The TPP is Not Dead

(ANTIMEDIA) While many are still breathing a sigh of relief that President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, some are noting that the world is nowhere near out of the woods yet. There’s another deal being negotiated right now, and this one may be even scarier than TPP. And like the TPP, it’s been quietly cobbled together behind closed doors for years.

The Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), which governments began crafting in 2012, represents 50 participating countries around the world. Before examining the text of agreement, however, it should be noted that TISA is largely a U.S.-E.U. deal and excludes some notable global players, as Glyn Moody highlighted for Ars Technica in 2015:

“Significantly, all the BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — are absent, and are therefore unable to provide their perspective and input for what is essentially a deal designed by Western nations, for the benefit of Western corporations.”

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As TISA is described on its page at the European Commission’s website:

“TiSA aims at opening up markets and improving rules such as licensing, financial services, telecoms, e-commerce, maritime transport, and professionals moving abroad temporarily to provide services.”

But many analysts are concerned that TISA’s aim of “improving rules” is really only about corporations tightening their grip on their respective industries. Deborah James, writing for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, concluded in November of last year:

“The TISA is intended to lock in a system of rules to allow multinational companies to operate in a borderless digitized environment with minimal regulation and maximum rights regarding the treatment of labor, capital, inputs, and the new key element of data.”

Continuing, she states:

“As promoted by the multinational financial, logistics, and big data corporations through Team TISA, the agreement would set severe limits on the ways that governments can regulate domestic economies, removing key tools of economic management and the ability to shape the service economy while providing an extensive corporate bill of rights for multinational companies’ operations across the globe.”

A corporate bill of rights.

The fact that we know anything at all about TISA is due largely to a series of data dumps from WikiLeaks beginning in 2014, then another later publication from Bilaterals.org, an organization dedicated to shedding light on trade negotiations taking place outside the scope of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

For their part, governments participating in TISA have been reluctant to post updates on the status of negotiations — if they decide to inform their citizens about the deal at all.

Canada’s last update, for instance, is from June, and it says vaguely that “Parties conducted a stocktaking session to assess the level of progress on all issues.” On the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative site, TISA is still described as being “part of the Obama Administration’s ongoing effort to create economic opportunity for U.S. workers and businesses by expanding trade opportunities.”

Given that TISA would do things such as prohibit regulation of the financial industry, including proven-harmful instruments like derivatives — and even, shockingly, instruments and products that have yet to be invented — curtail efforts to safeguard online and digital privacy, and effectively eliminate net neutrality, it’s not surprising that governments haven’t been advertising the deal.

In fact, many are noting that TISA is nothing more than an updated — and reinforced — version of the TPP. Bilaterals.org, noting that despite its unpopularity, the TPP is still being used as the model for TISA, explains:

“Several proposed texts from the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement have been transferred to TISA — including state-owned enterprises; rights to hold data offshore (including financial data); e-commerce; and prohibitions on performance requirements for foreign investors.”

While these proposals originated in the U.S., which has since pulled out of the deal, Bilaterals.org points out that “they appear to be supported by other members of the TPP” and, as such, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, through the Trade in Services Agreement, still has the potential to become the “new norm.”

And to that idea, the organization concluded quite succinctly:

“TPP cannot be allowed to become the new ‘default’ position for these flawed agreements.”

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TISA Ready to Take the Place of TPP

TISA’s Worse Than TPP—Kiss Internet privacy and national sovereignty goodbye  – National Economics

We got rid of TPP and now they’re bringing it back with TISA. In some ways it’s even worse that TPP.

TPP was killed because Congress wasn’t going to go along with it and US President Donald Trump withdrew the county from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as soon as he got into office.

But now we’re finding out that it lives on through the Trade In Services Agreement (TISA). TISA has actually been around for a long time, some 21 rounds of negotiations since April 2013.

And while many things can be said about TISA, it was obviously designed as a back up to TPP. In fact one can speculate that TPP was actually expected to fail and TISA was developed to take its place.

What is TISA? It’s another version of corporate globalism that further deregulates banks, reduces Internet privacy and turns various kinds of manufacturing into services to make internationalization ever easier.

Not only is TISA similar to TPP, it’s a lot bigger, including the US, the European Union and numerous South American and Asian countries. It’s actually a good deal more inclusive than TPP.

Article 9 of TISA’s draft legislation makes sure nations cannot create separate, domestic rules for banks that are not their own. Small, local banks would thus be thrust into competition with overseas multinationals.

Additionally it demands that individual countries allow all sorts of financial products to be sold, including derivatives.

And, like TPP, it allows corporations to sue counties that have passed legislation that would adversely affect corporations. Just as with TPP, disputes would be handled by an as-yes-to-be-created international system.

This was perhaps the most disputed part of TPP, and here it is once more, coming right back again.

They call TISA free-trade, but just like TPP and other recent agreements it’s nothing but managed trade, designed to get corporate advantages.

TISA doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at the moment. The Trump administration claims it wants bilateral trade  talks, not multi-lateral ones. So perhaps it will be on the back burner for a while.

On the other hand, Trump can recreate TISA-TPP with bilateral agreements, so the danger is not over. The next globalist step is to make large corporations equal to nation states or even superior to them. That is what these agreements are supposed to accomplish.

People should be careful about what kind of bilateral agreements Trump wants to make. He already seems to have potentially endorsed a one-world currency in talks with China,

Certainly Trump is no libertarian. He’s not seeking to roll back anything in terms of increasing authoritarian structures, like Homeland Security, that have been erected in the last 20 years.

He seems fine with the structure as it is. He just wants to make sure he can use it for his own purposes.

It’s not clear where Trump is going with TISA. He may well let it die. But he could resurrect it bilaterally if he doesn’t have negative feelings about the larger corporate versus nation-state debate.

Trump may be comfortable giving corporations more power. We would not be, for  reasons stated many times before. Modern corporations are pumped up on the steroids of court decisions that have handed them their monstrous size.

Essentially what we have is a form of corporate fascism that is directly related to the vast structure of these corporate entities. Let them collapse to normal size rather than being inflated by intellectual property rights, corporate personhood, and various regulatory constructs, and we would be much more amenable to letting corporations do as they choose.

But then again, if corporations were merely normal sized, they wouldn’t be the chosen vehicle of the elites. That’s what this is all about really. The top banking elites have created modern corporations from government power, and now they want to extend their control.

Conclusion: They call these agreements “free trade” but the vehicles they use are developed by government not competition. They are supposed to represent the next stage of capitalism. But they are nothing of the sort.