TTIP Agreement is Profoundly Undemocratic
http://billmoyers.com/2015/03/20/john-hilary-proposed-ttip-agreement-profoundly-undemocratic/
That’s absolutely correct. In 1995, a group was formed called the Transatlantic Business Dialogue, and it was composed of major companies from Europe and the US that got together to try to create a customs union where they could trade and invest without any restriction on their profits. They tried first through the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development], in the context of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. But there was a massive worldwide mobilization against it, and we saw the MAI collapse in 1998. They then tried again through the World Trade Organization, and once again, the WTO crashed in 2004 and all of these new powers had to be taken off the table. So we’ve already fought back against TTIP in its previous forms, and we have won both times. That’s why we’re confident we can win again.
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?
That’s 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 what’s 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 they’ve seen outside that room. Really, it’s 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. It’s profoundly un-transparent and anti-democratic, and it’s 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?
You’re 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 it’s important to say that this is not using the normal, domestic judicial system; it’s 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......
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