TTIP: The Aristocracy Aren’t Satisfied. They Demand More

Eric Zuesse
(Crosspost with First Iteration at strategic-culture.org)

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This new study is titled “Public Services Under Attack,” but it’s about more than just the proposed treaty’s impacts upon replacing “Public Services” by private services.

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Corporate Europe headlined about this study on October 12th, “Public services under attack through TTIP and CETA,” and listed 15 of what they consider to be the report’s highlights. The following will instead quote extensively from the study itself, so that this summary will come mainly from  the report itself:

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The study is “Published by Association Internationale de Techniciens, Experts et Chercheurs (AITEC), Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), European Federation of Public Services Unions (EPSU), Instytut Globalnej Odpowiedzialności (IGO), Transnational Institute (TNI), Vienna Chamber of Labour (AK Vienna), and War on Want.” So: it reflects a concern for workers, and for the poor, not mainly for corporate owners — the latter being the proposed Treaty’s sole sponsors and beneficiaries.

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This new study opens by defining (page 8) “Public Service”: “Public services are those provided by a government to its population, usually based around the social consensus that certain services should be available to all regardless of income.” Another way of stating this is that a “public service” is one provided to citizens as a right, available to all equally, instead of as a privilege, available only upon the basis of ability-to-pay. The “social consensus that certain services should be available to all regardless of income” is repudiated in treaties like this, because they reflect instead a “libertarian” (to use the U.S. term) or “liberal” (to use the European term) viewpoint, that a person’s wealth reflects that person’s contribution to society, so that no poor person possesses any rights at all. (Supporting this viewpoint, Adam Smith, in his 1762 Glasgow Lectures on Jurisprudence, said: “Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor.” He wrote this in a society and age in which virtually all wealth – or else poverty – was inherited from one’s parents, not earned. He portrayed the poor as being the enemies. Their rights were no more than their wealth, in his view. He retained that aristocratic view throughout his life.) This viewpoint is also often referred to as being “conservatism,” because it conserves the existing power-structure, with the richest (the aristocracy) being the most powerful in the future, as they have been in the past. Consequently, in the West at least, the ideological polarity is between “liberalism” versus “conservatism,” both of which are fundamentally the same. Progressivism hardly even has a name, as of yet. (In other words: the ideological ‘debate’ is bogus, and is shaped on ‘both’ sides by the aristocracy.)

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Therefore, proponents of Obama’s proposed ‘trade’ treaties call themselves, variously, “liberals,” “libertarians,” and “conservatives”; but only the terminology varies, because the reality does not.

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The same section of the study says: “With free trade treaties like CETA and TTIP, governments will lose policy space to organise public services according to societies’ preferences by locking in liberalisation and privatisation. This is raising great concerns about whether profit will distort the ability of these services to be run in the public interest. Moreover, government attempts to regulate them could be deemed ‘barriers to trade’ and overturned.”

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The report’s Table of Contents is also something of a summary of the report:

Here is the opening of:

Then, there is:

AHC complains that “today’s world of health care services is highly restricted and fragmented”, but an “open trading world for these services would create a large new flow of revenue into the United States [to executives and major stockholders of those companies]”. …

Then, there is:

Then, there is:

Then:

Heeding the demands of the business lobby, CETA and TTIP apply to virtually all public services … at best excluding some core sovereign functions such as law enforcement, the judiciary, or the services of a central bank.84 [In common parlance, as Grover Norquist has phrased the matter, “reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”]

Then, there are sections indicating that postal services and also the water utility are to be privatized so as to be available only only on a for-profit basis: excluding or else prohibitively charging regions where those services are unprofitable:

Education gets treated similarly. Then, there is:

Then, there are several sections devoted to such things as:

Regulatory changes, such as new laws or taxes diminishing private profits, may be seen as breaches of an investor’s “legitimate expectations” justifying multi-billion euro payouts in compensation [to companies that have been prohibited from activities by regulations, or even to the violating companies that have been fined]. 

and,

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] major failing of this study is that it ignores such things as: Locking in food, drug, automobile-safety, and other existing regulations, so that, for example, when new scientific studies or else newly developed technologies indicate that an updating of a regulation would save lives or otherwise help the public, the regulation under TTIP and similar treaties cannot be updated (except by subjecting the government to potentially crippling lawsuits), which crippling of government will produce ever-increasing numbers of diseases and deaths as government is frozen even while science and technology continue to advance.

This is feudal. Fascism is to the industrial age what feudalism was to the agrarian age; and this is fascism, but on an international or imperial scope, perhaps even an emerging fascist world government — the exact opposite of what the United Nations was founded in order to promote.

U.S. President Barack Obama was elected to office in 2008 with the promise and public expectation that he opposed anti-democratic, pro-aristocratic, initiatives such as this. The fact that he now goes even far beyond the extremists Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in them, is virtual proof that the United States is no longer a democracy. (At least those candidates were honest about their conservatism.) Is the EU at all a democracy? Or will they accept Obama’s global-aristocratic monstrosity, and push for the aristocracy against the public, like the U.S. government does? The hypocrisy is mind-boggling.

Even before TTIP and Obama’s other mega-‘trade’-deals get signed and become effective (if they do), they’ve already weakened regulatory protections of the public. On October 18th, Lauren McCauley at Common Dreams headlined “TTIP Already ‘Rewriting the Rule Book’ for EU Food Standards, New Report Finds,” and reported that a progressive British organization, Global Justice Now, issued a study on October 18th, which noted that:

Anyone who wants to know the mechanisms by which Obama’s mega ‘trade’ treaties — TTIP, TPP, and TISA — will operate, can find that machinery (the basic means to enslave the public to the aristocrats) described here.

And here is a description of the family that will benefit the most from these agreements.