Truth Out has the story WikiLeaks Reveals Global Trade Deal Kept More Secret Than the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“This agreement is all about making it easier for corporations to make profits and operate with impunity across borders,” said PSI General Secretary Rosa Pavanelli in response to the leak. “The aim of public services should not be to make profits for large multinational corporations. Ensuring that failed privatizations can never be reversed is free-market ideology gone mad.”
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The secrecy of the TISA negotiations “exceeds even the controversial Trans-Pacific Partner Agreement (TPPA) and runs counter to moves in the WTO towards greater openness,” wrote Jane Kelsey, a law professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who analyzed the leaked documents on behalf of Wikileaks, which leaked portions of the TPPA in the past.
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Kelsey’s analysis also confirms the concerns of trade unions like PSI that the TISA agreement would lock governments into and extend their current levels of deregulation and trade liberalization, thus preventing governments from returning public services into public hands when privatizations fail and establishing greater regulations to protect the environment and workers safety.
It is the antithesis of free markets to write rules that lock you into one way to provide a service even if the provider is a failure. If people can get together to provide a service more cheaply and/or with better quality than another group of people, why should we have a treaty to prevent the first group from competing? That first group of people might be in the form of a government entity. Why are people trying to foist their ideology on us that all work must be done in the private sector? Because they make money when they can trick us that way, obviously.
If people were really committed to actual “free markets” they wouldn’t be biased toward organizing those “free markets” in one particular way as opposed to another. Why not chose the method of organization for what works best in each individual case? Or at least let people freely choose to try any method they want.