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Martin Zeis, 21.10.2015

zerohedge, Oct 20, 2015 — http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-20/europe-secretly-starts-imposing-ttip-despite-public’s-overwhelming-opposition

Europe Secretly Starts Imposing TTIP Despite the Public’s Overwhelming Opposition
By Eric ZUESSE

The terms of Obama’s proposed TPP ‘trade’ treaty with Asian countries won’t be made public until the treaty has already been in force for at least four years. The terms of Obama’s proposed TISA (Trade In Services Agreement) with 52 nations won’t be made public until the treaty has already been in force for at least five years. Obama’s proposed TTIP treaty with European countries has been so successfully hidden, that even the number of years it will be kept from the public isn’t yet known. Hello, international fascism — all in secret, until too late for the public to do anything.

But in Europe, things are being rushed, just in case secrecy breaks and the treaty fails to pass. The European Union is already secretly imposing provisions from the secret Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) treaty, even before anyone has signed it, and even before it has been formally approved in any nation. This was revealed over the last weekend in two places:

On the night of October 17th, Phillip Inman of the online version of the Guardian bannered (in an article that the Guardian declined to publish in its printed edition), „Prospect of TTIP already undermining EU food standards, say campaigners,” and he reported that,

Nick Dearden, director of anti-poverty group Global Justice Now, says the EU’s chief trade counsellor, Damien Levie, has let slip that free trade means undermining current minimum standards agreed by the EU.
Dearden says that according to a report in the [subscription-only] newsletter Washington Trade Daily, Levie told a conference held by US free market thinktank the Cato Institute [which is owned by America’s passionately
anti-regulatory billionaire oil-investors, the Koch
brothers] that genetically modified crops and chemically washed beef carcasses were being allowed into the EU ahead of a deal.

According to the report, Levie said EU member states “have been stepping up case reviews and approving new genetically modified organisms [GMOs] with five new products approved so far”. …

Levie … told the Cato Institute conference that neither side wants to reach anything less than a comprehensive economic agreement. He conceded the deal could founder on resistance from the US to include financial services in the deal and Washington’s reluctance to open local and state procurement to bids from EU businesses.
Previously, information that was made public by wikileaks had made clear that in the negotiations over the TTIP, the U.S. has been the most aggresssive nation pushing for the ability of international corporations to shape national laws — this being the position that’s also favored by the Koch brothers.


On October 18th, Lauren McCauley at Common Dreams headlined “TTIP Already ‚Rewriting the Rule Book‘ for EU Food Standards, New Report Finds,” and stated that a progressive British organization, Global Justice Now, issued a study on October 18th, which noted that:

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.

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 [the
world’s worst oil from a global-warming standpoint] has foundered in the face of strong US-Canadian lobbying around both TTIP and the EU-Canada CETA deal.


As I reported on 2 February 2014:

[The
proposed] Keystone XL Pipeline wouldn’t contribute to U.S. energy-production, but instead to exports of the global-warming-dirtiest oil, from Canada, to Europe and South America. It would transport Alberta Canada’s tar-sands oil — half of which is owned by the Kochs — south to two Koch-owned refineries near the Texas Gulf Coast for transshipment mainly to Europe. President Obama is thus trying to get Europe to relax its anti-global-warming standards to permit their importation of this oil, which is the world’s absolute worst oil from the global-warming standpoint.
 (…)

— Further see URL:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-20/europe-secretly-starts-imposing-ttip-despite-public’s-overwhelming-opposition —