The New Worker
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 6th June 2014
OUR MEDIA tell us very little about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTPI) — a proposed massive free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union that has been quietly developing behind closed doors for the last few years and clearly the EU and US ruling class do not want ordinary people to know much about what is being cooked up.
They are saying it will result in multilateral economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic and create a massive free trade area with in which anything goes.
Regulations and restrictions will be swept aside and the only morality will be making money. Indeed the giant companies will be able to sue to death any national or local government or public body that is deemed to be standing in the way of it making maximum profits.
This will include bodies that provide things like free healthcare and education. It will smash through labour protection laws, health and safety laws, environmental protection laws and any structure that tries to protect the general population from the full force of the free market.
A proposed draft was leaked in March this year as the European Commission launched a public consultation on a limited set of clauses.
The leaked text of the proposed treaty sets out limitations on the laws that any government can pass to regulate or publicly run various economic sectors, particularly insurance and banking, telecommunications, and postal services. Any corporation which is “expropriated” from its existing investments (prevented from making maximum profits) becomes entitled to market value compensation, plus compound interest.
It would allow free movement of business managers and certain other workers among all signatory countries. It is proposed to allow corporations to bring actions against governments for breach of its rights
A few years ago a Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) was proposed. There was outrage from many sides and since then little has been hear of it. Now it has emerged as the TTIP free trade agreement could be finalised by the end of this year.
It has been described as a full frontal assault on democracy that would subvert our laws, rights and national sovereignty.
But how would they get the working classes of Europe and America to accept all this? We have only to turn our eyes on to Ukraine to see the measures that Nato, the US and the EU are prepared to resort to in order to terrorise the workers there to accept the IMF savage austerity measures being imposed there as a prelude to dragging Ukraine into the EU and Nato.
The workers there are fighting back. They have a memory of better times, Soviet times, when jobs, homes, health, transport and education were free or very low cost and totally secure.
Now the lords of Nato and the West are using openly Nazi terror gangs — wearing the same insignia and using the same methods as their grandfathers who joined the Halychnya SS to try to cow the people into submission.
Is this a dress rehearsal for what they intend to do in western Europe and even in the US to make us accept TTPI?
The capitalist ruling class know they are at a critical point. The economic, political and military power of the Bric (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries is rising. The big oils and gas deal struck between China and Russia last month was a body blow to them and to the future of the petro-dollar. They are also drowning in their own toxic debt.
They are striking at us out of desperation and weakness. They are hoping the working classes of Britain, Europe and America are weak and passive and will be easily terrorised. We must prove them wrong.
Our best defence is working class unity at an international level and solidarity with all who are fighting on the workers’ side in what is shaping up to be a world-changing battle.