Leaked EU document on the Transatlantic trade deal

Needless to say this makes clear that the EU is not for the people but for the corporations.

7 November 2013

Issues paper Communicating on TTIP – Areas for cooperation between the Commission services and Member States

On 22 November 2013 in Brussels, the Commission is organising an informal meeting with Member States representatives to discuss issues related to communication on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The meeting is intended to explore possibilities for greater cooperation and coordination of respective communication activities around TTIP. The present paper provides additional background for this discussion. It highlights a number of key issues to be discussed at the meeting.

I. Context

Strong political communication will be essential to the success of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), both in terms of achieving EU negotiating objectives and of making sure that the agreement is eventually ratified. So far, the negotiations have experienced an unprecedented level of public and media interest. No other negotiation has been subject to a similar level of public scrutiny. Communicating on TTIP and engaging with stakeholders is therefore crucial when taking the negotiations forward.

There are three main communication challenges:

1. Making sure that the broad public in each of the EU Member States has a general understanding of what TTIP is (i.e. an initiative that aims at delivering growth and jobs) and what it is not (i.e. an effort to undermine regulation and existing levels of protection in areas like health, safety and the environment).

2. Managing relations with third countries, as the agreement will affect also our other trading partners, in particular the multilateral level, our neighbourhood and major partners like China.

3. Supporting our negotiating objectives vis-à-vis the US negotiators, in particular in areas not falling under the direct responsibility of USTR. This may be the case with federal regulatory agencies and state-level authorities where there will be a need for the EU to help persuade these decision makers to also engage.

In order to be successful in these areas, the Commission services and the Member States will need to work closely together and to collectively manage and coordinate our communication and outreach strategies.

The Commission, on its side, has put in place a dedicated TTIP communications operation, an approach that has already delivered results. However, the negotiations are just beginning and considerable challenges lie ahead. The communications effort is led by a Head of Communications in DG Trade with support of other Commission services, namely DG Communications and the Spokespersons Service. It is coordinated across the Commission, with Commission representatives in Member States and, through the EEAS, with EU Delegations.

II. The current approach

The overall approach is holistic, uniting media relations, outreach and management of stakeholders, social media and transparency. The approach will need to further localise our communication effort at Member State level in a radically different way to what has been done for past trade initiatives, in addition to deploying efforts in Brussels, in the US and around the world, providing clear, factual and convincing arguments on all aspects of the negotiations.

The aim is to define, at this early stage in the negotiations, the terms of the debate by communicating positively about what the TTIP is about (i.e. economic gains and global leadership on trade issues), rather than being drawn reactively into defensive communication about what TTIP is not about (e.g. not about negotiating data privacy, not about lowering EU regulatory standards etc.). For the approach to be successful it needs to be both proactive and quickly reactive, involving monitoring of public debate, producing targeted communications material and deploying that material through all channels including online and social media.

So far, this has allowed us to:

• produce and disseminate communication materials on the narrative of the negotiations as a whole, as well as more focused material on specific issues: e.g the strategic, third country impact, the regulatory cooperation/convergence element, a detailed defence of the economic analysis behind the TTIP and a detailed rebuttal document on why the agreement is not ACTA.

make clear that transparency will be a key part of the EU approach to the negotiations by publishing the EU's initial position papers on key aspects of the negotiations, holding early stakeholder engagement meetings, committing to closer than usual consultation with the European Parliament, communicating directly with members of the public through a dedicated TTIP Twitter account with a considerable message-multiplying effect.

• keep a handle on the mainstream media narrative on the negotiations, where there is broad support for the logic and intended substance of the agreement.

• achieve traction in national media, at least in some Member States,

• reach out to influential third parties to secure their public support for the negotiations.

With the substance of the TTIP negotiations still to come, and an intensive ratification debate to follow, there is much more work to be done but the systems and approach we have now put in place provide a firm basis for future action. This needs support from and coordination with the Member States.

III. Key issues to watch

1. Anxiety around the potential impact on the European social model and approach to regulation: We need proactive, early and widespread communication on the reality of what is under discussion in sensitive areas and on the EU's strong record in international negotiations. While still respecting the confidentiality required for the negotiations to succeed, the process also needs to be transparent enough to reduce fears and avoid a mushrooming of doubts before the deal is even concluded. This messaging needs to be accompanied by clear communication about the benefits of the TTIP.

2. Challenges arising from the institutional characteristics of the EU: The huge interest in the process means that there will be many moments of intense public pressure around the negotiations. At such moments, and indeed throughout the process, it is vital that the EU speaks as much as possible with one voice. The election campaign for the European Parliament will be an important factor in this context. It seems clear that given the salience of the negotiation political groups in several Member States will position themselves around different aspects of the negotiations.

3. The strategic dimension of TTIP (impact on third countries and multilateral): We need to provide a clear, reasonable definition of the real strategic potential of TTIP. This is obviously more than just another FTA, if only because its scale. It’s bigger, broader and potentially deeper. As a result it will allow the EU and the US to show leadership on world trade, setting global precedents (e.g. in regulatory areas) that can help form the basis for future global trade negotiations in new areas. Single transatlantic rules, where possible, also offer benefits to third countries, whose exporters will find compliance less burdensome.

4. Making clear that this is a negotiation between equals: Many of the fears about what TTIP may represent are linked to a perception that the EU is not in a sufficiently strong position to engage with the United States. Some of this also stems from the fact that the EU is currently in a weaker economic position than the US and that therefore we need TTIP more than they do. We need to make clear that this is not the case, that despite the crisis the EU remains the world's largest market and is as such an indispensable partner for any trading economy (i.e. both sides have major economic interests in these negotiations). We must also make clear that we have as strong a track record as the US in trade and other negotiations, including with the US itself.

5. Transparency & stakeholder communication: Given the breadth of the issues under discussion, which cover much broader elements of policy-making than traditional trade agreements, expectations of transparency from stakeholders are higher than in previous trade negotiations. The complexity of the potential deal also means that negotiators have a greater need for stakeholder input during the process to make sure that proposed solutions to difficult issues are effective. At the same time negotiations demand a degree of confidentiality if they are to succeed.

IV. Possible questions

What are the key communication challenges for TTIP in respective Member States?

What activities are currently undertaken at Member State level to communicate about TTIP?

Who are the main stakeholders to be addressed? Do we have adequate tools?

In which areas could Commission services and Member States work closer together?"

Wheen man was an animal

Wheen man was an animal, he was a model of himself. This was before he could speak. Way before he was human. But he had culture, like bacteria in a suitable environment, but culture all the same. There was the world and there were the beings that interacted in and with it, beings that were constructed according to blueprints designed to carry information beyond death. This is because there is a difference between matter and living tissue. All life is subject to death, perhaps like matter is subject to change. Animals do not need rules if they don’t have volition. An animal that learns to behave accordingly gives birth to intellect in the subjective sense. There is no knowledge of intellect in any other sense. An animal that is aware of the self and of causality is intelligent. Intuitive intelligence is intelligence encoded in the blueprints suggesting that matter has developed ways to preserve information, and this manifestation of self-organization is what defines what is alive as opposed to dead matter. This is where we stand unless there are other dimensions to matter, dimensions that contemplate on their being, preserve traces of past events. All particles that preserve traces of former being, carry momentary conditions as memories, affirm that self-awareness has a history; history that makes humanity a recent instance. What is it when matter becomes aware of possibilities? It is realization. (This is the law, and the law is of immediacy.) If an animal is capable of resisting this realization, it becomes creator, moral being.

When was that instant that matter discovered itself?

When an animal becomes aware of its own traces, of the traces of others, of causality in the crudest sense, a new level of existence is opened; a level with vast possibilities calling to being an entire medium of bodiless presence, that of abstraction, a medium born of physical being but that transcended physicality. Is this what is called metaphysics? When a trace is used to refer to something and then carried from the vicinity of the referent, this medium is realized. Again and again. Realized and forgotten. Until a trace is carried beyond the instance of direct reference; language is born, first in gestures, signals that acknowledge the presence of another intellect. Intuition had learned it aeons ago, intuition had traversed and multiplied and finally faced itself then suddenly realized that it had become other. Other than the self. Is this how intuition leaped from the blueprint, encoded in the chemical possibilities inherent in all matter, to abstraction? Is this the birth of intellect? If it is, then intelligence’s first diaries are written with nucleic acids. The animal knew then.

Still governed by tempestuous organs, the hunger of cells that know more than the being itself, abstract formulations pass in this new medium that is the mind, our novice attempts to approximate this great confused happening we see. This new organ celebrating the union of cells, of interaction and organization freed from the senseless being of selfless matter. Something is missed here. How can senseless matter realize possibilities? Through an inherent function? Inscribed in stone by what? Will to become? A need to be instead of not? Still, I would refute the concept of God in its entirety if here be any implications of such folly, that construct to which we are as of yet not even close. The time is not yet. God does not belong into this context. That warp spasm at war with history, that carrier of contradicting interests should be banned from all that has to do with the will to learn of the world and of the self. But we are coming to that, with a quantum of avarice granted, but we are coming to that. We will take a look at this senescent concept and let go of its presence, with a gentle push help it on its way among floating wreckage and crumbling ice.

We are when formulations gallop and leap after what the multiplying layers of the self hunt for, leap from the mind to being, to physicality, as traces of it are painted and uttered, forced into being by the need to know and control, and if control is impossible, to anticipate. But since other intellects can be made to know the force and intuition of one, a possibility is realized in this action, that of negotiation. Motivated by urgency, the need to reason, faced with impatient brutes drunken with power, formulates quickly . This sign carries the mental reproduction of the referent from an intellect to another. And lo, there they roam. Now is it magic? Is it magical that a reed is a reed but also brings to mind what can be done with it? The twig can be used to will to being the termites that are nowhere to be seen but still somewhere. And then this object became, no, engendered a symbol, of use, of purpose, of question, this image that is formed in agreement and carried again, beyond death even.

And the symbol acquires the ability to carry traces of the notion of causality, and other formulations, through canonized use. And instrumental ability acquires a history of its own, a history encoded in the culture of these multiplying signs, signs that travel and get lost only to reappear unrecognizable and alien. (This my letter to you got lost in the invisible air of cultures. And when you found it, my signs had left me and the moment they were conceived was history, the sentiment was something I thought could last.) And the formulations were made solid like God and authority. They were cast in stone with force that reigned now over intuition, intuition that had disputed and faltered, erred, burdened by its costive mechanisms. So it formed a league with silence and patiently went about as it had, unconvinced but open to learn, hungry in the absence of words, hungry for reason that levels these Gods that thrive on conflict and contradiction. And just the fact that these obviously arbitrary authorities exist violates another instinctual sense; justice. And like intuitive drives this sense of justice is dominant, like hunger, despite the backlash, as on recoil intuitions retreat back to animality. This same animal base is the ultimate bastion of the subjective self, but at its purest this animality is selfless, thus the self can't retreat all the way without losing itself, like forever approaching zero with the exponential increase of intensity, but in this raw mode there is access to certainty that  stops you at the threshold of to the helpless condition where the culmination of individuality becomes leveled by relativity.
There is this very human tendency to make the constant change stop in favor of an eternal self. This is monumental folly, but a continuation all the same, a continuation of intuitively compelling reasoning that blinds itself to hold on to its premises and ideas it used to believe and accept without a thought as something that is intuitive can prove to be a dead-end too. But the thought is here, consciousness is free, and God cannot stand, the bicameral mind is broken, the priest king mumbles and chirps now like mad hatter, unintelligible instead of commanding. And we as animals have taken a step aside from determination and had to accept insecurity and silence; silence of the universe. God does not speak to us anymore, and we are back to face each other in and compromise to negotiate no longer blinded by overlycompelling intuition, yet still checked by the wisdom encoded in our vertebrea, in the nucleic acids that still allow for moments of collective knowing, for even if they produced the flaw that blinded us for centuries with its sheer insistence, they are there to guide us to what our bodies need and know to be good.

The organism we are is in yet another dead end, where being important becomes just as important as everything else. The animal loses no love on that as it reduces the human self into good eatin', to fuck all with correctness, you will be replaced like the folly you are as the animal takes over from here on again and all that treasured trauma will turn into acute fear. You will kill to eat, kill to live and kill to love. You will fight and die for what the animal knows and you couldn't because of all that fucking humanity infectious and lethal like the worst of diseases. Let it go and die out like the pretension it is and see world that made you, the fury of the earth you've tried to dismiss, but it is you that are the dream and not the world. A dream that confused the animal dangerously, but you will soon be fully awake and from there on all shall be natural again and the only thing that was alien was the human that ceased. 

The Honorables May Now Rise

The sum of human glory, the greatness of humanity

is that a human can, on individuation

sometimes evolve into a perspective

that perceives humanity as the sickness it is

and forms a grave loathing toward this form of being

that could have become something on its own

but refused

Even those angelic humans

who have faith in providence

and thus have with them

the promise of an afterlife

Even they shied away

from the responsibility

and rather remained subordinate

and satellite

to animal inconsistence

monstrous in the center

Or is it that they

like the rest of us

are by natural law forbidden,

perhaps programmed

not to surpass this,

our nature

and put to leash the beast's

appetites,

greed and complacency

that live in us

like a persistent never

in the place of what could have been?

Such a being is doomed

to be what it is,

to know itself and

exist unaltered

until the world buries it.

Ye, that judge

– the honorables –

may now rise

and create a verdict

out of your example.

The beast will then take its stand

in ovation

and step down

in awe of ideas

composition of which

resonates with all of the world

or resume with you

the tortured hunt

for ever evading

satisfaction.