/ world today news/ The USA and the European Commission have been negotiating for a whole year to conclude a series of agreements on the “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” (TTIP).
With good reason, the future agreement (for convenience it will be marked in the singular) has been criticized in many directions – it is believed that because of it, chickens cleaned with chlorine solution will end up on our plates, it is believed that it will reduce to zero advances in health care, the environment, and labor rights (because of the intended unification of standards), that it will limit access to education, culture, and science (because of the expansion of copyright), even that it will raise barriers to total surveillance. In fact, isn’t all this a reason to suspect TTIP of a civilizational threat?
However, there are two potential threats to TTIP that are political in nature. They can undermine the foundations of democracy, change the “genotype” of Western societies.
The first aspect is that the envisioned transatlantic partnership gives companies the right to sue countries for prohibited business and investments, for lost benefits and profits – for example, “Chevron” will be able to sue Bulgaria because of our country’s refusal of shale gas. And the not particularly solvent Bulgarian taxpayer will have to pay “chevron” compensation, which will hardly be less than half a billion dollars.
This will happen thanks to the envisaged special commercial courts, which will deal with disputes between investors and countries. These will be entirely new tribunals that will operate in parallel with existing corporate law, as TTIP critics have noted.
The mechanism will be as follows: if any company (investor) decides that it is being discriminated against by governments or faces indirect expropriation of its assets, it will be able to appeal to the court in question, which will consist of three arbitrators. The first will be appointed by the applicant (the company), the second by the state, and the third must be nominated jointly by the parties concerned or from a previously prepared list of candidate magistrates. This third referee is supposed to be neutral, but whether he will be is a big question. The American lawyer Lori Wallack, who is an expert on trade issues and one of the most prominent defenders of consumer rights not only in her country, claims that the leading international investment lawyers are a little more than the fingers of both hands – 15 in number. So far, however, they have considered as many as 55% of such cases. With such a limited composition, will the corporations not impose their own people for the neutral magistrate candidate?
But there is something that is even more dangerous and more absurd. And this is that the decisions of the intended court will be final – the appeal is excluded, there is no other court above it. The commercial court in question will be both the first instance and the last instance; and the District Court and the Supreme Court. Never mind that he will hear cases with hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars in damages, that the standard of living of entire countries, possibly the lot of entire nations, will depend on him.
In other words, a parallel judiciary is being created on a global scale. A corporate judiciary that would act above or simply bypass national laws. Thus, national judicial systems become voiceless letters. Voiceless letters will also become the countries themselves. There are such unpronounceable letters in the main language that is currently being negotiated and in which the text of the transatlantic partnership will most likely be written – English in its American version.
In the world, for decades, corporations have been suing countries for one or two business bans. For example, the Swedish company Vattenfall is suing Germany itself for compensation of 3.7 billion euros because of the country’s rejection of nuclear energy. But this happens within the framework of the current corporate law, European and national legislation, and not at some special, parallel and uncontrolled tribunal. A tribunal that will be a sort of juridical junta.
Moreover, fair or not, corporate law has introduced a norm of compensation for direct or indirect expropriation – to protect business from the arbitrariness or mere turmoil of dictatorial, authoritarian and wayward countries and statesmen such as Gaddafi’s Libya or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. But TTIP was conceived as an agreement between countries that are exactly at the opposite political pole – democratic, legal and settled countries with predictable politics. That is, there is no risk of expropriation or discrimination with them. Therefore, there is no need for such special commercial arbitrations. However, those courts won’t be thrown out of the deal — at least not yet.
This already looks like a corporate conspiracy against sovereignty, a transatlantic (or commercial) coup against statehood.
“The planned settlement would transfer power from elected governments and civil society to private corporations,” argued Laurie Wallack. Here is proof that you shouldn’t doubt her assessment. Prior to the negotiations, there were preliminary consultations and do you know who their participants were – 93% were industry representatives. The defenders of the environment and the rights of consumers had no say at all in the course of the consultations. The figure in question is not a fabrication or manipulation – it was provided by the European Commission at the request of the organization “Corporate Europe Observatory”.
This is what the veteran of the German political scene, the Christian Democrat Willy Wimmer, who, by the way, is a like-minded supporter of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and was also the vice-president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, says in this regard. TTIP “is not so much about chlorinated chickens as it is about influencing parliamentary democracy. If we, as a highly developed legal state, get arbitration courts where disputes in the field of investment will be resolved, then we no longer have to think about what will be left of our parliaments and from our governments”, he stated in an interview with the publication “Junge Welt”. Will we no longer think about what will be left of our countries tomorrow, we have to add?
Finally, let’s step on the home stage. Those of our statesmen, politicians and public figures who extol the TTIP actually endorse the corporate coup against statehood and national sovereignty.
The second dangerous aspect is the extreme secrecy of the negotiations between the US and the European Commission, which are determined to be ready with the agreement next month, so that it will enter into force in 2016. The negotiations are not just being conducted behind closed doors, but are being conducted as top secret. spy operation. “This contradicts the democratic principles”, the Spanish economist Santiago Niño-Becerra was angry before the television “Russia Today”. He recalled that so far all key negotiation processes in the EU have been completely transparent – both the EU Enlargement Treaty and the Maastricht Treaty for the introduction of the euro. While “absolutely nothing is known” about the negotiations on the transatlantic trade partnership. According to the economist, not a single petition to provide at least basic information about the agreement being prepared has been considered, “we have no possibility of direct control over the negotiation process, we cannot hold a referendum and express the will of EU citizens on this so important for the entire block issue. These grounds are sufficient to cancel the signing of the agreement,” Niño-Becerra is convinced.
Michael Effler, a representative of the British STOP TTIP movement, describes the negotiation process between the US and the European Commission as absurd. “The European Commission does not even allow representatives of the European Parliament to participate in the negotiations. The deputies cannot change a single letter in the agreement, they only have to vote when the negotiations are over. This is not democratic at all.”
There are also influential anti-TTIP voices overseas. According to US Senator Elizabeth Warren, an agreement negotiated without any democratic discussion should not be signed.
Opponents of TTIP warn that the interests of citizens are subordinated to foreign companies, and democracy to business interests. That’s true, but that’s not all. The procedure does not foresee the agreement going through national parliaments. Taxpayers in the individual member states will be deprived of a say, although it is precisely from their pockets that the benefits for the cooperatives will be paid. In this case, they will be placed in the position of slaves, powerless to stop the corporate robbery from their pocket. This is exactly what the Bulgarian taxpayer will become if, after the final acceptance of the agreement, “Chevron” decides to return to our country for shale gas. This smacks not just of a dictatorship, but of a corporate junta. This is already a corporate coup against civil society.
And all this is being done by the US and the current European Commission with their claims to be bastions of world democracy and civil society.
Meanwhile, the European Commission has conducted a dress rehearsal for TTIP – earlier this month it concluded a similar agreement with Canada. For now, she has no intention of giving up on the original idea. At the same time, again this month, Europe was rocked by protests against TTIP. And these days, already after the protests, Italy, as rotating chairman, announced at a meeting of EU finance ministers that it would insist on greater transparency in the negotiations. One kind – the protests have been heard. However, shouldn’t they become more frequent, for example monthly, in order to clear the prepared agreement of pitfalls and pitfalls for states and citizens?
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Yuri Mikhalkov is an international journalist, works at BGNES Agency. He worked in the newspapers “Cooperative Village”, “Zemya”, “Standart”, “Sega”.
#TTIP #corporate #coup #statehood #civil #society
