A submission to an EU consultation about 'TTIP'

A submission to an EU consultation about 'TTIP'

TTIP stands for 'Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership' and has already been referred to on this blog site. Now the campaigning organisation 38 Degrees has intervened toward facilitating EU citizen input into this consultation where the EU commissioners have previously hindered Swheatie's involvement.

The text of Swheatie's input appears below, with a link to the John Hilary briefing added.

Swheatie's submission in response to the 'public consultation' on TTIP

A pamphlet by John Hilary of War On Want about the dangers of TTIP listed the TTIP portal of the European Commissioners website and so I went there, aiming to input what I had to say about the matter. Thus I was instantly confronted with an invitation to give feedback on why I was visiting that site that day, and told that the survey should only take me a few minutes.
  
I know that I am a person with a learning difficulty that makes my mental processing among the lowest few percentile but I was appalled at how 'norm-based' that rubbishy survey was. Further, when I had given up on that survey as a complete distraction from my original purpose and attempted to locate any details regarding the deadline for submissions to the 'consultation', I found that the TTIP portal seemed to be designed more to obfuscate than to help with any real consultation.

What I did glean from my perusal of that website was that 'investors' were being presented as angels who must not be abused, and that that is the basis upon which 'Investor-to-State Dispute Settlement' exists, and that there was something about the law operating within a country [rather than any reference to the UN Declaration of Human Rights]. I believe that ISDS could lead to situations like how, historically, Haiti was punished by France for what it had done to free slaves: Haiti was forced to compensate the heirs of slave traders for their 'loss of human cargo'.

As I have stated, I am a person with a learning difficulty. For all the laudable anti-discrimination legislation that the EU has helped bring to the UK, I have not as far as I am aware been helped while the global company ATOS has in effect murdered vulnerable people in its 'disability denial factories' that have apparently been based upon those of American-based insurance company Unum, formerly Unum-Provident. It was only through legal aid that has now been withdrawn that I won my case against ATOS and the Department for Work & Pensions so I got Employment & Support Allowance after having accrued only 17 months total waged employment from November 1977 to early 2009 when I first applied for ESA. [Swheatie forgot to add that apart from 1994 to 1997 at uni as a mature undergraduate, he had been on jobseeker benefits before claiming any disability benefit.]

And in 1978 an Employment Rehabilitation Centre 'Social Worker' told my parents that because I was slow, it would be a waste of public money for me to receive any further government-funded education and training, despite "an academic brain."

In conclusion, while TTIP talks about 'removing barriers to trade', the authors show remarkable ignorance surrounding how physical, economic and environmental barriers turn personal impairments into disabilities. I want more enforcement of existing human rights legislation rather than a charter for human rights abusers to increase the world's injustices in the name of 'free trade'.