In this thread I'll explain why Hillary Clinton is against free college education in 15 seconds.
The answer is really well illustrated right now using the Internet. Can I ask all of you to take a look at a debate going on right now in India about the commodification of education and India's accession to the WTO. Part of that accession is that India is being asked by the US and other WTO members to sign the WTO "General Agreement on Trade in Services" or GATS, which Bill Clinton signed in December 1994.
You will find if you do a little Googling that signing on to the WTO GATS is alleged to require that Indians give up their constitutional right to public education.
And there is your answer. During the Clinton Administration this horrible trade deal that signs away our ability to vote for and have public services like education, health care and dozens of other important rights was signed but the nation was never told this. The same issue is also the cause of our health care insanity. Our future began to be blocked then in 1994 by this secretive deal hidden in plain sight by a code of silence.
And its still being hidden by an unwritten code of silence today. That's your answer. There is no other answer. The plan is to eventually trade jobs for market access, so they want the public sector to be privatized because procurement can then be forced through a system to globalize it, awarding thse jobs to the lowest qualified bidder firm wherever they are. So no more New Deals to create jobs, those jobs are likely to go wherever skills are highest combined with wages are lowest. To make sure that the process doest favor any one country, they have been working now for decades on "Disciplines on Domestic Regulation". One name for this global scheme is "progressive liberalisation". But its really a global privatization or "disinvestment" scheme as they call it in India. I hope this makes sense to people.
Please ask any questions if you have them. I can't promise to know the answer.
There are four modes of supply in GATS. The process I just described involves trading Mode Four - (Movement of Natural Persons) for Mode Three.
EDIT-- added the following statement
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http://www.eua.be/Libraries/Publication/EUA_Statement_TTIP.sflb.ashx
The European University Association (EUA) represents over 850 universities in 47
countries, as well as 33 national rectors’ conferences. It is the voice of universities in the
European Higher Education Area and a full consultative member of the Bologna Process. It
is in regular dialogue with the EU institutions and is a forceful and respected advocate in
the full range of higher education (HE) policy fields:
research, knowledge transfer, innovation and regional development
internationalisation, mobility and recognition
governance and funding
institutional capacity building and quality assurance
EUA and its members are fully committed to the cause of international development. They
work with peer organisations in other global regions, notably Africa, Asia, Latin and North
America, promoting the production and exchange of cultural and scientific knowledge and
the sharing of democratic and pluralist values.
EUA holds strongly to the view that HE is a public responsibility, dedicated to supporting
personal fulfilment and social cohesion, as well as to contributing to the satisfaction of
labour market needs. It believes in extending the benefits of HE to as many individuals as
possible, on a lifelong basis, without discrimination on grounds of gender, ethnicity,
disability, sexuality, religion, or the ability to pay.
In this regard, a number of trade agreements currently being negotiated give cause for
concern. They are:
the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and
Canada, which is nearing completion;
the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which brings together
the EU and the USA;
and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), involving 23 countries and including
the EU EUA has closely followed the TTIP and TiSA negotiations1, as a participant in the European
Commission’s Civil Society Dialogue. Both sets of talks have potentially significant
implications for HE institutions, as well as for regional and national systems within the EU
and the European Economic Area.
TTIP seeks to eliminate non-tariff barriers to the trade of manufactured and agricultural
goods, boosting growth and stimulating job creation. Service sectors feature equally
prominently. TTIP nevertheless goes far beyond the scope of a traditional trade agreement.
It aims at maximising regulatory cooperation between the two largest internal markets in
the world – the EU and the US – and at opening up a single public procurement and
investment space.
TiSA is a plurilateral negotiation: it involves only some of the World Trade Organisation’s
(WTO) members. The EU hopes that in the course of time it will evolve into a multilateral
agreement embracing all WTO member countries. Its focus is solely on services, of which
the EU and the US are the largest global providers.
Both TTIP and TiSA have a strategic motivation. They are designed to set precedents in the
management of global trade, compensating for the perceived failure of the Doha
Development Agenda (DDA) and pre-empting initiatives which might be taken by other
global economic powers.
Both potentially cover HE, adult education (AE), and ‘other’ educational services. In TTIP,
negotiations proceed according to the principle of the negative list, in which all negotiable
items are tabled at the outset, with only rare exclusions. The scope of TiSA is the same as
that of the 1995 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).
In the light of information currently available (published and leaked documents, official
briefings, statements by governments and the European Commission) on the ongoing trade
agreement negotiations, EUA notes that:
1. Negotiators regularly offer reassurances that public services will be protected. However,
the GATS definition of a ‘public’ service is not adequate for purpose where higher education
is concerned. HE is not administered by the exercise of government authority in the
manner of defence, justice and police; it is not automatically excluded from trade
negotiations. Moreover, HE fails to satisfy the GATS criteria which allow exemption for
services supplied ‘neither on a commercial basis nor in competition with one or more
service suppliers’. Many HE systems include both public and private providers and many
public institutions depend on a mix of public and private funding. Such hybridity at system
and institutional levels means that trade negotiations such as TTIP and TiSA cannot be
conducted with legal certainty and clarity.
2. The definitions of ‘higher’, ‘adult’ and ‘other’ educational services are also problematic.
The UN’s Central Products Classification code (CPC), which is used in trade negotiations,
gives ‘no explanatory note’ for HE. ‘Other’ is defined in a manner more appropriate to
‘higher’2. The clearest definition is reserved for ‘adult’3, notwithstanding which, the
European Commission has been obliged to canvass Member States to ascertain in what AE
actually consists.
3. The ability of elected national and regional authorities to determine the nature of their
HE provision is cast into doubt by some of the key features of TiSA and, by extension, of
TTIP. The mechanisms of ‘standstill’, ‘ratchet’ and ‘future-proofing’ significantly limit the
scope of legislative action once agreements have been signed. They require that the level
of service liberalisation can never be reduced, that any change can operate only in the
direction of further liberalisation, and that all services to be developed in the future fall
automatically within the scope of the agreements.
4. This particular issue is clouded by the uncertainty surrounding the extent to which the
EU is mandated to negotiate on trade in general, in which it has exclusive competence, and
on education, in which it has only complementary competence. In TiSA, the EU has lodged
a reservation identical to the one it lodged previously in GATS, whereby it ‘reserves the
right to adopt or maintain any measure with regard to publicly-funded education services.’
This, the European Commission believes, offers full reassurance that Member States retain
the right to discriminate in favour of publicly-funded HE. The Commission is reluctant to
consider the possibility that education might be exempted from the scope of trade
negotiations, as the audio-visual sector has been and as many stakeholders believe health
services should be.
5. The domestic policy scope enjoyed by national and regional authorities is further
threatened by the investor state dispute mechanism (ISDS) which is included in TTIP,
although not in TiSA. ISDS gives private corporations the right to sue public authorities
whenever they feel that local legislation impinges on their ability to generate ‘legitimate’
profits. This feature of TTIP is particularly controversial and has drawn 149,000 responses
to a consultation launched by DG Trade.
6. Current trade negotiations have the potential to impinge not only on the learning and
teaching mission of universities, but also on other aspects of HE, such as research and
development, data collection and data flows, intellectual property, e-commerce, and the
recognition of professional qualifications. However, the detail of the negotiations is
shrouded in secrecy and it is impossible for the HE sector to discover the extent to which
its operating environment might change.
EUA accordingly declares that:
A HE benefits individuals, society and the world at large in ways that are not easily
quantifiable. It is a public responsibility to which all citizens have right of access and not a
commodity to be transacted by commercial interests on a for-profit basis. It should not be
subject to international trade regimes.
B Moreover, HE should not be transacted within a framework that puts the systems of
developing countries at risk from corporate ventures located outside their borders.
Developing countries must retain the autonomy to determine how their universities
should participate in the growth of international HE.
C The internationalisation of HE has proceeded at considerable pace in recent years.
Collaborative research, joint curriculum development, staff and student mobility, open and
distance learning have all flourished, on a not-for-profit basis and outside the scope of
trade agreements. A greater degree of global governance is desirable, but it should develop
on the model of the UNESCO-supported academic recognition frameworks, designed and
implemented with full participation by appropriate sectoral bodies.
D Intellectual property rights are inevitably at issue in trade agreements. It is essential
that TTIP and TiSA protect both individuals’ rights to privacy and universities’ codes of
conduct in respect of the openness of scientific collaboration, particularly with regard to
the international transfer and secondary processing of data.
E The global HE context is rapidly evolving. There is an urgent need for the categories of
‘public’, ‘private’, ‘higher, ‘adult’ and ‘other’ to be redefined on the basis of stakeholder
consensus. Knowledge import- and export markets clearly exist and must be regulated to
the benefit of all, but ISDS, standstill, ratchet and future-proofing have no place in this
process.
F The inclusion of items of ‘other education services’ in trade agreements must be
undertaken on a positive list basis, following full consultation with appropriate sectoral
bodies at European level, together with extensive ex ante impact assessment.
G In every other respect, the EU should not make commitments in the categories of HE and
AE. It should make absolutely clear to its negotiating partners that elected Member State
governments reserve the right to determine the character of their HE and AE systems.
EUA President and elected Board members
• Prof. Maria Helena Nazaré, University of Aveiro (EUA President), Portugal
• Prof. David Drewry, University of Hull (EUA Vice-President), United Kingdom
• Prof. Lauritz B. Holm-Nielsen, Aarhus University (EUA Vice-President), Denmark
• Prof. Gülay Doğu Barbarosoğlu, Bogazici University, Turkey
• Prof. Esther Giménez-Salinas, Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain
• Prof. Vaclav Hampl, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
• Prof. Kristín Ingólfsdóttir, University of Iceland, Iceland
• Prof. Stefano Paleari, University of Bergamo, Italy
• Prof. Margret Wintermantel, DAAD, Germany
EUA Council: Europe’s national university associations represented by their Presidents
• Universities Austria
• Rectors' Conference, French Community of Belgium
• Flemish Interuniversity Council
• Croatian Rectors' Conference
• Cyprus Rectors' Conference
• Czech Rectors' Conference
• Universities Denmark
• Estonian Rectors' Conference
• Universities Finland
• Conference of University Presidents (France)
• German Rectors’ Conference
• Greek Rectors' Conference
• Conference of Rectors of Roman Pontifical Universities
• Hungarian Rectors' Conference
• Rectors’ Conference of Iceland
• Irish Universities Association
• Conference of Italian University Rectors
• Latvian Rectors’ Council
• Lithuanian Universities Rectors' Conference
• University of Luxembourg
• Association of Universities in the Netherlands
• Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions
• Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools in Poland
• Council of Rectors of Portuguese Universities
• Romanian Council of Rectors
• Serbian Rectors’ Conference
• Slovak Rectors’ Conference
• Slovenian Rectors´ Conference
• Spanish Rectors’ Conference
• Association of Swedish Higher Education
• Rectors’ Conference of the Swiss Universities
• The Council of Higher Education (Turkey)
• Universities UK
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