TISA

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pacts, the increased desire to ‘invert’ ownership and headquarters by ‘American’ companies, TISA (published only by Wikileaks?), points us to a world managed by what organizations?

Via Alternet comes a note in TISA, a trade agreement that tries to frame itself in the private/government rhetoric, but we need to substitute ‘free’ for ‘managed’ trade in our discussions, and figure out ‘managed for what and who’:

As with leaks from the secret Tran-Pacific Partnership negotiations, this leak shows that the largest corporations are working to bypass recent efforts by governments to rein them in by pushing through “trade” agreements that override their ability to write their own laws and regulations.

This time the leak is the “Financial Services Annex” of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). It shows that the TISA negotiations are an effort to not only undo the minimal regulation of Wall Street that occurred after the financial crash, but to further deregulate financial markets worldwide.

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TISA is a huge “trade” agreement that covers the services sector, which includes audiovisual; finance; insurance; energy services; transportation, logistics, and express delivery services; information technology services; and telecommunications. TISA currently has 50 countries participating in the negotiations: Australia, Canada, Chile, Taiwan, Colombia, Costa Rica, European Union, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Republic of Korea, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States. (European Union includes: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom.)

Jane Kelsey, Law Professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has provided a preliminary analysis of the draft.  In Memorandum on Leaked TISA Financial Services Text, Kelsey writes that the secrecy “runs counter to moves in the WTO [World Trade Organization] towards greater openness,” that the agreement appears to be “a new template for future free trade agreements and ultimately for the WTO” and that participating governments “will: be expected to lock in and extend their current levels of financial deregulation and liberalisation; lose the right to require data to be held onshore; face pressure to authorise potentially toxic insurance products; and risk a legal challenge if they adopt measures to prevent or respond to another crisis.”