In 38 hours, the
One of the ways we can know what t-tep or tafta will mean for all of our lives is by looking
at the 20-year record of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In the period of that time, for most people in the US, in Canada, and Mexico, NAFTA has
been a damaging experience.
We have been the lab rats, so we have seen in the United States our manufacturing jobs
disappear.
First, the corporations used the investor privileges to go to Mexico, where the wages
were only $6 a day, and then they went to China, once China went into the World Trade
Organization.
So now Mexico also has less industrial jobs than Mexico did before NAFTA.
We also saw challenges through the ISDS that is in NAFTA, $400 million had been paid out
to corporate tax against our clean water, environmental, toxic, food safety, labeling
regulatory standards.
So it's not speculative that ISDS is very dangerous.
Investors state arbitration is something that's not new.
It's been in trade agreements, bilateral trade agreements, free trade agreements for decades.
But it has really come back to the spotlight with the EU-US trade negotiations, and to
a certain extent EU-Canada trade negotiations as well.
Basically investor state arbitration is really about special provisions that you include
in a trade agreement, and that allows companies, a foreign investor, to sue the host state
when the host state is passing a regulation, which the company thinks is hindering their
profits, their investment potential.
So an example of this would be, for instance, what is happening at the moment in Canada.
A US company, Lone Pine Resources, which is an oil and gas company, is using the North
America free trade agreements to challenge the government of Canada.
And basically the reason why they're doing this is that the province of Canada, the province
of Quebec, has introduced a moratorium on fracking, which is a technology to extract
shade gas, out of safety and out of precaution for the people and the environment.
So the government of Quebec, the province basically said that they were not quite sure
about the effect of this technology, which in fact is harmful.
What happened is that then the US investor decided to sue the government, the national
government, saying that by doing this, basically the government was not treating the investor
in a fair and equitable treatment.
And that, of course, is problematic because they're not suing them in their own national
courts, they're suing them in private tribunals, where a set of three individual arbitrators
that are usually for-profit lawyers, paid by the hours, who have basically an interest
in maintaining the system, are going to decide whether a sovereign state was right or wrong
in putting a regulation for the safety of its people and its environment.
The reaction on the ISDS system in the United States is actually increasingly negative and
critical.
Now our state legislatures have officially come out, all 50 states, and said if any agreement
includes investor states, they will oppose this agreement.
One of the things in terms of environment we're really worried about is a very big attack
we see at the moment on the precautionary principles that we are applying in the European Union.
Precautionary principle is at the basis of all the good environmental things we have
in Europe, but also on our system of food authorization, chemical authorization.
And at the moment, big businesses have very much understood that TTIP is actually the
golden opportunity to get rid of that precautionary principle.
So the main threat for TAFTA, for people both in the US and the EU and around the world,
is that this would become a model of global governance and its global governance by four
and of multinational corporations.
What we see very much is a massive industry lobby, dirty energies, exon, chevron, shells,
the usual suspects, agro businesses, chemical industries that are really trying to push
this transatlantic trade and investment partnerships to bring down regulations that are protecting
people.
The agreement would be like cement, like supergroup, it would lock into place a system of policies
that are strongly enforced that give new rights and powers to corporations and that restrain
what the governments can do to regulate the companies and our interests.
The new rights are the investor rights, the extraordinary investor rights to offshore
jobs to attack our laws and demand, our government money and compensation, new intellectual property
rules that would undermine our access to the internet and internet freedom, new rights
that would undermine our privacy, new rights that would increase medicine prices and intellectual
property.
But then in addition, there are many constraints, handcuffs and our government's ability to
ensure our food is safe, that the banks are not instable and don't cause another crisis.
So the combination of limiting the governments and empowering the corporations will be locked
in permanently.
It's like a slow-motion coup d'etat against democratic government that is permanent because
once these rules are in place, we cannot change them unless all the countries agree.
It's not like when it policies in parliament and the assembly national or the Bundestag
says, that was a stupid idea, why did we do that 10 years ago, now we're changing it.
That is not how the trade agreements work.
If there's really one thing to keep in mind about TITV, it's about everything but trade.
It's all about bringing down regulations that are seen as barriers to big businesses, but
that can actually save the life of people and protect the environment and the people.
