By Michael McAuliff, March 11th, 2014. Huffington Post. 

WASHINGTON -- A report due to be released Tuesday aims to offer an object lesson to President Barack Obama: Free trade deals have high costs in unintended consequences for the environment, people's way of life, and local sovereignty.

The report by the Sierra Club and other groups in Canada and Mexico, released on the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement, summarizes more than 100 nonprofit, government and scholarly studies of NAFTA, and draws a damning picture.

Perhaps hardest hit is Mexico, according to the report, where expanded trade in agricultural products came at the expense of smaller farmers, who couldn't compete with a surge in pesticide-heavy factory farms. Small farmers resorted to cutting down forests to farm more land, and still failed. A boom in mining came at the expense of local landowners, with subsequent industrial pollution.

March 10, 2014. 

By Miriam Ross

Trade unions and campaign groups have written to Vince Cable calling for a halt to negotiations on the EU-US trade deal, as talks begin in Brussels today.

The groups, including the UK’s second biggest trade union UNISON, environmental, social justice and anti-poverty organisations, believe the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will undermine democracy, threaten public services and lead to lower standards in a range of areas including environmental protection, workers’ rights and food safety.

By Shawn Donnan in London, March 10th 2014

Faced with an increasingly vocal opposition to a landmark EU-US trade agreement, a growing number of backers of the deal are starting to ask a simple question: might the future of transatlantic trade be better served if one of its most controversial provisions was simply dropped?

Cecilia Olivet and Pia Eberhardt, March 7 

Corporations, backed by lawyers, use international investment agreements to scavenge for profits by suing Europe’s crisis countries. While speculators making risky investments are protected, ordinary people have no such protection and – through harsh austerity policies – are being stripped of basic social rights.

Profiting from Crisis is a story about how corporations, backed by lawyers, are using international investment agreements to scavenge for profits by suing governments from Europe’s crisis countries. It shows how the global investment regime thrives on economic crises, but is very uneven in who it benefits. While speculators making risky investments are protected, ordinary people have no such protection and – through harsh austerity policies – are being stripped of basic social rights.

March 5,  2014 Bilaterals.org

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a comprehensive free trade and investment treaty currently being negotiated – in secret – between the European Union and the USA. As officials from both sides acknowledge, the main goal of TTIP is to remove regulatory ‘barriers’ which restrict the potential profits to be made by transnational corporations on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet these ‘barriers’ are in reality some of our most prized social standards and environmental regulations, such as labour rights, food safety rules (including restrictions on GMOs), regulations on the use of toxic chemicals, digital privacy laws and even new banking safeguards introduced to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. The stakes, in other words, could not be higher.

MEDIA ADVISORY, March 07, 2014

Berlin, Brussels, Washington, Ottawa – A new website was launched today dedicated to enlarging the public debate on the EU’s controversial policies for investment protections and investor-to-state dispute settlement systems (ISDS) in the EU-US and EU-Canada trade negotiations.  

The site (http://eu-secretdeals.info) includes newly leaked investment chapters from the ongoing EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) negotiations, analysis of those chapters, and other information contradicting the Commission’s position that these transatlantic trade agreements must include strong investment protections. 

No Fracking Way: How the EU-US trade deal risks expanding fracking in Europe and the US.

It was prepared by Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth Europe, Corporate Europe Observatory, Transnational Institute, PowerShift, Blue Planet Project, and Attac
France.

The full report is available here: http://sc.org/no-fracking-way

http://action.sierraclub.org/site/DocServer/FoEE_TTIP-ISDS-fracking-0603...

March 5TH, 2014.  There is a lot going on in Germany right now. Yesterday we reported that a leaked document from inside the Ministry for Environment warns about the potential effects of TTIP on consumer protection and environment legislation. Now, IG Metall, a german trade union with roughly 2,4 million members (making it the largest trade union in the world), has called for an immediate halt to the ongoing negotiations on TTIP.
The IG Metall chariman, Detlef Wetzel, considers the agreement to be "dangerous", and fears how it may damage consumer protection and workers rights, as well as undermining democracy and the sovereignity of the state.
Considering the growth and jobs promised by the European Commission, Wetzel calls these projections for overly optimistic and disputes that TTIP will have any noticable benefit whatsoever. Wetzel considers the conclusions in the report from