Monday, Aug 29, 2016, 9:08 pm
BY Kate Aronoff
The Trans-Atlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP) is dead, at least according to Angela Merkel’s
second-in-command. And the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may not be far
behind.
German Vice Chancellor Sigmar
Gabriel said Sunday that
“negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody
is really admitting it.” According to Gabriel, who also serves as his country’s
economy minister, negotiators from the European Union and United States have
failed—despite 14 rounds of talks—to align on any item out of 27 chapters being
discussed. Gabriel and his ministry are not directly involved in the
negotiations.
EU officials were quick to
downplay Sigmar’s statement, saying
they hoped to “close this deal by the end of the year.” But Gabriel isn’t the
first to cry foul on the TTIP, which, if enacted, would establish the world’s
largest free trade zone between the United States and the EU’s 28 member
states. In May, French negotiators threatened to block the agreement. U.S.
negotiators have also reportedly been angry over the passage of a similar
agreement between Canada and the EU, which included protections U.S.
negotiators don’t want included in the TTIP.
Sunday’s TTIP news comes
on the heels of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) saying that the
Senate would not vote on the TPP in the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress.
(The Obama administration countered,
saying it still hopes to pass the deal before the next president takes office.)
Both trade announcements
follow years of protests on each side of the Atlantic to fight the TTIP and the
TPP, especially from unions and environmental groups.
"The fact that TTIP has
failed is testament to the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the
streets to protest against it, the three million people who signed a petition
calling for it to be scrapped, and the huge coalition of civil society groups,
trade unions, progressive politicians and activists who came together to stop
it,” writes
Kevin Smith of Global Justice Now, an organization that has worked to fight
TTIP in the United Kingdom.
While the TPP has become a lightning
rod for labor and other progressive organizations in the United States, the
TTIP has slipped mostly under the radar stateside. That’s partially because
talks over it, which began in 2013, have taken place almost entirely behind
closed doors. Among the proposals unearthed are provisions to open European
public services to U.S. businesses and to scale back online privacy
protections. European groups have also raised the concern that the deal could
send jobs from their continent to the United States, where trade unions and labor
protections are weaker than in the EU.
Like the TPP, the TTIP would
dismantle regulations in areas like banking and the environment by limiting
governments’ ability to impose rules on transnational corporations. Both trade
deals would further allow the investor-state dispute settlement system, which
permits corporations to sue states. (TransCanada Corp.—the Canadian company
behind the now-defunct Keystone XL oil pipeline—is currently seeking
$15 billion from Washington under a similar NAFTA provision for rejecting the
controversial project.)
Though both presidential
candidates in the United States have voiced their opposition to the TPP,
neither has said much about TTIP. Hillary Clinton changed her tune on the
former, which she pushed for as secretary of state. The move is largely seen as
a response to dedicated protests from unions and community groups that have
been mobilizing to stop the talks since they began, and as a reaction to the
fact that both her primary and general election opponents have spoken out
aggressively against so-called free trade agreements.
In a letter this
month, a coalition of progressive groups including Demand Progress and 350
Action called on Clinton to reject a vote on the TPP in the next session.
“Allowing a lame-duck vote,” they write, “would be a tacit admission that
corporate interests matter more than the will of the people.”
Beyond progressive
organizations’ fold, though, lies a growing bipartisan resentment of
NAFTA-style deals. A poll
released in April found that just 17 percent of Germans and 18 percent of
Americans support the TTIP—likely not enough to save deals like the TTIP and
TPP from a political climate that increasingly sees free trade agreements as
anything but free.
Kate Aronoff is a writing
fellow at In These Times covering the 2016 election and the politics of climate
change. Follow her on Twitter @katearonoff
thank you for the insight
ReplyDelete