Regulation of working
conditions and of the environment, as well as of product-safety
including toxic foods and poisonous air and other consumer issues, would
be placed into the hands of panels whose members will be appointed by
large international corporations. Their decisions will remove the power
of democratically elected governments to control these things. “Red
tape” that’s imposed by elected national governments would be eliminated
— replaced by the international mega-corporate version.

De Zayas was quoted in Britain’s Guardian on May 4th as saying also that, “The bottom line is that these agreements must be revised, modified or terminated,”
because they would vastly harm publics everywhere, even though they
would enormously benefit the top executives of corporations by giving
them control as a sort of corporate-imposed world government, answerable
to the people who control those corporations.

De Zayas told the Guardian that the panels that are proposed to be at the very center of these trade-pacts

“constitute an attempt to escape the jurisdiction of
national courts and bypass the obligation of all states to ensure that
all legal cases are tried before independent tribunals that are public,
transparent, accountable and appealable.”

That is, in fact, the motivation behind these deals. Costs
get transferred from corporations onto consumers, workers, and the
environment, while profits are increased for the corporation’s
investors, and CEO pay will soar. In fact, the EU’s own study of the economic impact of the TTIP with America, calculated

“economic gains as a whole for the EU (€119 billion a
year) and US (€95 billion a year). This translates to an extra €545 in
disposable income each year for a family of 4 in the EU, on average, and
€655 per family in the US. … Income gains are a result of increased
trade. EU exports to the US would go up by 28%, equivalent to an
additional €187 billion worth of exports of EU goods and services.
Overall, total exports would increase 6% in the EU and 8% in the US.”

According to the analysis, no one would lose anything. For example,
tariffs would be reduced but income taxes and other taxes that the
public pays wouldn’t be increased in order to make up for that loss of
income to the state from reduced tariffs. Not at all. Instead: “As much
as 80% of the total potential gains come from cutting costs imposed by
bureaucracy and regulations, as well as from liberalising trade in
services and public procurement.”

In other words: government regulations of product-safety and the
environment and workers’ rights are a terrible waste, which would be
eliminated and handled more efficiently by letting international
corporations themselves handle those things, according to the EU’s
study. And “liberalising trade in services and public procurement” would
cut “red tape” that has prevented government officials who are the
purchasers in “public procurement” from getting high-paid corporate
directorships, etc. under the existing regulatory structures in
democratic nations where the public, the voters, can hold their own
government accountable for such corruption. If these functions become
the domain of the international corporations themselves, then existing
regulations and the government employees who enforce them can be
eliminated. Accountability, in other words, is such a waste, for the
inside investors in large corporations. They don’t need it; they fight
against it. They are fighting against it. They don’t even want
accountability to their own outside investors, who might want them
removed from corporate management.

The EU simply doesn’t mention the downsides. And they also don’t mention that, “Obama’s TTIP Trade Deal w. Europe Would Be Disastrous for Europe, Says the First Independent Study.” That
study wasn’t paid for by the EU, so they just ignore it. (They even
ignore that it found that America’s international corporations would
benefit even more from the deal than would Europe’s international
corporations, which is the exact opposite result than the EU’s own study
calculated. President Obama performs brilliantly for America’s
billionaires, even though most of them are Republicans.) The economist
who did that study wasn’t paid by anybody to do it. Occasionally, a
study like that is performed by an economist. However, paid-for studies
get far more publicity, because the findings are then heavily promoted
by the sponsoring organization — after all, it’s propaganda.

Favoring local ownership is prohibited. …

Corporations must be paid to stop polluting. [Yes: Obama demands that corporations possess an actual right to pollute! It’s in the contract!! Ignore his mere rhetoric.] …

Three [corporate] lawyers will decide who’s right in secret tribunals. …

Speculative money must remain free [of governmental regulation] …

Corporate interests come before national ones. …

Then, there’s a sixth basic provision: to “prohibit governments
from requiring that a foreign investor be under any obligation to serve
the host country’s people or national interest.”

And that’s just one chapter of the proposed document. No wonder,
then, why the billionaires at Davos are eager for Obama to ram this
secret treaty through Congress. (Their people were in on the drafting of
this proposed treaty, so Davosians didn’t need Julian Assange’s
organization for them to know what the treaty contains. Only we do. And
so now we understand why Obama wants to imprison or execute Assange.)

“‘The question is whether USTR [Obama’s U.S. Trade
Representative, the same man who is negotiating both the TPP and the
TTIP] considers murder to be a violation of the labor chapter. That is
the question,’ she said. ‘The point is that USTR has informed us that
labor-related violence does not constitute an actionable violation of
the labor provisions [of NAFTA]’.”

Obama relies almost entirely upon congressional Republicans for
support of his proposed trade-deals, and of his existing trade-policies
(such as non-enforcement of NAFTA). The only real question is whether
congressional Democrats will be able to block his deals. When American
voters in 2014 elected Republicans to majorities in both houses, the
result was to ease the way for passage of Obama’s proposed
international-trade deals. Harry Reid controlled the Senate and blocked them,
but he was now replaced by the Republican Mitch McConnell, who is
trying to win Senate approval for the TTIP. Reid, now as the Minority
Leader, is still doing the best he can to block that; he just doesn’t
have the power he did when he was Majority Leader.

“Q3 As you may know, the U.S. and the EU are negotiating a
free trade agreement called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership, or TTIP. Do you think this trade agreement will be a good
thing for our country or a bad thing?”

In the United States, 53% of respondents marked “Good thing,” 20%
marked “Bad thing,” and 14% marked “Haven’t heard enough.” (Most of the
others marked “Don’t know.”) Whereas 53% of all respondents said “Good thing,” 60% of Democratic respondents did, but only 44% of Republican ones did.
That’s a 16% difference — substantial. Thus, apparently, at least as of
a year ago, when a member of the public heard “TTIP,” the person mainly
thought that it came from Obama (which it does), and that Obama is a
Democrat (which he isn’t, except in rhetoric, but members of Congress
are different; they know that he’s not, even if the public don’t); and,
so, Republican voters were far less supportive of TTIP than were
Democratic voters.

The general public judged the deal by the nominal party of the person
who initiated and is negotiating it. This is why, whereas in Congress,
Republicans almost unanimously want TTIP to pass, and most Democrats
want it to fail, the situation among the voting public is in the exact
opposite direction: overwhelmingly favorable to the deal among
Democrats, but only slightly favorable to the deal among Republicans. On
the other hand, all Republican U.S. Presidential candidates support
Obama’s trade-deals in principle and they only want him to speed up his
getting other nations’ leaders to sign onto to them — as if he even has
the power to do that.

“I am concerned about the
secrecy surrounding negotiations for trade treaties, which have excluded
key stakeholder groups from the process, including labour unions,
environmental protection groups, food-safety movements and health
professionals”