An URGENT need exists for CARVE OUTS to be made to prevent lock in by secretive backroom T-Deals
Do you care about having an affordable future?
health care, education, water and everything else essential to a forward looking society!? Then you must become aware of this issue-
As we've been wrapped up in the Presidential election - negotiations in Europe - Geneva and Brussels- have proceeded which could easily render the outcome of OUR elections totally moot before January-
Bluntly- urgently- we need to make carve outs a big issue here or run the risk of the Presidential and all future elections becoming a farce with little or no power to change the core problems- to some extent some of that may have already even happened! (see links at the bottom - especially their recommendations- )
Carve outs are RESERVATIONS OF RIGHTS TO DEMOCRACY- which would otherwise be signed away to corporations and become their property!
We need these "carve outs" to be explicitly put into all deals that explicitly establish and immortalize forever policy space for all public services- meaning healthcare insurance, healthcare, public higher and K-12 education, water (police, fire, prisons too!) and also the right to regulate must ALSO be preserved for drug pricing and net connectivity/communication.
Policy space - the right to regulate needs to be protected- Otherwise they can, will and in a very real sense are stealing democracy away under our noses!
No deals should be able to take away our rights to health care and education forever, like has been attempted/is being attempted, all around the world, including here.
And no services liberalizations when they pit the poor countries' skilled workers against the embattled US middle class in competition for the same jobs!
There are recommendations near the end of this paper- ( PUTTING HEALTH FIRST: Canadian Health Care Reform, Trade Treaties and Foreign Policy )
for Canada but they also could apply here! There are also recommendations for carve outs in the links 1 and 2 below- read them-
[I am already embedding them twice! thats too much to avoid spam bots- Do I need to obfuscate the URLs below to prevent triggering it?]
And here some links that I think link to real carve out proposals- ones that are actively being negotiated now in Europe-- if the cost of selling them health insurance, higher education, etc, is the loss of our own ability to have those things be public and/or affordable-(and that very much seems to be the case!) then we must all stand together - We want OUR policy space to be preserved- thats perhaps a reason for the secrecy and net censorship!)
These are undoubtedly old revisions- I still have not figured out how they are organized- please forgive me- please help!
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+COMPARL+PE-567.814+01+DOC+PDF+V0//EN
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+AMD+A8-2015-0175+028-042+DOC+PDF+V0//EN
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+AMD+A8-2016-0009+002-008+DOC+WORD+V0//EN
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+AMD+A8-2016-0009+002-008+DOC+PDF+V0//EN
These are the European outlines of the two pending deals there- not the carve out proposals:
http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-6891-2013-ADD-1-DCL-1/en/pdf
http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-11103-2013-DCL-1/en/pdf
These things need to be carved out here too, and likely more- but the situations here and in the EU are not identical- A good Google search term is "right to regulate" - another is "disciplines on domestic regulation" another is "not more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service"- and please read and understand the issue in link 3 in my sig and below- about the two line test-
This is my current sig. You should see this twice- if you have sigs turned on-
IF YOU CARE ABOUT: OUR FUTURE-HEALTHCARE-EDUCATION-LIVES-WORLD READ THESE LINKS: (1) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.405.5725 (2) http://www.adaction.org/media/TradingLives.pdf (3) http://www.iatp.org/files/GATS_and_Public_Service_Systems.htm - PLEASE READ THEM- THANK YOU!
