Its already impacted our health care substantially going back to 1994-ish by means of so called chilling effects, (fright to regulate) blocking functioning health care because (as shown by/in Skala- link below) is WTO-illegal. Approximately 1.5 million 'excess deaths' is probably a conservative estimate of the number of people who have died due to not being able to afford health care that they would have gotten in more-civilized countries. Those people are likely to be low and middle income people which means our country's failure to come up with a scheme that adequately delivers modern healthcare to all Americans has disproportionately impacted people of color compared to white Americans (although all of these issues are poverty driven they are also clearly race driven as nonwhite people of equal income - there is still a substantial racial disparity in access to health care which has only been slightly reduced by the ACA- very slightly- inadequately reduced, by any measure, just a few percent)
Its prevented new public housing and created a situation where all new housing has to be public private and people don't realize that.
The proposed energy chapter in the transatlantic deal could result in sudden jumps in the cost of energy which could cause a cascade leading to loss of affordable housing due to challenges to rent stabilization laws, even if that does not happen the rising heating costs could result in a lot of older buildings being deemed blighted and "too expensive to heat" leaving them vulnerable to (see kelo v. City of New London) 'redevelopment' schemes that would push existing residents out of urban neighborhoods - which they would be unable to afford to return to.
Its created a push to privatize education by means of the GATS Article I:3(b)(c) test which basically sets up big chunks of the public sector to be privatized. Once privatized those jobs will eventually be subject to new procurement regs which will likely result either in their going to foriegn firms or US wages walling to 'global norms' which are a fraction of US norms. We would likely have to conform our service sector (70% of all jobs) wage laws or eliminate them or accept no work as the consequence of this, due to never winning bids (another alternative would be automation, but that would also mean no jobs) . In short its a sneaky way to lower wages while pretending to want to raise wages.
They managed to get away with this (just as they managed to deceive the whole country on health insurance) because Americans are math challenged, as a group. All of the country seems to be-
Generally, my biggest worry (and this is what the academic literature says is the result of liberalisation of "movement of natural persons" as part of the "Mode Four" of trade in services agreements is that we will lose the middle of the job curve- the better paying middle class jobs which are framed as artificially high and protected by "professional protectionists" will be lost to low wage foreign subcontracting firms- Those would be the entry and middle level jobs that the younger generation would otherwise had been able to use to enter the middle class. There will be a general falling of wages with minimum wages becoming what is earned by fairly highly trained people and no paid jobs below that, below that would be unpaid volunteer positions where people do unpaid work for several years until they have built up a reputation in a field - this is in addition to having educational accomplishments, maybe an MS or PhD. (The consensus in the computer science and engineering communities is basically that if current trends continue, we're heading into a largely workless future where vast majority of would be workers in the not too distant future will be unemployed or only sporadically employed due to automation. This situation will also result in falling wages due to supply and demand. This is a natural consequence of exponential growth in technology and has nothing to do with politics. )
Also, its likely that existing carve outs for women and minority owned businesses would be lost as they would be framed as an internal US matter between the US government and its people and not something which could effect hiring of firms to subcontract for staffing as that would be a benefit covered by trade rules-
As far as what can be done, we all need to stop the current push to nail down the current inequalities and create new ones in FTAs- and insert broad carve outs into them for all public services and public policy options - especially in essential areas like healthcare and healthcare payment, education at all levels as well as adult education, water, seeds, professional licensing and market access to services- and also we need to figure out a just plan to gradually reduce the worlds wage inequalities in a way that wont leave families high and dry with huge debts or expenses when wages suddenly fall-
We need to either dump the trade deals completely (evidence has been that they do not improve trade!) actually taht is a better approach than carve uts-
carve outs will likely leave key things out- They would need to go it now- before they are finalized. Failure to do that and especially if the US elects the wife of the man who signed the original GATS would be seen as an endorsement of the American people of its global "progressive liberalisation" agenda which would (one way irreversible privatization) and be a huge mistake.
As the new FTAs will worsen the situation greatly. Example with education is shown by the EUA - European University Association's statement of January 2015 on the pending 'pluriliateral' services agreement- (now almost completed in Geneva) which identifies the GATS as a source of many problematic definitions- especially the scope definition at Article I:3(b) and (c) see http://www.ictsd.org/downloads/2008/06/cassim_steuart_part3.pdf , http://www.ciel.org/Publications/PublicServicesScope.pdf and many others.
Carve outs need to broadly establish a right of countries to decide their own policies in these areas in a manner which supports democracy, so that elections could be used to change policies if they are provn to not work, every four years or whatever. In other words, one President and Congress cannot be allowed to irreversibly poison future policy with policy that creates irreversible corporate entitlements to specific sets of policy.
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