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Secret Trade Agreement TISA Revealed: ‘Threatens’ 68 Percent Of World Services

21st Century Wire says…

The transparency seeking organization WikiLeaks has apparently obtained a 19-page international trade agreement that is being crafted in secret. This appears to be another attempt by the ‘corporate elect’ to sellout the public’s best interest…

Public Services International General Secretary Rosa Pavanelli, recently weighed in on the stark trade deal that involves some fifty countries, urging affiliates to have their governments withdraw from the proposed Trade in Services Agreement that is currently being negotiated behind closed-doors in Geneva, Switzerland this week. Pavanelli went on to cite that TISA could consolidate 68 percent of world services, which is similar to the Transpacific Trade Partnership (TPP) that is also looking to infringe on people’s rights and interests:

We believe this deal is about transferring public services into the hands of private and foreign corporations motivated only by profit. This will undermine people’s rights and affordable access to vital public services such as healthcare, water and sanitation, energy, education, social services and pensions, and exploit common goods and natural resources.”

Participating countries are all members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) whom are also connected to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in an agreement that will deregulate the goods and service industry giving a decided financial foothold to private entities.

Pavanelli continued by stating:

If governments are so confident that they are working in the interests of the people they represent, why do they continue to conduct these secret and undemocratic negotiations? This deal is rotten on so many fronts. It is unacceptable that our own governments are excluding us from discussion of laws and policies that will impact social and economic justice, equality and living condition for billions of people.”

Some 340 civil society organizations are currently engaged in a battle against TISA, signing a joint letter to call on the WTO to drop the trade talks.

Keep a watchful eye on the implications of this trade deal as it comes to fruition.

More from RT below…


IMAGE: (Photo world-psi.org)

Secret trade agreement covering 68 percent of world services published by Wikileaks

Russia Today

The text of a 19-page, international trade agreement being drafted in secret was published by WikiLeaks on Thursday as the transparency group’s editor commemorated his two-year anniversary confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

Fifty countries around the globe have already signed on to the Trade in Service Agreement, or TISA, including the United States, Australia and the European Union. Despite vast international ties, however, details about the deal have been negotiated behind closed-doors and largely ignored by the press.

In a statement published by the group alongside the leaked draft this week, WikiLeaks said “proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets,” and have participated in “a significant anti-transparency manoeuvre” by working secretly on a deal that covers more than 68 percent of world trade in services, according to the Swiss National Center for Competence in Research.

Touting the deal earlier this year, the United States Chamber of Commerce said a successful TISA agreement would benefit America’s services industry and its 96 million, or 84 percent, of the nation’s private sector workers. “As its chief goals, the TISA should expand access to foreign markets for US service industries and ensure they receive national and most-favored nation treatment,” the chamber said of the deal in February. “It should also lift foreign governments’ sectoral limits on investment in services,” “eliminate regulatory inconsistencies that at times loom as trade barriers” and “prohibit restrictions on legitimate cross‐border information flows and bar local infrastructure mandates relating to data storage.”

WikiLeaks warns that this largely important trade deal has been hardly discussed in public, however, notwithstanding evidence showing that the policy makers involved want to establish rules that would pertain to services used by billions worldwide.

“The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers,” WikiLeaks said in a statement. “The leaked draft also shows that the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, which would allow uninhibited exchange of personal and financial data.”

Additionally, the current draft also includes language inferring that, upon the finishing of negotiations, the document will be kept classified for five full years.

In Australia, journalists at The Age reported that experts say the proposed changes included within the WikiLeaks document “could undermine Australia’s capacity to independently respond to and weather any future global financial crisis.”

Dr. Patricia Ranald, a research associate at the University of Sydney and convener of the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network, told the paper that the documents suggest the US wants to “tie the hands” of other governments, including allied ones, by way of sheer deregulation.

More from RT here…

READ MORE ON THE TPP AT: 21st Century Wire TPP File

 

 

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