2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumWhy the Next President May Have No Power to Change The Corporate Privatization of Everything
This is why the trade deals are dangerous!
No elected anybody will be able to change this, and its very dangerous,
The word out is that Obama will sign TPP during the Lame Duck.
Fast track lasts SIX YEARS so Bernie MUST win or we're sunk because both Hillary and Trump are for these deals.
Trump is only against NAFTA - he supports the international temping programs that utilize L-1 visas to replace US workers with temps who can be here up to five years and have no minimum wage. So does Hillary.
felix_numinous
(5,198 posts)TTIP will surrender national sovereignty to international corporations, it would make our Constitution worth nothing.
Fairgo
(1,571 posts)and surprise! At the evil heart of it all is the United States, controlled by a nest of corporate vipers. Our government is the one ring that binds them all in darkness. How does it feel to play a collective Saruman on the world stage, the ultimate henchman and dupe of an evil philosophy? The obsession to become the president, the ring bearer, has attracted its own gollums.
Smeagol for President! Smeagol will protect precious!
Aerows
(39,961 posts)them in the first place.
Broward
(1,976 posts)of the moneyed elite above all else.
bjo59
(1,166 posts)That is 100% enough reason to vote for him but a lot of people do not see utter doom poised to walk right in the front door. When people start to cry and moan and tear their hair after the reality of those trade deals sinks in it'll be just so much indecipherable yammering going in one of my ears and out the other. People who willfully vote for candidates who will, there is no question, ratify these deals deserve exactly what is coming down the pike. It's a real tragedy that the rest of us, the environment, and wildlife do not. Great video, by the way. These three agreements are a stunningly major step on the path to global corporate totalitarianism.
Baobab
(4,667 posts)You left out TISA, also GATS is already there, thats a lot like TISA, but TISA included all service sectors and modes of supply by default and countries have to opt out. TiSA is supposed to be folded into the GATS eventually. Read the paper in my sig.
Basically, once we're in these deals, politics will be like the button people press to cross the street that does absolutely nothing.
Armstead
(47,803 posts)TTIP Agreement is Profoundly Undemocratic
http://billmoyers.com/2015/03/20/john-hilary-proposed-ttip-agreement-profoundly-undemocratic/
One of the characteristics of this agreement is the secrecy that is surrounding it. Apparently, members of the European Parliament who have followed the negotiations for TTIP have been essentially forced to sign confidentiality agreements. Is this correct?
Thats absolutely correct, and the level of secrecy surrounding these negotiations means that ordinary people across Europe and most of the national members of parliament have no idea whats going on. The European Commission placed a 30-year ban on all public access to the key documents behind TTIP right at the beginning of the negotiations. Any members of the European Parliament who are given access to the special reading rooms where they can see some of the documents they have to sign documents promising that they will not share any of what theyve seen outside that room. Really, its like a scene from the Stalinist Soviet past, where you have individual documents marked with secret markings, so that they can trace the source of any leaks when the documents do go out into the public domain. Its profoundly un-transparent and anti-democratic, and its destroying any credibility within the European Commission itself.
One of the main areas of contention surrounding TTIP are the so-called investor-state dispute settlements, which would allow multinational corporations to sue sovereign governments over policies that they do not agree with, in special courts. Could you share with us some examples of what these settlement courts are like and what this would mean as far as oversight of these corporations?
Youre right to say that this is one of the most controversial areas of TTIP, this idea that corporations could be elevated to the status of nation-states, and they would be given the right to sue sovereign governments in special courts. I think its important to say that this is not using the normal, domestic judicial system; its a parallel system of justice [that] is available only to those corporations. So for the first time, a US corporation could have access to these corporate courts to be able to sue our governments if they felt that their profits in the future were going to be undermined.
The examples we have are extraordinary. For example, in Canada, they introduced a ban on the poisonous fuel additive MMT, and they were immediately sued by a US corporation called Ethyl, which produced exactly that fuel additive. The Canadian government was told that it had no right to block this suit, and in the end they backed down, they paid out compensation to the company, and they had to drop the ban, even at the same time that a similar ban was being introduced in all other countries around the world......
Baobab
(4,667 posts)Thats why corporations are moving elsewhere, to get special rights to sue our own government if they change ANYTHING.