The Current State of the TTIP

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European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker recently declared, “There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.” He was referring to the iron resolve of the Eurozone cabal to crush any Greek attempt to liberate itself from the economic war of aggression called “austerity”. This ideological proclamation can be applied just as much to the Commission’s resolve to join the US government and the global corporations in a second and parallel economic war waged upon the people. This is the attempt to impose upon the people of America and Europe a corporate dictatorship in the form of a globalization treaty, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the TTIP. A similar attempt is ongoing on the other side of the world with the Transpacific Partnership, the TPP. I focus on the TTIP, but everything I say applies to the TPP as well.

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The US government and the European Commission were hoping to have the TTIP wrapped up and ratified by a year ago, but democratic pressures have forced a big slowdown, as the EC and officials from various member states have sought to get their propaganda in order. Thus the EC felt compelled to hold a bogus “public consultation” (the equivalent of a public comment period) on the most controversial element of the plan, Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), while government officials struggled to present a united front in promising that the TTIP would not lead directly to such outcomes as the privatization of Britain’s health system or the eradication of European truth-in-geographical-branding regulations, a common concern everywhere. It obviously will bring these and far worse outcomes, as some officials admitted before later backpedaling. Meanwhile even high-level pro-TTIP (and pro-CETA, Canada-Europe Trade Agreement, another pact which was supposed to be completed in 2014 but has stalled) officials are now telling the US they think ISDS is overkill. They give legalistic reasons for this change of heart, though the main reason must be that they think it’s political overkill which threatens ratification of the pact itself. That’s why the EC had to take time out for the “consultation” a year ago.

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Indeed, European civil society must ensure that it’s political overkill, enough overkill to kill the pacts. This is their best bet for getting the European Parliament and/or the governments of the 28 EU member states to refuse to ratify these two pacts. Even if ISDS is taken out of the agreement(s) in a de jure sense, we must go ahead and say it’s still in there, since the only thing which will have changed is that instead of explicitly enshrining it upfront like they’d originally planned, they’ll instead seek to institute its equivalent gradually through the permanent and ongoing “regulatory coherence” war plan. This is where all the most inflammatory goals are likely to seek realization, for example the gutting of the precautionary principle.

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In spite of the delay, the negotiations are gradually oozing forward. Early in February US and EC representatives met in Brussels to draft the sector specific Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) provisions of the TTIP. This includes the pact’s goal of gutting all that still exists of food safety, public health, and animal welfare regulation. The draft encodes almost all the demands submitted by industry, including the establishment of a secret US/EC/corporate committee that would have the power to oversee safety regulation prior to government regulatory processes, pact-imposed federal preemption in the US and Europe, an effective ban on any future restrictions on product classes, severe restrictions on customs inspections at the port of entry, the requirement that all regulations be “harmonized” with the WTO and its Codex Alimentarius, and many other draconian clauses. It formally institutes ISDS within these sectors. It pays lip service to government rights to protect human life and animal and plant health, but governments may do this only in ways that are the “least trade restrictive”. How can you enshrine a value like protecting human life but then put a restriction on it – a restriction which strongly implies that corporate profit is a higher value than human life. Obviously this is the same as not valuing human life at all, as indeed these pro-globalization activists and their supporters do not.

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The goal here as with every other part of the TTIP is to gut all public interest and democratic controls. Power and effective decision-making are to be shifted from member states and the EC itself to the pact committees. The same is to happen in the US. In addition to a radical escalation of the existing trend toward federal preemption and usurpation of the power that rightly reposes at lower levels of government and sovereignty, effective power is also to be shifted from the US system in general to the TTIP itself. The real power and control will be wielded by the corporate oligopoly sectors. This is typical of all such globalization policy. The TTIP is explicit in its charter: The goal is to maximize supply-driven “trade” and profits “to the greatest extent possible”. At the SPS committee meetings hundreds demonstrated against this “Trojan Horse Treaty”, which under the fraudulent rubric of “free trade” seeks to establish the closest thing yet to direct corporate dictatorship on a mass scale.

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I’ve written extensively about the rise of corporate domination. In Part Two we’ll review this evolution of government power from the nation-state to the modern bureaucratic state to globalization and corporate rule.

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