In a blog post entitled "Why Is It So Acceptable to Lie to Promote Trade Deals?," the economist Dean Baker wrote: "Implying that a deal that raises GDP by 0.4 or 0.5 percent 13 years out [in 2027] means "job-creating opportunities for workers on both continents" is just dishonest. The increment to annual growth is on the order of 0.03 percentage points. Good luck finding that in the data."
And that's the best case scenario. With studies which appear to ignore any downside of the trade agreement.
Another choice morsel:
According to CEO's analysis of the leaked document: "as soon as a new regulation is in the pipeline, businesses should be informed through an annual report, and be involved". Specifically, governments wishing to bring in new regulations have to offer companies that may be affected by legislation or regulation an opportunity to provide input, with the rider that this input “shall be taken into account” when finalising the proposal."
Consumers, on the other hand, can just get stuffed, no privileged access for NGOs.
Not to mention the ISDS mechanism, which is pure madness. What democratic government would want to be subject to secret tribunals, especially considering the litigation-happy nature of US business culture? A system which, apparently, is already used to strong-arm Canada into watering down legislation which would endanger US corporate profits...
The people are not important, only owners of Capital are important. It is more important that they have control, then we actually do anything for the people. The people are preferably reduced to third world conditions you know where you have a very rich elite and a bunch of poor peasants that look up to them for guidance. They want to turn their countries into this.
I know it's not a very charitable response, but that's simply ridiculous. The world is not run by mustache twirling villains who get sustenance from the tears of "the people."
There are mustache twirling villains and then there are just your garden variety sorts that run the "free" world. They usually direct their violence towards the people of the part of the world run by mustache twirling villains. And use the rest of their power to strip freedom and independence from the people of their own countries... so that the world can be ruled by a single conglomerate of garden variety villains who think that they know what's best for everyone... but if you look at their track record, it's less than spectacular. You know because as the market shows centralization is not a good thing. The world should be a bazaar not a cathedral.
It depends in what context you look at it. If we are talking economics, using "consumers" to talk about an economic agent in a transaction is not demeaning. But in the general case, I agree with you.
Yes, and GDP increase per year would be the commonly-accepted standard: they should have said 0.03% (which anyone would recognise as a rounding error).
They've quoted 0.4% to make it sound better than it is. This is a standard psychological trick.
Strictly speaking the calculation is the 13th root of 1.04
Sorry which democracy? If these talks and their outcomes are already a secret (without discussing matters of national security), then this is one more reason for me not to consider the EU nor the US a democracy. The people have just a tiny fraction of power compared to the corps.
Let's just be fair and teach the next generations that our countries have been hijacked by corps+lobbyists, and that democracy is just a word used to make people accept their totalitarian power.
Sound like sour grapes and No True Scotsman to me. The president, who is leading negotiations, was elected democratically, and Congress, who decides whether this treaty becomes law or not, was also elected democratically. If the people dislike how the government is doing things they have only themselves to blame for electing these representatives.
To be honest I don't believe anybody really cares about the ideals of democracy. If the same secrecy was being used to push legislation you supported you wouldn't be whining at all, you would probably be defending it instead because you would rationalize that passing the law is more important than the method used to pass it.
That's not democracy. That's doublespeak. The US's "Founding Fathers" hated democracy and stressed it was a republic. Those slaveowners wanted to protect minorities against majority rule — the wealthy minority. (Obviously they didn't mean African Americans and women.)
Hating democracy is a massive overstatement. It was designed as a democratically elected representative republic. They didn't want a mob ruling, but at the base, the people select the representatives. That is how virtually every democracy runs itself.
Unions don't donate directly, they make independent campaign expenditures through Super PACs. Look in the Independent Expenditures tab in the page you gave me.
Most of those elections, at least in the US, are arranged to be a choice between two bad candidates with relatively small (even if sometimes important) differences. That's not a real choice and the fact that one of them won shouldn't be construed as approval.
There are primaries and third parties, you know? That the final choice comes down to two mediocre individuals says more about the intelligence of the average voter than any sort of corporate conspiracy.
I'll give you though that the first-past-the-post system is terrible and you would be better off with a proportional system.
Until third parties get the funding and backing by powerful people that already run the nation, they aren't able to produce a truly viable candidate.
They won't get the exposure. They'll be pigeonholed as the joke candidate by the well-funded machines that have interest in making sure you don't consider leaving the two-party system that's worked well for them.
Needing excessive funding and backing by elites to really be considered a candidate implies that only those who promise to uphold their interests will be portrayed as being a legitimate choice.
The option for a third party is in the specification, but we've purposely implemented it in such a way that power remains in the hands of the few.
Third parties do nothing useful. Primaries could be useful, but in practice aren't.
And sure, maybe it's voter intelligence or apathy rather than some conspiracy. Doesn't matter. I'm just saying the result isn't representative and shouldn't be framed as the will of the people. I'm not saying anything about the root cause.
> I'm just saying the result isn't representative and shouldn't be framed as the will of the people.
Fine, but then you can't really frame anything as being or not the will of the people as there's no point of reference. You can't say that TTIP and TPP and TISA are not the will of the people just because Reddit and a bunch of news sites like to hate on them, for instance.
First past the post is actually an inherently two party system [0]. It would take a monumental amount of effort to overcome that bias and an intelligent voter knows that they can't beat the system and have to work with it. Thus, the final choice for all voters is still two mediocre individuals.
Yep. Those of us who voted for Kucinich in the primaries were impressed by his fair treatment of the televised debate system and the amount of support he was able to garner from the Democratic party. I'm very grateful that we have a political system in this country in which money isn't at all a factor, because I don't know how I could handle living in a country in which wealth was directed towards those candidates that would be most likely to serve the interests of that wealth.
I bet a country like that would fall victim to a two-party system virtually over night. I wouldn't even be surprised if it ended up being a single-party system where the two parties were only superficially different.
Me too! That's why I lament the fact that it is not (maybe even quite opposite).
I think we should try it, like trias-politica and all, by trying to keep our legislative leg free from non-democratic influences. Like those mehhhh lobby organisations.
>Let's just be fair and teach the next generations that our countries have been hijacked by corps+lobbyists, and that democracy is just a word used to make people accept their totalitarian power.
I have been wondering why all this madness hasn't resulted in more violent uprisings by ideologically radicalised groups or individuals. History in Europe has seen lesser triggers to call for (or act out) the expulsion of similar individuals like Karel de Gucht.
If anything, the high unemployment in the EU over the past decade would have been a fertile breeding ground for such ideas. I'd say we're doing pretty well so far as a society by not engaging in more drastic measures given how much our rights are trampled on.
Lack of solidarity, co-opted fronts, infiltration and neutralization of non co-opted organizations by economic interests and easy fractures among the economic class based on ethnicity/religion/arbitrary differences have historically been great ways at keeping a population from gaining a consciousness about their situation as a whole.
As has the historic tendency for the average citizen in countries run by plutocrats to enjoy substantially better standards of living, as well as a good deal more peace, than countries run by "class conscious" revolutionaries...
You can have a "class consciousness" without pulling out the hyperbole and Stalin card.
This consciousness is what afforded us civil rights, granted us a safe work place, an eight hour work day, labor rights and bought us social programs that keep people from dying in the streets.
Somehow these "class conscious" revolutionaries didn't let society devolve into chaos.
It's this consciousness that we need to remind ourselves and those with power of our worth. Otherwise, we'll continue to get fucked over. No one will offer to make us concessions that we never had the power to ask for.
The majority of the third world and anyone who wasn't born into the right religion/race/family in the first world would like to have a word with your first point, though.
I guess we shouldn't realize nor negotiate from our position in society since being run by plutocrats isn't so bad because you say so.
Good plutocrats try to make sure their population has "just enough" that they don't rally in the streets with guns. Relying on the goodwill of these people is an absurd expectation.
The reason you're not seeing that kind of revolution, is the modern central bank system in place enables the use of fiat to placate the population for a dramatically longer amount of time than was possible in eg 1920 or 1940.
The EU is doing that right now, debasing the Euro to reduce the overall massive debt load and fake growth to placate the population and pretend to show things improving. Being able to abuse the currency makes it easy to continue to meet social obligations, but in actuality they're defaulting on those obligations through currency devaluation (ie the net result being citizens of the EU will suffer a lower standard of living, while most people won't realize what's happening until years later).
If Japan couldn't abuse the Yen to fill the huge hole in their budget that their debt is causing, what would happen to their government? It would have already collapsed, unable to pay its bills. It's only the fiat system that enables them to continue. Japanese savers used to pay for the debt accumulation, then their savings rate collapsed; so now the Japanese government is taking wealth from their citizens via currency devaluation instead to keep covering the debt costs.
The far right and the far left are both growing in Europe.
We aren't as violent as we used to be in the 1970s-80s (violent crime has dropped precipitously, for instance). Perhaps because we don't use leaded petrol any more.
>The far right and the far left are both growing in Europe.
The far-right consists of anti-immigration people. That's not far-right. That was a normal centre-right opinion just a few decades ago. It's definitely not Fascism despite the implication.
The far-left consists of people wanting to protect their government pension funds, green activists and people who do not like meddling by the likes of the IMF and WB. That's not far-left either. They definitely aren't communists.
It's ridiculous how the media portrays these mostly sane political opinions as extremes held only by extremists.
Jobbik[1] are now the third biggest party in Hungary. Their candidates are openly anti-semitic[2]. They want to return Hungary's borders to those of the pre-WWI Kingdom of Hungary. They put up statues to military commanders who were allies of Hitler. It would be a big mistake to call Jobbik just an anti-immigration movement.
I agree that there are very few far left parties in Europe with any number of elected politicians.
[2] >In a newsletter published by a group calling itself "The trade union of Hungarian police officers prepared for action", the following was allegedly printed: "Given our current situation, anti-Semitism is not just our right, but it is the duty of every Hungarian homeland lover, and we must prepare for armed battle against the Jews." The editor of the union, Judit Szima, was a Jobbik candidate in the upcoming election for the European Union parliament. Haaretz alleged Szima "didn't see anything wrong with the content of the article."
>The far-right consists of anti-immigration people. That's not far-right. That was a normal centre-right opinion just a few decades ago. It's definitely not Fascism despite the implication.
I think Golden Dawn waving Swastikas around counts as fascism, even if some of the other right-wing parties in Europe are more tiptoeing around it.
I honestly doubt real fascism will make any great gains until the financial elites feel their masters of the universe positions threatened, at which point some of them will throw their lot (and considerable wealth) in with the far right and ramp up the rhetoric and the violence. That's when things are going to get scary real fast.
We're not there yet, but the potential is growing very quickly. The fusion of a lot of cash, a paranoid elite and a bunch of terminally unemployed very pissed off young people is explosive.
>The far-left consists of people wanting to protect their government pension funds, green activists and people who do not like meddling by the likes of the IMF and WB. That's not far-left either. They definitely aren't communists.
There are communists in Europe, but yes, what is designated far left by the media these days is pathetically middle of the road by historical standards. Syriza's a mildly lefty damp squib.
>It's ridiculous how the media portrays these mostly sane political opinions as extremes held only by extremists.
Of course.
That said, left/right/far left/far right are all relative terms.
I upvoted you because of the interesting historical context, but I'm not sure it is sensible to imply that anti-immigration stances are not reprehensible.
If anti-immigration is as a result of racism, that's one thing - but politics is a broad spectrum and I don't think it is sensible to close down the underlying debate on the topic by stigmatising those who believe immigration is an issue.
Inherent to democracy is the fact that the fighting "you" is minority and it keeps shrinking. Minority loses. But all good. Hopefully in a few centuries humanity will see bloody revolutions
No, we really don't. We live in a mixed economy, which means freedom mixed with government controls, which always means there are government-chosen winners and losers. It's what the people want, though. It's what we're taught is good in school; it's what we believe in.
That's not really relevant to joeyspn's statement at all. He's not talking about an economic system, he's talking about a political system. While political systems influence economic systems, they don't have a one to one relationship. In the case of the US, we have a corporatocracy which maintains the current mixed economy.
"Corporatocracy" cannot be an appropriate name for a system where most corporations are the victim of a few corporations that have governmental powers.
So, "corporatocracy" is not a valid word.
It would be like calling a dictatorship a "manocracy."
On the subject of political vs. economic systems: a specific political system implies a specific economic system, and vice versa, so there isn't the distinction here that you think.
Yes, they do. Which serves to illustrate that we need separation of education and state, for the same reasons that we need separation of church and state.
I see the parent's point as being we need to stop referring to [plutocratic] oligarchies as democracies.
If you allow the rich to establish treaties that prevent nations from exercising sovereign power to bring those same rich people in to line, and you do it in private preventing the citizens/subjects from even knowing the details of the regime you intend to impose then you're operating well outside anything that can be described as democratic. TTIP seemingly intends to go further still, not only preventing nations from exercising sovereign powers against corporations but allowing the corporations (which are really proxies for the plutocrats) to exercise equivalent powers over those nations.
We've seen these sorts of powers in use by tobacco companies suing countries for trying to improve citizens health.
It's fantastic capitalism - profit above environment, profit above health, profit above morality, profit for the few against rights and freedoms of the many.
1) A true democracy has never existed. The needle is pushed by a tiny percentage of all the people. Such is the nature of humans. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is up for a debate. Do you really want that Walmart cashier lady's take on policy? There are counter arguments as well of course, but that's not the main point of this thread.
2) >It's fantastic capitalism - profit above environment, profit above health, profit above morality, profit for the few against rights and freedoms of the many.
This statement shows that you have 0 understanding of capitalism in regards to society. Capitalism is not about selfishness. It is about self-interest. For example, it is not in the long term self-interest of energy companies that we are experiencing global warming and they know it, and despite what you think they are working on fixing that. It's just not so simple to shift.
3) Having said that, I for one, don't want someone who has such strong feelings about things he understands so little about, to have a say in policy making. He can be swayed so easy by emotions and articles in the NYT and form an opinion about complicated problems he has no clue about. But representative democracy is great, right?
>Do you really want that Walmart cashier lady's take on policy? //
Indeed, democracy is flawed - IMO it's the least worst system we have a chance of implementing effectively and with relative stability. I may not want a particular group's opinions but I'm prepared to accept that system over others.
As for "0 understanding of capitalism in regards to society" - I'm using capitalism as a short form for "Western capitalism" which is epitomised by things which aren't truly "capitalism" per se.
Semantic niceties aside energy companies in my country regularly act against their long term interest as do most businesses. Indeed they usually only act in a way that might be termed moral to fulfil legal obligations and then they tend to find a way to subvert their obligations. But then as the rhetoric here often reminds us "companies are there solely to make profit", shareholders complain if they do anything beyond their obligations. Energy companies are looking at their own goals and not societies needs.
As for 3 ... I'll confess now I didn't read the NYT article [I just assumed it was the same content as has been doing the rounds in the last couple of months - very similar to what's happening with TPP], I've been following TTIP since I learnt about it from ex-colleagues in the IPR community about 18 months ago. 38degrees started their campaign about 14 months ago IIRC. I'm the first to admit I'm ill informed on it, but that's almost the whole point - negotiations and details of the direction and end goal are hidden and actively kept secret even from representatives. There's no way for me to be completely informed. Representative democracy can't work if the representatives aren't even allowed to access the knowledge needed to make decisions for the people and it fails to be democratic when the people aren't able to see if those representatives are acting in their own interest or in the interests of the people they deign to represent.
I'm the oil company that will continue to sell oil until wells pump out dust, destroying the environment in the interim, but its okay because we've diversified and have many contingency plans.
Have you seen our catalog of contaminate filters for your home's closed air filtration system?
If you subscribe now, you can have access to our Above The Clouds solar farm. Yields on surface farms have decreased considerably as the out of control heating of the atmosphere blocks out the sun.
The conclusion to this is very strange. There's vast amounts of people on both sides of this deal that come into the fray in black and white. What I mean is they're either totally for or totally against. I've watched one of these presentations to the EU Parliament and the MEPs completely shredded the negotiators on ISDS. And yet there are still people concerned that the European Parliament is somehow going to lower standards and screw the public over.
The final few paragraphs state that if one EU member votes against TTIP then they will be blamed for not facilitating growth. Yeah, by lobbying companies, but not by the people. The EP have generally been the 'good' guys in history, and I highly doubt that they're going to U-turn and go against everything they created in the past few decades by allowing multinational companies to lobby them into lowering standards.
It's all very sensational and the media takes a very jazz hands approach to presenting the happenings to the public, when in actuality if one did a little research, you would find that the documents that exist right now present the opposite case of what the public believes.
If TTIP is horrible, I still have faith that our MEPs will reject it. But we're not anywhere near a final document to vote on, so I don't think we should be running around waving our hands in the air just yet.
And yes, I do think we should be running around waving our hands, because when the treaty gets approved, it will be too late. "Faith" is the very last think I have in our political parties when they act with their backs turned to the people.
> The EP have generally been the 'good' guys in history, and I highly doubt that they're going to U-turn and go against everything they created in the past few decades
This is a very rose-tinted view of MEPs. Like most of the European machinery, their work is not scrutinised with the same level of detail that applies to national parliaments; you hear about them when something particularly controversial comes up for voting, and at that point, most vote "with the public" just to go back to the quiet life. In some cases, they vote to stick it to the (undemocratically appointed and way too powerful) Commission, with whom there are long standing constitutional conflicts that are far from being settled. The Commission typically represents overall winners at the previous round of national elections (it's appointed by national ministers), whereas the EP is elected with mostly-proportional mechanisms, resulting in smaller (and louder) parties prevailing; that, of course, increases conflicts. In addition, there is the issue of large transnational groups (conservatives and socialists) constantly struggling between national priorities and traditional party discipline.
Obviously that's not always the case -- a lot of MEPs do work hard for the public and just vote with their conscience -- but I'm just saying they are not innately "good", their voting record is the sum of many factors and as far as I know there is no such thing as the will of MEPs "as a whole".
> If TTIP is horrible, I still have faith that our MEPs will reject it.
That would be interesting, and it would create a big constitutional mess. The Commission could technically soldier on and just push it down to national parliaments; would it be OK for them to ratify such a significant treaty after the (theoretically superior) EP rejected it? I'm not a scholar, there might be precedents in this area, but the EU is not a "common law" institution anyway...
The EU Parliament videos? I don't know how BBC iPlayer works for other countries, but I think the one where they were heavy on ISDS was this on: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05wq51g
The trend was started long ago. The whole notion of "globalization" is a development to disempower the single nations. Before the globalization was known in Germany, it was a nation that could stand against the big corporations and say "we have our own rules in this country" (e.g. worker rights, environmental, ...).
And we had a state where wealth was rather evenly divided and with many people that did well. Also we had rather low crime and view people had to worry that they could be poor when they are old.
Than came globalization and the notion that the "free market" will be always right and will make things (automatically) perfect. (That was promoted by Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan, to name two early adopters). Than the governments in Germany and all over the world started to bend. "It is the free market, we can not do anything against it" was said by them. "We have to bend our laws to comply with the free market".
So it was going all over the world.
What do we have today: All over the world, people get richer ... 1% of the people. The others get gradually poorer and the lowest part of the people are really poor, because in Germany it is already clear, that a big part of the people working today, will not be able to live from the pensions they will get.
So the "free market" took over and the "free nations" are enslaved by one economic theory, that nobody has ever proved.
We are all at the mercy of "unlimited growth". Our economic systems are only stable, when growth is guaranteed. In biology, unlimited growth is called cancer.
That's basically John Ralston Saul's argument in his book "The Collapse of Globalization". Good story from that book was how the PM of Malaysia was laughed out of Davos for installing capital and currency controls then after the financial meltdown of the late 90s they hailed him as a visionary at Davos for surviving the crisis. Saul also predicted they would try this insane system again because it is ideology and therefore can never be wrong.
It is not about "free market" -- but about the ideology behind the current system. It has the name "free market" -- but it is only free for those, that have the money to control politics. That are the persons that control, what is negotiated at TTIP and other treaties.
To answer your question: Go to Bangladesh, go to Mexico (already have a treaty like TTIP in place, and what happened: The rich get richer, the poor get poorer), go to Germany, go to the US. Must I go on?
I don't think, your question was a real question.
You view the world from your position (of a rather rich guy) -- but there are approx. 5 billion people poorer than you and me around.
Edit: One final thought about it: Even when you are on the profitable side of today's system (what might even change), you even might be effected by its back-sides, when for example environmental regulations are lowered. Many regulations today are lowered or not strengthened, because they could potentially harm big corporations. Also in the rich countries, even rich people are dying of environmental induced deceases. That politics is turning more and more a blind eye to those problems, is showing, that we are indeed enslaved!
"Through a US Freedom of Information Act request, Intellectual Property Watch has obtained some 400 pages of email traffic between USTR officials and industry advisors ... the emails reveal a close-knit relationship between negotiators and the industry advisors that is likely unmatched by any other stakeholders. "
"RCEP can be compared with the .. TPP, except that rather than being driven by the United States, it is being driven by the ten-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) .. [plus] India and China .. This draft is .. far worse than ACTA, and is even worse than the most recent leaked draft of the TPP."
So, where are unions on countering the corporate influence over the USTR? There are still some big unions in the U.S., with plenty of money and influence. Aren't they the natural counterparty in these things?
Good question. One union (Communications Workers) is in a group calling for the release of lobbyist emails. Unclear why they have been unable to influence more legislators.
"10 organizations representing more than 10 million Americans called on U.S. Trade Representative -- USTR -- Michael Froman to publicly release all records of communication between himself and representatives of the ten largest U.S. financial institutions -- including his former employer Citigroup -- while he has served in the USTR position."
yeah, and it's kind of the only reason why an ordinary EU or US citizen would find enticing in such a treaty... as an EU citizen, I'd almost swallow ISDSs for the short term benefits I would see as possible from this ...but it would be seen as indirectly putting more power in the workers' hands and not in the ones of the companies ... and we can't have more "socialism", can't we :)
My question is, why is this representative of innate inertia? It seems like even if this is managed to be stopped, there will be 3 more similar deals ready to replace it. The people who push for these things do not stop pushing.
That's a narrow way of looking at it. More likely rule by government will simply be replaced with rule by cooperations (e.g. Gibson's trilogy) - it's not an unexpected movement since the role of governments has weakened significantly since the time when a large standing army in Europe gave dominance to a nation.
Will it be worse for the average person/family? Probably, yet I tend towards seeing it as a natural historical movement rather than some kind of craftily-perpetrated evil. For example Spengler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler) writes about the dominance of money and commercial interest as being the primary value at the aged point of a civilizations development (cf. the last couple centuries of ancient Rome).
Without even considering our present situation from a moral perspective, but simply acknowledging the pattern you just pointed out, it is obvious that there is a deep systemic flaw. Of course there is the very old argument of the apologists: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." But this is the incredibly predictable result of a system structured around the concept of everybody owning some small part of everybody else, controlling that interest with a vote, and outsourcing the execution to people who wear lapel pins.
This is why it is so important to make sure that concepts like rule of law and due process are enforces universally. The problem we have right now is that we have let things go uncorrected for too long.
All those "little" problems that never really resolved - the corporation trying to exploit a legal technicality to raise the costs for their competitors, the sociopath manager that ignores labor laws to try raise their profit margin, the politician getting kickbacks from the business in exchange for not passing some regulation - well... in most cases, we never rally addressed these problems properly. A few people got slaps on the wrist. Some were simply declared legal (and therefor moral to many people).
Operant conditioning[1] works in humans. We have spent the last several decades training people to see profit as the main goal. We have not been punishing the problems as people inevitably start to test the boundaries of the laws that supposedly limit what they can do. This combination of influences creates a situation where it is entirely rational for someone to start to themselves as being above the law and untouchable. They are simply extrapolating their own experience and observations.
So now we have a serious problem on our hands - some people have gotten so emboldened (and enriched), they have started to take the next step: actually writing this power imbalance back into the law and making their new aristocracy legal.
The core of this problem is fear, or the lack of it. Without a belief that there is at least some chance you could be caught, humans tend to act in a manner that reinforces their current situation. A decade ago I would have suggested that we simply needed to start throwing the book at the banks/business/politicians that misbehaved. We used to do that; politicians would resin if they were caught taking bribes, and corporations were occasionally heavily sanctioned or even forcibly dissolved for their crimes. Do you really believe any of that could happen today? I don't. We've had plenty of examples, from the "banking crisis" a few years ago, to the CIA getting away with murder and torture without even so much as a show trial.
No, if we had any intention of actually putting aside our differences and showing a bit of solidarity against the common enemy of corruption, we would have done it by now. Instead, were still acting like we have the luxury of being able to argue about our traditional political disagreements. Meanwhile, troops and the crony-capitalist apparatchik have been moving into more and more positions of power and influence.
The only way this tide is going to be turned back is... very unfortunately... when the people responsible regain their fear that they could could be caught, and the only way that fear will be restore is when they soe a real risk to their own survival. This is what the French understood when they got out the guillotines.
Of course, this is why the NSA has been working so hard to establish domestic surveillance and working with the FBI on parallel constriction: COINTELPRO never ended, and it's still the easiest way to break up any threatening social structure.
[1] see; Skinner's box on how conditioning can affect volition
>> The nominal one million signatures from EU citizens was achieved in just two months; at the time of writing, over 1.7 million Europeans have signed the unofficial ECI—a stunning rebuke to the European Commission for refusing to allow this to proceed officially. Resistance isn’t limited to the digital world, either. Recently, a global day of action against TTIP and CETA saw 750 events organised around the world, with many tens of thousands of people taking to the streets to show their engagement and concerns.
--> they are now at a 1.9 Mio votes against TTIP. If you're in the EU vote against it here: https://stop-ttip.org/
The problem with ECI is, you can force the government to talk about your topic. Essentially, people have right to make a plea to the rulers, who are then free to ignore it. Apparently, this is called a "democratic instrument". Oh well, I'm from Switzerland, so maybe I just got a distorted idea about who should have the last word in a democracy. (I'm not saying you shouldn't sign this if you are in the EU, but it's humiliating if that's the best option you have.)
Any argument at this point will require a level of speculation that makes me uncomfortable. I'm against the TTIP on principle, simply because I cannot read it. That's the only information I need to be against it, nothing else is germane to my stance.
Given that, I feel little need to read up on it, or learn about how it might be terrible. Until I can read it, I don't want to hear speculation about what might be in it.
All I wanted was for things such as unified vehicle safety standards between the EU and US. If the US adopted the far newer and more relevant EU standards (which has effectively already happened to a large extend due to the globalized car market) Americans would benefit from safer vehicles while Europeans would benefit from more options.
Instead we seemingly ended up with a whole bowl of agreements regarding controversial protectionism, financial regulation, etc.
Freedom needs institutions that strip evil from inertia, by making it loose power in combat against itself, by bleeding it dry and redirecting the ressources into new smaller evils.
That is what democracy basically consist off. Accepting that humanitys nature is a dangerous snake pit and building a machinery that converts snake venom and strangling motion into movement .
Democracy is a bad ideal that is much inferior for economic prosperity than one party states/kingdoms like Singapore, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Qatar who have a high degree of economic freedom. This deal would increase prosperity and trade and prevent unelected bureaucrats on both sides of the atlantic from restricting commerce with oppressive laws.
If only US and EU weren't a democracy, but allowed full blown economic freedom, we would all have plenty more money in our pockets.
> Democracy is a bad ideal that is much inferior for economic prosperity than one party states/kingdoms like Singapore, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Qatar who have a high degree of economic freedom
Er, right. You're surely aware that most one-party states have very little in the way of economic freedom AND have a high degree of corruption? Not to mention that economic freedom, for many people, is less important than a decent human rights record. And while neither the EU nor the US are perfect in this record, they're still considerably better than bastions of economic freedom like Qatar.
You don't have to be a one-party dictatorship to have a free country. The US was originally designed to be a free country, and it was a constitutional republic (not a democracy). The reason the US strayed from that was because, basically, the Constitution was too weak (and there were many generations of Supreme Court justices devoted to undermining it).
The power of denial is strong. That's an interesting ideal, but the reality is that we have a bought government. How is giving the same people who bought the government more power going to fix anything? If anything that would lead to dictatorship and outright serfdom.
And that's the best case scenario. With studies which appear to ignore any downside of the trade agreement.
Another choice morsel:
According to CEO's analysis of the leaked document: "as soon as a new regulation is in the pipeline, businesses should be informed through an annual report, and be involved". Specifically, governments wishing to bring in new regulations have to offer companies that may be affected by legislation or regulation an opportunity to provide input, with the rider that this input “shall be taken into account” when finalising the proposal."
Consumers, on the other hand, can just get stuffed, no privileged access for NGOs.
Not to mention the ISDS mechanism, which is pure madness. What democratic government would want to be subject to secret tribunals, especially considering the litigation-happy nature of US business culture? A system which, apparently, is already used to strong-arm Canada into watering down legislation which would endanger US corporate profits...