Bill Mitchell — Financial services agreements – the EU as a neoliberal, corporatist project

I have been reading the new book by Costas Lapavitsas – ‘The Left Case Against the EU’ – which has been recently published. It is solid and clearly explains why the EU is not an institution or structure than anyone on the progressive Left should support or think is capable of reform any time soon. It has become a neoliberal, corporatist state and hierarchical in operation, with Germany at the apex bullying the weaker states into submission. Divergence in outcomes across the geographic spread is the norm. It is also the anathema of our concepts of democracy both in concept and operation. It is more like a cabal of elites who are unelected and, largely unaccountable. By giving their support to this monstrosity, the traditional Left political parties (social democrats, socialists etc) have been increasingly wiped out such is the anger of voters to what has become a massive coup by capital against labour. These are the themes that Thomas Fazi and I also explored in our recent book – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, 2017). I also just finished reading an interesting report – Financial Regulation challenged by European Trade Policy – published by the Veblen Institute and Finance Watch (October 2, 2018), which examines “the impact of European trade policy on financial regulation”. It is essential reading for those progressives who still think that Britain should remain in the EU. If they understand the research findings they would change their minds....

The underlying problem is the crush of empires, which has been the scourge of Europe for centuries after tribal conflict became conflict of nations and nations were combined by force into empires. The empires of old in Europe largely disappeared after WWI or remained in a vestigial state. On the other hand, new empires arose (America) and old empires began to wake up (Russia, China, Iran, Turkey), while India is also assuming an imperial presence as the nationalistic aftermath of the British Raj.

European elites see the handwriting on the wall. If they do not unite Europe into a empire of states, similar to the US as domestic empire of sovereign states, they will be dominated, as they are now by the US, and likely crushed in the future conflict of empires on their borders.

Neoliberal globalization American-style is imperial statism masquerading as individualism. The dialectical response is growing nationalism domestically as the "peasants" push back and growing multipolarism and militarism internationally as old and new power centers collide.

This pressure is only going to increase as the arms race unfolds and the developing world comes on line (China, India, Iran, Turkey). This will eventually spread to Latin America, with Brazil as the dominant power. Africa still hangs in the balance, but its large Islamic population predisposes it to a renewed Islamic empire like the Ottoman.

All part of the process of globalization. There's an intelligent way to do this systematically, and a random way to do it chaotically. Nature probably doesn't "care" about the route taken, although Nature "prefers" the principle of least action (efficiency). It's up to humans to add effectiveness based on purpose.

How will that purpose be determined and by whom?

If left to self-interested and unaccountable elites, the direction is pretty obvious—more conflict. The West under the US will be pursuing transnational corporate totalitarianism under Western (read US) leadership—because American exceptionalism.

Economists tend to ignore political issues of this scale, even though they are fundamentally economic, being about control of territory, population, and resources, both financial and real. However, these forces are determinative historically. Hence, they constitute "the big picture" in which long term trends are embedded socially and unfold in time.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Financial services agreements – the EU as a neoliberal, corporatist project
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Michael Brune — TransCanada Files NAFTA Suit Demanding More Than $15 Billion for Keystone XL Rejection

On June 24, foreign oil company TransCanada filed a lawsuit against the U.S. under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing that the U.S. rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline violated NAFTA’s broad rights for foreign investors by thwarting the company’s “expectations.” As compensation, TransCanada is demanding more than $15 billion from U.S. taxpayers.

TransCanada’s case will be heard in a private tribunal of three lawyers who are not accountable to any domestic legal system, thanks to NAFTA’s “investor-state” system, which is also included in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The controversial TPP would empower thousands of additional corporations, including major polluters, to follow TransCanada’s example and use this private tribunal system to challenge U.S. climate and environmental policies.…

Oh what the heck, it isn't "taxpayer money" – just government on the hook. (snark)

EcoWatch
TransCanada Files NAFTA Suit Demanding More Than $15 Billion for Keystone XL Rejection
Michael Brune

ht Dan Crawford at Angry Bear

Wikileaks — Trade in Services Agreement [Tisa]

Today, Wednesday, 25 May 2016, 11:30am CEST, WikiLeaks releases new secret documents from the huge Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) which is being negotiated by the US, EU and 22 other countries that account for 2/3rds of global GDP.

This release includes a previously unknown annex to the TiSA core chapter on "State Owned Enterprises" (SOEs), which imposes unprecedented restrictions on SOEs and will force majority owned SOEs to operate like private sector businesses. This corporatisation of public services - to nearly the same extent as demanded by the recently signed TPP - is a next step to privatisation of SOEs on the neoliberal agenda behind the "Big Three" (TTIP,TiSA,TPP).

Other documents in todays release cover updated versions of annexes to TiSA core chapters that were published by WikiLeaks in previous releases; these updates show the advances in the confidential negotiations between the TiSA parties on the issues of Domestic Regulation, New Provisions, Transparency, Electronic Commerce, Financial Services, Telecommunication Services, Professional Services and the Movement of Natural Persons. WikiLeaks is also publishing expert analyses on some of these documents.

The annexes on Domestic Regulation, Transparency and New Provisions have further advanced towards the "deregulation" objectives of big corporations entering overseas markets. Local regulations like store size restrictions or hours of operations are considered an obstacle to achieve "operating efficiencies" of large-scale retailing, disregarding their public benefit that foster livable neighbors and reasonable hours of work for employees. The TiSA provisions in their current form will establish a wide range of new grounds for domestic regulations to be challenged by corporations - even those without a local presence in that country.

Cementing hardcore neoliberalism in place as the basis for a new world order of global governance under transnational financial and business elites. The noose is closing, but expect blowback. some will not go quietly, but the police state is already in place.

Wikileaks

Trade in Services Agreement

Karel van Wolferen — The Predators Behind the TPP

The designation “trade” used by politicians and the media when talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact and the proposed Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TPIP) agreement is another perfect example of a misnomer thanks to which a new shadow will be cast over the generally more fortunate parts of the world.

If signed and ratified, the trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic agreements, which seek to organize business activity under one gigantic umbrella of new rules, are likely to change our living environment in ways very different from what elected officials have been misled to imagine.

They have been peddled as trade treaties, and hence as being wonderful for economic growth, job creation, social well-being and general happiness.

But the TPP agreement, which aims to tie the United States together with close to a dozen countries in Asia, Oceania and a bit of Latin America, is not in the first place about trade, and may hardly be significant at all for stimulating genuine exchanges traditionally labelled that way. The same is true for its TPIP companion, which is meant to create and foster a new American-European business environment.

The TPP and TPIP accords are about power, not trade. More specifically, the agreements are about changed power relations between a collectivity of politically well-connected large corporations and the sovereign states in which these entities want to sink new roots. In particular, these treaties would allow U.S. corporations to engage in conduct unchecked by national rules of the participating countries. In eyes not fogged over through neoliberal dogma, such a thing would be recognized as predation.…

All this is easily understood. But it still leaves us with the puzzle of why Asians as well as Europeans, whose EU trade commissioners have been mouthing the same job creating nonsense around the TPIP that accompanies the TPP rhetoric, appear unable to tackle intellectually the dominant power aspects of these treaties.

Perhaps this is because the world in which they exist is politically sterilized by current economic suppositions. More generally, the concept of power (not influence with which it is often confused) receives a “stepmotherly” treatment in popular as well as serious writing, and the social science denizens of academia are entirely at sea over it.
Mainstream economics is ahistorical by design and hence has no room for power, which has helped continue the fateful division of political and economic affairs into separate realms for discussion that has long served the interests of power elites…

Raging Bull-Shit
The Predators Behind the TPP
Karel van Wolferen, former NRC Handelsblad correspondent for East Asia, and professor emeritus of comparative political and economic institutions at the University of Amsterdam
(cross-posted from The Japan Times)

Don Quijones — German Judges Pooh-Pooh Obama’s Sacred US-EU Trade Pact

This past week saw the ceremonious signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in Auckland, an event whose prime purpose was to convince the world that a trade agreement that most people have not even heard of and which has so far been approved by only one (Malaysia) out of 12 elected parliaments is already done and dusted.

Even the Sidney Morning Herald concedes that it was a giant PR exercise:

"It masks the fact that for Australia and most TPP countries, the public debate and parliamentary process to pass implementing legislation, leading to final ratification of the deal, is just the beginning, and it will be a rocky road."

The road will be particularly rocky in the U.S. where the treaty’s safe passage through Congress and the Senate is far from guaranteed. Indeed, the trade agreement has become so toxic with the voting public that not a single presidential contender dares to endorse it. Even the former US Trade Representative, and now Senator, Rob Portman, has come out against TPP, albeit for the wrong reasons, most tellingly the fact that he, too, is up for reelection this autumn.

However, the biggest blow to the global corporatocracy’s bloated designs did not come from the U.S. It came from Germany, where the German Association of Judges (DRB, an association that also includes prosecutors) just issued adamning indictment on the EU’s proposal to establish an “international investment court (ICC)” for the TPP’s sister treaty, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)…

Wolf Street
German Judges Pooh-Pooh Obama’s Sacred US-EU Trade Pact
Don Quijones

Andrew Korybko — Reconceptualizing The TPP: The Brotherhood Of The Three Blocs

Taking TPP and TiSA a step further in the analysis. How the US uses trade agreements to "lead from behind."

Noteworthy:

What one should never forget, however, is that the TPP has clauses that hand de-facto political rights to corporations, thus making it the world’s first formalized system of post-modern “government” or “economic governance”. To put it bluntly, transnational economic actors begin exercising political rights over populations and their elected governments, while neither of these two subjects is able do the same to the corporations, thus creating a top-down vertical of power.

"Economic liberalism" to rule the world— getting closer to the neoliberal objective of global imperial plutonomy and transnational corporatism.

The Vineyard of the Saker

Reconceptualizing The TPP: The Brotherhood Of The Three Blocs
Andrew Korybko

Don Quijones — Switzerland’s Largest City Declares Itself “TiSA-Free”

The US vision for a neoliberal world order under globalization is hitting resistance. Europeans can see that TiSA is a plan to destroy social democracy and replace democratic welfare states under social and political liberalism with the oligarchic transnational corporatism under plutonomy. This goes beyond replacing the welfare state with the market state since it subordinates national sovereignty to international institutions under the control of plutocrats and their cronies and minions.

Raging Bull-Shit
Switzerland’s Largest City Declares Itself “TiSA-Free”
Don Quijones

Bill Totten — Trade is War

On June 3rd at De Balie in Amsterdam, ‘angry old man’ Yash Tandon presented his new book Trade is War: The West’s War Against the World (2015) – a new perspective in the debate on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the controversial trade agreement which the EU is currently negotiating with the US. In Europe, opponents of TTIP are mainly concerned about transparency, ever-increasing corporate power and the impact on the environment. But what does the treaty imply for North-South relations and what are the geopolitical dynamics behind it?

The debate on Trade is War – organised by TNI, SOMO and Both ENDS – places TTIP in a broader perspective. Tandon passes a devastating judgement on free trade. “Since colonial times, global trade has been aimed at Western world domination”.…

The nascent US realized that the British system of "free trade" was for the benefit of the British Empire and not the countries it was supposed to benefit. Hence, the American system of tariffs and protection of infant industries under which the US prospered was developed, based on Alexander Hamilton's American School of Economics and the National School of Friedrich List and Henry Carey.

Now that the British empire has morphed into the American empire, the US is pushing the British system to maintain and extend Western dominance.
 
Bill Totten's Weblog

Trade is War
Bill Totten

Don Quijones— Did the European Court of Justice Just Torpedo the Mother of All US Trade Agreements?

Europe’s already rocky trading relationship with the U.S. just got a whole lot worse. Thanks to one young man’s battle against one of the world’s biggest tech companies, data traffic underpinning the world’s largest trading relationship has been thrown into jeopardy.

As the Wall Street Journal warns, hanging in the balance could be billions of dollars of trade in the online advertising business, as well as more quotidian tasks such as storing human-resources documents about European colleagues.

When, in 2013, the Austrian law graduate Max Schrems filed a data-privacy-infringement lawsuit against Facebook after Edward Snowden had revealed the full extent of the company’s collusion with the NSA, little could he have imagined the impact he would end up having. Now, two years later, the European Court of Justice has ruled that the Safe Harbor Agreement that has governed EU data flows across the Atlantic for some 15 years is no longer valid.…

As WOLF STREET previously reported, TiSA appears to have three primary goals: 1) privatize all services; 2) rip up national and regional financial regulations and 3) spread the U.S. approach to data protection — i.e. no protection — around the world…

Battle brewing against US overreach.

Raging Bull-Shit
Did the European Court of Justice Just Torpedo the Mother of All US Trade Agreements?
Don Quijones

Don Quijones — Uruguay Does Unthinkable, Rejects Global Corporatocracy [TiSA]

Often referred to as the Switzerland of South America, Uruguay is long accustomed to doing things its own way. It was the first nation in Latin America to establish a welfare state. It also has an unusually large middle class for the region and unlike its giant neighbors to the north and west, Brazil and Argentina, is largely free of serious income inequality.

Two years ago, during José Mujica’s presidency, Uruguay became the first nation to legalize marijuana in Latin America, a continent that is being ripped apart by drug trafficking and its associated violence and corruption of state institutions.
Now Uruguay has done something that no other semi-aligned nation on this planet has dared to do: it has rejected the advances of the global corporatocracy.…

Despite – or more likely because of – its symbolic importance, Uruguay’s historic decision has been met by a wall of silence. Beyond the country’s borders, mainstream media has refused to cover the story.…

This post is more about the spread of Global Corporatocracy through trade agreements being spearheaded by the US. It is about TiSA in particular, which includes more countries that TTP and TTIP combined.

Important.

Good summary of what we know about TiSA as the installation of neoliberal global corporatocracy and why not only Uruguay but also China and Russia are right in opposing it. It is the end of liberal democracy and the institution of plutocracy. Since the US has written the rules, it would give the US power elite and their cronies permanent global hegemony to extract rent without limitation.

The contents of TiSA would not be revealed publicly until five years after ratification.

There agreements are being designed as the final step enclosure and the suppression of democratic governance by neoliberal global corporatocracy.

This is a power play on a grand scale and little Uruguay has courageously said "nothing doing" to the gringos.

Pass this on.

Wolf Street
Uruguay Does Unthinkable, Rejects Global Corporatocracy
Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET

Deirdre Fulton — TISA Leaks Part Deux: More Evidence of Concerted Attack on Democracy

One day after it leaked a trove of documents related to the massive, pro-corporate Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), WikiLeaks on Thursday published another four chapters of the proposed 52-nation trade deal, covering key areas ahead of the next negotiating round on Monday.

As with Wednesday's documents, Thursday's batch of texts reveals "a concerted attempt to place restrictions on the ability of participating governments to regulate services sectors, even where regulations are necessary to protect the privacy of domestic populations, the natural environment or the integrity of public services," WikiLeaks declares.

Combined with Wednesday's revelations, this week's leaks underscore how TISA "responds to major corporate lobbies’ desire to deregulate services," trade expert Deborah James, of the Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) network and the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote on Thursday. "This leak exposes the corporate aim to use TISA to further limit the public interest regulatory capacity of democratically elected governments."....

More evidence that neoliberal capitalism is antithetical to democracy.

Common Dreams
TISA Leaks Part Deux: More Evidence of Concerted Attack on Democracy
Deirdre Fulton

Sputnik — WikiLeaks: TISA to Block Other Deals Aiming to Boost Developing Economies

The government procurement section of the published TISA documents “makes the new risks from TISA to governments’ right to regulate in their national interest much clearer,” University of Auckland Law Professor Jane Kelsey wrote in a legal analysis of the document for WikiLeaks.

The terms of the treaty document would allow powerful multinational corporations in major industrial nations to “bypass other governments in the World Trade Organization (WTO), and rewrite its services agreement in the interests of their corporations,” Kelsey warned.

Sputnik
WikiLeaks: TISA to Block Other Deals Aiming to Boost Developing Economies

Don Quijones — EU Parliamentarians Call On Congress To Stop Fast Track

This morning 42 members of the European Union Parliament delivered a letter to the United States Congress. Like U.S. Congress, EU Parliamentarians have also been shut out of the negotiating process for rigged corporate trade deals like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). They are doing everything in their power to stop this corporate takeover and we must continue to do our part. If we are able to stop Fast Track, we will deliver a huge blow to the world’s most exploitative multinational corporations. Many thanks go to our allies in EU Parliament.

Read the text of the letter:

Neoliberalism unraveling due to voter pushback?

Democrats need to recognize that they will be blamed for the mess created by Clinton's NAFTA, and Obama's TPP and TISA.

Raging Bull-Shit
EU Parliamentarians Call On Congress To Stop Fast Track
Don Quijones

Pepe Escobar — American dreaming, from G1 to Bilderberg

The bottom line is that these three mega-deals – TTP, TTIP and TiSA – are the ultimate template of what could be politely described as global corporate governance, a Bilderberg wet dream. The losers: nation-states, and the very concept of Western democracy. The winners: mega-corporations.

Julian Assange, in a statement, succinctly nailed it “It is a mistake to think of the TPP as a single treaty. In reality there are three conjoined mega-agreements, the TiSA, the TPP and the TTIP, all of which strategically assemble into a grand unified treaty, partitioning the world into the West versus the rest. This 'Great Treaty' is described by the Pentagon as the economic core to the US military's 'Asia Pivot.' The architects are aiming no lower than the arc of history. The Great Treaty is taking shape in complete secrecy, because along with its undebated geostrategic ambitions it locks into place an aggressive new form of transnational corporatism for which there is little public support."....

Now for the counterpunch. As the show in the Bavarian Alps unrolled, the first BRICS Parliamentarian Forum was taking place in Moscow – ahead of the BRICS summit in Ufa next month.

Neocons – with Obama in tow - knock themselves out dreaming that Russia has become “isolated” from the rest of the world because of their sanctions. Since then Moscow has signed major economic/strategic contracts with at least twenty nations. Next month, Russia will host the BRICS summit – 45 percent of the world’s population, a GDP equivalent to the EU, and soon bigger than the current G7 – as well as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, when India and Pakistan, currently observers, will be accepted as full members.....

RT
American dreaming, from G1 to Bilderberg
Pepe Escobar

Don Quijones — LEAKED: Secret Negotiations to Let Big Brother Go Global

Much has been written, at least in the alternative media, about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), two multilateral trade treaties being negotiated between the representatives of dozens of national governments and armies of corporate lawyers and lobbyists (on which you can read more here, here and here). However, much less is known about the decidedly more secretive Trade in Services Act (TiSA), which involves more countries than the other two put together. 

At least until now, that is. Thanks to a leaked document jointly published by the Associated Whistleblowing Press and Filtrala, the potential ramifications of the treaty being hashed out behind hermetically sealed doors in Geneva are finally seeping out into the public arena. 

If signed, the treaty would affect all services ranging from electronic transactions and data flow, to veterinary and architecture services. It would almost certainly open the floodgates to the final wave of privatization of public services, including the provision of healthcare, education and water. 

More worrisome still, the proposal stipulates that no participating state can stop the use, storage and exchange of personal data relating to their territorial base. In other words, the U.S. approach to data protection (read: virtually non-existent) could very soon become the norm across 50 countries spanning the breadth and depth of the industrial world…

Think TPP and TIPP are bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

In private, however, EU trade negotiators – that is, the people with real power – are coming under intense U.S. pressure to sign away virtually all European data protection rights. As Bendrath notes, U.S. lobbying efforts, through groups such as the Orwellian-named “Coalition for Privacy and Free Trade”, have been pushing for “interoperability” between European and American rules on both sides of the Atlantic. That basically means a mutual recognition on the respective rules on both sides of the Atlantic. The only catch: in the United States there are currently no comprehensive data protection laws in place. 

If the U.S. negotiators get their way – and let’s face it, when it comes to its dealings with its so-called “allies,” Washington invariably does – multinational corporations will have carte blanche to pry into just about every facet of the working and personal lives of the inhabitants of roughly a quarter of the world’s 200-or-so nations. Such a prospect should worry us all: exploitation of big data serves today to shape our consumption; it can reveal our whereabouts at all times, our conduct, preferences, feelings or even our most intimate thoughts. If TiSA is signed in its current form – and we will not know what that form is until at least five years down the line – that data will be freely bought and sold on the open market place without our knowledge; companies and governments will be able to store it for as long as they desire and use it for just about any purpose.

The TPTB are going for total control through neoliberal globalization. It's now possible to say that that is transnational corporate totalitarianism when coupled with the total surveillance society and security state. Because "freedom."

Perhaps the most perverse irony is that while the corporations and their servants in our elected (or in the case of the EU, unelected) governments seek to turn our lives into a vast open book of actionable or monetizable data, their own actions are increasingly being conducted behind an impenetrable blanket of darkness and secrecy. And as John F Kennedy once said during a little known speech on the grave threat posed by the Soviet Union, “the very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.”

Raging Bull-Shit
LEAKED: Secret Negotiations to Let Big Brother Go Global (December, 2014)
Don Quijones

Don Quijones — Germany U-Turns, Torpedoes Corporate Sovereignty Charter in Trade Agreements, Joins Growing Resistance

The reason this could be of paramount importance – not only for Germans but for all Europeans, Canadians and Americans – is that the investor state dispute settlements (ISDS) that Germany now seems reluctant to accept are precisely what give trade agreements like CETA, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) their long canine teeth: they allow private companies to sue entire nations whenever they feel that a new law lost them money on their investment.

Historic U-Turn

Whether Germany’s reservations are genuine or whether they merely form part of last-minute horse trading is still too early to tell. However, it’s certainly telling that Süddeutsche Zeitung’s allegations come hard on the heels of a statement by Brigitte Zypries, a Parliamentary State Secretary at the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, that Berlin is determined to exclude arbitration rights from the EU-US trade deal (TTIP) as well. “From the perspective of the [German] federal government, U.S. investors in the European Union have sufficient legal protection in the national courts,” she said.
If completed, Germany’s U-turn could well be a serious game changer, for two reasons. First, as home to the largest economy in Europe which is effectively backstopping the cratering economies on the periphery, Germany wields more influence over EU decision making than any other Member State. Second, Germany has been a major advocate of ISDS for decades. Indeed, the first ever bilateral investment treaty (BIT) was agreed between Germany and Pakistan, in 1959.…

But now Germany appears to be getting cold feet, having had a bitter foretaste of the potential consequences of handing over what remains of its national sovereignty to the Global Corporatocracy. If, in the end, Merkel’s coalition government does refuse to sign on the dotted line, the European Commission will have little option but to take the ISDS clause out; because of the nature of CETA and TTIP, all 28 EU member states must approve it before it is fully ratified.

Wolf Street
Germany U-Turns, Torpedoes Corporate Sovereignty Charter in Trade Agreements, Joins Growing Resistance
Don Quijones

Alexander Reed Kelly — British PM Cameron Enabling Wall Street’s Takeover of National Health Service

The U.K.’s cherished public health service is in danger of being sold off to private corporations via a trade deal that would create a single market between the European Union and the United States and open future British governments to massive lawsuits in international courts should they attempt to reverse the decision.

Truthdig
British PM Cameron Enabling Wall Street’s Takeover of National Health Service

Alexander Reed Kelly

David Cay Johnston — Thanks to WikiLeaks, public can debate alarming new trade deal

WikiLeaks last week again pierced the veil of official secrecy that surrounds global trade negotiations. The peek it gave us should alarm everyone.

Big Business and national governments wanted to conceal the terms of the proposed Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) while keeping consumers, unions, environmentalists and the vast majority of businesses in the dark. Thanks to WikiLeaks, they failed.

The draft agreement WikiLeaks released on June 19 is fresh, written in May. It is a model of secret law, blatant in its disregard for transparency, democratic process and history. Its opening page says the terms are to remain secret for five years after negotiations formally end or the proposed new rules take effect. Talks to refine that agreement were to resume Monday in Geneva.

Even the secrecy-shrouded Trans Pacific Partnership that President Barack Obama and his Big Business allies want to ram through Congress without changes and only perfunctory debate does not include a five-year veil of secrecy after adoption. WikiLeaks has released a portion of TPP draft documents to the public.

It is impossible to obey a law or know how it affects you when the law is secret. And that is what this agreement would be, a new rulebook for trade in services — principally banking, insurance and trusts.

The 18-page draft agreement involves 50 nations, which produce more than two-thirds of officially measured global economic activity. That means the consequences of the new rules would be enormous, especially for those living in the more than 140 countries not taking part in the talks. Whether people can get loans or buy insurance and at what prices as well as what jobs may be available will be affected by any new trade rules.

Al Jazeera America
Thanks to WikiLeaks, public can debate alarming new trade deal
David Cay Johnston

Bill Black — Obama’s Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big Banks: TISA

Wikileaks has done the world a great service again by publishing a leak of an April 2014 (partial) draft of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA).

Professor Jane Kelsey of the Faculty of Law, University of Auckland prepared an analysis of the leak that I recommend that everyone read. She, appropriately, emphasizes that any analysis must be tentative because we have only a partial, stale draft through the whistleblower(s).

My analysis is more limited in scope but is consistent with the thrust of her concerns.

New Economic Perspectives
Obama’s Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big Banks: TISA
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Philip Dorling — Secret deal: bank free-for-all

Leaked WikiLeaks documents reveal the Abbott government is pressing ahead with secret trade negotiations aimed at bringing about radical deregulation of Australia's banking and finance sector. 

Highly sensitive details of the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) negotiations, obtained by The Age, show Australian trade negotiators are working on a financial services agenda that could end the Australian government's ''four pillars'' banking policy and allow foreign banks much greater freedom to operate in Australia. It could also see Australians' bank account and financial data freely transferred overseas, and allow an influx of foreign financial and information technology workers. 

Experts warn the proposed changes could undermine Australia's capacity to independently respond to and weather any future global financial crisis.

But Trade Minister Andrew Robb says the TiSA negotiations are a ''key focus'' in his policy to ''open as many doors as possible'' for Australian financial services exports.

Read on. This is actually even worse than I had imagined.

The kicker.

Dr Ranald pointed out that the TiSA negotiations are taking place outside of the World Trade Organisation and are not subject to WTO transparency practice in which draft texts have been released for public discussion. ''This document moves in the opposite direction, stating on the front page that it must remain secret for five years,'' Dr Ranald said.

This is tyranny, not democratic governance. It is global corporate statism aka fascism, which is soft until it is hard. It's the mob in legitimized power.

Sunday Morning Herald (AU)
Secret deal: bank free-for-all
Philip Dorling
(h/t Dan Lynch)