Contacts to Sweden Wanted

Readers of this blog will have noticed that CETA, this free trade agreement with Canada, was since a while pretty heavily on my mind (see ”Cecilia Malmström Unchanged” and ”Alarm !!!”).

These worries were obviously not shared by the political establishment and the media: Finland’s Riksdag was agreeing to CETA on Wednesday 16.05. (with ONLY Vänstern, the Greens and the Perussuomalaiset voting against it, and Erkki Tuomioja – of whom one could have expected something better – advising the Social Democrats to vote in favour of it, which they did …), and my daily Hufvudstadsbladet neither on Wednesday nor on Thursday nor on Friday nor since writing a single word about the matter (unclear whether they were simply so ignorant/incompetent that they did not see the importance of the matter or whether they had got some ”hint” from ”somewhere high up” to keep quiet about it).

Anyway, the situation is that Finland has agreed, but that CETA can still be blocked if some other European government or parliament of high court refuses to agree to it. That Finland was agreeing was in fact not much of a surprise: the government (and the majority of the parliament) is even headed by an entrepreneur, and CETA gives just to entrepreneurs new and attractive possibilities: for them, CETA makes it easier to expand into new markets, and if their expectations of profits are not fulfilled they can still try to hire some witnesses and sue some foreign government for compensation, which will NOT have to be paid by any entrepreneur but by those foolish taxpayers – quite deservedly so; why, after all, have they neglected to do as those wise entrepreneurs do, who take really every care to avoid paying taxes … . But well, there may be other governments in Europe who are not headed by some entrepreneur. And as this blog is mostly written in Swedish, is even read by some in Sweden, and as Sweden has at the moment a government which one can expect to be left-leaning, perhaps even to be open to anti-CETA reasons and suggestions, one could, even SHOULD (!), try to establish some cooperation with organisations in Sweden who would be willing to fight against CETA. Thus, anybody who has some fitting contacts in/to Sweden, please activate them and try to open some channels via which we here in Finland could contribute to their efforts. Of course there should also be quasi-official channels (such as from Attac Finland to Attac Sweden), but I do think that it would be easier to get people to be active if one knows them PERSONALLY. Thus, if any reader of this should have some fitting contact(s), it would be a good beginning if they could draw their Swedish contacts’ attention to, e.g., all the things which have already been written in this blog about CETA.