Put forth by the UK-based social justice organization Global Justice now, the report (pdf), published Sunday, highlights a component of the pact known as "regulatory cooperation" or "regulatory coherence," which seeks to establish common standards between the United States and the European Union.
Under the provision, notes the group, multinational corporations are granted the opportunity to influence any new regulation—amounting to a "blueprint for corporate domination."
"To most people regulations such as air pollution limits and food safety standards are common sense protections against dangerous threats," said report author Alex Scrivener, who works as a campaigns officer at Global Justice Now. "But to big business, these are little more than tiresome barriers to increasing profits."
Scrivener added that "Corporate lobbyists are pushing so hard for TTIP because this is one of the biggest chances they've ever had to systematically strip these protections away from citizens and consumers. TTIP isn't really about trade, it's about corporations rewriting the rule book as to how they're allowed to operate."
The study, which comes a day before international delegates will meet in Miami, Florida for the next round of negotiations, finds that even though it has not been signed, the trade agreement is already driving EU regulators to loosen or abandon certain food standards.
According to report:
US officials successfully used the prospect of TTIP to bully the EU into abandoning plans to ban 31 dangerous pesticides with ingredients that have been shown to cause cancer and infertility.These new insights on the corporate-friendly agreement comes as European leaders faces growing public opposition to the deal.
A similar fate befell regulations around the treatment of beef with lactic acid. This was banned in Europe because of fears that the procedure was being used to conceal unhygienic practices. The ban was repealed by MEPs in the European Parliamentary Environment Public Health and Food Safety Committee after EU Commission officials openly suggested TTIP negotiations would be threatened if the ban wasn't lifted.
On climate change, the European Fuel Quality Directive which would effectively ban Canadian tar sands oil has foundered in the face of strong US-Canadian lobbying around both TTIP and the EU-Canada CETA deal.
More generally, the EU's Better Regulation programme has also been linked to TTIP. Better Regulation explicitly seeks to reduce the regulatory 'burden', delaying the implementation of new rules on things like safe levels of chemicals. Trade unions say that Better Regulation has already been responsible for 100,000 deaths from cancer.
Last week, an estimated 250,000 protested in Berlin and more than three million have signed a petition calling on the European Commission to abandon negotiations over the TTIP and drop the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada.
In 2002-2003, over TEN MILLION people worldwide protested over the US intention to illegally attack Iraq, a sovereign country which the UN inspectors said had no WMD, and which had nothing whatever to do with 9-11, in fact Saddam Hussein was a committed enemy of terrorists and terrorism.
In spite of that, the US and a coalition of its NATO partners and other suck-ass countries from around the globe participated in the rape and destruction of Iraq and the murder of over a million of its people.
250,000 people protesting in Berlin, or even more pathetic, 600 people protesting in Brussels, is not going to do anything to make the psychopathic vampires who rule this world stop sucking our blood.
On the other hand, a program of assassinations of corporate CEOs would work wonders. This is exactly what the Iraqi people did when the US conquerors tried to auction off the assets and state-owned industries of Iraq to foreign corporations. Every foreign businessman who came to Iraq to inspect the potential acquisition was assassinated. Very quickly, the foreign corporations decided it was not worth the risk, and there were no bids for Iraqi assets, so the seizure-and-fire-sale program of the US conquerors collapsed.
Now imagine this. If mobs were to occupy and torch the offices of Monsanto, Dow Chemical, or Merck in Brussels, (every major corporation has an office in the capital of the EU,) and lynch a few of their executives, the corporations would rapidly decide the TTIP was not worth the risk, especially as their share prices would collapse after their head offices were destroyed by mobs, and they would lose interest in the whole proposal.
Their bribery of European politicians would then cease, and those politicians would have no longer any motive to impose the TTIP on the European people.
Far be it from me to advocate violence!! Oh no!! I am just pointing out what would be the consequences of such violence. And, too, what will be the consequences of no violence, namely, the passage of TPP, TTIP, and anything else the corporate oligarchs want, and the poisoning of the food and water of hundreds of millions of European chicken-hearted citizens, the destruction of their pension, health, workplace safety, and other social programs which their taxes have paid for, and their brutal and violent suppression of dissent by police forces armed with military-grade weapons and tanks, just like here in the USA.
Get used to this idea, people of Europe. Just like under Nazism or Soviet Communism, by the time you realize what has happened to you, and your children and grandchildren, it will be too late to do anything about it.