free trade agreements

The text of a 19-page, international trade agreement being drafted in secret was published by WikiLeaks on Thursday as the transparency group's editor commemorated his two-year anniversary confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Fifty countries around the globe have already signed on to the Trade in Service Agreement, or TISA, including the United States, Australia and the European Union. Despite vast international ties, however, details about the deal have been negotiated behind closed-doors and largely ignored by the press.

In a statement published by the group alongside the leaked draft this week, WikiLeaks said "proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets," and have participated in "a significant anti-transparency manoeuvre" by working secretly on a deal that covers more than 68 percent of world trade in services, according to the Swiss National Center for Competence in Research.

Touting the deal earlier this year, the United States Chamber of Commerce said a successful TISA agreement would benefit America's services industry and its 96 million, or 84 percent, of the nation's private sector workers. "As its chief goals, the TISA should expand access to foreign markets for US service industries and ensure they receive national and most-favored nation treatment," the chamber said of the deal in February. "It should also lift foreign governments' sectoral limits on investment in services," "eliminate regulatory inconsistencies that at times loom as trade barriers" and "prohibit restrictions on legitimate cross?border information flows and bar local infrastructure mandates relating to data storage."

WikiLeaks warns that this largely important trade deal has been hardly discussed in public, however, notwithstanding evidence showing that the policy makers involved want to establish rules that would pertain to services used by billions worldwide.

"The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers," WikiLeaks said in a statement. "The leaked draft also shows that the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, which would allow uninhibited exchange of personal and financial data."

Additionally, the current draft also includes language inferring that, upon the finishing of negotiations, the document will be kept classified for five full years.

In Australia, journalists at The Age_{#fnWiki1" id="txtWiki1">1} reported that experts say the proposed changes included within the WikiLeaks document "could undermine Australia's capacity to independently respond to and weather any future global financial crisis."

Dr. Patricia Ranald, a research associate at the University of Sydney and convener of the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network, told the paper that the documents suggest the US wants to "tie the hands" of other governments, including allied ones, by way of sheer deregulation.

"Amendments from the US are seeking to end publicly provided services like public pension funds, which are referred to as 'monopolies' and to limit public regulation of all financial services," she said. "They want to freeze financial regulation at existing levels, which would mean that governments could not respond to new developments like another global financial crisis."

Earlier this week, US Trade Representative Michael Froman said the TISA deal was already well on its way to being put together.

"The basic framework of the agreement is in place, initial market access offers have been exchanged, and sector-specific work in areas like telecommunications andfinancialservices is in full swing," Froman said, according to Reuters.

The document published this week by WikiLeaks is dated April 14 – two months before Froman last weighed in on the progress of the negotiations and six months after his office hailed previous re-write to the proposal. Along with representatives from Canada, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Turkey and dozens others, American policy makers will meet in Geneva, Switzerland later this month starting June 23 to begin the next round of negotiations.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, meanwhile, remains confined to Ecuador's embassy in London where two years ago this Thursday he arrived seeking asylum. Assange, 42, is wanted for questioning in Sweden but fears his arrival there would prompt a swift extradition to the US due to his role in exposing American state secrets.

Footnote[s]

#fnWiki1" id="fnWiki1">1. #txtWiki1">↑ This helpful report by Peter Martin is an exception to the Age's typical misreporting of all the critical local, national and international issues. The Age can usually be depended upon to to misreport to serve interests of the local elites and the New World Order against the interests of the local people. An example is the Age's repeated calls for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad since the proxy war aginst Syria started in March 2011. However, after Syrians overwhelmingly voted for the allegedly corrupt and brutal tyrant Bashar al-Assad in the Presidential elections of 3 June 2014, the Age and other mainstream media presstitutes have toned their deceitful narrative. For now, they are confining their deceit to other conflicts such as Ukraine and the new insurgency in Iraq.

The agreement signed by the Australian Government and other Pacific Powers at the recent Trans Pacific Partnership, largely held in secret in Kuala Lumpur takes away from people in the Pacific, much of what democratic rights they previously had to make decisions on matters that what would effect their livelihoods and environment.

See also: Flush the TPP! -- Stop the Global Corporate Coup! at http://www.flushthetpp.org/; Marles vows not to cave to US pressure by Peter Martin in the Age of 15 July 2013; Public health at risk in trade talks by Deborah Gleeson and David Legge in the Age of 14 July 2013. Broadcasts of interviews embedded in this article.

from Global Research TV of 15 July 2013

Protestors: Stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership and incinerator for Baltimore’s Curtis Bay

from the Baltimore Post-Examiner of 16 July 2013

...

Activist Margaret Flowers shared her views with respect to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is a proposed free trade agreement. Flowers labeled it “a gift to the oil and gas industry.”

She added that the ex-U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, who negotiated the agreement in secret, said that if the people knew what was in it, “that it would never be able to be signed.” To learn more click at the Popular Resistance webpage.

Nick Davenport also shared his views with respect to the highly controversial Keystone XL Pipeline. He opposes it. If completed, it will carry “toxic tar sands from under Canada’s Boreal forest 2000 miles [south] to the Gulf of Mexico,” he says. Davenport is associated with the Baltimore Ecosocilalist Alliance. To learn more about the issue check out this webpage.

Japan Times warns how Trans Pacific Partnership threatens local farmers, fishermen, IP consumers ..

From an editorial of the Japan Times

Parties must clearly explain TPP

Jul 18 July 2013

Whether Japan should join the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade scheme is one of the main issues in the coming Upper House election. If Japan becomes a member of the TPP, it will greatly impact agriculture and other industries, and people’s lives. Deplorably, political parties are talking about the TPP only in the general terms of whether they support or oppose it. They should present the TPP’s merits and demerits in a clear-cut and detailed manner so that voters can be fully informed before passing judgment on it.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced in March that Japan will start a procedure to take part in negotiations for the TPP. But both the Liberal Democratic Party and its junior partner Komeito have neglected to show how the TPP will help promote Japan’s national interests.

The opposition forces are divided over the issue. ... the DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan) does not clearly say whether it supports or opposes the TPP. The Japan Communist Party, the People’s Life Party, the Social Democratic Party and the Green Wind oppose the TPP mainly because they think it will destroy Japan’s agriculture and local economies.

Many parties call for exempting tariffs on rice, wheat, pork and beef, dairy products and sugar from abolition, the principle tenet of the TPP. But they also should emphasize the importance of food security as well as the noneconomic values of Japanese agriculture, such as its role in protecting the environment as well as preserving traditional cultures and ways of living.

Political parties also should pay attention to the fact the TPP scheme covers trade rules in 21 fields including intellectual property, government procurement and the environment. Japan should not forget that the United States has a clear strategy on how to expand its interests in the finance and insurance sectors in the Japanese economy through the TPP arrangement Political parties should specifically address fears that the TPP may undermine Japan’s public health insurance system.

There is a possibility that environment-related rules may ban Japan from providing subsidies to help reconstruct devastated fishing ports in the Tohoku region and that government procurement-related rules may force Japan to allow overseas firms greater access to its market for public works projects.

It is odd that political parties talk very little about the TPP’s investor-state dispute settlement mechanism, which could enable global business enterprises to supersede decisions taken by Japanese central and local governments regarding environmental protection and social policy.

Political parties should make it clear to people that the TPP is not just a traditional free trade agreement but could very well topple Japanese business practices and social policy arrangements that they have long taken for granted.