[CTC] Big news! Wikileaks Releases Largest Trove of Trade Negotiations Documents in History on Proposed ³Trade in Services Agreement, ² Exposes Secret Efforts to Privatize and Deregulate Services

Wed Jun 3 06:42:30 PDT 2015

Hey folks, wow something big just happened! This has big implications for
Fast Track! This is the biggest leak of trade agreement documents ever. What
we do with this leaked information could really have an impact on the future
of the campaign! Please see the wikileaks.org/tisa page for all the analysis
that should be helpful in writing your releases. Hopefully the below could
be helpful as well.

Best wishes,

Deborah James
OWINFS

Wikileaks Releases Largest Trove of Trade Negotiations Documents in History
on Proposed ³Trade in Services Agreement,² Exposes Secret Efforts to
Privatize and Deregulate Services

Leaks Prove ³Fast Track² Critics in the United States like Senator Elizabeth
Warren Right: were Fast Track passed, a potential TISA, if approved under
it, would lead to Financial (and other Services) Deregulation

Statement of Our World Is Not for Sale (OWINFS) global network

Today, as Ministers meet to further a controversial and little known
proposed Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) on the sidelines of the annual
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) meeting,
Wikileaks released (wikileaks.org/tisa/) a trove of negotiating texts,
including annexes covering a wide range of issues on domestic regulation,
financial services, air and maritime transportation, electronic commerce,
transparency, telecommunications, professional services, and the natural
movement of persons (called ³Mode 4² in trade agreements.)

The TISA negotiating texts are supposed to remain secret for five years
after the deal is finalized or abandoned. Today, the secrecy charade has
collapsed, and the risks to Wall Street oversight are exposed for all to
see.

 ³The secrecy charade has collapsed. TISA members trying to keep their
publics in the dark as to the negative implications of the corporate TISA
for financial stability, public safety, and elected officials¹ democratic
regulatory jurisdiction have been exposed to the light of day, in the
largest leak of secret trade negotiations texts in history,² said Deborah
James of the OWINFS network.

The leak throws further fuel on the fire ignited by the debate in the United
States over the controversial Fast Track legislation, also known as Trade
Promotion Authority (TPA). Critics like U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who
played a crucial role in leading the post-crisis regulation of the financial
sector in the U.S., has already warned that the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) risk
undermining 
<http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/warren-trade-bill-could-tear-down-wal
l-street-oversight-117670.html>  even the limited changes achieved to
restore financial stability. After President Obama called her worrying
³wrong², analysts in Bloomberg
<http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-15/warren-claim-that-tra
de-bill-could-undermine-dodd-frank-is-right> , The Hill
<http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/finance/241829-why-obama-is-absolutel
y-wrong-on-tpp-and-warren-is-right> , and other publications concurred with
the Senator. However, their debate focused on the speculated impacts of a
potential TPP, the financial services text of which has yet to be made
public; with this leak, the dangers to financial stability of a financial
services chapter in the proposed TISA are no longer speculative. (The 2015
Fast Track bill specifies that Fast Track procedures will apply to ³an
agreement with respect to international trade in services entered into with
WTO [World Trade Organization] members²  the TISA.)

Trade unionists in Uruguay have been engaged in a high-stakes battle with
pro-corporate government officials as to whether the nation should
participate in the agreement. The leaked telecommunications annex, among
others, demonstrate potentially grave impacts for deregulation of state
owned enterprises like their national telephone company. The leak of the
documents today provides direct ammunition for the ³No to TISA² side.

Analysis of the air transport services annex by the International Transport
Workers¹ Federation notes that ³[i]n the TISA document there is virtually no
discussion on safety standards. .. . Over the last decade outsourcing and
offshoring aircraft maintenance has been on the rise and there are
scientific studies pointing out the possible negative implications of this
for current and future aviation safety.² The TISA proposed TISA annex states
that its rules would take precedence over the International Civil Aviation
Organization (ICAO), which has far more credibility and expertise on the
issue.

Analysis of the text on so-called ³transparency² states that
³Œ[t]ransparency¹ in this TISA text means ensuring that commercial
interests, especially but not only transnational corporations, can access
and influence government decisions that affect their interests  rights and
opportunities that may not be available to local businesses or to national
citizens.²

Preliminary analysis notes that the goal of domestic regulation texts is to
remove domestic policies, laws and regulations that make it harder for
transnational corporations to sell their services in other countries
(actually or virtually), to dominate their local suppliers, and to maximize
their profits and withdraw their investment, services and profits at will.
Since this requires restricting the right of governments to regulate in the
public interest, the corporate lobby is using TISA to bypass elected
officials in order to apply a set of across-the-board rules that would never
be approved on their own by democratic governments.

The documents show that the TISA will impact even non-participating
countries. The TISA is exposed as a developed countries¹ corporate wish
lists for services which seeks to bypass resistance from the global South to
this agenda inside the WTO, and to secure and agreement on servcies without
confronting the continued inequities on agriculture, intellectual property,
cotton subsidies, and many other issues.

Background

This leak backs warning from global civil society about the privatization
and deregulation impacts of a potential TISA since our first letter on the
issue 
<http://ourworldisnotforsale.org/en/signon/international-civil-society-sends
-letter-governments-opposing-proposed-trade-services-agreeme> , endorsed by
345 organizations from across the globe, in September 2013. At that time,
OWINFS argued that ³[t]he TISA negotiations largely follow the corporate
agenda of using ³trade² agreements to bind countries to an agenda of extreme
liberalization and deregulation in order to ensure greater corporate profits
at the expense of workers, farmers, consumers and the environment. The
proposed agreement is the direct result of systematic advocacy by
transnational corporations in banking, energy, insurance,
telecommunications, transportation, water, and other services sectors,
working through lobby groups like the US Coalition of Service Industries
(USCSI) and the European Services Forum (ESF).² Today¹s leaks prove the
network¹s arguments beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Today¹s leak follows others, including a June 2014 Wikileaks revelation of a
previous version of the Financial Services secret text
<https://wikileaks.org/tisa-financial/> , the December 2014 leak of a U.S.
proposal on cross-border data flows, technology transfer, and net neutrality
<http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org/en/report/briefing-us-tisa-proposal-e-c
ommerce-technoloy-transfer-cross-border-data-flows-and-net-neutr> , which
raised serious concerns about the protection of data privacy in the wake of
the Snowden revelations.

The TISA is currently being negotiated among 24 parties (counting the EU as
one) with the aim of extending the coverage of scope of the existing General
Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in the WTO. However, even worse than
the opaque talks at the WTO, the TISA negotiations are being conducted in
complete secrecy  until now. Public Services International (PSI) global
union federation published the first critique, TISA vs Public Services
<http://www.world-psi.org/en/psi-special-report-tisa-versus-public-services>
, by Scott Sinclair, in March 2014, and PSI and OWINFS jointly published The
Really Good Friends of Transnational Corporations Agreement
<http://ourworldisnotforsale.org/en/report/owinfs-and-psi-releases-special-r
eport-trade-services-agreement-tisa>  report on Domestic Regulation by Ellen
Gould in September 2014. A factsheet on the TISA can be found here
<http://ourworldisnotforsale.org/en/report/why-trade-services-agreement-tisa
-dangerous-democracy-development-and-public-interest>  and more information
on the TISA can be found at http://ourworldisnotforsale.org/en/themes/3085.

###
OWINFS is a global network of NGOs and social movements working for a
sustainable, socially just, and democratic multilateral trading system.
www.ourworldisnotforsale.org <http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org>

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