The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a bilateral ‘free trade’ agreement currently under secret negotiation by the EU, USA and powerful industry lobbies. Very few Europeans have heard of this deal, which will change the face of Europe forever.
They say the deal will create jobs and boost the economy, but after seven years of financial crisis we should have learned one thing: any extra cash made will be siphoned off to the 1%, while the rest of us get poorer and poorer.
Here’s what TTIP really means: threats to online privacy, American corporations suing European countries that don’t do as they are told, fracking rights, closure of public services, and Monsanto’s takeover of agriculture on our continent (as it has already done in Ukraine). It would mean that Monsanto could destroy a nation’s food supply and the people would be powerless to do anything about it. It would destroy free national health services, strip us of our civil liberties and ensure that American corporations have full control over the European parliament.
The most hideous thing about this top-secret trade deal is that over one million citizens signed a petition to stop it, and they were ignored. This might not seem so strange- public opinion is never an obstacle to corporate lobbyists- but in Europe we are supposedly granted protection from shady deals like this through ECIs, or European Citizen’s Initiatives. Petitions signed under an ECI must be considered by law, but in this case, it was ignored.
In addition to the informative cartoon above, more details on the consequences of TTIP by a speaker from the Gaia Foundation can be seen below. Please consider signing and sharing the petition against TTIP here.
