Proponents, opponents and trade negotiators involved in the elaboration of two vast investment treaties currently under construction, the EU-US trade deal now known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the twelve-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) between Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam agree on the most essential point.

The agreements, which have been deliberately and misleadingly branded as Free Trade Agreements to boost their marketing, have little to do with lowering tariffs, which are generally already low. At the heart of these projects is the drive to further expand the already considerable power of transnational investors by restricting the regulatory power of governments and locking the system into place to prevent new regulatory initiatives or reverse privatizations.

A new IUF publication, Trade Deals That Threaten Democracy, exposes the corporate power grab at the core of these two mega-treaties, how they build and expand upon the toxic web of the thousands of investment treaties which have been layered on to the WTO rules and why the labour movement should throw its full support behind the growing movement in outright opposition to these deals.

Click here to download Trade Deals That Threaten Democracy.

(source: IUF website)