The TTIP agreement between the EU and the US creates a parallel private arbitration system where corporations can sue states for lost profits and decisions are irrevocable. Labor and environmental regulations can be invalidated as “takings” or “indirect expropriation.” Public interest laws can be chilled or invalidated as infringements of the “human right to profit” of foreign investors.
Fast Track, TPP and TTIP Should Be Scrapped!
to read the articles by Thilo Bode, Christopher Stark and Sahra Wagenknecht translated from the German, click on
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2015/05/268209.php
“Cartels” and “state monopolies” are emphasized. Core areas like educational institutions, universities and schools are ultimately also privatized and opened up to the markets. This perspective is alarming in the light of already fatal economization tendencies in the education system and genuine dangers for free and critical education.
For free trade dogmatists, state monopolies should always be rejected as economically inefficient. The fact that schools should be intellectually and didactically capable and not efficient is ignored. That public waterworks and sanitation facilities can be built very efficiently even without competition is also ignored. Whether competition makes any sense is not seen. Different suppliers entering in competition makes little sense in the water supply with a uniform infrastructure. The product water always remains the same. Poor and rich persons should both have the best possible water quality.
