TTIP - Secret Courts

Alright, I know it always seems that I'm banging on about some appeal or petition all the time but that is because, as far as I'm concerned, this is the stuff that should be in the news papers but isn't, probably because the big businesses pulling this crap don't want it in the newspapers.

For instance, a trade deal between the EU and US, known as TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), threatens to undermine our basic democratic rights and puts our public services at risk but despite the severity of the threat, TTIP is facing a media blackout, with the newspapers refusing to publish news about it.  I wonder who told them not to.

Not only that but last month 250 people, including MPs and trade union leaders, were arrested in Brussels while peacefully protesting against TTIP.  Now did that make it into the newspapers, no of course not, the businesses don't want us to know about it.

TTIP is being negotiated in secret – clearly, policy makers do not want people to know about it and if we want to beat this undemocratic deal, we need to make sure people know what's going on behind closed doors.  Makes me feel like I'm living in 1930's Germany and this time it is the big business men who are acting like Hitler.

If that gets up your nose then here is the link to help out.

Take action and get TTIP into the papers.
One of the reasons the corporations don't want people knowing about TTIP is because it is set to include a system of offshore ‘corporate courts’ that will allow companies to sue governments for protecting their people and environment.  They are dressing this up as "investor state dispute settlements" or “Investor-State Arbitration Settlement" (ISDS) but really all it means is that big businesses will be able to sue the governments for trying to curb their powers.

ISDS would set up a system of tribunals where corporations could take our governments to court if they didn’t like a particular law that they thought harmed their business.

If TTIP is passed a future UK government could be faced with huge law suits if it wanted to remove companies from the NHS, freeze energy prices, restore public control to the railways, outlaw fracking, or raise the minimum wage.  That is what has happened where similar ‘corporate courts’ already in existence in other countries.

 Recently Germany was sued for placing a moratorium on nuclear power by a Swedish energy giant, Argentina has been sued for freezing energy bills, Slovakia for renationalising its health insurance system, and Egypt for raising the minimum wage.  Also Ecuador is being sued by Chevron because the country is requiring it to clean up a huge toxic oil spill in the heart of the Ecuadorian rainforest and Australia is being sued by Phillip Morris because it wants to take action to curb teenage smoking.

This is what ISDS would mean for Europe -- more corporate lawsuits against the things we care about.

Thanks to public pressure the EU Commission has opened up a public consultation on the part of TTIP allowing ‘corporate courts’. This gives us a unique opportunity to tell the EU we want democracy, not a corporate power grab. But guess what, they are only keeping the consultation open for a short period of time so it seems to me that they don't want too many people knowing about it.

The SumofUs community has built a tool to make submitting any comments you have about this destruction of our democracy easy - it doesn't take three minutes to use and it could be the best chance to tell both the EU and the US what we think about one of the most dangerous parts of the TTIP trade deal.

The EU’s consultation is a great first step - and it shows that pressure to drop the deal from all over the EU is starting to work. Now the EU have said they’ll listen, we need to make sure they hear from us. We know the public is against these rules -- but the EU needs to hear that loud and clear.
Making a comment is easy with this new tool, and it's our best chance of stopping these secret corporate courts.

See the link above if you want to tell the US to butt off.  Seems weird to be having to do this to a county that has spent over a decade trying to convince the world that it's the good guy.