than the governments in Germany and all over the world started to bend. "It is the free market, we can not do anything against it" was said by them. "We have to bend our laws to comply with the free market".
So it was going all over the world.
What do we have today: All over the world, people get richer ... 1% of the people. The others get gradually poorer and the lowest part of the people are really poor, because in Germany it is already clear, that a big part of the people working today, will not be able to live from the pensions they will get.
So the "free market" took over and the "free nations" are enslaved by one economic theory, that nobody has ever proved.
We are all at the mercy of "unlimited growth". Our economic systems are only stable, when growth is guaranteed. In biology, unlimited growth is called cancer.
For example, those that even slightly resemble the low tax, low regulation, low government involvement system of the US between 1820-1920.
To answer your question: Go to Bangladesh, go to Mexico (already have a treaty like TTIP in place, and what happened: The rich get richer, the poor get poorer), go to Germany, go to the US. Must I go on?
I don't think, your question was a real question.
You view the world from your position (of a rather rich guy) -- but there are approx. 5 billion people poorer than you and me around.
Edit: One final thought about it: Even when you are on the profitable side of today's system (what might even change), you even might be effected by its back-sides, when for example environmental regulations are lowered. Many regulations today are lowered or not strengthened, because they could potentially harm big corporations. Also in the rich countries, even rich people are dying of environmental induced deceases. That politics is turning more and more a blind eye to those problems, is showing, that we are indeed enslaved!
"Through a US Freedom of Information Act request, Intellectual Property Watch has obtained some 400 pages of email traffic between USTR officials and industry advisors ... the emails reveal a close-knit relationship between negotiators and the industry advisors that is likely unmatched by any other stakeholders. "
Worse terms for RCEP in Asia: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/just-when-you-thought-...
"RCEP can be compared with the .. TPP, except that rather than being driven by the United States, it is being driven by the ten-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) .. [plus] India and China .. This draft is .. far worse than ACTA, and is even worse than the most recent leaked draft of the TPP."
http://www.foe.org/news/news-releases/2015-05-with-controver...
"10 organizations representing more than 10 million Americans called on U.S. Trade Representative -- USTR -- Michael Froman to publicly release all records of communication between himself and representatives of the ten largest U.S. financial institutions -- including his former employer Citigroup -- while he has served in the USTR position."
Evil only has to win once.
Will it be worse for the average person/family? Probably, yet I tend towards seeing it as a natural historical movement rather than some kind of craftily-perpetrated evil. For example Spengler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler) writes about the dominance of money and commercial interest as being the primary value at the aged point of a civilizations development (cf. the last couple centuries of ancient Rome).
All those "little" problems that never really resolved - the corporation trying to exploit a legal technicality to raise the costs for their competitors, the sociopath manager that ignores labor laws to try raise their profit margin, the politician getting kickbacks from the business in exchange for not passing some regulation - well... in most cases, we never rally addressed these problems properly. A few people got slaps on the wrist. Some were simply declared legal (and therefor moral to many people).
Operant conditioning[1] works in humans. We have spent the last several decades training people to see profit as the main goal. We have not been punishing the problems as people inevitably start to test the boundaries of the laws that supposedly limit what they can do. This combination of influences creates a situation where it is entirely rational for someone to start to themselves as being above the law and untouchable. They are simply extrapolating their own experience and observations.
So now we have a serious problem on our hands - some people have gotten so emboldened (and enriched), they have started to take the next step: actually writing this power imbalance back into the law and making their new aristocracy legal.
The core of this problem is fear, or the lack of it. Without a belief that there is at least some chance you could be caught, humans tend to act in a manner that reinforces their current situation. A decade ago I would have suggested that we simply needed to start throwing the book at the banks/business/politicians that misbehaved. We used to do that; politicians would resin if they were caught taking bribes, and corporations were occasionally heavily sanctioned or even forcibly dissolved for their crimes. Do you really believe any of that could happen today? I don't. We've had plenty of examples, from the "banking crisis" a few years ago, to the CIA getting away with murder and torture without even so much as a show trial.
No, if we had any intention of actually putting aside our differences and showing a bit of solidarity against the common enemy of corruption, we would have done it by now. Instead, were still acting like we have the luxury of being able to argue about our traditional political disagreements. Meanwhile, troops and the crony-capitalist apparatchik have been moving into more and more positions of power and influence.
The only way this tide is going to be turned back is... very unfortunately... when the people responsible regain their fear that they could could be caught, and the only way that fear will be restore is when they soe a real risk to their own survival. This is what the French understood when they got out the guillotines.
Of course, this is why the NSA has been working so hard to establish domestic surveillance and working with the FBI on parallel constriction: COINTELPRO never ended, and it's still the easiest way to break up any threatening social structure.
[1] see; Skinner's box on how conditioning can affect volition
--> they are now at a 1.9 Mio votes against TTIP. If you're in the EU vote against it here: https://stop-ttip.org/
Given that, I feel little need to read up on it, or learn about how it might be terrible. Until I can read it, I don't want to hear speculation about what might be in it.
Instead we seemingly ended up with a whole bowl of agreements regarding controversial protectionism, financial regulation, etc.
That is what democracy basically consist off. Accepting that humanitys nature is a dangerous snake pit and building a machinery that converts snake venom and strangling motion into movement .
If only US and EU weren't a democracy, but allowed full blown economic freedom, we would all have plenty more money in our pockets.
Freedom is often distributed fairly unevenly. Economic freedom is of little comfort if you're only free choice is between different types of poverty.
Winston Churchill
Er, right. You're surely aware that most one-party states have very little in the way of economic freedom AND have a high degree of corruption? Not to mention that economic freedom, for many people, is less important than a decent human rights record. And while neither the EU nor the US are perfect in this record, they're still considerably better than bastions of economic freedom like Qatar.