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	The great political question of our age is what to do about corporate power by George Monbiot United Kingdom   January 2015   The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade deal will throw equality before the law on the corporate bonfire, writes George Monbiot.   If a government proposes to abandon one of the fundamental principles of justice, there had better be a powerful reason. Equality before the law is not ditched lightly. Surely? Well, read this and judge for yourself. The UK government, like that of the US and 13 other EU members, wants to set up a separate judicial system, exclusively for the use of corporations. While the rest of us must take our chances in the courts, corporations across the EU and US will be allowed to sue governments before a tribunal of corporate lawyers. They will be able to challenge the laws they don’t like, and seek massive compensation if these are deemed to affect their “future anticipated profits”.   I’m talking about the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and its provisions for “investor-state dispute settlement”. If this sounds incomprehensible, that’s mission accomplished: public understanding is lethal to this attempted corporate coup.   The TTIP is widely described as a trade agreement. But while in the past trade agreements sought to address protectionism, now they seek to address protection. In other words, once they promoted free trade by removing trade taxes (tariffs); now they promote the interests of transnational capital by downgrading the defence of human health, the natural world, labour rights, and the poor and vulnerable from predatory corporate practices.   The proposed treaty has been described by the eminent professor of governance Colin Crouch as “post-democracy in its purest form”. Post-democracy refers to our neutron-bomb politics, in which the old structures, such as elections and parliaments, remain standing, but are uninhabited by political power. Power has shifted to other forums, unamenable to public challenge: “small, private circles where political elites do deals with corporate lobbies”.   Investor-state dispute settlement – ISDS – means allowing corporations to sue governments over laws that might affect their profits. The tobacco company Philip Morris is currently suing Australia and Uruguay, under similar treaties, for their attempts to discourage smoking. It describes the UK’s proposed rules on plain packaging as “unlawful”: if TTIP goes ahead, expect a challenge.   Corporations can use the courts to defend their interests. But under current treaties, ISDS lets them apply instead to offshore tribunals operating in secret, without such basic safeguards as judicial review and rights of appeal..   http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/13/ttip-trade-deal-transatlantic-trade-investment-treaty http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960233-1/fulltext http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2014-09-29/europe-seeks-expand-big-pharma-monopoly-expense-poor-people-warn   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/opinion/dont-trade-away-our-health.html http://www.socialplatform.org/news/the-fight-continues-for-protection-and-transparency-in-eu-us-trade-negotiations/ http://citizen.org/documents/tpp-investment-leak-2015.pdf http://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/cases/summary.faces/en/58670/html.bookmark http://www.afj.org/press-room/press-releases/more-than-100-legal-scholars-call-on-congress-administration-to-protect-democracy-and-sovereignty-in-u-s-trade-deals http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kill-the-dispute-settlement-language-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership/2015/02/25/ec7705a2-bd1e-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9_story.html http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/blog/entry/nurses-sound-a-code-blue-in-dc-on-fast-track-and-tpp/ http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/pressroomredirect.cfm?ID=5454 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/where-are-the-tpp-negotiations-up-to3f/6275624 http://corporateeurope.org/international-trade/2015/03/meps-must-protect-public-eu-us-trade-deal-threat http://www.somo.nl/publications-en/Publication_4166   October 2014   Leaked TTIP draft for chemicals sector reveals a toxic partnership   A leaked restricted access text for the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) from August 2014 from the European Commission confirms that negotiations continue to favour business interests over the protection of citizens’ health and of the environment.   The Commission’s text, previously accessible only to members of the TTIP advisory group and the EU’s Trade Policy Committee, shows that the EU’s proposals for a “chemicals annex” closely follows the chemical industry’s agenda for TTIP which would hinder the development of stronger controls for toxic chemicals on both sides of the Atlantic. An analysis of the leaked text was released today by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), ClientEarth, and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).   Civil society groups from the US and EU have repeatedly voiced deep concerns regarding the dangers of TTIP. Over 110 public health and environmental organizations in the EU and US object to the inclusion of the chemicals sector. TTIP negotiators continue to downplay serious concerns raised by civil society, and the US chemical industry and US government show no sign of acceptance of the generally more protective EU approach to chemicals regulation.   According to Vito Buonsante, Law and Policy Adviser with ClientEarth, “the EU is giving the US a chance to block any initiative to protect EU citizens and environment from the risk from toxic chemicals. TTIP could erase all progress which has been made in the EU to ensure precautionary decision making on chemicals.”   The leaked text for a chemicals annex provides for extensive consultations, creating multiple, additional, and unnecessary opportunities for the chemical industry to delay draft rules and laws.   “It is clear that the chemical industry’s agenda is to delay or derail public efforts to establish protections from toxic chemicals to the greatest extent possible on both sides of the Atlantic,” said Daniel Rosenberg, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “The interests of the chemical industry are not the same as the publics and U.S. and EU officials should be strenuously opposing the industry’s agenda, not eagerly abetting it.”   “Stronger, more precautionary and protective measures for carcinogens, hormone (endocrine) disruptors, and nanomaterials by the EU are all targeted by USTR and the chemical industry as trade barriers,” according to Baskut Tuncak, Senior Attorney with CIEL. http://www.ciel.org/   The great political question of our age is what to do about corporate power, writes George Monbiot.   Does this sometimes feel like a country under enemy occupation? Do you wonder why the demands of so much of the electorate seldom translate into policy? Why the Labour Party, like other former parties of the left, seems incapable of offering effective opposition to market fundamentalism, let alone proposing coherent alternatives? Do you wonder why those who want a kind and decent and just world, in which both human beings and other living creatures are protected, so often appear to find themselves confronting the entire political establishment?   If so, you have already encountered corporate power. It is the corrupting influence that prevents parties from connecting with the public, distorts spending and tax decisions and limits the scope of democracy. It helps to explain the otherwise inexplicable: the creeping privatisation of health and education, hated by almost all voters; the private finance initiative, which has left public services with unpayable debts; the replacement of the civil service with companies distinguished only by their incompetence; the failure to re-regulate the banks and to collect tax; the war on the natural world; the scrapping of the safeguards that protect us from exploitation; above all the severe limitation of political choice in a nation crying out for alternatives.   There are many ways in which it operates, but perhaps the most obvious is through our unreformed political funding system, which permits big business and multimillionaires effectively to buy political parties. Once a party is obliged to them, it needs little reminder of where its interests lie. Fear and favour rule.   And if they fail? Well, there are other means. Before the last election, a radical firebrand said this about the lobbying industry: “It is the next big scandal waiting to happen … an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money. … secret corporate lobbying, like the expenses scandal, goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics.” That, of course, was David Cameron, and he’s since ensured that the scandal continues. His lobbying act restricts the activities of charities and trade unions, but imposes no meaningful restraint on corporations.   Ministers and civil servants know that if they keep faith with corporations while in office they will be assured of lucrative directorships in retirement. Dave Hartnett, who, as head of the government’s tax collection agency HMRC, oversaw some highly controversial deals with companies like Vodafone and Goldman Sachs, apparently excusing them from much of the tax they seemed to owe, now works for Deloitte, which advises companies like Vodafone on their tax affairs. As head of HMRC he met one Deloitte partner 48 times.   Corporations have also been empowered by the globalisation of decision-making. As powers but not representation shift to the global level, multinational business and its lobbyists fill the political gap. When everything has been globalised except our consent, we are vulnerable to decisions made outside the democratic sphere.   The key political question of our age, by which you can judge the intent of all political parties, is what to do about corporate power. This is the question, perennially neglected within both politics and the media. I think there are some obvious first steps.   A sound political funding system would be based on membership fees. Each party would be able to charge the same fixed fee for annual membership (perhaps £30 or £50). It would receive matching funding from the state as a multiple of its membership receipts. No other sources of income would be permitted. As well as getting the dirty money out of politics, this would force political parties to reconnect with the people, to raise their membership. It will cost less than the money wasted on corporate welfare every day.   All lobbying should be transparent. Any meeting between those who are paid to influence opinion (this could include political commentators like myself) and ministers, advisers or civil servants in government should be recorded, and the transcript made publicly available. The corporate lobby groups that pose as think tanks should be obliged to reveal who funds them before appearing on the broadcast media, and if the identity of one of their funders is relevant to the issue they are discussing, it should be mentioned on air.   Any company supplying public services would be subject to freedom of information laws (there would be an exception for matters deemed commercially confidential by the information commissioner). Gagging contracts would be made illegal, in the private as well as the public sector (with the same exemption for commercial confidentiality). Ministers and top officials should be forbidden from taking jobs in the sectors they were charged with regulating.   But we should also think of digging deeper. Is it not time we reviewed the remarkable gift we have granted to companies in the form of limited liability? It socialises the risks which would otherwise be carried by a company’s owners and directors, exempting them from the costs of the debts they incur or the disasters they cause, and encouraging them to engage in the kind of reckless behaviour that caused the financial crisis. Should the wealthy authors of the crisis, not have incurred a financial penalty of their own?   We should look at how we might democratise the undemocratic institutions of global governance. This could involve the dismantling of the World Bank and the IMF, which are governed without a semblance of democracy, and cause more crises than they solve, and their replacement with a body rather like the international clearing union designed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1940s, whose purpose was to prevent excessive trade surpluses and deficits from forming, and therefore international debt from accumulating.   Instead of treaties brokered in opaque meetings between diplomats and transnational capital (of the kind now working towards a Transatlantic Trade and Investment partnership), which threaten democracy, the sovereignty of parliaments and the principle of equality before the law, we should demand a set of global fair trade rules, to which multinational companies would be subject, losing their licence to trade if they break them. Above all perhaps, we need a directly elected world parliament, whose purpose would be to hold other global bodies to account. In other words, instead of only responding to an agenda set by corporations, we must propose an agenda of our own.   This is not only about politicians, it is also about us. Corporate power has shut down our imagination, persuading us that there is no alternative to market fundamentalism, and that “market” is a reasonable description of a state-endorsed corporate oligarchy. We have been persuaded that we have power only as consumers, that citizenship is an anachronism, that changing the world is either impossible or best effected by buying a different brand of biscuits.   Corporate power now lives within us. Confronting it means shaking off the manacles it has imposed on our minds.   http://www.monbiot.com/category/corporate-power/ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/23/skivers-strivers-200-year-old-myth-wont-die Visit the related web page
	The Post-2015 Goals: People Around the World Talk Back by Barbara Crossette Pass Blue   January 2015   Advocates offering some alternative ideas and a few dissenting views on the Sustainable Development Goals on track to be adopted by the United Nations at a special session later this year are convening on Jan. 26 in New York to air opinions from all major developing regions on this critical new proposed set of policies.   Regions Refocus 2015, the title of the Jan. 26 meeting and the report now being published, is the result of nine regional workshops from July 2014 to January 2015 involving policy makers and civil society activists. The workshops — in Southern Africa, West Africa, the Pacific, South Asia, the Caribbean, the Arab states, Latin America (with two) and European institutions and partners — revealed striking differences and some similarities among regional attitudes on development priorities.   In the report that presents the outcomes of these workshops, as weighed against the Sustainable Development Goals now being finalized, there was wide support among regions for making national governments more effective, responsible and accountable in, for example, recovering lost revenues from tax evasion, capital flight, illicit transfer of funds and too-easy terms for foreign investors. Latin America held a separate workshop on these issues, titled “Hidden Money, Hidden Resources: Financing Development With Transparency.”   Debt relief was a general topic of discussion, and featured widespread wariness about public-private partnerships, especially in crucial public services like health and education, an increasing trend advocated in the UN system and among donor governments. There was also opposition to international trade agreements, based on fears that these would inevitably benefit the global North more than the developing counties. African workshops stressed these issues emphatically.   Workshops also devoted attention to social policies affecting health, education and women’s rights, though the subtitle message of the overall report, “Fostering Regional and Feminist Solidarities for Justice,” emerged in a few cases more as an add-on than as a major theme. Notable was the strong support in several regions for more explicitly stated rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people — those under the LGBT umbrella — which the Sustainable Development Goals avoid, ignoring worldwide movements for gay rights and against rising discrimination, criminalizing and persecution in a number of countries.   The Regions Refocus 2015 initiative, organized almost entirely by nongovernment organizations, is housed at the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation in New York. It was supported by the Ford Foundation, where the launch of its report will take place, and by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (Unitar), with help from numerous international and national foundations and nonprofit groups.   Highlights from the regional reports reveal a growing sense that diverse areas of the world want to focus on their own relevant priorities, with regional nations working together more closely to advance their policies, including bids to have more voice as regions in international organizations, especially the UN system. This was a particular concern of Caribbean nations, where some elected officials were included in the workshop mix, along with academic experts on development issues.   “A significant thread in the workshop discussions focused on the decline of Caribbean participation, both governmental and of civil society, in intergovernmental spaces over the past several decades,” the Caribbean workshop found.   The Caribbean regional report was very focused and strong on women, broadened to “gender” to be more inclusive. “Gender justice, economic justice, and a human rights perspective are three critical principles to advance,” participants agreed, particularly in the current environment of austerity. The leading partners in the Caribbean discussions were the Nita Barrow unit of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, at Cave Hill in Barbados; the gender justice division of the Caribbean Community (Caricom); and the gender and economic section of the Caribbean Development Bank.   The Pacific region was also focused closely on women/gender components in development strategy, as the title of its workshop indicates: “Pacific Partnerships on Gender, Climate Change and Sustainable Development.” UN Women, the UN agency, was among the leading partners in this workshop. Like the Caribbean and other island regions threatened by rising seas, the Pacific workshop heard from numerous speakers engaged on that issue, including the safeguarding of women’s health and reproductive rights.   “As women are fourteen times more likely than men to die during disasters, participants articulated the rationale for including a gender perspective in disaster risk reduction and climate change policy that acknowledges the particular vulnerabilities and contributions of women and girls,” the Pacific report said. The region also gave explicit support to gender identity rights.   Most outspoken on the issue of gender identity was the workshop report from South Asia — India and its neighbors — where LGBT rights are nonexistent or have suffered recent setbacks. The leading nongovernment organization in the workshop was the New Delhi-based YP Foundation, a youth-run and youth-led organization working through Indian state partners on gender and sexuality, among other social and cultural projects. The workshop strongly backed effective sexuality education, which much of the region lacks and adolescents need.   “A major thread of the workshop focused on the need to redefine sexuality at national levels, within South Asia as a whole, and through the global development space,” the South Asia report said.   In addition to its workshop on transparency in financing for development, the Latin American regions held a second workshop on “Education to Guarantee Rights: For a World of Dignity and Education for All.” In a controversial statement, this report, again focusing on regional specificity, said that “The group disputed the narrative that Millennium Development Goal (MDG) #2 — achieve universal primary education — has been accomplished, stressing that while global trends may indicate success, states are facing obstacles in its implementation at the national level.”   Among the concerns in the region were social and economic inequalities and the encroachment of the private sector in education. “Inequalities were identified as the major impediment to the realization of human rights in the region, which is the most unequal in the world,” the report said, noting that education is the most important vehicle to end inequalities in Latin America, but donor financing often skews the agenda “since donors are not financing lifelong learning but only ‘read, write, count’ initiatives,” the report said.   In its summary of the messages gleaned from the nine reports, the editors mentioned the role of the UN, saying: “All of the meetings emphasize the need for increased policy coherence of development-related systems, guided by the UN’s rights-based normative framework and oversight. The Latin America feminist caucus calls for reform of the international financial architecture “towards development, equity, and human rights for all” — a recommendation that echoed throughout the workshops.   http://www.daghammarskjold.se/regions-refocus-2015-report/ http://passblue.com/2015/01/25/the-post-2015-goals-people-around-the-world-talk-back/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/01/opinion-brazil-can-help-steer-sdgs-towards-ambitious-targets/   * Barbara Crossette is a board member of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Previously, Crossette was the UN bureau chief for The New York Times from 1994 to 2001 and before that its chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia.
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