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TTIP trade deal could be re-launched under a different name, say EU ministers
- mynameislegion 10y agoThis redirects here, can someone change the URL? http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/ttip-latest-eu-deal-dead-must-be-relaunched-transparency-say-ministers-a7325276.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/ttip-latest-...
- wanderr 10y agoOr better yet link to another article without advertising modals and auto playing videos.
- krylon 10y ago> European Union ministers today admitted that a giant EU-US trade deal is dead in its current form, with drastic change needed to salvage any hope of a deal going ahead. The devil, as always, is in the fine print - a cynic might read that to mean "TTIP has gotten such a bad reputation we would rather wait a few more years so the public forgets all about it, then try again." In fact, I am tempted to quote Lovecraft here, except that a few years hardly count as "eternal".
- aerique 10y agoThe name escapes me for a moment but they're already working on a new secret deal. (Since 2012, so that's why they're so easily letting go of TTIP.)
- xg15 10y agoTISA? (Though that one isn't EU-US but has a much wider range from what I've read)
- aerique 10y agoYes, I just looked it up and was about to edit my comment. Here's an article in Dutch about about TiSa: http://sargasso.nl/tisa-bijl-aan-wortel-democratie/ http://sargasso.nl/tisa-bijl-aan-wortel-democratie/
- the_mitsuhiko 10y agoWhat do you mean by "secret"? All negotations are listed on the information page of the commission.
- jpfr 10y agoAn optimist might read that to mean "Europeans found out that trade deals can be a lot better than what TTIP offered. Such as CETA which the EU is about to close with Canada".
- thatfrenchguy 10y agoCETA is terrible though.
- petre 10y agoThey will just change the name to something else, change a few words and voila, a new secret trade agreement.
- singularity2001 10y agoThey have realized that multinational corporations can screw the citizens of the EU just as well through CETA, which is about to get ratified on October 27.
- makomk 10y agoOf course, CETA has vital concessions to EU interests such as banning Canadian companies from marketing Canadian cheese as "parmesan-style" to Canadians.
- pipio21 10y agoThere is nothing wrong about trade deals per se. I am not against any trade deals, but against this particular deal with those particular conditions because of some particular reasons.
- krylon 10y agoWith TTIP, I kind of got the impression that the "Trade" part was just an excuse to push various policies politicians know very well are not popular with their voters.
- StavrosK 10y agoOfftopic, but does anyone else find Lovecraft too over-the-top? I know that many people like him, but it gets tiresome that everything is nameless, frightful, indescribable, hideous, hellish, monstrous, indescribable, etc. He's not very subtle at all with his descriptions, even a house that was previously established as super creepy gets an "abominable" when referring to it. I found him so over the top that I wanted to confirm my hunch experimentally, and made a list of the 150 most prominent words in his opus. It is unsurprising: https://i.imgur.com/pUUzFCJ.png https://i.imgur.com/pUUzFCJ.png
- BjoernKW 10y agoSomeone once said that Lovecraft suffered from adjectivitis. I'm fond of his writing and have read pretty much all of his stories but I get the point. Especially when reading several Lovecraft stories in quick succession they can seem repetitive. I'm surprised words like 'mongrel' aren't featured more prominently in that word cloud. His blatant racism really detracts from some of his otherwise great stories. It's particularly annoying in the Call of Cthulhu where it's almost like from the author's perspective the true evil isn't the monstrous, cyclopean abomination but non-WASPs.
- StavrosK 10y agoYeah, I saw the word "nigger" show up in the diagram, so I went and had a look. In "The Rats in the Walls" the author has a cat called "Nigger-man", but that was a proper name so I removed it (I removed all proper names). Also, I think you're spot on with adjectivitis. It explains exactly what I don't like about his stories.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago>> does anyone else find Lovecraft too over-the-top? Does anyone find Metallica over the top? How about Slayer? Cannibal Corpse? It's the form- it's supposed to be over-the-top. And btw, that's not in an ironic way.
- moogly 10y agoI must admit I cracked up when seeing "PENGUINS" in that word cloud.
- sam4ritan 10y agoWell, thats what happened to ACTA too, isn't it? A lot of the stuff that was in there got reused in TTIP.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y agoI don't see the overlap of ACTA with TTIP.
- pluma 10y agoYou may be thinking of IPRED, not TTIP? IPRED popped up at some point during the anti-ACTA protests and seemed to have significant overlap.
- toyg 10y agoThe price of freedom is eternal vigilance, said someone pretty famous on one side of the Atlantic.
- walterbell 10y agoRelated analysis of TiSA, Sep 20, https://edri.org/tisa-leaks-set-alarm-bells-ringing/ https://edri.org/tisa-leaks-set-alarm-bells-ringing/ "Despite the rumours and assertions by several Member States that TTIP is dead, the fight for safeguarding citizens’ rights and freedoms via so-called “trade agreements” is far from over ... Greenpeace Netherlands has released another batch of crucial and worrying documents ... EU privacy and data protection standards are endangered and diminished in 6 out of the 9 analysed documents ... Exceptions for “essential security interests” are a Damocles sword over every single part of the agreement ... TiSA can limit the access and transfer of software source code."
- sztwiorok 10y agocan someone summarize ttip in 3 short points? I am sure that most people like me do not have a clue about what is ttip
- walterbell 10y ago5-min video on the major trade agreements and ISDS, https://youtube.com/watch?v=M4-mlGRPmkU https://youtube.com/watch?v=M4-mlGRPmkU
- feelix 10y agoMy god, this is brilliant
- lumberjack 10y agoSo the US negotiators don't want to concede anything. So then one questions what they had in mind to convince the EU negotiators to go on with the deal...
- toyg 10y agoUS elites got used to a very sweet state of things in transatlantic relations post-1989, and it got even better after 9/11. Steamrolling Europeans was almost too easy, because Euroelites had been fully co-opted by the American way. Unfortunately, 13 years of unpopular wars have taken their toll. There are now two generations of politically-active Europeans who were not invested in the Cold War, and see the US fundamentally as a big bully. Couple that with tight economic times (which, many feel, have been foisted upon us by reckless American finance), waves of unwanted migrants generated by US foreign policy, and the self-inflicted loss of influence of "Airstrip One" Britain over EU matters, and you have a situation where US negotiators likely found themselves surprised by European pushback on all sorts of topics.
- evgen 10y agoPossibly. An equally likely situation is that US leadership can see that the EU is falling apart. The UK is already headed out the door, the failure of EU banking and financial institutions given the current massive debt problems, and a collective that seems to only be able to solve their bleak demographic future by pulling in eastern European basket-cases that no one really wants to have in the union makes an EU trade deal less important. Why waste time dickering with a declining EU when you can get a better return on your efforts by improving trade with Asia and Africa?
- kalleboo 10y agoTPP negotiations aren't doing too well either... Only Japan seems gung-ho about jumping into that basket. It's true an Asia deal is probably a bigger deal to the US, but not because Europe is unattractive but rather because they need to get in before China (which would explain why Japan is so eager despite it being unpopular with the citizenry)
- soufron 10y agoIt's also due to the US elections. The same thing happened last time. Negotiations will come back under a new name - and probably a slightly different scope and form, after the new administration has been designated.
- douche 10y agoYup. Obama is sliding into lame-duck territory, with a Congress that won't agree with him on anything. Chances of successfully sliding anything in before January are not good, and then it will be a more-or-less different regime involved.
- erhardm 10y agoWhat really bothers me, as citizen of an european country, why is it possible to have secret deals? If I don't know about such deals how can I call my representative to oppose them? Or encourage them to take the deal if it's a good one. AFAIK, TTIP was leaked and that's the only way european citizens knew about it. Why is it legal? Because all I see is corporations trying to make a sweet deal with governments, and the loosing side is always the people. That's the only incentive I see to make deals secret.
- sehr 10y agoThe full text is going to be released. I've heard most trade deals are negotiated this way, but I don't know how true that is.
- erhardm 10y ago"... Upon the insistence of the US, the documents are not transmitted any more as electronic or even printed documents.[5] They are only made available [to authorised readers] in secure rooms at the European Commission HQ in Brussels, in a number of US embassies,[5] and at the offices of member states' trade ministries.[61] In all these secured rooms phones or other types of scanning device are forbidden.[5] Blank sheets of paper, marked with the reader's names, are provided on which visitors can jot down their notes.[61]..."[0] How can my representative be really productive in analyzing such a deal? Why all the barriers to understand the document? I didn't find out the time it's supposedly be public for debate, but if you're doing a deal for the people, you want people to negotiate, not just accept the deal as it is, which, as history taught us, it will be a really tight timeframe for debate and it's approved few days before a major holiday when people are distracted. Our representatives must have our [all citizens] best interest at heart. I don't see how this is in our best interest. And I didn't event talked about the deal itself, only the procedure which seems flawed. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership#Confidentiality_measures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Invest...
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
- acqq 10y ago> Under a similar trade deal the government of Ecuador was ordered to pay German oil company Occidental $2.3 billion for, apparently legally, terminating a contract. No. Occidental is a US company, the trade deal was US-Ecuador bilateral investment treaty ("BIT"): http://kluwerarbitrationblog.com/2012/12/19/icsids-largest-award-in-history-an-overview-of-occidental-petroleum-corporation-v-the-republic-of-ecuador/ http://kluwerarbitrationblog.com/2012/12/19/icsids-largest-a... Such kind of penalties are planned by TTIP too, and I don't see the major EU leaders rejecting that approach. Also, don't forget there's at least CETA and TISA, and CETA is to be signed very soon. More demonstrations are needed if EU citizens want to attempt to affect anything! http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ttip-ceta-tisa-trade-deals-brexit-laim-fox-about-to-take-its-place-a7218281.html http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ttip-ceta-tisa-trade-dea...
- jokoon 10y agoThe issue people are failing to see, is that usually, countries are negotiating against each other, for their own perceived interest. The much valued "rule of law" only applies within countries, not internationally. There are no "international law" for trade. So it's a murky situation from the beginning. I think the TTIP is an attempt to have a common ground to end up with something instead of nothing. Of course there are huge interests at stake here, and I want to be the devil's advocate for once to try and understand the real philosophy of the treaty without the cynicism and a more strategic view in mind.
- izacus 10y ago> So it's a murky situation from the beginning. I think the TTIP is an attempt to have a common ground to end up with something instead of nothing. That's the standard rationalization we've been fed form EU comission as well. But when that "something" means that we give up on our EU consumer protection laws to benefit american corporate profits it's actively harmful and against the values of people actually living in EU.
- witty_username 10y ago> our EU consumer protection laws to benefit american corporate profits it's actively harmful Could you elaborate on why it's actively harmful? Also, what does actively harmful mean? What is the difference between actively and passively harmful? > values of people actually living in EU. People vote for representatives who vote for/against the TTIP.
- cm2187 10y agoA roadkill of brexit... With the loss of support of the UK.
- Silhouette 10y agoOriginal source without the strange Google link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/ttip-latest-eu-deal-dead-must-be-relaunched-transparency-say-ministers-a7325276.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/ttip-latest-...