About TTIP

Having recently returned from Germany, by that having finally time again to read my email a bit more carefully, I came across a mail to which a proposed text from the negotiations about the TTIP was attached.

Well, it is of course good if such things are made accessible for the public. On the other hand the experience of reading such a text is, for the non-expert, more than just ”somewhat” frustrating: the text is LONG, it is in LEGALESE, in the text there are frequent cross-references to, e.g., WTO agreements (which the usual reader is not either well-informed about). Thus, what can a usual reader in fact say about the matter?

Perhaps this: For checking and interpreting the text of the TTIP, legal and/or economical, experienced specialists will be needed. Being specialists in their fields, they will be less well informed about other relevant fields of knowledge (for which, though, the TTIP will certainly have consequences) – think of environmental protection, the consequences of agrochemistry, the health effects of gene-manipulated organisms (and the foods prepared from them). There is even the danger that their specialist-pride (being ”masters of the universe”) will tempt them to sabotage efforts to protect the interest of such inferior things as mere humans (or even ecosystems) – with such we are familiar from at least representatives of the banking business. Altogether, it does not look good for usual humans and their future life on this globe.

What even usual people can in fact say about the whole business is, though, that (a) the exchange of goods and services between the EU and the USA seems already now to work rather well (i.e. the TTIP is simply not needed and to sign it would mean to take quite unnecesary risks), which means (b) that the whole project should be abandoned the sooner the better. The negotiators (who will easily feel a wish not to seem non-diplomatic or impolite to their colleagues) should be urgently reminded of the start of World War I (where all the diplomats involved just did their duty as diplomats, by that triggerering consequences which not a single one of them had imagined). Those (unluckily numerous) politicians who simply ”believe” that, e.g., Finland should be ever further ”integrated into the Western World” should be reminded that (a) there is no safety in getting further attached to the USA (NATO or no NATO, the USA will never risk a serious conflict with nuclear-armed Russia – as to be observed in the US dealings with North Corea -, this especially not for the sake of those ridiculous 5,6 mio Finns when New York City has already 8,4 mio), that (b) too close attachment to the USA would be even risky, as there is every 4 years qauite some possibility that somebody becomes US president who is mentally sick and/or criminal by European standards, by that prone to start irresponsible military adventures and insisting on followership, and that (c) even a superficial reading of Ha-Joon Chang (who is luckily very much easier accessible than, e.g., Thomas Piketty) makes it VERY clear that the whole ideological basis of the free-trade economy (of which the TTIP is an example) is rotten through and through. And finally one could point to article 14 of the German constitution, where it is expressly said that ”property is an obligation” and ”its use should at the same serve the common good” (an aspect which is with glaring obviousness absent from, e.g., the dealings of tobacco giant Philip Morris with Australia and Uruguay). – This passage from the German constitution could even give the possibility of killing the TTIP by going to the German constitutional court in case that the politicians should be unwise enough really to sign the TTIP.