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Fast Track Will Also Apply to TISA, the "Scariest Trade Deal Nobody's Talking About"
by Gaius Publius
Fast Track is not just a path to TPP ... it's evil all on its own. There's now another leaked "trade" deal, called TISA, and Fast Track will "fast-track" that one too. Want your municipal water service privatized? How about your government postal service? Read on.
Most of the coverage of the Fast Track bill (formally called "Trade Promotion Authority" or TPA) moving through Congress is about how it will "grease the skids" for passage of TPP, the "next NAFTA" trade deal with 11 other Pacific rim countries. But as we pointed out here, TPA will grease the skids for anything the President sends to Congress as a "trade" bill anything.
One of the "trade" deals being negotiated now, which only the wonks have heard about, is called TISA, or Trade In Services Agreement. Fast Track legislation, if approved, will grease the TISA skids as well.
Why do you care? Because (a) TISA is also being negotiated in secret, like TPP; (b) TISA chapters have been recently leaked by Wikileaks; and (c) what's revealed in those chapters should have Congress shutting the door on Fast Track faster and tighter than you'd shut the door on an invading army of rats headed for your apartment. ....................(more)
- See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2015/06/fast-track-will-also-apply-to-tisa.html#sthash.zH1AEpmm.dpuf
historylovr
(1,557 posts)Elwood P Dowd
(11,443 posts)<snip>
... In general, trade deals today are markedly different from those made in the decades following World War II, when negotiations focused on lowering tariffs. As tariffs came down on all sides, trade expanded, and each country could develop the sectors in which it had strengths and as a result, standards of living would rise. Some jobs would be lost, but new jobs would be created.
Today, the purpose of trade agreements is different. Tariffs around the world are already low. The focus has shifted to nontariff barriers, and the most important of these for the corporate interests pushing agreements are regulations. Huge multinational corporations complain that inconsistent regulations make business costly. But most of the regulations, even if they are imperfect, are there for a reason: to protect workers, consumers, the economy and the environment.
Whats more, those regulations were often put in place by governments responding to the democratic demands of their citizens. Trade agreements new boosters euphemistically claim that they are simply after regulatory harmonization, a clean-sounding phrase that implies an innocent plan to promote efficiency. One could, of course, get regulatory harmonization by strengthening regulations to the highest standards everywhere. But when corporations call for harmonization, what they really mean is a race to the bottom.
A race to the bottom of what? The least regulation governmental interference in profit-seeking that they can get away with. These deals really are just about the money. Stiglitz continues:
When agreements like the TPP govern international trade when every country has agreed to similarly minimal regulations multinational corporations can return to the practices that were common before the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts became law (in 1970 and 1972, respectively) and before the latest financial crisis hit. Corporations everywhere may well agree that getting rid of regulations would be good for corporate profits. Trade negotiators might be persuaded that these trade agreements would be good for trade and corporate profits. But there would be some big losers namely, the rest of us.
<snip>
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)Elwood P Dowd
(11,443 posts)with excitement and fall all over themselves cheerleading for the damn thing.