As so often, George Monbiot is a very welcome voice in sounding the alarm.
As we have come to know, the case for free trade agreements had been hyped, and even the honest assessments overstated -Paul Krugman is a notable case of a major enonomist observing that the outcome had been less positive than he had envisaged, in great part because very little if anything was done to address the distributional effects, and also because free movement of workers is mostly an illusion.
But at least you could make a case for it and put it forward as a policy option.
This is not the case of adding to the free trade agreement the creation of secretive (debates are not revealed to the public!) courts, where judges are corporate lawyers, that have power to supersede governments' decisions with no possibility of appeal.
This is pure Corporatist transfer of power slipped in a bill that was sold as facilitating transactions -ie, stealthily renouncing sovereignty. Democracy is becoming Corporatism without the people having a say.
Not what we need. And, I must admit from reading the example that George Monbiot exhibits, the consequences are even worse than I would have thought (for instance, a mine is by essence local. Forcing exploitation has nothing to do with free trade, it is a completely different thing from having deliberately restricted standards to prevent sales of foreign products).
Despite all the posturing about the EU (and it has, indeed, created huge problems in the way the Eurozone was created, but that's not what you hear from the UK press, for instance, since they are not in the Euro), the sovereignty threat is not so much between national and supra-national, but in this establishing a Corporate power that is becoming stronger than the States'.
As we have come to know, the case for free trade agreements had been hyped, and even the honest assessments overstated -Paul Krugman is a notable case of a major enonomist observing that the outcome had been less positive than he had envisaged, in great part because very little if anything was done to address the distributional effects, and also because free movement of workers is mostly an illusion.
But at least you could make a case for it and put it forward as a policy option.
This is not the case of adding to the free trade agreement the creation of secretive (debates are not revealed to the public!) courts, where judges are corporate lawyers, that have power to supersede governments' decisions with no possibility of appeal.
This is pure Corporatist transfer of power slipped in a bill that was sold as facilitating transactions -ie, stealthily renouncing sovereignty. Democracy is becoming Corporatism without the people having a say.
Not what we need. And, I must admit from reading the example that George Monbiot exhibits, the consequences are even worse than I would have thought (for instance, a mine is by essence local. Forcing exploitation has nothing to do with free trade, it is a completely different thing from having deliberately restricted standards to prevent sales of foreign products).
Despite all the posturing about the EU (and it has, indeed, created huge problems in the way the Eurozone was created, but that's not what you hear from the UK press, for instance, since they are not in the Euro), the sovereignty threat is not so much between national and supra-national, but in this establishing a Corporate power that is becoming stronger than the States'.
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