We won't be able to turn this market access off. It's irreversible. If a treaty requires market access be given to IT, health care., teaching and other critical sector-specific markets means that, one by one, markets will wink out of profitability for Americans burdened as we are by the costs of education. If this happens, it may become reality that only national security related jobs are clearly exempt, so if that happens, the change will force the US into a warlike paranoid stance, because only those jobs will be exempt from our own trade deals. ISP workers, electricians and cable installers may eventually need security clearances because of trade deals hollowing out the middle class leading to a push for pervasive surveillance.
We might be tempted to think that globalizing services hike health care and education would lower prices of things like health care and higher education in America. Think again, doing that would be prohibited by WTO rules that bar that kind of government regulation..
Even if tomorrow we replaced all our teachers with Mode Four
professionals, the federal or state governments would be totally
prohibited from telling industries what to allocate profits to for
the same reason they are with Obamacare. Those profits are theirs to
keep. The business is either there to make money or it is
non-commercial. There is no in between with the rules as they exist
today. That's a lie they tell us.
Let's also not forget
that foreign professionals will leave if the economy tanks and we're
forced into austerity. They will leave en masse.
And we
won't have our own young people enter the IT-career path because it
will make the bottom 90% of computing jobs pay much less. Few
Americans will have the money to stay in college for eight years to
get a PhD, likely the first education level that won't be dominated
by low-wage temporary (up to 6 years) subcontractors.
And at the same time, our ability to pursue economic stimulus may vanish (steering jobs to your own companies and workers is against WTO rules now).
Several other deals, such as TTIP, also are likely to include
similar cross border trade in the re-marketed services of natural
persons. (subcontracting) Government procurement (even in areas like
construction and environmental reclamation/renovation/redevelopment)
is likely to become part of an international e-tendering system, bid
upon by foreign firms as well as our own, and that will push wages
down, if winning bids end up being based on much lower wages than
American firms can offer.
The fact that it will not be
reversible would make this deal an instant no for me if voting and
politics could change it.
(It can't. Once they are signed
they go largely on autopilot thereafter.) Considering that jobs are
vanishing very quickly, even if we signed no more trade deals, the
exponentially increasing rate of discovery and commercialization of
new labor saving technologies means that one year today will bring as
much change as five years did 20 years ago. And ten or fifteen years
into the future -- or maybe less, that rate may have nearly doubled
again. This makes any kind of "permanent" commitment or
entanglement in treaties extremely unwise. Corporations are not
entitled to permanent rights to anything. People are. Governments are
supposed to be responsive to the needs of people, not corporations
which are legal fictions. The people need to end the practice of
awarding entitlements to sell things, paralyzing public policy,
because if we don't, corporations will literally have taken over the
world and stolen everything of value in it without firing a shot,
that is what these trade in services deals are doing,, by the way.
Given the exponential growth in technology and the impossibility
of knowing what effects these changes, all in combination, all at the
same time will do, I would be hard put to think of a worse decision
than locking down our future for corporations in this manner at this
point in history. It's the very worst thing anybody could do policy
wise.
These deals may end up privatizing and then trading
large numbers of (currently) public service jobs away to the
lowest qualified bidders, (via e-tendering systems like the one in
the WTO Government Procurement Agreement) and if they don't go to
American workers, (Its clearly forbidden in that context to attempt
to steer jobs to your own workers!) its going to be a huge mistake -
because that's just a total betrayal to our public servants.
Consider that for a moment. It means that Jill Stein's entire Green Jobs platform could not happen. It also means that Hillary Clinton is either profoundly unaware of the effect of a trade deal her husband signed or she is shamelessly lying about her own plans, knowing that she could not override the commitments being made in WTO and other pending and recently proposed FTAs, which would not be a new thing for Mrs Clinton given that her much hyped 1993 health care program appears to have been distracting the public at the exact same time that GATS was being finalized, GATS having taken away our ability to implement a single payer program which we know -- because of its track program, would have worked, and would work.
So these deals taken together or individually will make affordable single-payer health care. and free college both arguably impossible, except at tremendous costs. (We would have to buy our way out by negotiating payments to "injured parties" -countries home to corporations or in some FTAs the corporations themselves. based on future lost expected profits, basically free money based on unrealistically rosy predictions of future growth for a system that is basically a Ponzi scheme thats eliminating the sole drivers of real wealth creation one by one, as we are describing here, they are eliminating learning and education, and health.
This is the controversial and hideously wrong "ISDS" or "investor-state dispute settlement" or "indirect expropriation" clauses that have become so controversial around the world.
We would have to buy our freedom by paying for it with the lost expected profits. At the very least, all essential services like health insurance, health care, higher and primary education, and social security of all forms should be excluded via broad "carve-outs".
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