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A Rosetta Stone to Bad Policy and Bad Politics- Part One

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That principle is GATS Article I:3- Charging money is our clue, which maintains college as a commercial service sector, which means that government subsidies will be quite limited by something called competition policy.

Basically, anything that charges money cannot be public.

Similar issues apply to health care. The health care would have to be single payer which means free, because the definition of public services is quite narrowly limited to totally noncommercial service sectors only, something which very few countries have any of in the areas of the greatest concern.

The definition of "public services" or more specifically "services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority" that I am talking about is found at in the World Trade Organization "General Agreement on Trade in Services" (GATS) at Article I:3 (b) and (c) and it reads:

"For the purposes of this Agreement"

(b) 'services' includes any service in any sector except services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority;

(c) 'a service supplied in the exercise of governmental authority' means any service which is supplied neither on a commercial basis, nor in competition with one or more service suppliers."

This definition turns out to be the crucial two line test that is being used to determine the scope of a great many newer deals when they refer to services, as well as the original GATS. For example, the US-EU deal which is targeting US government procurement and infrastructure construction.

Taken together the deals amount to a global war on public services, and the public interest, a transfer of (how much, a lot) of the world's unowned public wealth wealth to corporations who can then sell it back to its former owners. This is a theft of immense proportions and indigenous people are losing literally everything because they never have "deeds" to property and so dont exist. Neither do we own things like "jobs" or even any right to have politicians represent our interest. In fact the deals obligate nations to prioritize corporate interests, to eliminate all doubt. happening out of the public view. "progressive liberalisation" (basically the GATS and its successors represent an effort to effectuate a one way privatization of services everywhere.)

Because of the binding nature of trade agreements, this problematic definition has had the effect of subsequently acting as a dictate to governments the world over, including our own, that with few exceptions requires innumerable changes "opening up" services to foreign business to increase competition (lowering wages) and create a Level playing field for CORPORATIONS... that elevates the corporate model and blocks otyher more appropriate ones that dont require such high profits to attract investors, which dont act so irresponsibly- The Global Value Chains model- places smaller businesses at extreme disadvantage.

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Chris is a person with a questioning and inquisitive mind living in the United States, who believes another world is possible.
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