EU Trade Deals with US and Canada Blasted as 'Attacking Public Services'

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/10/19/eu-trade-deals-us-and-canada-blasted-attacking-public-services

As EU and U.S. negotiators start the 11th round of TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) talks in Miami on Monday, a European watchdog group is sounding the alarm over the negative impacts such "trade" deals could have on citizens' rights to basic services like water, energy, education, and healthcare.

For the sake of corporate profits, both the TTIP and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada "could lock ... public services into a commercialization from which they will not recover—no matter how damaging to welfare the results may be," the Brussels-based Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) stated last week.

The group's report, Public Services Under Attack (pdf), highlights "the secretive collusion between big business and trade negotiators in the making of the EU’s international trade deals."

Specifically, it exposes "the aggressive agenda of services corporations with regards to TTIP and CETA, pushing for far-reaching market opening in areas such as health, cultural and postal services, and water, which would allow them to enter and dominate the markets."

And "[g]iving in to corporate demands for unfettered access to government procurement could restrict governments’ ability to support local and not-for-profit providers and foster the outsourcing of public sector jobs to private firms, where staff are often forced to do the same work with worse pay and working conditions," the group adds.

Opposition to the TTIP, which would create a trade and investment zone encompassing 800 million people and nearly half of global economic output, is growing. A protest against the pact drew an estimated 250,000 demonstrators to Berlin earlier this month, while a recent poll indicated nearly half of Germans oppose the deal, compared to 25 percent against it last year. Due to the intense secrecy surrounding negotiations, WikiLeaks in August offered a €100,000 ($113,230 USD) reward for the full text.

A separate report released Sunday by the UK-based social justice organization Global Justice Now showed that the controversial pact is already pushing European governments to loosen key food safety standards.