Surround The European Business Summit!

by Crazy Cat Fri Apr 18, 2014 17:53

Pepe Escobar speaks of this, the free trade agreement, about half way down this article:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Others/Escobar.html

by fred Sun Apr 20, 2014 07:27

TTIP is a secretive betrayal of the people of Europe.

George Monbiot has been highlighting this as best he can:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/04/us...cracy

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/02/tr...eu-us

http://www.monbiot.com/?s=TTIP

Wikileaks spilled the beans on this too:
https://wikileaks.org/tpp/pressrelease.html

We need to wake up to this or we will end up eating GM and other shite for breakfast dinner and tea and be at the mercy of large corporations holding our economies to ransom in unaccountable unelected corporate courts whenever our governments dare to make laws that don't suit their greed driven psychopathic agendas.

i.e. anything strengthening labour laws, small business protections, environmental regulations etc. the state can be sued for future lost corporate profits.

by Crazy Cat Tue Apr 22, 2014 17:02

Glad to find another article in English! From an old copy of the Monde Diplo, an article by Lori M Wallach:

http://mondediplo.com/2013/12/02tafta

by Crazy Cat Wed Apr 23, 2014 10:36

I think it is worth looking at the now 20 year old trade agreement between Canada , the U.S and Mexico. Its got the same rules

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) included an array of new corporate
investment rights and protections that were unprecedented in scope and power.
NAFTA extreme rules have been replicated in various U.S. “free trade”agreements (FTAs), including
CAFT and bilateral FTAs with Peru, Oman, Korea, Panama and Colombia
.
These special privileges provide foreign investors new rights to own and control other countries’
natural resources and land , establish or acquire local firms, and to operate them under privileged
terms relative to domestic enterprises. The scope of the “investments” covered by these rules is vast,
including derivatives and other financial instruments, intellectual property rights, government licenses and permits, as well as more traditional forms of investment.
The pacts provide foreign firms with a way to attack domestic public interest, land use, regulatory and otherlaws if they feelthat a domestic policy or government decision has undermined the
firms’ new “trade” pact privilegesby contravening their “expectations”or threatening their “expected future profits.”
These firms have access under the deals to an “investor-state” enforcement system, which allows them to skirt national court systems and privately enforce their extraordinary new investor
privileges by directly challenging national governments before extrajudicial tribunals
These investor - state cases are litigated outside any domestic legal system in special international arbitration bodies of the World Bank and the United Nations. A three-
person panel composed of private attorneys listens to arguments in the case, with the power to award an unlimited amount oftaxpayer dollars to corporations
Because the mechanism elevates private firms and investors to the same status as sovereign governments,
it amounts to a privatization of the justice system

http://www.citizen.org/documents/NAFTA-at-20.pdf

http://www.citizen.org/documents/investor-state-chart.pdf

by Crazy Cat Wed Apr 23, 2014 11:48

At the bottom of the page there are some examples of what they call "investor rights.":

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2001/01april/corp1.ht...#name

by Crazy Cat Sat Apr 26, 2014 12:59

Some informative articles here:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140416/09560626932/...shtml

And A report from ' La bas si je suis' on France Inter, from a meeting that took place in Paris on the 10th of April 2014, on discussions for Tafta or Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)

http://www.la-bas.org/article.php3?id_article=2986

The programme starts at 3min43sec.