Het EU-VS Vrijhandelsverdrag (TTIP) #2

quote:

Op dinsdag 23 februari 2016 07:22 schreef Igen het volgende:

[..]

Private leken die voor rechter spelen? Waar heb je het over?

Bij de meest spraakmakende zaak tot nu toe, Rusland vs. ex-Yukos, deed het Hof van Arbitrage in Den Haag de uitspraak.

Die zaak laat trouwens ook precies zien waar zo'n clausule van investeringsbescherming voor bedoeld is. De veroordeling van Rusland in die zaak was 110% terecht.

quote:

Hoeveel globalisering verdraagt de mens?

quote:

Het is fijn om voor een habbekrats de wereld over te kunnen vliegen en overal de vertrouwde H&M binnen te kunnen lopen. Maar wat hebben we straks zelf nog te zeggen over de kwaliteit en productie van de spullen die we kopen als het voorgenomen vrijhandelsverdrag (TTIP) tussen de VS en de Europese Unie er komt? De euro en democratie lijken in toenemende mate met elkaar op gespannen voet te staan, en eurokritische partijen krijgen steeds meer aanhang. Wat gaat er mis? En hoe kan het beter? Daarover gaat deel 4 van de reeks De economie van overmorgen, waarin Hella Hueck (RTL Z) en econoom Robert Went van de Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid (WRR) de kennis van vandaag proberen te vertalen naar de samenleving van de toekomst.

quote:

Handelsverdrag TTIP: slechte deal voor Europa

quote:

Op zondag 27 maart 2016 18:16 schreef broodjepindakaashagelslag het volgende:
Handelsverdrag TTIP: slechte deal voor Europa

BENG! Een recent Amerikaans onafhankelijk rapport laat zien dat het handelsverdrag (TTIP) dat in de maak is tussen Europa en de VS, 583.000 banen in Europa kost. Het onderzoek heeft –onterecht– nauwelijks aandacht gekregen. Wakker worden, mensen.

Eind oktober kwam dit Amerikaanse rapport van Jeronim Capaldo naar buiten. Het is vernietigend over de consequenties van het verdrag voor Europa

Dit zijn de belangrijkste bevindingen uit het rapport:

- Als TTIP doorgaat gaan er in Europa 583.000 banen verloren tot 2025. Daarvan valt het grootste deel (223.000 banen) weg in de noordelijke landen Finland, Nederland en België. (Er zijn helaas geen aparte cijfers voor Nederland.)

- Het verdrag kost ons 0,5 procent economische groei

- Lonen van Nederlandse werknemers dalen afgerond met zo’n 5.000 euro per werknemer.

-Vooral de noordelijke lidstaten, zoals Duitsland en Frankrijk maar ook Nederland gaan de gevolgen van TTIP het hardst raken. Onze export (die vaak naar andere EU lidstaten gaat) wordt vervangen worden door Amerikaanse producten en diensten. Die zijn goedkoper omdat de lonen in de VS lager liggen dan hier.

De schrijver van het rapport denkt dus dat onderaan de streep de VS meer profijt zullen hebben van het vrijhandelsverdag. De Amerikaanse economie zal juist een beetje groei laten zien en er komen 784.000 nieuwe banen bij.

Overigens zijn deze effecten niet jaarlijks, maar berekend over een periode van 10 jaar tot 2025. Dus als we nu een TTIP overeenkomst zouden hebben, kost dat Europa over een periode van 10 jaar tijd een groei van 0,5%. De schrijver van het rapport Jeronim Capaldo heeft voor die periode gekozen omdat andere Europese rapporten (van de Bertelsmann stichting en Ecorys die allebei wél van groei uitgaan ) ook van die periode uitgaan en de rapporten op dat punt beter onderling vergelijkbaar zijn.

quote:

Trade policy is no longer just for political nerds: it matters in the UK and US | Business | The Guardian

Rise of outsiders such as Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn reflects sense of being left behind by globalisation


Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have something in common. Both are hostile to the free trade deals that Barack Obama has been negotiating, and both have been campaigning on a platform of putting American workers first.

One thing is certain: if either of these two political insurgents makes it to the White House, there will be no great rush to provide easier access to the world’s biggest market. The agreement that Obama has been seeking with the European Union, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), will be dead in the water.

Hillary Clinton has been more supportive of trade deals in the past but has grown noticeably less enthusiastic as it has become clear that the tougher line adopted by Sanders resonates with many Democrats.

Related: What is TTIP and why should we be angry about it?

Trade has turned into a political issue in the US. Presidential hopefuls are expected to have a view on the transpacific partnership, imposing sanctions on China for currency manipulation and whether the US should have signed the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada in the early 1990s.

The same applies in the UK, where the Brexit debate has forced both sides to develop an instant expertise in the different sort of trade regimes that exist between the EU and the rest of the world. There are intense debates about the merits – or otherwise – of the Norwegian model, the Swiss model and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) model, and detailed forecasts about the economic costs and benefits of each.

An early sign that trade policy was no longer merely the preserve of political nerds came with the groundswell of opposition in Europe to TTIP. This was billed originally as something largely apolitical: an attempt to harmonise rules and regulations in the US and the EU so there were fewer barriers to trade.

Yet the TTIP is deeply contentious. Opponents say “harmonisation” is not some boring, technocratic exercise, but rather a race to the bottom that will dilute quality controls and safety standards. But it has been the idea of an investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, under which corporations could challenge decisions made by governments, that has proven particularly toxic.

Related: Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why | Thomas Frank

It was not that long ago that freer trade was thought to be a good thing. The WTO was set up at the end of the Uruguay round of trade liberalisation talks, which ended in late 1993. At that point, it was assumed that there would soon be further global agreements to cover unfinished business in areas such as agriculture and services.

Few imagined that it would take until 2001 to begin another round of talks and that these would drag on for 14 years before being abandoned. The assumption in the early 1990s was that the world was entering a new era of globalisation, to match that of the late 19th century, in which there would be free movement of capital, people and goods.

The first world war put paid to what has been dubbed one era of globalisation. Brexit, rows over TTIP, Europe’s attempts to halt the flow of migrants and the “America first” approach adopted by Trump and Sanders all send out the same message: the retreat is underway from another period of globalisation.

This process has had a number of phases. It was always obvious that there would be winners and losers from globalisation, since it involved companies moving production from high cost to low-cost parts of the world. Factories in the west closed, but consumers benefited from cheaper goods. Initially, the winners easily outnumbered the losers, although the losses suffered by the losers were bigger than the gains for the winners.

But the last period of globalisation was a lot more fragile than it looked. It was built on the availability of easy credit, as became painfully apparent in 2007, when the financial markets froze up and trade collapsed on a scale not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

There has been no return to pre-crisis days. Recovery has been much more modest than in previous economic cycles and world trade is barely growing. Unemployment has remained high in the eurozone and even in those developed countries where it has come down – the US and the UK – wages have remained under pressure.

The recession and its aftermath have meant an increase in the number of people who think that the economic system may be working for the owners of multinational corporations and the global super rich, but is not working for them.

The sense of unhappiness has been fanned by two other factors. First, the recovery has been skewed in favour of the haves rather than the have nots, largely because while earnings have been depressed, asset prices have been going up fast. Second, the traditional parties of the centre appear to have nothing to offer other than a return to the debt-sodden, finance-driven world that led to the crisis in the first place.

As in the retreat from the globalisation era that ended the first world war, voters are turning their backs on mainstream politicians and looking instead to those that can articulate their sense of being ignored or left behind. Hence the support for Trump, Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Marine Le Pen in France, all of whom come from outside the mainstream.

Politics is grappling with what the economist Dani Rodrik has called an “inescapable trilemma”: the ability to have any two of democracy, global integration and the nation state, but not all three simultaneously.

One solution, according to Rodrik, would be global federalism, an attempt to align the scope of politics to that of global markets. The EU could be considered an attempt to test out the viability of this approach. Europe’s current difficulties suggest that a global polity remains some way off.

Another answer, he suggests, would be to put global economic integration ahead of domestic objectives. This would mean a return to the pre-1914 world of the gold standard, unfettered capital flows and unchecked migration. Incompatible with mass democracy and the growth of welfare states, it risks intensifying the backlash against globalisation.

Finally, Rodrik says there could be a recognition that there can only be so much global integration, with controls on the free movement of capital, people and goods. This was pretty much the settlement that was brokered after the second world war, but unpicked from the mid-1970s onwards.

If history is any guide, this process has further to run. It took more than three decades, which included two world wars and the Great Depression, for a new economic order to emerge. Efforts to turn the clock back failed, old solutions to economic problems no longer seemed to work, banks failed, deflation set in, and free trade was replaced by protectionism and economic nationalism. This all seems worryingly familiar from the perspective of 2016.

Bron: www.theguardian.com

quote:

'Tweede Kamer buitenspel bij handelsverdrag'

De Tweede Kamer kan buitenspel worden gezet bij de invoering van de internationale handelsverdragen tussen Europa en de VS en Europa en Canada. Via een zogenoemde ‘voorlopige inwerkingtreding’ kunnen de omstreden vrijhandelsverdragen - TTIP en CETA - al dit jaar van kracht worden, dus nog voordat de Nederlandse politiek er een besluit over heeft genomen.

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 april 2016 12:48 schreef Perrin het volgende:

[..]

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 april 2016 15:16 schreef Tocadisco het volgende:

[..]

Kan buitenspel worden gezet, het ligt absoluut niet voor de hand dat dat ook echt gaat gebeuren. De EU heeft op dit moment al met meer dan genoeg crises te maken zonder dat daar ook nog eens een 'democratische' crisis bij komt.

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 april 2016 15:20 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

De EU is een democratische crisis.

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 april 2016 15:20 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

De EU is een democratische crisis.

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 april 2016 15:26 schreef Perrin het volgende:

quote:

Op dinsdag 19 april 2016 15:25 schreef Weltschmerz het volgende:

[..]

Precies, de EU in deze vorm is er juist om er dingen doorheen te drukken die het electoraat niet wil maar de multinationals en banken wel.

quote:

Duizenden demonstreren in Hannover tegen TTIP

quote:

HANNOVER (AP) - Duizenden mensen zijn zaterdag in de Duitse stad Hannover op de been gekomen om te demonstreren tegen een vrijhandelsakkoord tussen de Verenigde Staten en de Europese Unie.

De politie schatte het aantal deelnemers op meer dan 20.000.

Bestuurders in Washington en Europa hopen belangrijke onderdelen van het TTIP-verdrag voor het einde van het jaar te bezegelen. Voorstanders zeggen dat het verdrag de handel in een tijd van wereldwijde economische onzekerheid zal stimuleren. Critici menen echter dat het afbreuk zal doen aan de bescherming van consumenten en milieunormen.

De Amerikaanse president Barack Obama komt zondag naar Hannover om een industriële jaarbeurs te openen.

quote:

Leaked TTIP documents cast doubt on EU-US trade deal | Business | The Guardian

Greenpeace says internal documents show US attempts to lower or circumvent EU protection for environment and public health

Greenpeace says internal documents show US attempts to lower or circumvent EU protection for environment and public health

Talks for a free trade deal between Europe and the US face a serious impasse with “irreconcilable” differences in some areas, according to leaked negotiating texts.

The two sides are also at odds over US demands that would require the EU to break promises it has made on environmental protection.

President Obama said last week he was confident a deal could be reached. But the leaked negotiating drafts and internal positions, which were obtained by Greenpeace and seen by the Guardian, paint a very different picture.

Related: TTIP is a very bad excuse to vote for Brexit | Nick Dearden

“Discussions on cosmetics remain very difficult and the scope of common objectives fairly limited,” says one internal note by EU trade negotiators. Because of a European ban on animal testing, “the EU and US approaches remain irreconcilable and EU market access problems will therefore remain,” the note says.

Talks on engineering were also “characterised by continuous reluctance on the part of the US to engage in this sector,” the confidential briefing says.

These problems are not mentioned in a separate report on the state of the talks, also leaked, which the European commission has prepared for scrutiny by the European parliament.

These outline the positions exchanged between EU and US negotiators between the 12th and the 13th round of TTIP talks, which took place in New York last week.

The public document offers a robust defence of the EU’s right to regulate and create a court-like system for disputes, unlike the internal note, which does not mention them.

Jorgo Riss, the director of Greenpeace EU, said: “These leaked documents give us an unparalleled look at the scope of US demands to lower or circumvent EU protections for environment and public health as part of TTIP. The EU position is very bad, and the US 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.”

US proposals include an obligation on the EU to inform its industries of any planned regulations in advance, and to allow them the same input into EU regulatory processes as European firms.

American firms could influence the content of EU laws at several points along the regulatory line, including through a plethora of proposed technical working groups and committees.

“Before the EU could even pass a regulation, it would have to go through a gruelling impact assessment process in which the bloc would have to show interested US parties that no voluntary measures, or less exacting regulatory ones, were possible,” Riss said.

The US is also proposing new articles on “science and risk” to give firms greater regulatory say. Disputes over pesticides residues and food safety would be dealt with by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Codex Alimentarius system.

Environmentalists say the body has loose rules on corporate influence, allowing employees of companies such as BASF, Nestle and Coca Cola to sit on – and sometimes lead – national delegations. Some 44% of its decisions on pesticides residues have been less stringent than EU ones, with 40% of rough equivalence and 16% being more demanding, according to Greenpeace.

GM foods could also find a widening window into Europe, with the US pushing for a working group to adopt a “low level presence initiative”. This would allow the import of cargo containing traces of unauthorised GM strains. The EU currently blocks these because of food safety and cross-pollination concerns.

Related: What is TTIP and why should we be angry about it?

The EU has not yet accepted the US demands, but they are uncontested in the negotiators’ note, and no counter-proposals have been made in these areas.

In January, the EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström said [pdf] the precautionary principle, obliging regulatory caution where there is scientific doubt, was a core and non-negotiable EU principle. She said: “We will defend the precautionary approach to regulation in Europe, in TTIP and in all our other agreements.” But the principle is not mentioned in the 248 pages of TTIP negotiating texts.

The European commission has also promised to safeguard environmental laws, defend international standards and protect the EU’s right to set high green benchmarks in future.

But the new leak will not placate critics of the deal, who have pointed to attempts by fossil fuel firms and others to influence its outcome, as a sign of things to come.

The EU negotiators internal note says “the US expressed that it would have to consult with its chemical industry on how to position itself” on issues of market access for non-agricultural goods.

Where industry lobbying in regulatory processes is concerned, the US also “insisted” that the EU be “required” to involve US experts in its development of electrotechnical standards.

Bron: www.theguardian.com

quote:

Op zondag 1 mei 2016 19:43 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

quote:

Op maandag 2 mei 2016 03:39 schreef skysherrif het volgende:
Ik ben benieuwd wat er gebeurd als EU TTIP er door wil drukken.

Gunstig geval eindigt het ergens met een huilende Pechtold.

quote:

Op maandag 2 mei 2016 11:09 schreef Weltschmerz het volgende:

[..]

Ik zou geweld niet bij voorbaat als ongerechtvaardigd willen beschouwen.

quote:

Op maandag 2 mei 2016 11:03 schreef Erasmo het volgende:
Heeft er iemand al een linkje naar de dump?