WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (photo: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters)
WikiLeaks
Says Secretive Trade Agreement Paves Way to 'Corporatization of Public
Services'
By John Dyer, VICE
28 May 16
WikiLeaks
has released a thousands of documents that critics of free trade said shows how
officials negotiating the Trade in Services Agreement, or TiSA, could force
privatization on public institutions around the world.
The
most surprising revelations in the WikiLeaks documents released this week
involve state-owned enterprises, or SOEs — government-owned corporations that
often operate like private businesses but pursue public goals, experts said.
The
United States Postal Service might be considered a SOE. The service has a
monopoly on snail mail. But it also competes against private companies by
selling money orders, retail merchandise and express deliveries. When the
postal service needs more money, it raises the price of stamps and other
products or, when times are desperate, goes hat in hand to Congress.
WikiLeaks
and others claim that negotiators from the United States and 22 other countries
want to erode SOEs to clear the way for multinational corporations to take over
their functions. TiSA would seek to lower trade barriers for finance,
telecommunications and other service industries. It would cover around 75
percent of the world's $44 trillion services market, according to
the Office of the US Trade Representative.
"This
corporatization of public services — to nearly the same extent as demanded by
the recently signed TPP — is a next step to privatization of SOEs on the
neoliberal agenda behind the 'Big Three,'" said a
WikiLeaks statement.
The
"Big Three" referred to TiSA, the controversial Trans-Pacific
Partnership, or TPP, a deal that the US and 11 other governments have finished
negotiating but not yet ratified, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership, or TTIP. American and European diplomats are now negotiating the
TTIP. European trade officials have said they would like
to conclude TiSA talks by the end of the year.
Defenders
of the trade agreement said TiSA critics were crying wolf. Nobody expects the
pact to abolish Britain's National Health Service, for example, said Claude
Barfield, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former
consultant to the US Trade Representative under President Ronald Reagan.
Instead, TiSA would prevent governments giving favorable treatment to
state-owned enterprises at the expense of foreign competitors.
"There
will continue to be SOEs, but it's just the biases and special deals they get
from governments will be, if not ended — that's probably not possible —at least
curtailed a great deal," Barfield said. "Treat SOEs the same way you
treat private corporations."
The US
Postal Service, for example, would need under TiSA to behave according to the
same rules as German courier service DHL when shipping express mail, a function
that's outside its normal 'public service' duties of delivering regular mail
and parcels, according to the internal documents WikiLeaks claims to have
obtained. It couldn't depend on Congressional handouts, in other words.
"Each
Party shall ensure that any state-owned enterprise that it establishes or
maintains, when engaging in commercial activities... acts in accordance with
commercial considerations in its purchase or supply of services, and in its
sale of goods," the WikiLeaks documents said.
Those
rules would especially impact China, where the communist state controls much of
the economy via state-owned businesses. Echoing arguments in favor of the TPP —
which does not include China — Barfield said nailing down TiSA now would help
set ground rules for when China also joined the accord. "When you are
talking about SOEs, China is the big elephant in the room," he said.
Celeste
Drake, a trade and globalization policy specialist at the AFL-CIO, agreed. She
was skeptical of the deal but saw merits in the TiSA's proposals.
"We
want trading rules that set up a level playing field," Drake said, adding
that the AFL-CIO hadn't yet taken an official position on the deal. "It's
not level if one country is providing subsidies to allegedly 'private
enterprises' that other countries are not providing because it is against the
rules. That's one of the threats from China: that it is using public monies to
subsidize state-controlled businesses so they can behave in a predatory manner
and destroy US jobs."
US
trade officials declined to comment on or confirm the authenticity of the
WikiLeaks disclosures.
But
TiSA critics said the deal wasn't as straightforward as its supporters
suggested.
"We
know trade theory predicted that there would be greater economic activity if
trade barriers were lifted on commodities and manufacturing," said Mark
Langevin, subregional secretary of Public Services International, a coalition
of labor unions. "That's generally our experience. Some people benefit from
that. Some don't. Trade theory has not really been tested out on services. The
advocates of TiSA are guessing."
WikiLeaks
dropped internal documents passed around by TiSA negotiators in 2014 and 2015,
too. They and the most recent leaks contain provisions that have concerned
Langevin and others.
The
deal could bar signatories from establishing new significant state-owned
enterprises because in theory they might impinge on foreign competition,
experts said.
"If
TiSA had existed prior to the establishment of the National Health System in
the UK, then it would not have been able to exist," said Deborah James,
director of international programs at the Center for Economic Policy Research.
"I can't imagine how we could be able to have a single-payer health system
here. There would never be change in a way that would disadvantage a foreign
company. This is their intention."
The
deal also would bar government entities from undoing privatization.
"Pearson
sells a lot of educational services around the world to public school
authorities," said Langevin, referring to the British multinational that
makes textbooks and other learning materials. "What happens when a public
school authority says 'We aren't going to buy these texts anymore? We are going
to make our own.' Under this, they would be sued."
The
WikiLeaks document said TiSA would exempt schools, water utilities, and similar
public sector businesses. Countries could exempt specific sectors, too, like
businesses that operate on Native American reservations in the US.
But
it's not easy to separate, say, government-owned mass transit's
responsibilities to the community from other, purely moneymaking functions,
said Jane Kelsey, a law professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand,
where officials privatized and then renationalized their
railroad, ferries, and national airline in the past 15 years after private
companies let those networks fall into disrepair.
"Attempts
to carve out the 'public good' functions is... extremely difficult in a
practical sense," she said in an e-mail. Kelsey wrote an analysis for
WikiLeaks documents that accompanied the group's release of the documents.
Barfield
believed profit-seeking managers would always run businesses better than
bureaucrats or government-appointed executives. He admitted, though, that big
state-owned corporations couldn't be privatized overnight.
"A
lot of the inefficient SOEs in China employ hundreds of thousands of
workers," he said. "If you are going to cut them down to size you
need to do that gradually. You cannot dump these workers out on the
streets."
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment