Secret Trade Agreement Treason

Secret trade agreement covering 68 percent of world services published by WikiLeaks Posted on July 8, 2014 Written by Katherine Lehman

The text of a 19-page, inter­na­tional trade agree­ment being drafted in secret was pub­lished by Wik­iLeaks on Thurs­day as the trans­parency group’s edi­tor com­mem­o­rated his two-year anniver­sary con­fined to the Ecuado­rian Embassy in London. Fifty coun­tries around the globe have already signed on to the Trade in Ser­vice Agree­ment, or TISA, includ­ing the United States, Aus­tralia and the Euro­pean Union. Despite vast inter­na­tional ties, how­ever, details about the deal have been nego­ti­ated behind closed-doors and largely ignored by the press.

In a state­ment pub­lished by the group along­side the leaked draft this week, Wik­iLeaks said “pro­po­nents of TISA aim to fur­ther dereg­u­late global finan­cial ser­vices mar­kets,” and have par­tic­i­pated in “a sig­nif­i­cant anti-transparency manoeu­vre” by work­ing secretly on a deal that cov­ers more than 68 per­cent of world trade in ser­vices, accord­ing to the Swiss National Cen­ter for Com­pe­tence in Research.

Tout­ing the deal ear­lier this year, the United States Cham­ber of Com­merce said a suc­cess­ful TISA agree­ment would ben­e­fit America’s ser­vices indus­try and its 96 mil­lion, or 84 per­cent, of the nation’s pri­vate sec­tor work­ers. “As its chief goals, the TISA should expand access to for­eign mar­kets for US ser­vice indus­tries and ensure they receive national and most-favored nation treat­ment,” the cham­ber said of the deal in Feb­ru­ary. “It should also lift for­eign gov­ern­ments’ sec­toral lim­its on invest­ment in ser­vices,” “elim­i­nate reg­u­la­tory incon­sis­ten­cies that at times loom as trade bar­ri­ers” and “pro­hibit restric­tions on legit­i­mate cross‐border infor­ma­tion flows and bar local infra­struc­ture man­dates relat­ing to data storage.”

Wik­iLeaks warns that this largely impor­tant trade deal has been hardly dis­cussed in pub­lic, how­ever, notwith­stand­ing evi­dence show­ing that the pol­icy mak­ers involved want to estab­lish rules that would per­tain to ser­vices used by bil­lions worldwide.

“The draft Finan­cial Ser­vices Annex sets rules which would assist the expan­sion of finan­cial multi-nationals – mainly head­quar­tered in New York, Lon­don, Paris and Frank­furt – into other nations by pre­vent­ing reg­u­la­tory bar­ri­ers,” Wik­iLeaks said in a state­ment. “The leaked draft also shows that the US is par­tic­u­larly keen on boost­ing cross-border data flow, which would allow unin­hib­ited exchange of per­sonal and finan­cial data.”  Addi­tion­ally, the cur­rent draft also includes lan­guage infer­ring that, upon the fin­ish­ing of nego­ti­a­tions, the doc­u­ment will be kept clas­si­fied for five full years.

In Aus­tralia, jour­nal­ists at The Age reported that experts say the pro­posed changes included within the Wik­iLeaks doc­u­ment “could under­mine Australia’s capac­ity to inde­pen­dently respond to and weather any future global finan­cial crisis.” Dr. Patri­cia Ranald, a research asso­ciate at the Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney and con­vener of the Aus­tralian Fair Trade and Invest­ment Net­work, told the paper that the doc­u­ments sug­gest the US wants to “tie the hands” of other gov­ern­ments, includ­ing allied ones, by way of sheer deregulation.

“Amend­ments from the US are seek­ing to end pub­licly pro­vided ser­vices like pub­lic pen­sion funds, which are referred to as ‘monop­o­lies’ and to limit pub­lic reg­u­la­tion of all finan­cial ser­vices,” she said. ”They want to freeze finan­cial reg­u­la­tion at exist­ing lev­els, which would mean that gov­ern­ments could not respond to new devel­op­ments like another global finan­cial crisis.”

Ear­lier this week, US Trade Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Michael Fro­man said the TISA deal was already well on its way to being put together. “The basic frame­work of the agree­ment is in place, ini­tial mar­ket access offers have been exchanged, and sector-specific work in areas like telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and ­fi­nan­cial ser­vices is in full swing,” Fro­man said, accord­ing to Reuters.  The doc­u­ment pub­lished this week by Wik­iLeaks is dated April 14 — two months before Fro­man last weighed in on the progress of the nego­ti­a­tions and six months after his office hailed pre­vi­ous re-write to the pro­posal. Along with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Canada, Israel, Mex­ico, New Zealand, Turkey and dozens oth­ers, Amer­i­can pol­icy mak­ers will met in Geneva, Switzer­land later this month start­ing June 23 to begin the next round of negotiations.

Wik­iLeaks founder Julian Assange, mean­while, remains con­fined to Ecuador’s embassy in Lon­don where two years ago this Thurs­day he arrived seek­ing asy­lum. Assange, 42, is wanted for ques­tion­ing in Swe­den but fears his arrival there would prompt a swift extra­di­tion to the US due to his role in expos­ing Amer­i­can state secrets.

Source:http://agenda21news.com/2014/07/secret-trade-agreement-covering-68-percent-world-services-published-wikileaks/Filed Under: Monetary System, Trade