Over at Hullabaloo Tom Sullivan has a great post on the revolt against trade deals.
Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Berlin on Saturday in protest against a planned free trade deal between Europe and the United States that they say is anti-democratic and will lower food safety, labor and environmental standards.
The organizers — an alliance of environmental groups, charities and opposition parties — said 250,000 people were taking part in the rally against free trade deals with both the United States and Canada, far more than they had anticipated.
[snip]
Opposition to the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has risen over the past year in Germany, with critics fearing the pact will hand too much power to big multinationals at the expense of consumers and workers.
“What bothers me the most is that I don’t want all our consumer laws to be softened,” Oliver Zloty told Reuters. “And I don’t want to have a dictatorship by any companies.”
The same thing is happening in Australia and New Zealand over the TPP:
On the Pacific rim, citizens of Australia and New Zealand are concerned about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They don’t want “a dictatorship by any companies” either.
The people of the Democracies of the world don’t want a return to feudalism which is exactly what these so called free trade deals will result in. Massive power being given to the new feudal overlords, multinational corporations.
More trade is not what really concerns people. Sovereignty and democracy are. And stability. “People are really hungry … for economic stability, more even than economic opportunity,” Shenker-Osorio told One News in New Zealand.
The question is whether “the economy” will allow them to have any. That is the question that hangs in the balance.
Do we really want the Western Democracies to look like China? I don’t think so.