Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Two weeks ago the latest round of US-EU negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP, took place in Brussels. The lack of transparency in these talks is outrageous. Negotiating documents and stakeholder contributions are not published; neither are the agendas nor minutes of meetings. This is in stark contrast to public statements made about the talks by Commissioner De Gucht who wrote in The Guardian last December that “There is nothing secret about the EU trade deal. Our negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are fully open to scrutiny...” Last month the Corporate Europe Observatory received 44 documents about the European Commission’s meetings with industry lobbyists as part of preparations for the TTIP talks, 39 of which were heavily censored and released only after a freedom of information request submitted by the observatory almost ten months ago. The documents show that Commissioner De Gucht's officials invited industry to submit wish lists for regulatory barriers they would like to be removed during the negotiations. There is no way for the public to know how the European Union has incorporated this into its negotiating position or even what has been asked for and by whom, as all references have been removed. Responding to the Commissioner’s claims of openness and transparency, the organisation stated that, according to Global Research:

Not only is the text of the EU’s negotiating position secret the public is even denied access to sentences in meeting reports that refer to the EU negotiating position. This is especially problematic as these are minutes from meetings with industry lobbyists who were clearly given information about the EU’s negotiating position in the TTIP talks, unlike the public ... sharing information about the EU’s negotiating position with industry while refusing civil society access to that same information is unacceptable discrimination.

We can ascertain from the heavily censored documents released by the Commission that in advance of the TTIP talks it was extremely active in seeking guidance from big business and its lobbyists. The documents also show that the major issue in the negotiations is the removal of differences in EU and US regulations. As the Corporate European Observatory has highlighted, regulatory co-operation is one of the most worrying aspects of the TTIP talks and its repercussions will be felt long after the deal is concluded. As George Monbiot of The Guardian pointed out recently:

Nothing threatens democracy quite as much as corporate power ... When everything has been globalised except our consent, corporations fill the void. In a system that governments have shown no interest in reforming, global power is often scarcely distinguishable from corporate power. It is exercised through backroom deals between bureaucrats and lobbyists.

I am no fan of what Russia does, any more than what the United States or China gets up to, but Russia has acted to protect what it sees as its security interests, just as the United States did in Cuba a long time ago. International experts warned as far back as 2008 that if the United States and the European Union continued to encroach on Ukraine, there would be social and economic chaos, but NATO ignored such warnings and boasted that Georgia and Ukraine would become part of it. The West seems to think it is always right, no matter what its stance. I wish the people concerned would read history because they might learn something. It was interesting to hear Mr. David Cameron launch his attack on Russia for having the audacity to invade a neighbouring state while he was coming back from a friendly visit to Israel. When he was there, did he propose a plebiscite on the West Bank? It might have been a good idea to do so.

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