{"id":22082,"date":"2016-10-23T16:46:39","date_gmt":"2016-10-23T21:46:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22082"},"modified":"2016-10-23T16:51:11","modified_gmt":"2016-10-23T21:51:11","slug":"tiny-region-of-wallonia-in-small-country-of-belgium-trips-up-global-corporatocracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22082","title":{"rendered":"Tiny Region of Wallonia in Small Country of Belgium Trips up Global Corporatocracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"art-postmetadataheader\">\n<header>\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/wolfstreet.com\/2016\/10\/22\/wallonia-belgium-trips-up-global-corporatocracy-ceta-eu-canada\/\">Tiny Region of Wallonia in Small Country of Belgium Trips up Global Corporatocracy<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"entry-meta\"><strong>\u201cThinly veiled threats\u201d from corporations.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p><em>Visibly shaken,\u00a0<\/em>as\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-eu-canada-trade-idUSKCN12L12J\" target=\"_blank\">Reuters<\/a>\u00a0put it, Canadian trade minister Chrystia Freeland walked out of EU trade negotiations in Belgium on Friday evening, lamenting that the EU is \u201cincapable of reaching an agreement \u2013 even with a country with European values such as Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A big trade deal that had taken\u00a0years to negotiate, mostly in total secrecy, had just collapsed.\u00a0So how in the world did such a mega\u00a0screw-up happen?<\/p>\n<p>In Europe, all that is needed for the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada to come into effect, \u201cprovisionally\u201d (in EU double-speak, more or less irrevocably), before being passed to national parliaments to vote on, is\u00a0for the governments of the EU\u2019s 28 Member States to sign along the dotted line.<\/p>\n<p>This\u00a0could usher in a new age of corporate domination, for CETA, just like its sister deals TTIP, TPP and TiSA, is not really a trade deal at all; it\u2019s an investment rights deal that will effectively neuter the ability of national elected governments to regulate in the interests of their electorate.<\/p>\n<p>Yet\u00a0almost all of the EU\u2019s national governments are firmly on board. Even the UK government has promised it will sign the deal, even as it prepares to negotiate a clean break from the EU. In Spain, there is no elected government, yet Rajoy\u2019s caretaker administration has assured Brussels that it, too, will happily lend its signature to the agreement.<\/p>\n<p>But the European Commission needs the signatures of\u00a0<em>all<\/em>\u00a028 nations. And to its mounting frustration, the Belgian region of Wallonia refuses to sign the agreement,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.euronews.com\/2016\/10\/20\/wallonia-premier-urges-fresh-negotiations-on-eu-canada-free-trade-deal\">citing<\/a>\u00a0a host of social, political and economic reasons, including the inclusion of an Investment State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clause and the possibility of non-Canadian corporations using the deal to gain greater access to EU markets.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"art-postcontent\">\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tiny Region of Wallonia in Small Country of Belgium Trips up Global Corporatocracy \u201cThinly veiled threats\u201d from corporations. Visibly shaken,\u00a0as\u00a0Reuters\u00a0put it, Canadian trade minister Chrystia Freeland walked out of EU trade negotiations in Belgium on Friday evening, lamenting that the EU is \u201cincapable of reaching an agreement \u2013 even with a country with European values [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1957,103,7304,14500,5660,279,284,6172,804,1132,4255],"class_list":["post-22082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-belgium","tag-canada","tag-ceta","tag-comprehensive-economic-trade-agreement","tag-don-quijones","tag-eu","tag-european-union","tag-tisa","tag-tpp","tag-ttip","tag-wolfstreet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22082"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22084,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22082\/revisions\/22084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}