The terms of Obama’s proposed TPP ‘trade’
treaty with Asian countries won’t be made public until the treaty has
already been in force for at least four years.
The terms of Obama’s proposed TISA (Trade In Services Agreement) with
52 nations won’t be made public until the treaty has already been in
force for at least five years. Obama’s proposed TTIP treaty with European countries has been so successfully hidden, that even the number of years it will be kept from the public isn’t yet known. Hello, international fascism — all in secret, until too late for the public to do anything.
There is even speculation that “The Ed
Show” was cancelled by the Democratic Party’s propaganda-operation owned
by Comcast Corporation, MSNBC, because its star, Ed Schultz, was that
cable-news network’s only host who covered Obama’s proposed ‘trade’
deals; and he was highly critical of them — he was critical of them
notwithstanding that his employer,
Comcast is one of the few companies
that have been brought in behind closed doors – where our elected
Representatives don’t even get to go – to help review and consult with
leaders about the global trade agreement. Comcast is hungry for the
power they would receive from the TPP because it would gut regulations
for all industries, so they had to silence the only voice on their new
network that had the courage to talk about how horrible the trade deal
would be for American citizens.
But in Europe, things are being rushed,
just in case secrecy breaks and the treaty fails to pass. The European
Union is already secretly imposing provisions from the secret
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) treaty, even
before anyone has signed it, and even before it has been formally
approved in any nation. This was revealed over the last weekend in two
places:
On the night of October 17th, Phillip Inman of the online version of the Guardian bannered (in an article that the Guardian declined to publish in its printed edition), “Prospect of TTIP already undermining EU food standards, say campaigners,” and he reported that,
Nick Dearden, director of anti-poverty
group Global Justice Now, says the EU’s chief trade counsellor, Damien
Levie, has let slip that free trade means undermining current minimum
standards agreed by the EU.
Dearden says that according to a report in the [subscription-only] newsletter Washington Trade Daily, Levie told a conference held by US free market thinktank the Cato Institute [which is owned by America’s passionately anti-regulatory billionaire oil-investors, the Koch brothers] that genetically modified crops and chemically washed beef carcasses were being allowed into the EU ahead of a deal.
According to the report, Levie said EU
member states “have been stepping up case reviews and approving new
genetically modified organisms [GMOs] with five new products approved so
far”. …
Levie … told the Cato Institute
conference that neither side wants to reach anything less than a
comprehensive economic agreement. He conceded the deal could founder on
resistance from the US to include financial services in the deal and
Washington’s reluctance to open local and state procurement to bids from
EU businesses.
Previously, information that was made
public by wikileaks had made clear that in the negotiations over the
TTIP, the U.S. has been the most aggresssive nation pushing for the
ability of international corporations to shape national laws — this
being the position that’s also favored by the Koch brothers.
On October 18th, Lauren McCauley at Common Dreams headlined “TTIP Already ‘Rewriting the Rule Book’ for EU Food Standards, New Report Finds,” and stated that a progressive British organization, Global Justice Now, issued a study on October 18th, which noted that:
US officials successfully used the
prospect of TTIP to bully the EU into abandoning plans to ban 31
dangerous pesticides with ingredients that have been shown to cause
cancer and infertility.
A similar fate befell regulations
around the treatment of beef with lactic acid. This was banned in Europe
because of fears that the procedure was being used to conceal
unhygienic practices. The ban was repealed by MEPs in the European
Parliamentary Environment Public Health and Food Safety Committee after
EU Commission officials openly suggested TTIP negotiations would be
threatened if the ban wasn’t lifted.
On climate change, the European Fuel Quality Directive which would effectively ban Canadian tar sands oil [the world’s worst oil from a global-warming standpoint] has foundered in the face of strong US-Canadian lobbying around both TTIP and the EU-Canada CETA deal.
As I reported on 2 February 2014:
[The proposed] Keystone XL Pipeline
wouldn’t contribute to U.S. energy-production, but instead to exports of
the global-warming-dirtiest oil, from Canada, to Europe and South
America. It would transport Alberta Canada’s tar-sands oil — half of which is owned by the Kochs — south to two Koch-owned refineries near the Texas Gulf Coast for transshipment mainly to Europe. President Obama is thus trying to get Europe to relax its anti-global-warming standards to permit their importation of this oil, which is the world’s absolute worst oil from the global-warming standpoint.
Furthermore, “Currently,
most Canadian tar sands exports are mainly limited to the U.S. Midwest
market by a lack of transportation infrastructure.” This fact (the lack
of “infrastructure” or transportation facilities to move the oil to the
international market) keeps down not only the price the Kochs can get
for their oil (since it can’t currently be sold on the international
market); it also greatly lowers the sheer volume of it that they can
sell (at any price), because the local Midwest oil market is small.
Keystone XL would thus also enormously increase the annual sales-volume
of this currently deeply landlocked oil.
Moreover, if this filthy oil isn’t
sold out fast, it won’t ever be sold at all; and here is why, as
explained by no less than the Oil & Gas Sector Analyst at the
world’s largest bank (in terms of assets):
He says, “Between
60 and 80% of current fossil fuel reserves listed on global markets
cannot be burned if we are to limit the rise in global temperature to 2
degrees [Celsius, or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit],” and that’s the
temperature-rise 97% of climatologists endorse as
being the cut-off point that mustn’t be exceeded if the climate is to
avoid going haywire with soaring heat and destroying the planet’s
biosphere as humans have always known it.
So: U.S. President Obama has been
aggressively pushing for the largely-Koch-owned Canadian tar-sands oil
to be allowed into European markets in order for that portion of their —
and Exxon’s, etc. — oil reserves to be sellable at all, because it
otherwise might not be.
The Koch brothers are generally considered to be the biggest fundraisers for the U.S. Republican Party. On 5 January 2012, the Washington Post headlined, “Koch-backed political coalition, designed to shield donors, raised $400 million in 2012” and
Matea Gold reported that, “The resources and the breadth of
the organization make it singular in American politics,” and that, “Its
funders remain largely unknown.” However, one self-admitted member,
Jack Schuler, a Chicago health-care
entrepreneur, attended one of the Kochs’ donor meetings in Beaver Creek,
Colo., several years ago and has contributed about $100,000 a year
to their efforts since then. “They came across as guys who are putting a
lot of their own money into it,” Schuler said. “They are pretty
soft-spoken, not screamers or screechers. They provide the leadership,
the staff — without the framework, I wouldn’t do it on my own.”
A large portion of that $400 million went
to Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign against Barack Obama’s re-election
bid. Obama supports the Kochs financially, though the Kochs preferred
the self-declared Republican candidate.
Thus, apparently, the Kochs have already
won Obama’s success at defeating the EU’s fuel-quality standards, even
if the TTIP gets turned down. The EU did it without needing to go all
the way to put in place and effectuate the TTIP.
NOTE: The headline to this article says
“Despite the Public’s Overwhelming Opposition,” but the publicly
available scientific polling on these secret treaties is also being
gamed. Early on, the polls had asked respondents whether they approved
of “free trade” or other such vagaries,
and the public did. Then the polling just stopped, as if that was that,
and Obama’s proposed ‘trade’ deals are popular. But the massive public demonstrations, etcetera, since then, against these treaties, have become increasingly clear
that, to the extent people actually come to know about Obama’s proposed
‘trade’ treaties (especially in Europe, which isn’t quite as corrupt as
is the U.S. and so fewer people are totally in the dark), they’re
strongly opposed, and might even revolt violently if that’s the only way
to stop the treaty from being approved. News such as you’re reading
here has been submitted to the news-media in all Western countries, but
only few publish it. The major advertisers have participated in the
committees that drafted these treaties, and probably wouldn’t be pleased
if their handiworks were known to the public in time to be blocked from
going into effect.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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