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tisa
As TTIP Falters, Campaigners Warn Against Democracy-Wrecking Sister Deals
TISA
A new briefing on TISA published Tuesday by GJN warns about the global ambitions of the deal, which focuses on services--rather than goods (like most trade agreements)--and primarily "allowing multinationals to provide services across borders."
The primer explains:
TISA considers all regulations to be trade barriers. This means that it has serious consequences for things that have little to do with trade, affecting areas like labor rights, banking regulation and whether public services like electricity and water are run for the benefit of the people or by profit-making multinational companies. [...]
Much of the danger in TISA lies in the fact that it turns many public services into commodities to be run for the benefit of business, rather than in the interest of people who need services like electricity, healthcare and transport. TISA signatories will have to treat foreign multinationals from TISA countries with at least as much favor as local companies, even if local firms are much smaller.
What's more, negotiations over the deal, which are expected to conclude by late 2016, have been conducted with "even less transparency than those on TTIP."
Some details that have emerged, however, paint a grim picture for the future of public services. One particularly insidious provision, the so-called "ratchet clause," forbids a country that has decided to "liberalize" a public service to multinationals from retracting that measure from TISA member state companies.
Similarly, the "standstill" clause prevents countries from passing new regulations that might give foreign companies worse treatment.
In effect, these provisions could "make it much harder for a future [U.K.] government to renationalize the railways, a move backed by a majority of the British public," GJN states.
"Vested interests and ideologues will seek to create TTIP anew, but we already have an engaged movement aware of the threat of corporate-authored, secret trade deals."
--Mark Dearn, War on Want
Dearden expands on some of the other known threats:
We also know that some countries are pushing clauses in TISA which would prevent signatories introducing laws to favor renewable energy over fossil fuels. Others are pushing to allow high tech companies to transfer data across borders at will. [...].
Meanwhile, some categories of migrant worker may end up being "independent service suppliers" and will consequently not enjoy the right to things like the minimum wage or be allowed to join a trade union, essentially becoming a form of modern indentured labour.
Further, the organization notes, the countries involved represent 70 percent of the total world economy, and, ultimately, the "aim is to impose the deal on the rest of the world through the World Trade Organization (WTO)...For this reason, TISA is the trade deal that most threatens poorer countries of the global south. It must be stopped."
More imminently, Dearden notes, is the threat posed by CETA. Like TTIP, critics say, CETA aims to "water down or abolish environmental, health, and consumer protection regulations."
The deal is likely to reach a European Parliament vote before next spring and campaigners are concerned it could be "provisionally applied" as early as this autumn.
Hoping to stall the deal, a coalition of German NGOs on Wednesday launched a complaint with the nation's highest authority, the Constitutional Court, asking the judges to block implementation of CETA on the grounds that it "subverts the German constitution because it does not leave room for parliamentarians to interpret the agreement or vote against it."
According to Deutsche Welle, the groups delivered boxes containing 125,047 signed powers of attorney, making the case "the biggest constitutional complaint in German history."
The NGOs are particularly concerned about the agreement's Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which employs a parallel legal system to grant corporations dangerous leverage to use against countries that attempt to pass regulations that might hurt their profits, as Common Dreams has previously reported.
Echoing those fears, a new report (pdf) published earlier this week by a coalition of advocacy groups raised alarm over the threats posed by CETA to food safety and consumer standards should the E.U. be forced to comply with Canada's more lax regulations on things like pesticide use, animal welfare, genetically modified organisms, and agricultural safety standards.
"All over the world, people want more local, sustainable and healthy food, for our economies, our environment and our well-being. CETA takes us in the opposite direction--towards factory farms, unsustainable production, and questionable safety regulations," said Sujata Dey, a trade campaigner with the Council of Canadians trade campaigner, which issued the report along with War on Want, and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
With these other deals on the horizon, Europe, ultimately, will "gain little if the end of TTIP allows such awful deals to make it to the statute book," as Dearden put it.
At the same time, across the pond, U.S. President Barack Obama continues to doggedly pursue ratification of the other highly-controversial trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), despite growing national opposition.
But campaigners say there are lessons to be gleaned from the collapse of the TTIP, namely that civil society--if loud enough--can turn these corporate deals into political minefields.
"Vested interests and ideologues will seek to create TTIP anew, but we already have an engaged movement aware of the threat of corporate-authored, secret trade deals," Mark Dearn, senior trade campaigner with War on Want, wrote recently.
"Now," Dearn continues, "is the time for this movement to organize for trade justice."
With TPP 'At Heart' of Obama Agenda, Critics Debunk Trade Talking Points
The 2016 blueprint also highlights the administration's efforts to conclude other controversial trade agreements, including the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the U.S. and Europe and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), currently being negotiated by the U.S., EU, and 22 other countries that account for two-thirds of global GDP.
"We expect this to be an historic year for U.S. trade policy," said USTR Michael Froman.
So too do opponents of what WikiLeaks has called "the United States' strategic neoliberal 'trade' treaty triumvirate."
Indeed, watchdog group Public Citizen put out a memo on Wednesday debunking several of the Obama administration's TPP talking points.
For example, while the USTR claims the TPP will "cut over 18,000 taxes on Made-in-America exports, support more high-paying U.S. jobs, and promote both our interests and our values," Public Citizen points out that the TPP "includes rules that make it cheaper and less risky to offshore U.S. jobs to low wage nations."
According to the memo:
The administration stopped claiming the TPP would create jobs after a four Pinocchio rating by the Washington Post fact checker. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), more than 57,000 U.S. manufacturing facilities have closed and five million U.S. manufacturing jobs - one in four - were lost with more than 875,000 U.S. workers certified under just one narrow U.S. Department of Labor program.
Public Citizen also on Wednesday put out a video suggesting that with members of Congress across the political spectrum lined up "staunchly against the deal," the TPP is dead-on-arrival.
At the end of last month, President Barack Obama said that he was "cautiously optimistic" that Congress would pass the TPP, while acknowledging that opposition in both parties and election politics could slow down the effort.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is among other leaders who have said that the TPP is unlikely to get a vote until after the November elections. Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump have all expressed opposition to the deal.
In February, at the end of the negotiating process, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) urged her colleagues "to reject the TPP and stop an agreement that would tilt the playing field even more in favor of big multinational corporations and against working families."
Noting that "most of the TPP's 30 chapters don't even deal with traditional trade issues," she argued, "most of TPP is about letting multinational corporations rig the rules on everything from patent protection to food safety standards--all to benefit themselves."
Just last week, environmentalists pointed to a World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling on India's rapidly growing solar energy program as evidence of the TPP's potential harms.
5 Lessons Trade Unions Can Teach the WTO
Developing countries united to stop the EU and US getting a green light to negotiate more trade deals on investment, public services and regulation within the WTO. As with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), these sort of deals would have made it harder for countries to support local businesses over foreign corporations and regulate in the public interest. If these had been struck at the WTO this weekend, all countries would be bound by them, not just the few which have already chosen to participate.
Without doubt, efforts will now be redoubled by various governments and business lobbies to push through a whole host of other trade deals that are currently being negotiated, such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), TTIP and TISA.
These deals have many similarities. They are designed to open up new markets for global corporations and create the conditions for them to be as lucrative as possible. Perceived barriers to trade, such as labour standards, food safety regulations and publicly provided services, are to be reduced or removed. Additional legal protection to safeguard corporate profits from the effect of government policy - such as raising the minimum wage or introducing plain packaging on tobacco products - will be introduced. And of course, the negotiations are held in secret and away from parliamentary scrutiny.
Trade unions were well represented among the civil society groups gathered at the trade talks, with the likes of the ITUC, Public Services International, COSATU, the Ghana Congress of Trade Unions and Sentro from the Philippines.
The global unions' statement of priorities issued ahead of the WTO Nairobi round of talks is here.
Here are five lessons the WTO could learn from the trade union movement:
1. Value your members and give them a vote
The WTO has 164 member countries and tries to reach a decision by consensus. As on many occasions, consensus was not reached in Nairobi. Yet if each country had a vote, decisions would have been made favourably on a range of agriculture issues of interest to the global south. The consensus system allowed the US and EU to block this and the deal to be struck between the five most powerful countries (EU, US, India, China and Brazil) in private sessions. The WTO negotiations were held for the first time in Africa, without African representatives, or those from least Developed Countries, in the room.
2. Learn from Latin America
Since 2005, Latin American countries have been putting into practice a progressive alternative to the WTO's neoliberal trade deals, in the form of ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America). ALBA is based on the fundamental principles of solidarity, complementary trade, social justice, and respect for national and regional sovereignty. Trade is a tool to fight poverty, rather than the enrichment of powerful countries at the expense of impoverished ones. The Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign has an excellent summary here (pdf).
3. Public services are the most efficient way to deliver quality services to everyone
The history of the WTO is a history of neoliberal attacks on public services. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) was an early battle to defend public services from liberalisation. Today, we are resisting the Trade In Services Agreement (TISA). This is being negotiated by over 50 countries outside of the WTO. The EU and US were thwarted in their attempts in Nairobi to bring deals like TISA into the WTO and therefore bind all countries to their devastating effects on public services. There is plenty of evidence to show that the private sector is failing to deliver quality public services. The wave of remunicipalisation, where previously privatised water services are brought back under public control, is phenomenal. 100 million people now get their water from a remunicipalised water service, in 235 cities (including Paris and Dar es Salaam), in 37 countries.
4. Corporations do not need a parallel legal system to protect their profits
The global trade union movement is united in arguing that parallel legal systems, such as Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) in TTIP, give unnecessary protection to business and act against the public interest. Well known cases, including Veolia suing the Egyptian government because raising the minimum wage would reduce its profits, have mobilised millions of people across the EU to call for TTIP negotiations to stop. Nonetheless, the EU's trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom went to Nairobi to get the green light for a new global deal on investment, modelled on TTIP. Developing countries stood their ground and refused to give the go ahead to a new multilateral deal of this kind.
5. Trade is a means to an end and not an end in itself
Throughout the WTO talks in Nairobi, it was taken for granted that if trade contributes to the growth of an economy (in GDP) it must be a good thing. Trade unions support international trade because it can help to build industries, provide jobs and pay for public services. But these very goals are at risk from some of the deals WTO members, including the EU, want to negotiate on deregulation and the liberalisation of public services. There is plenty of evidence to show that economies can be growing, with rising GDP, but increasing poverty, such as Mozambique. Conversely countries with less than impressive growth, such as Nepal, can halve poverty. There are many international bodies whose role is to increase economic and social justice and tackle poverty and inequality, such as the ILO's role to strengthen and enforce labour standards, UNCTAD's to support development and the WHO's to improve healthcare. But none of these bodies has the clout of the WTO, with its dispute resolution system which can discipline and penalise countries which do not follow the rules. Trade should be a means to the end of social and economic justice and not the end in itself.
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