[D66] TiSA

[Oto]

https://wikileaks.org/tisa-financial/WikiLeaks-secret-tisa-financial-annex.pdf

On 14-07-14 15:48, Oto wrote:
> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/13/capital-politics-wikileaks-democracy-market-freedom
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_in_Services_Agreement
> 
> 
> How capital captured politics
> WikiLeaks has shown us that western democracies are now ruled by market
> forces that debase the very notion of freedom
> 
>         Slavoj Žižek	
>         The Guardian, Sunday 13 July 2014 20.15 BST	
>         Jump to comments (368)
> 
> 'The Trade in Services Agreement prohibits more regulation of financial
> services, despite the fact the 2007-08 meltdown is generally perceived
> as resulting from a lack of regulation.'
> 
> In May, an international trade agreement was signed that effectively
> serves as a kind of legal backbone for the restructuring of world
> markets. While the Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa) negotiations were
> not censored outright, they were barely mentioned in our media. This
> marginalisation and secrecy was in stark contrast to the global
> historical importance of what was agreed upon.
> 
> In June, WikiLeaks made public the secret draft text of the agreement.
> It covers 50 countries and most of the world's trade in services.
> 
> It sets rules that would assist the expansion of financial
> multinationals into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. It
> prohibits more regulation of financial services, despite the fact that
> the 2007-08 financial meltdown is generally perceived as resulting from
> a lack of regulation. Furthermore, the US is particularly keen on
> boosting cross-border data flow, including traffic of personal and
> financial data. Despite all this, we heard little about it.
> 
> Yet is this discrepancy between importance and secrecy really
> surprising? Is it not rather a sad but precise indication of where do
> we, in western liberal democratic countries, stand with regard to
> democracy? A century and a half ago, in Das Kapital, Karl Marx
> characterised the market exchange between worker and capitalist as "a
> very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom,
> Equality, Property and Bentham." For Marx, the ironic addition of Jeremy
> Bentham, the philosopher of egotistical utilitarianism, provides the key
> to what freedom and equality effectively mean in capitalist society. To
> quote The Communist Manifesto: "By freedom is meant – under the present
> bourgeois conditions of production – free trade, free selling and
> buying." And by equality is meant the legal formal equality of buyer and
> seller, even if one of them is forced to sell his labour under any
> conditions (like today's precarious workers).
> 
> The main culprits of the 2008 financial meltdown now impose themselves
> on us as experts leading us on the painful path to financial recovery.
> Their advice should trump parliamentary politics. Or, as Mario Monti put
> it: "Those who govern must not allow themselves to be completely bound
> by parliamentarians." What, then, is the higher force whose authority
> can suspend the decisions of the democratically elected representatives
> of the people? As far back as 1998, the answer was provided by Hans
> Tietmeyer, the then governor of the Deutsche Bundesbank, who praised
> national governments for preferring "the permanent plebiscite of global
> markets" to the "plebiscite of the ballot box".
> 
> Note the democratic rhetoric of this obscene statement: global markets
> are more democratic than parliamentary elections, since the process of
> voting goes on in them permanently (and is permanently reflected in
> market fluctuations) and at a global level, not only within the limits
> of a nation state.
> 
> This, then, is where we stand with regard to democracy, and the Tisa
> agreement is a perfect example. The key decisions concerning our economy
> are negotiated and enforced in secret, and set the coordinates for the
> unencumbered rule of capital. In this way, the space for decision-making
> by the democratically elected politicians is severely limited, and the
> political process deals predominantly with issues towards which capital
> is indifferent (like culture wars).
> 
> This is why the release of the Tisa draft marks a new stage in the
> WikiLeaks strategy: until now its activity has been focused on making
> public how our lives are monitored and regulated by the intelligence
> agencies – the standard liberal topic of individuals threatened by
> oppressive state apparatuses. Now another controlling force appears –
> capital – which threatens our freedom in a much more twisted way: by
> perverting our very sense of what the word means.
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