New Report: TTIP free trade deal 'would remove people's rights to access basic human needs like wate

[Ichingcarpenter]

A new report claims TTIP and CETA deals could allow all public services to be locked into commercial deals

People’s access to basic rights such as water and energy could be at the mercy of multinational corporations, according to a new report into two controversial EU free trade deals.

The report claims that the agreements could allow all public services to be locked into commercial deals that would place profit above the rights of individuals to access basic services - regardless of any possible consequences for welfare.

According to the report, Public Services Under Attack, such deals would be “effectively irreversible.” They would allow multinational corporations to sue governments that try to regulate the cost of public services if it could be proved companies’ profits would be harmed.

The two trade agreements, the CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) with Canada and the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) with the US, are currently being negotiated.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/ttip-free-trade-deal-would-remove-peoples-rights-to-access-basic-human-needs-like-water-and-energy-a6690066.html

[Hoyt]

1. Oh, yeah, the TTIP is going to end public water systems, British National Health Service, etc.

Come on, do people seriously believe that every one of the EU nations -- Britain, Germany, France, Finland, Denmark, Ireland, etc. -- and the USA are going to approve an agreement like that? And, no, the dispute mechanisms -- which have been in trade agreements since 1959 -- won't force them to do that either.

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. Water privatisation in England and Wales

Water privatisation was undertaken in 1989 by the government of Margaret Thatcher which partly privatised the ten previously public regional water authorities (RWAs) in England and Wales through the sale of assets. The regulatory arm of the RWAs, including pollution control and water resource management, was hived off to the newly created National Rivers Authority.

Water privatisation in England and Wales remains controversial. A 2001 study by the Public Services International Research Unit stated that
tariffs increased by 46% in real terms during the first nine years,
operating profits have more than doubled (+142%) in eight years,
investments were reduced and
public health was jeopardised through cut-offs for non-payment, however, this was made illegal in 1998 along with prepayment meters and 'trickle valves

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatisation_in_England_and_Wales

Water privatisation: a worldwide failure?

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jan/30/water-privatisation-worldwide-failure-lagos-world-bank


Ireland and the Privatization of Water:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/11/ireland-and-the-privatization-of-water-a-victory-for-the-anti-charge-campaign/


Germany's hypocrisy over Greece water privatisation

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/aug/14/germanys-hypocrisy-over-greece-water-privatisation

France Shows Why Water Privatization Is a Bad Idea

http://ecowatch.com/2012/01/20/france-shows-why-water-privatization-is-a-bad-idea/


IMF Forces Water Privatization
on Poor Countries

http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/waterIMF.html

[Hoyt]

4. Has nothing to do with TTIP, though. If countries are trying to pass the upfront investment

to rebuild, and maintain, water systems to corporations, that is one thing. But the trade agreement won't do it.

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. Oh......... you have links to your assertation ?

I doubt it.

But it is well known and documented that corporations can
upend the wishes of a nation with this treaty.

Or this more Margret Thatcher type claims?

[nationalize the fed]

6. They don't care

WikiLeaks reveals CBC and Canada Post may be sold under TPP agreement.

A secret letter leaked by WikiLeaks on Wednesday reveals that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and Canada Post could be sold under the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, being negotiated by Canada and 11 other countries this week in Maui, Hawaii.

The confidential letter, titled, “State-Owned Enterprises (SOE) Issues for Ministerial Guidance” (PDF), reveals the perils Canada’s key Crown Corporations now face under the Harper government’s burgeoning privatization and trade agenda.

The leaked document was prepared for a TPP Ministerial Meeting held in Singapore in December, 2013. According to the whistle-blowing website, the document “indicates a wide-ranging privatisation and globalisation strategy” whose main aim is to undermine state-owned enterprises (SOEs) – publicly owned corporations whose mandate is to deliver the public good with no or minimal commercial considerations. That will change under the TPP.

“Even an SOE that exists to fulfil a public function neglected by the market or which is a natural monopoly would nevertheless be forced to act ‘on the basis of commercial considerations’,” said WikiLeaks in a press release introducing the leak. “Foreign companies would be given standing to sue SOEs in domestic courts for perceived departures from the strictures of the TPP, and countries could even be sued by other TPP countries, or by private companies from those countries.”...snip MORE
https://anonyyc.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/55-wikileaks-reveals-cbc-and-canada-post-may-be-sold-under-tpp-agreement/

PDF https://wikileaks.org/tpp-soe-minister/WikiLeaks-TPP-SOE-Ministerial-Guidance.pdf

[Hoyt]

16. Treaties have had similar dispute mechanisms since 1959. People are reading junk into these

agreements that just isn't there.

[Rex]

18. And that is why you have nothing to back up your claims but more baseless claims.

People give you links to proof and you still pretend reality is what you say it is. How sad.

[Hoyt]

23. No, the poster gave me links that have nothing to do with trade agreements.

If Ireland or Britain are privatizing their water system, what the heck does that have to do with a trade agreement. It may be bad, but the government deciding to do that has nothing to do with a trade agreement.

[Rex]

19. Don't waste your time.

Thankfully we only have a few corporate radicals on DU. Nothing but baseless claims with no proof over and over. They pretend they are in some sort of business that is 'in the know'.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

7. Right leaning governments that get into power in many of the 'socialist' countries routinely try to

privatize government-run public utilities.

Hell, every single time National gets into office, they're immediately trying to sell off state enterprises in New Zealand. Then Labour gets back in and ends up buying them back, and round and round they go.

So yes, I do think, depending on which parties are in power at the moment, that such things can happen, in any country.

[Hoyt]

17. But that is different from trade agreements. I agree privatization is usually bad, unless

there is no other way to get investment for something needed. But right leaning government privatizing something is not trade.

[magical thyme]

25. Nestle's CEO is on record as saying people don't have a right to water and all water should be

privatised and sold.

Nestle has a track record here in Maine of suing small village after small village trying to force us to let them pump from our aquifers, so they could bottle our water and sell it back to us.

TPIP will save them the trouble and expense of civil lawsuits, allowing them to sue for their imagined profits in front of a tribunal of corporate lawyers that rotate between representing corporations such as Nestle and sitting on tribunals. It allows them to impose unlimited compensation for potential lost profits, with no appeal available to the communities sued, and it allows them to seize public assets as compensation.
http://www.citizen.org/TPP


And just check in with the small communities in the US who privatized their water systems and see what happened to them.

[Hoyt]

27. No it won't. A company might be able to sue if a local government encouraged them to come in and

build a water system, then kicked them out and took over the water system. But, that's about it. They don't get unlimited compensation.

Usually, the tribunals have 3 judges -- quite often professors who are knowledgeable in the field -- one selected by the company, one by the country and one by agreement of both parties. That's quite fair.

Unless you think the governments of all countries -- including Finland, Denmark, Britian, etc. -- are corrupt, the fact they line up to sign these trade agreements ought to tell you something. All the governments know these agreements are needed to attract investment which brings jobs and tax revenue.

[magical thyme]

28. with all due respect, I'll believe Elizabeth Warren before I believe any anonymous poster

ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws — and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers — without ever stepping foot in a U.S. court. Here’s how it would work. Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the company won, the ruling couldn’t be challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require American taxpayers to cough up millions — and even billions — of dollars in damages.

If that seems shocking, buckle your seat belt. ISDS could lead to gigantic fines, but it wouldn’t employ independent judges. Instead, highly paid corporate lawyers would go back and forth between representing corporations one day and sitting in judgment the next. Maybe that makes sense in an arbitration between two corporations, but not in cases between corporations and governments. If you’re a lawyer looking to maintain or attract high-paying corporate clients, how likely are you to rule against those corporations when it’s your turn in the judge’s seat?

If the tilt toward giant corporations wasn’t clear enough, consider who would get to use this special court: only international investors, which are, by and large, big corporations. So if a Vietnamese company with U.S. operations wanted to challenge an increase in the U.S. minimum wage, it could use ISDS. But if an American labor union believed Vietnam was allowing Vietnamese companies to pay slave wages in violation of trade commitments, the union would have to make its case in the Vietnamese courts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kill-the-dispute-settlement-language-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership/2015/02/25/ec7705a2-bd1e-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9_story.html

[Hoyt]

29. Sure, is Warren still telling us the TPP will be secret 4 years after approved by Congress?

That same dispute mechanism has been in NAFTA, agreements in EU, and most trade agreements since 1959. That hasn't happened. If you don't dig into the circumstances of the relatively few disputes, they sound unfair. When you do dig into facts, most make sense. Again, why would all the governments line up to sign these agreements if they were so bad?

[brentspeak]

30. Wait, you mean you don't trust some anonymous internet poster

who regurgitates US Chamber of Commerce talking points while hiding behind a Woody Guthrie avatar?

What's the matter with you?

[lamp_shade]

3. ...

[RiverLover]

8. Water is already being privatized in the US. Frackers love it. And Obama has made it even easier

ie,

Last week, I got to be a fly on the wall at Shale Insight 2015 in Philadelphia, the annual conference of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which includes companies working at all stages of gas drilling, fracking, processing and distribution As you can imagine, I heard some concerning things I while there, but among the more revealing “break-out sessions” was a love-fest between the oil and gas industry and private water industry, sponsored by American Water, the largest private water company in the country.

American Water has aggressively privatized water systems in Pennsylvania and sees dollar signs in the fracking industry’s relentless thirst for water — up to 10 million gallons of water to frack some wells.

Kathy Pape, Senior Vice President of American Water and head of the company’s Pennsylvania arm, chaired the session, titled “Working with Public Water Utilities: Reliable and Beneficial Water Sources for Hydraulic Fracturing.” In her opening remarks, she shared her disbelief that, years ago, American Water’s decision to sell water for fracking was actually a subject of heated debate within the company. Smiling from ear to ear, she explained how American Water “got over that hump” by making the argument that the company shouldn’t discriminate and not sell water to a sex shop, so it likewise ought not miss the opportunity to sell water to the fracking industry. Of course, unlike the fracking industry, sex shops don’t have a reputation of polluting drinking water....

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/25/private-water-and-fracking-dubious-duo

&

....Although more than 20 cities in the U.S. have taken back control of water from private companies since 2002, that process is under threat after President Obama signed the Water Resources Reform and Development Act into law last year, which seeks to expand private financing for water projects....

http://www.globalresearch.ca/reversing-the-tide-of-water-privatization/5478280

[gregcrawford]

9. Imagine the most horrifically evil scheme that a Marvel Comics villain could devise...

... multiply it by 100 gazillion, and you can bet the lives of your children that corporations and banksters already have it in development. Do not ever, ever, EVER underestimate the depths of depravity, malice, and boundless greed to which corporatists will plunge to steal money, resources, and to strip away civil rights that get in the way of having dominion over the lives of others.

Only a sociopath of the most malevolent sort would commit such crimes, and then state before a Senate committee "investigating" the 2008 economic crisis, "We are doing God's work." (For the record, those were the words of Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs)

BOTTOM LINE: These people have proven themselves to be irredeemably evil down to their DNA. Deal with them accordingly. This assessment is NOT IMHO, it is based on facts and events already documented, a complete list of which would likely crash this site.

[raouldukelives]

12. Not only is he doing "God's work".

There are legions of acolytes making daily offerings to him in pursuit of those works.

[PotatoChip]

10. I live in an area where good, clean water is plentiful and

most of us have wells. I suspect climate change will not detrimentally affect this abundance. Nestle Water has been buying up aquifers all over the place up here in towns that let them. I assume they see this coming too.

Most of Canada is in a similar situation, btw. At least most of the eastern Provinces. I don't know as much about the others...

My fear though, is the so-called 'Resource Curse' --if we continue on this path of neoliberal capitalism, that is:

Resource curse thesis
The idea that natural resources might be more an economic curse than a blessing began to emerge in the 1980s. The term resource curse thesis was first used by Richard Auty in 1993 to describe how countries rich in natural resources were unable to use that wealth to boost their economies and how, counter-intuitively, these countries had lower economic growth than countries without an abundance of natural resources. Numerous studies, including one by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, have shown a link between natural resource abundance and poor economic growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

It will probably not happen in my lifetime, but perhaps in my daughter's, and she will be inheriting this place. She might be better off staying where she is in NYC.

Just a somewhat off-topic random thought. Sorry, and don't mind me. Please carry on.

[gregcrawford]

13. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe...

... Chairman of the Board of Nestle, has said publicly that people have no "right" to water. Nestle, however, does, apparently. Whatever happened to chocolate bars?

A plague of unspeakable evil poisons the land. Instead of a tattered black cloak, it wears Armani. Fight the privatization of essential services and resources. Fight it to the death, and wipe the very thought of it off the face of the Earth forever.

[PotatoChip]

14. Sickening, isn't it?

We have experienced a corporate coup d'etat (as Chris Hedges puts it) yet so few people are even aware of this reality. One has to hand it to these despicable, fascist 'captains of industry'-- they truly are evil geniuses in how they pulled this off. I like how you put it: A plague of unspeakable evil poisons the land. Instead of a tattered black cloak, it wears Armani. So true, that...

But yeah, I agree. We need to fight back no matter how bleak our chances of defeating them may appear. Fight with everything we have in us. At least there are more of us than there are of them.

[kelliekat44]

11. I don't know where the OP is from but this has been happening to years. Stop paying your water bill

and see what happens.

[Oilwellian]

15. A nasty remark void of any depth...

of understanding what the hell is being discussed in this OP.

[KamaAina]

20. Basic human needs like water?

Nestle's CEO begs to differ.

[jwirr]

21. All we need to do to see this in practice is look at what the

Chicago Boys did in South America Or read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine".

And they are trying to tell us that these trade deals are progressive deals.

[Rex]

22. Obviously humans don't need water.

It will make you weak and yearn for it, best to just not drink it at all.

[AZ Progressive]

24. Social Darwinism on turbo

As if we don't have enough social darwinism...

[AZ Progressive]

26. These trade deals are nothing short of a coup attempt by big multinational corporations