Posted on 05/06/2016 9:12:27 AM PDT by HomerBohn
Outrage is growing on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean following a massive new leak of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a globalist “trade” agreement negotiated between the Obama administration and the European Union. The leaked documents are being used, properly in some cases, to portray the treaty as a giant handout to Big Business cronies. Just as importantly, the almost 250 pages of text also confirm once again that the controversial new “trade” regime aims to merge the regulatory regimes of the United States and the EU under unaccountable transnational institutions. In short, the threats to liberty, privacy, self-government, and national sovereignty are very real. But critics are fighting back.
With public support for the scheme collapsing and the new revelations sparking fury across the political spectrum, some analysts are actually heralding the death of TTIP. Top politicians, business leaders, and media outlets across Europe are suggesting that the end may be near for the unpopular pseudo-free trade agreement. However, despite the statements of some government leaders, without an even more massive outcry in the United States, the TTIP is unlikely to die a peaceful death anytime soon. Instead, globalists will continue working to impose their anti-sovereignty agenda on the world, just with more regulations to placate the controlled opposition from the Left that demands more environmental, consumer, and labor "protections." Everybody agrees that chances for the scheme to come to fruition are better while Obama occupies the White House.
Among the leaked documents were more than a dozen key sections of the massive agreement. Most of the coverage surrounding those sections has centered on allegations by Greenpeace, which leaked the documents, about an alleged lack of sufficient regulations in everything from the environment and labor to investments and consumer protection. There are some very valid concerns in terms of the regulatory tsunami emerging from the negotiations. In a statement, Greenpeace explained why it leaked the documents, and why it thinks you should care about what is revealed in them. Basically, the deal is “a huge transfer of power from people to big business,” Greenpeace said.
Of course, the increasingly radical regulatory bureaucracies of the EU and the Obama administration are not “people” — and they are already dominated in large measure by the establishment and its cronies. However, the whining about specific regulations completely misses the point. The real story is not that the TTIP regime will not regulate Americans and Europeans, or "the climate," with sufficient zealotry. Though widely overlooked in the media, the real story is that bureaucrats and lobbyists are working behind closed doors to fashion regulations that will purportedly govern almost a billion people and half of the global economy, all with no accountability to the people subject to the grandiose schemes.
The deal also allows so-called “eurocrats” to meddle in U.S. policy, and vice versa. One proposal floated by the Obama administration that came out in the leaks, for example, would force the EU to give U.S. companies advanced notice of proposed regulations and then allow them to provide “input” in influencing the regulatory regime. “Before the EU could even pass a regulation, it would have to go through a grueling impact assessment process in which the bloc would have to show interested U.S. parties that no voluntary measures, or less exacting regulatory ones, were possible,” fumed Greenpeace EU boss Jorgo Riss, totally missing the point on the real dangers posed by the TTIP.
Riss was outraged at various other proposals by the Obama administration contained in the documents, too. “These leaked documents give us an unparalleled look at the scope of U.S. demands to lower or circumvent EU protections for environment and public health as part of TTIP,” he said. “The EU position is very bad, and the U.S. position is terrible. The prospect of a TTIP compromising within that range is an awful one. The way is being cleared for a race to the bottom in environmental, consumer protection and public health standards.”
Other Greenpeace statements and officials gave similar warnings, suggesting that their opposition to the TTIP concerns mostly a few quibbles about the number and scope of specific regulatory schemes rather than the real issues. Sylvia Borren, the executive director of Greenpeace Netherlands, which released the leak, practically spelled that out. “We call on citizens, civil society, politicians and businesses to engage in this debate openly and without fear,” she said. “We call on the negotiators to release the latest, complete text to facilitate that discussion, and we ask that the negotiations be stopped until these questions, and many more have been answered. Until we can fully engage in a debate about the standards we and our planet need and want.”
After Greenpeace and the “planet” get the transnational Big Government regulations they “need and want,” the TTIP can proceed as planned, as far as Greenpeace is apparently concerned. “We have done so to provide much needed transparency and trigger an informed debate on the treaty,” the group said. “This treaty is threatening to have far reaching implications for the environment and the lives of more than 800 million citizens in the EU and US. Whether you care about environmental issues, animal welfare, labor rights or internet privacy, you should be concerned about what is in these leaked documents. They underline the strong objections civil society and millions of people around the world have voiced: TTIP is about a huge transfer of power from people to big business.” If eurocrats in Brussels keep the power, though, apparently the deal is OK.
Some of the concerns Greenpeace has raised, though, are impacting the debate. For example, Greenpeace, which opposes genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food, has lashed out at TTIP developments. The documents reportedly show the Obama administration trying to do favors for globalist GMO giant Monsanto, which lavishly funds the campaigns of politicians in both major U.S. parties. Under the draft agreement, U.S. imports of agricultural goods that contained traces of genetically engineered organisms could be allowed. Currently those shipments would be banned over concerns about potential contamination and safety issues, and in Europe the ban is quite popular with the public.
Some business leaders, though, spoke out against the process. “I just believe that what the EU is doing is essentially against the will of the European people, who are mostly happy with the regulation and have a large degree of skepticism about genetically modified crops,” said CEO Mark Garrett of Austria-based chemicals producer Borealis. “I don’t understand why governments would act not in the interest of their own people. But then, I live in Switzerland, where the government has to act in the interest of people.” In fact, the EU has lashed out at the Swiss, who overwhelmingly refuse to join the EU, on more than a few occasions, for precisely that reason.
Also included in the leak this weekend was a document outlining the internal positions of the EU super-state and the Obama administration, and the alleged differences between the parties. While much of that will be sorted out in upcoming negotiating sessions, some of the differences were described as potentially “irreconcilable.” At least in the press, the EU is being portrayed as giving in to Washington, D.C., on loosening environmental protections and other government “standards” to help everyone. But the two parties were reportedly stuck on issues such as cosmetics, where an EU ban on animal testing is apparently not going to give way.
In the wake of the leak, European media outlets rushed to condemn the treaty. Socialist French President Francois Hollande, only slightly less unpopular than the widely loathed U.S. Congress, even suggested after the leak that the “trade” scheme was doomed — at least “at this stage.” Even before the new revelations, though, the TTIP was radically unpopular. While more than half of Americans and Germans supported the deal in 2014 polls, just 17 percent of Germans and 15 percent of Americans now do, according to a recent YouGov survey. If trends continue, the scheme will soon have essentially no backers outside of crony capitalists, the globalist establishment, and their lackeys.
But the recent brouhaha surrounding the leaked information should be examined critically. While the information in the leak is valuable, Americans and Europeans should be careful to see through the media and Greenpeace spin. The real problem with the TTIP is not that it allegedly reduces a few draconian EU environmental restrictions or “consumer protection” schemes. Therefore, the solution is not and cannot possibly be to renegotiate the section on environmental restrictions, or anything of the sort, as the controlled opposition has suggested.
Instead, the real problem with TTIP is systemic: the fact that the deal purports to strip Americans and Europeans of their inalienable right to self-government and self-determination by allowing regulations and other coercive controls to be developed and imposed by unelected, unaccountable transnational institutions. Plus, real free trade, assuming it is desirable, does not require hundreds or even thousands of pages of regulations and decrees developed by lobbyists and bureaucrats.
As the leaked documents confirm yet again, the radical plot to merge the EU and the United States under a supranational regulatory regime is an abomination — a threat to liberty, sovereignty, and prosperity. In Europe, sovereignty has already been surreptitiously stolen over generations, all under the deceptive guise of advancing pseudo-“free trade.” The United States must not allow the same forces to do the same thing here. The American people should demand that Congress reject both the TTIP and the equally dangerous Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). It can still be stopped.
The Brussels bureaucrats want to micromanage the US as well (read: as poorly) as they do Europe. These Malthusian, misanthropic Mandarins have no clue how real, normal, people live -- how can they, with their exorbitant salaries and € 100,000 (and more) perks and per diem benefits?
Opt out America and go back to the days when our nation was self-sustaining!
Ping
The used to laugh at people who forewarned of the NWO global government.
All those #NeverTrump people; the Dems; RINO’s; GOPe; RNC; Mitch McConnell; Paul Ryan and others are trying to shove down our throats...
Anyone who has not done their jobs as Representative or Senator should be voted out of office!!!
VOTE TRUMP!!!
I can scarcely believe these words are about to come out of my mouth, but....
THANK YOU, GREENPEACE!
Not only should this treaty be opposed, others in the same vein need to be annulled and abandoned.
Turns out the John Birchers had it right all along.
Your Bilderberger dollars at work.
And my mom was a ‘Bircher’ years ago. :)
I think Alex Jones had said something about this. That’s why the globalists hate Trump.
“Turns out the John Birchers had it right all along.”
Have to agree they did get some big things right, just took a little bit longer than they thought. Remembering back over 40 years, most of my wise elders said “Americans would never be so stupid to sign up for what the Birchers fear”. Well, here we are and “stupid is as stupid does”.
NWO
Thus, a United States of Europe, where people have the same fundamental rights as Americans, were governments aren't socialist but free-market oriented, and where citizens make the decisions, not bureaucrats and elites. That is what we should have been working for, and at the same time, in the early 90s, pushing to integrate Russia into that system. Oh what might have been!
In places ready for the American system that values individuals, like Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica, India, South Africa, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, maybe a few others, work with them. Develop a set of principles that we believe that any free society should have, and encourage that those be implemented, within the framework of each country's unique history and culture.
Meanwhile, we can still trade and have good relations with Mexico and the banana republics, Africa, China, and the Arab states in the Middle East. Limits should be placed, however, on integration and especially immigration, from those areas. Efforts to bring them to change their ways should be more heavy-handed, with an eye to the notion that it might take 2 or 3 generations to change those societies. But if those places see what is happening in a place like India or Argentina, then they might move more quickly to bring about change.
In other words, the idea that I have always had was to make the world like America, not to take over the world nor to destroy America by integrating it with foreign hell-holes. The parts of the world that joined in with us would prosper. Those that didn't would suffer, but we could bring some of them to our side over time.
That is the opportunity that Bush 41 sqandered, and it has bothered me ever since.
All the RINO’s in Congress love these free traitor deals.
Yep, I am no longer a “Conservative”. A Conservative is now a globalist, neocon one world type. No thanks.
All the “principled conservatives” on Free Republic love these deals.
I much prefer the party of Trump: American!!!
The opposition to Trump is all about K Street operatives who WROTE and pushed TPP and all these NOT free trade, cheap labor, sovereignty busting ‘agreements’. Thanks Ted Cruz and PAUL RYAN, Marco Rubio!
See Who runs the GOP and owns Paul Ryan & Marco Rubio? Let’s name names!
http://towncriernews.blogspot.com/2016/05/who-runs-gop-and-owns-paul-ryan-marco.html
This is the left’s ultimate wet dream - it provides a way to nullify the 2nd Amendment.
Paul Ryan is saddened at this leak and how it will affect his lame duck session adoption strategy.
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