An Interview With the Woman in Charge of the T-TIP

Do you have concerns about the damage to national sovereignty from the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership? Have you noticed the intense popular opposition to it, and how it steamrollers on without taking much notice? A reporter from the United Kingdom's Independent got a word with the boss, who explains.

When put to her, Malmström acknowledged that a trade deal has never inspired such passionate and widespread opposition. Yet when I asked the trade commissioner how she could continue her persistent promotion of the deal in the face of such massive public opposition, her response came back icy cold: “I do not take my mandate from the European people.”

So who does Cecilia Malmström take her mandate from? Officially, EU commissioners are supposed to follow the elected governments of Europe. Yet the European Commission is carrying on the TTIP negotiations behind closed doors without the proper involvement European governments, let alone MPs or members of the public. British civil servants have admitted to us that they have been kept in the dark throughout the TTIP talks, and that this makes their job impossible.

The T-TIP's mirror image is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, which is also being negotiated in secrecy. Congress wasn't allowed to look at the text except in a secured room from which they were not allowed to take notes, and they were sworn not to talk about what they saw. When the Obama administration was asked about opposition, they had the audacity to say that their opponents couldn't name anything specifically wrong with it. Well, indeed they could not: they were forbidden by law.

Both of these treaties need to be shot down or, failing that, abrogated immediately by the first better administration we get.