‘Stopping the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership’ with Linda Kaucher

Linda Kaucher explores the numerous threats contained in the US/EU ‘free trade’ TTIP deal, and presents the campaign to stop its implementation.

Despite the attempt to keep secret the implications of a US/EU supposed ‘free trade’ agreement called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), public awareness of the deal and how it will take us towards a corporate-run world is growing.

In addition to the usual corporate-friendly provision in ‘trade’ deals when services are ‘liberalised’, TTIP goes much further. Regulatory harmonisation (also called co-operation or coherence) between the world’s two biggest economies, the US and the EU, is in fact a deregulation mechanism – a way for transnational corporations to get rid of laws that limit their profit-making.

The threat to current regulations on food safety, involving eg US-style chlorine-washed chicken and hormone-treated beef, have attracted so much public disgust the EU Trade Commission has been forced to pledge to maintain EU standards on these. However it is the hidden provision for the future that is the bigger threat. - to regulations and to democracy.

A Regulatory Co-operation Council, with big business at the table from earliest consideration of new regulations, will threaten both sound public interest regulating and democracy.

And planned investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) will allow corporations to sue governments for any introduced regulation that doesn’t suit corporate profit-making.
Linda Kaucher is a long-term researcher on the EU’s international ‘trade’ deals, and will launch the latest StopTTIP booklet on this and other corporate-benefit ‘trade’ deals.

Register to tell a friend about this lecture.

Comments

If you would like to comment about this lecture, please register here.

©2003-2006 Niminim Limited. Created by

Any ad revenue is entirely reinvested into the Lecture List's operating fund