Apparently, the few selected MoP in Germany who were given access to the drafts had a few hours to look at a 1000+ pages, in English legalese, with a dictionary but no internet access.
Apparently, the drafts were full of certain spelling errors. The assumption was that they were personalized and injected on purpose such that photographs could be traced back to the origin.
Source - German media coverage.
My support for most post-globalisation trade liberalisation treaties tends to be lukewarm. However, this can't really be called "not much". 400,000 jobs against a working population of ~300M is a decrease in unemployment by .13 percentage points. 0.5% increase in GDP is still ~70B that otherwise wouldn't be there.
Besides, you can't decontextualize the gains from the losses, both economical and cultural.
I can imagine for example, in worst case scenario, billions transferred from EU to tax havens because of the ISDS, and job losses because of [partial] loss of protection of Geographical indications.
[1]=https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140417/09391926947/tafta...
But if only selected MPs can see the text at all, maybe they've been selected carefully.
It's more a corporations against the people thing. The problem those treaties solve is that they lock future legislative changes at the national level.
After signing it, how are you going to change it? It will be very hard and we will accept it because it's like "things work in the real world".
Good for the EU. If only our government showed the same care for its own citizens.
Sounds like a reasonable argument.
These kinds of lawsuits don't exist in Europe, in the worst case a company will pay $10,000 to a single person. But there are other protections in place and if you take those away you will end up with much worse protection than the US has because this indirect regulation doesn't exist.
> "whereas the U.S. only bans them if people have already been harmed as a result of consuming said products"
I think those people harmed would disagree.
Also to "scientifically prove" something might not be as easy as it sounds. You may have a couple of studies that find a harmful effect, and then you have some (possibly industry-backed) studies that find no effect at all. You now have a strong hint, but no proof. At best it is "scientifically debated". Think of tobacco industry vs "smoking causes cancer", or oil companies vs "global warming is caused by humans".
So the real question is: should something only be banned when it's 99.5% certain that it's harmful? Is 50% chance of it being harmful okay? Or 80%? And why?
The EU prefers to err on the side of safety. The US prefers to err on the side of profit. I don't see why the US approach would be better.
The burden of proof shouldn't be on the government, it should be on the manufacturer, similar to how medicines require FDA approval.
The very reason we're creating GMOs for food is to reduce the resources (land, energy, fertilizers, water, etc.) needed for food production. The motivation of course is that lower resource usage means lower production costs.
Requiring unreasonable burdens of proof mean greater waste in our food production, but that side of things isn't a scary and therefore gets less consideration than the limitless possibilities of unknown harms that could come from GMOs.
There's some drop in the price of a hamburger below which I'm not willing to risk a Leprechaun extinction. However, I'm willing to risk extinction of Leprechauns, Yetis, and Loch Ness "monsters" in exchange for less land needed to grow my food, and fewer children being under-nourished. These are real problems that GMOs can help with.
If you're from one of non-blessed EU countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Romania and most notably Poland), you can not enter the US without a visa, even for tourism.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/20...
At least put some effort into naming. To have your rights grind away so slowly and being coerced like a mule to even thread that mill that maims you.. Im for a law that forbids to discuss content-similar contracts that have been downvoted for at least 8 years.
On average, the EU is more transparent than the EU, and politicians tend to feel more like they really should be representing the people, but it's really a sliding scale with the US just a bit further down than the EU.
I really hope transparency about the TTIP negotiations will help turn this around in both the EU and the US.
I don't know much about that kind of negotiations, the secrecy might as well be the right strategy to push it through I guess?
".. it also contains an ‘investor protection’ provision allowing corporations to effectively sue governments for taking action to harm their business."
(source: http://www.publicfinanceinternational.org/news/2016/02/ttip-...)
So .. effectively, this could mean that a corporation could overrule a government in legislation if it would be harming it's profits.
The big problem with this for example here in Finland is that through these measure big corporations could try to take over the nations natural resources, like water and forest, which are and should be protected by local laws. But through this kind of legal means, these corporations could be allowed to sue the government over the loss of a profit due to protecting legislation, in order just to make a profit out of it. Which is complete and total bullshit.
ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) is a sane concept. The implementation might have problems (for example closed courtroom "trials"), but it's not about protecting profits. It's about protecting equality and fairness for all before the law, and in case of States, holding them accountable to make fair and egalitarian laws.
What's the typical example? A random Company invests in a country, sets up a nice subsidiary starts doing business, everything is legal. But the country (the State) sees that it's taking up the market, uh-oh,
a) better make a law against whatever they are doing, or b) better make a law against (that specific or all) foreign companies doing whatever.
Which one(s) is (are) problematic?
Also, the other thing, fairness, comes in when a State wants to buy out a company but doesn't want to pay market price. Basically eminent domain without unfair compensation.
The same goes for ending tax breaks (or other investment incentives) sooner than promised. Because that's a breach of agreement.
Your link (publicfinanceinternational.org) refers an article from globaljustice.co.uk which has a list of problematic ISDS arbitration cases, that's the real data, anything else is just fluff. ( http://www.globaljustice.org.uk/sites/default/files/files/re... )
Let's look at the big bully US agribusiness vs Mexico (the rules of arbitration are set by NAFTA).
http://www.state.gov/s/l/c42198.htm
http://www.italaw.com/sites/default/files/case-documents/ita... the concrete "award" (findings of the tribunal).
It turns out that these tribunals are looking at laws and apply them. Like courts. And they are much likely more objective than any court in either host country. And then that award was reviewed by the courts of a place chosen by the parties (the Ontario court system).
Seems quite like due process to me.
I'm not saying all of the cases are jolly good and there was absolutely no problematic awards, but just looking at the Vodafone vs India one, the "retrospective capital gains tax" hits us and makes you wonder, what the fuck were the Indians thinking, first rule of how to legislate. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_certainty )
But enough on ISDS. There are big problems with TTIP, but not this one.
Why not canceling this whole concept of democracy.
Why is regulation a bad thing? These rules exist for a reason in health/food for example.
The recent changes to VAT feel like a mess. Maybe I'm missing something there and they're not as bad as they seem?
We usually call it consumer protection here and most of EU citizens like the way it is.
