Treaty that compels privatization of jobs, education and healthcare back!

Treaty that compels privatization of jobs, education and healthcare back!

The Trade in Services Agreement, an international plurilateral treaty on services (defined loosely as everything you cannot drop on your foot or as all services that are not that extends new rights to sell essentials and move employees where they can be utilized most profitably is back on the agenda in Washington, according to USTR Lighthizer in a hearing in the Senate Finance Committee last Thursday. The treaty privatizes most activities of governments in a one way manner however it does offer narrow exclusions to privatization, for example its expected it will dovetail with an earlier treaty and be compatible with it, which means it will generously exclude “the activities of central banks and other monetary authorities, statutory social security and public retirement plans, and public entities using
government financial resources”. What services do have to be privatized? Basically this new agreements scope is supposed to be even wider than its predecessor which was disturbingly wide.

For example, this question was put to the WTO in Geneva and here was their answer:

Question: “What protection is there for a government which allows both a
private services provision and a public provision but wants to ring-fence the
public component?”

Answer: “f the public component, as you put it, consists of services supplied
in the exercise of governmental authority, it is outside the scope of the GATS,
by virtue of Article I.” It appears that the TISA as its called also uses the same definition.

However, that definition is increasingly understood to offer little if any protection to existing public services as the most restrictive possible interpretation of it is definitions are used.

The crucial difference between the two is the shift in defaults from opt in, to opt out. The US was perhaps the most eager to opt in to many services sectors which other countries did not commit, in the previous agreement.

With the new agreement, it will basically go on auto-pilot and privatize everything, putting it up for international bidding to lower costs such as wages.

To reiterate this very important point, if a country does not exclude a service in advance, it is included, a crucial difference from its predecessor. this will tend to favor the cheapest countries, in the international competitions for jobs building infrastructure or perhaps warehousing the growing numbers of unemployed and destitute, or sick. One might expect a few huge companies to specialize in providing such services to the entire world, perhaps making extensive use of automation, so that bids could be won by paring down the service so it could be delivered efficiently at the lowest possible costs. the rules may lend themselves to a centralized internationalized model for delivery of services.

Once this process begins it is locked in by a ratchet, taking it out of the realm of things which voting can still change. This is truly myopic thinking, given the exponential growth in technology and its increasingly unpredictable nature.

NEW CORPORATE RIGHTS THAT TRUMP ALL OTHERS

TISA is potentially one of the largest shifts in power and wealth in human history, and it may signify the beginning of a new phase in corporate development, a shift in the ownership of the resources of the planet to large jridicial persons which man national borders, delivering services and optimizing value chains to maximize profits.

Although it seems anticlimactic, TISA formally anoints shifts made in the last thirty years which were previously little known. It extends new fundamental property rights in policy, for example new rights to sell essentials unless those essentials are also free and never sold. It halts the trend in the last century to favor natural persons and reverses it via the standstill of regulation and progressive liberalization (one way privatization) of national policies that impact trade in services, giving a one way tilt towards deregulation and privatization to all future policy which will be regardless of who or what the consumers making up markets around the world “vote” for. What the previous rulers of the earth, the human race would have called a race to the bottom becomes a triumphant race to the top in profits for the new masters of Earth.