These treaties amount to something like a corporate coup d’état on an international scale. They create an avenue for extraterritorial legislation that bypasses national parliaments and any form of democratic discussion, pouring scorn on the idea of elected government. In this sense, the ideology of ‘free trade’ overplays its own hand and exposes itself as farce. The FTAs make it clear that free trade was never meant to be about freedom in the first place. Indeed, the very things that do promote real human freedoms – such as the rights of workers to organise, equal access to decent public
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