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US-EU Trade Agreement Gains Exaggerated, Say 41 Consumer Groups, Economist
Glyn Moody (946055) writes "The main claims about likely economic gains from concluding the US-EU trade agreement TAFTA/TTIP, billed as a 'once-in-a-generation prize,' are increasingly under attack. BEUC, representing 41 consumer organizations from 31 European countries, has written a letter to the EU Trade Commissioner responsible for the negotiations, Karel De Gucht, complaining about his 'exaggeration of the effects of the TTIP,' and 'use of unsubstantiated figures regarding the job creation potential.' In a blog post entitled 'Why Is It So Acceptable to Lie to Promote Trade Deals?,' Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, has even harsher words: 'Implying that a deal that raises GDP by 0.4 or 0.5 percent 13 years out means "job-creating opportunities for workers on both continents" is just dishonest. The increment to annual growth is on the order of 0.03 percentage points. Good luck finding that in the data.' If the best-case outcome is just 0.03% extra growth per year, is TAFTA/TTIP worth the massive upheavals it will require to both US and EU regulatory systems to achieve that?"
'Why Is It So Acceptable to Lie to Promote Trade Deals?
For the same reasons that trade deals are negotiated in secret. The general population never benefits, only a few select special interests.
This is just classic use of government to support established corporations. It's been happening for a long time, and it's been lied about for a long time. It's not surprising that their sales pitch to the public isn't exactly accurate...
Pretty obvious, since (a) 0.03% growth is well within the margin of error for GDP measurements, and (b) the worst-case scenario is probably a GDP reduction of more than 0.03%.
The U.S.A. and the European Commission are tired of democracy interfering with corporations. This "Free Trade" treaties will mean that governments are no longer allowed to interfere with multinational corporations: the corporations may conduct business as they have paid their politicians at home to do, and when a local government says "we have human rights and environmental protections over here", then the corporation can sue the government in a corporation-run quasi-court committee and get all the "losses" paid as "penalties".
Of course it's worth it to those money-grabbing interest groups to extend their power and bypass all democratic control and law.
It effectively outlaws nationalised companies by allowing private corporations to sue for profits lost through productive state labour. Since all essential utilities - water, electricity, gas, train, healthcare, telecoms - have got worse since part or total privatisation in the UK, TTIP can get fucked.
(Telecoms is arguable - it's easy to compare the technology of the early '80s with that of 2014 and say, "Things have improved under private ownership," but in terms of contemporary technical innovation, BT up to 1985 was a leader, whereas today it is an also-ran in bed with its regulator.)
http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/03/front-runner-to-head-va-predicts-obamacare-will-lead-to-single-payer/
Seeing the success at the VA of single payer government health care, how can we not do this?
“The first ones will be the small companies,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Every CEO I’ve talked to knows how much he’d save between insuring his people and paying the federal penalty.”
“The first time some big player does that, it’s going to fall like dominoes,” he continued. “What that does is drive everybody to the exchanges.”
Asked what that meant in the long-term, he said, “it’s going to be a faster move towards one payer.”
“Increasingly, people think that in 10 years you’re going to have 75% of the health-care costs paid by the federal government,” he said."
It is pretty obvious the current US lead trade agreements are nothing more than vain attempt to lock in the corporate power obtained through propaganda as news and the corruption of democracy, when they took over the fourth estate and turned it into tool of corruption after Ronny Raygun killed the fairness doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... basically legalising lies in the news. After growing exposure of the corruption on the internet, the corporate psychopaths are desperate to keep the power they have gained and that is now slipping away from them and they a looking to be facing justice for the countless crimes they have committed in every imaginable area of human economic interaction and politics.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It's an excellent reason to lie, if the lies will help remove legal protections against the deal's sponsors. Dr Evil would strongly approve!
davecb@spamcop.net
Culturally, from what i can gather, its become acceptible in America to lie in order to sell damned near anything. Our breakfast cereals tout everything from brain vitamins to anti-cancer properties and our fruit juices insist theyre some kind of godlike elixer of everything from bone health to limitless endurance. Now technically we're supposed to have regulatory agencies to police this sort of action, but american regulatory agencies are double-booked with mandates to simultaneously promote and police their industry. Theyre as useful as wheels on a fish, and at best they affirm product recalls due to life-threatening contamination.
If youve never tried to buy a car in america, its largely the same. theres no concern for your budget or real money as it pertains to your specific earnings. The entire event is predicated with an understanding that you as a customer will finance your purchase, so there isnt much to stop a sale aside from gas prices. youll be sold on christlike reliability and power, and fuel economy where applicable. Big questions like maintenance costs and carbon footprint are avoided.
so when a trade deal comes down the pipe and it sounds too good to be true, take it from us (it is.) We were sold NAFTA and in turn we lost our manufacturing to south america. We were told goods and services would be cheaper to produce, and in a perverse sort of way they were. WalMart peddled sweatshop clothing and chinese plastic trinkets at rock-bottom prices to a middle class that now basically had no alternative but to concede to their purchase now that they had to take a job at a call center for a fraction of what they made at their old workplace. Countries like Viet Nam and Nicaragua which historically resisted our "free trade" came around to our idea of the marketplace once sponsored rebel groups like the Contra razed their hospitals and blew up their schools for daring to vote a candidate that didnt embrace capitalism.
what we call trade is pretty laughable. American cars are made in mexico and china, and we ardently prop the automotive industry with bailouts we quixotically insist will create or maintain jobs without realizing the goal of our trade policy is to extinguish the costliest element of our commerce, the american worker. when we say EU trade agreement we mean to target your poorest countries to assemble wiring harnesses for slave labor. We mean to flood your markets with corn and other commodities that will render your farmers bankrupt, just as we have in Mexico. We want you to use dangerous chemical processes because former east block countries with socialized medicine and laughable environmental standards amounts to very little concern for when we poison an entire city and leave So heed this warning:
we as a nation have left no stone unturned in our relentless quest to crush the world in poverty, desolation, and ruin under the sunny phrase 'free trade.' We wish to render you wholly dependent upon American goods, be they healthy or not, because it makes our next war that much easier to secure your consent to participate.
Good people go to bed earlier.
big surprise, De Gucht is a lobbyist lying sack of shit, one of the biggest proponents of ACTA / CETA.
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-12-128_en.htm
quote: "This means that ACTA will not change anything in the European Union, but will matter for the European Union."
"If the best-case outcome is just 0.03% extra growth per year, is TAFTA/TTIP worth the massive upheavals it will require to both US and EU regulatory systems to achieve that?"
0.03% is essentially the cost to implement the massive upheaval in the regulatory systems I bet.
They didn't say what kind of jobs. It's government jobs, obviously.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
When large corporate lobbyists and their politicians talk about the economy, simply substitute the word "profit" for "jobs" to get a more honest version of what they're saying.
I think it was Noam Chomsky who pointed this out.
Anyway I'm all in favor of completely free trade between the EU and the US. Why the hell do we even need an agreement? That's like asking for horrible amounts of irrelevant big corporate crap to seep in and do damage to all sorts of areas of the economy. Just open the borders, remove the tolls and unnecessary government checks, and then we'll sort out the kinks after they happen, if they happen.
Is there any reason that reducing pointless barriers to trade has to occur in one giant all-or-nothing pact, instead of lots of little treaties over a period of years that don't depend on each other?
I'm all for the notion of free trade in theory, but the problem with treaties like these (and the EU in general, and the US Federal government, etc) is that their notion of "free trade" tends to simply mean "trade under the rules of whatever is biggest" rather than what the term mentally implies, i.e. people trading without lots of red tape getting in their way.
Given the absolute and total weakness of EU "leadership" when it comes to demands by the USA, I suspect any trade deal reached between the EU and USA would simply amount to adjusting EU law to match whatever Congress already came up with regardless of whether it makes sense or not. So this seems like a good incentive to not go for it, for Europeans. Unfortunately both America and EU increasingly tend to enforce their laws internationally, regardless of jurisdiction, so in the end I'm not sure it really matters much anyway: in a globalised world with lots of trade between rich countries you end up with a horrific hodge podge of conflicting laws and regulations, with companies trying to comply with all of them and ultimately putting their hope on lax enforcement to be able to remain in business. I don't see much of a way to solve this, short of a sea change in the level of government intervention in trade people tolerate.
Random groupings of people say bad things about major international deal without any supporting evidence.
Seriously, the best they can do is "The language used is vague"? How about doing their own analysis instead of just pointing out that the documents aren't perfect?
Frankly, I don't trust the "all for yourself" form of capitalism that seems to infest America. Not that Europe is perfect by any means but the governments seem to work more for the people and less for corporations. Every new law in the US seems to be 1) A kneejerk reaction to some external event 2) A carefully manipulated and corporate sponsored bill which will save them money in some way - even if it's to the detriment of the wider community.
The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted." - Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, Paris, 13 Nov. 1787
What if I reframe the question, "We can standardize regulatory frameworks between allied friendly countries through modernizing uphevals. In the long run this is expected to be free of cost, or even slightly profitable!" I don't know if it'll change your mind, but it sounds nice to me.
How about an alternate reframing: "We can take away your ability to threaten your elected officials with punishment when you don't like the regulations they are enforcing". That sounds like a bad deal to me.
Let's look at some current examples from Slashdot's favorite topics:
1) marijuana medicinal use regulations. Federal law standardized the regulatory framework across states so that no matter what local voters say or how unanimously they say it, the DOJ is still raiding medical dispensaries.
2) banking regulations. Federal law allows banks to choose to be regulated only by the federal standardized regulatory framework instead of those enacted by individual states so that no matter how egregiously they behaved in the run up to 2008, the big financial institutions can just pay a small (or no) fine and escape oversight.
How did you like the effects of standardizing those regulatory frameworks?
I think they're also counting the jobs required to implement the new regulations.
The amount of jobs required to implement it will be huge, on both continents.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Forgive one for being "old", but before ACTA/SOPA, before the Sub-Prime-Crisis, before Occupy-Wall-Street there was an issue of "death of liberty", if I may....
To "Water the tree of liberty", you need water. Before the above, the issue plagueing the American DEMOCRAZY was that of "proportional representation", politically speaking. The figures were 2% of American taxpayers are Jewish, but Washington DC operates under a grossly misrepresented influence. Then again, maybe I`m just OLD, but back then, when someone was talking about "Occupied", they were talking the Occupied West Bank and Gaza
Let`s not detract from the article, assessing American and European Free-Trade. Is it not right that the EU invite Palestine to be a member, subsequently enjoy the free-trade with the USA?
"Break down that wall!" Ghost of the USS Liberty
Fuck Nafta and Taft
Yes. The flaw in the assumption embedded in that argument is that the regulatory systems were and are OK. Or that citizens have been able to effectively participate in them until now. They weren't, they aren't, and they haven't.
Because this time the Federal Register is online (federalregister.gov) and hence readable (and searchable) by the average citizen (no, spending days on end at the local law library chancing you might get access to a weeks old version isn't the same). Because now, Regulations.gov allows citizens to more easily see what everyone else is saying, allowing them to adopt more persuasive and effective arguments. Because now, overall, there is a more efficient, more democratic regulatory adoption procedure. (The only downside is that the EU regulatory procedure is still as opaque as ever. But at least English-speaking EU citizens can participate in US government decision-making.)
Because, admit it, you don't even know what I'm talking about. Well, this would be your chance to redeem yourself.
Where did you get that information? From the EU mandatory lobbyist register?
Oh, wait. The EU doesn't require the men pulling their strings to be registered. Like the US does.
Don't confuse absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
I recommend a quick scan of a little book called "The Wealth of Nations" by a man called Adam Smith, the father of an obscure and little known (to judge by this comment section) discipline called Economics. As only 238 years have passed since it was published, it is perfectly reasonable that so many apparently literate people feel able to express an opinion on Free Trade without first giving themselves the benefit of his world-changing research (now available as a free e-book, or in various summaries) to update their economic views.
If you were to read this or any related work, you would quickly find that trade barriers function mostly to the benefit of narrow and special interests, and to the detriment of the wider public. A quick glance at, for example, EU tariffs on apples and garlic, or American ones on clothing (pure cotton versus polyester blends) will demonstrate beautifully that what was true in 1776 remains so today - some producers are able to persuade or induce our dear leaders (who may, in their defence, also not have read The Wealth of Nations, and so be merely incompetent, rather than corrupt) to pass laws for their particular benefit - the very definition of privilege.
The point of free trade is not some dubious forecasts about the specifics of its effect on GDP or jobs figures (I would love to see the error bars on those!) but its obvious and unquestioned benefit - that you can buy or sell as you see fit, rather than trade with the people your political "masters" think best deserve your business.
He already was deep in the ACTA touters' pockets, and TTIP is no different.
In the long term, the TTIP is the premise for the absorption and take-over of the European markets and economy. Europe must reject the agreement and stop the wholesale buy-outs of their major corporations, or they will slowly lose control over their own markets and economy.
FTA:
If the best-case outcome is just 0.03% extra growth per year, is TAFTA/TTIP worth the massive upheavals it will require to both US and EU regulatory systems to achieve that?"
Those "massive upheavals" are precisely what makes the effort worthwile in the minds of the legislators and negotiators responsible. Just think of how much opportunity there is here for consultants, contractors, family members, and other corporate and governmental parasites and hangers-on. No, it's not going to boost the overall economy - probably quite the opposite. And no, it's not going to result in jobs where they're needed - it's going to result in extra money and bigger power bases for people who already have too big a slice of the pie. Make no mistake, it's the globalization of nepotism - only in this case, the 'family' is 'the 0.1%' It probably isn't that way by design, (though maybe it is), but you can bet the people who are and will be involved see the opportunity and are happy about it.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is similar, but less likely to work, as a bunch of independent minded Asians are involved, Has similar proposals. Corporations will be able to sue governments if new regulations interfere with business. Not sure I voted for that. Pretty sure I won't get the chance to.
According to Hillary Clinton TTIP is 'an economic NATO'.
http://www.clingendael.nl/publication/geopolitics-ttip
Look at the graph at the end of the PDF. Fear of losing primacy is the driving factor.
Albright, Hillary Clinton and the democrats in general adhere to:
The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997) by ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI
That's why there is next to no difference between GOP Neocons and Dems with respect to foreign policy.
With respect to the Ukraine. That's not about democracy or human rights. Ever heard the US trying to promote that in Saudi Arabia?
Ukraine is gambit to revive NATO, to drive a wedge between EU and Russia, and drive the EU to a US led military-economic US/EU power block with NATO the military component and TTIP to cement the economic aspect.
There is a hard and fast rule in political economy - (trade == democracy) -> peace. Trade and democracy are directly and inextricably related, which has caused serious consternation among those seeking to quantify the interactions as there is no known variable that operates on only one. Anything increasing trade increases democracy and vice-versa. The second half of the rule is based on the fact that modern democracies NEVER go to war against each-other.