Deregulation is there in order so that all services or resources of all kinds (defined as everything you cannot drop on your foot) could be commoditized under trade agreements, taking them out of the realm of things governments can touch.
Thats both deregulation and reregulation, but in forums where people do not exist and there is no democracy.
Organizations like the WTO pay lip service to democracy but the fact is they all are profoundly intentionally undemocratic. They were created to limit democracy to shambolic, non-economic things, and increasingly arbitral bodies where governments only exist there to be sued by corporations.
Of all service sectors, energy has been the one most subjected to ISDS arbitral bodies up until now, with governments almost always losing, so you can expect lots more.
Sometimes what is happening is cryptic and basically hidden messaging.:
http://www.iatp.org/blog/201602/obama-undermines-climate-efforts-in-solar-trade-disputeWhat is happening is a global second enclosure in response to the shift towards automation.
Along with the loss of jobs comes loss of power, and the norms before the industrial revolution are re-asserting themselves. Except in a world without jobs, it will be much harder for people than it was under feudalism, when the elite still needed the labor of the peasantry.
Second enclosure is really a good way of framing it. The powerful are all in a hidden alliance, one that is disguised as various agreements, and phony disputes, with division and conquest the goal. They are united by a shared contempt for democracy, taxation and egalitarianism of any kind. They want to lock down and sell off, and in many cases, export the resources, until they're gone. To whomever pays the most, not people who need it the most. Think gold rush or land grab. The global corporate state that is emerging wants to expropriate everything of value before people realize whats going on. So of course, they frame any attempt by humanity to assert any right of any kind via government as
"indirect expropriation" What were once public services become 'services of general interest' and must be sold or a situation is 'trade distorting'. If its sold anywhere in a country or if a government is in competition with any provider of a like service it must be commercialized. This is why we cant have good healthcare and why social security is slated to become another crappy investment. They systematically barred and made impossible the entire New Deal behind the country's back. We just never got the memo.
NAFTA was the first negative list FTA and many of the newer ones are based on it, but services are in many ways the most ugly in its implications. That all began Jan 1, 1995 with the WTO. WTO is opt in (we opted in in many more areas than many others) the more recent US style 'agreements' countries must opt out. (This is called 'negative list')
Also 'standstill' applies in many areas locking in the autonomous level of regulation at the start. (Jan 1, 1995)
Newer regulations in those areas can be challenged and rolled back to their state on that date. Also countries that are joining the WTO may have to give up services that dont comply with WTO rules (basically ones where governments help people) Unless that service sector is totally free in a country, and non-commercial, and has been since that date. Healthcare in Canada would pass that test, thanks to a smart Canadian NGO that informed their government, but most other countries, including some that pride themselves on having healthcare for all, would not.
Thats to prevent the reversion of privatizations (corporations get entitlements to certainty, people get uncertainty)
Services and regulation are framed as takings. So is creation or prologation (they all are supposed to eventually go away, that is the desired end state, totally privatized everything) of any new state owned monopolies. Corporations get a right to sell services that trumps any national or subfederal entity laws. Under the new system, nation states are disempowered like Ulysses, tied to the mast so the Sirens of the electorate cannot influence policy, and public services are framed as a theft of opportunity from entitled corporation.
There is a ratchet so regulations can only be eliminated, and once lost they cannot be reestablished. Especially in service sectors like financial services, and energy.
Of course they are hiding this because its also basically millions of jobs - all the jobs where money is currently being "wasted" on wages above global norms are on the table. If national laws stand in the way, they will be attacked in the WTO and countries may well lose, especially if they have made committments to 'open' them. Newer US style negative list agreements include everything by default that isnt excluded in advance in writing.
Services, everything that cant be dropped on feet, becomes international trade and all regulations in those areas must be not more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service, and no more.
All those jobs, even areas like education, energy, healthcare, water, prisons, every area where any tax money is spent, becomes an internationally tradable service, if its not on the table now it soon will be, and is auctioned off to the lowest bidder (preferably in a developing country we want to prop up) therefore made irreversible and untouchable, so this ends up being hyper-regulation.
Did we Americans get the memo? I never did. Different countries have varying levels of awareness. The key fact though is that its happening just as the world needs public services more, because so many jobs will be going away in the coming years, so many that the number of jobs put into play by these agreements will likely be much smaller than they had expected.
Roughly 80% of all business is in services, so basically this shift is going to be like a super-NAFTA for the rest of the jobs. They have been working on it for more than 20 years and its almost done.
Yes, it may throw large numbers of people, (a princeton economist estimated 26% but his estimate was returned to in another study by two people at Harvard and they concluded 40% were offshorable. (Many of these jobs will be offshored with some workers here and some overseas) But it was immediately obvious to me that a lot of their assumptions were over optimistic, as they left out entire targeted service sectors - for example, they by and large excluded the public sector, which is clearly the #1 target down perhaps to the state and municipal level.
Also, what escapes the shift now will likely be on the table in two or four years, either via the WTO's "single undertaking" or in plurilateral, bilateral or regional trade agreements.
But the biggest organization - is the WTO and at the bi-annual WTO Ministerial conferences, they return to the table every two years and there is pressure from the big countries like the US to put more and more on the table.
Huge agreements like TISA are intended to be folded into the WTO at some point in the future (perhaps when wages have fallen far enough in the expensive countries to make it easier to create common markets similar to the one in the EU, but larger, and with movement of natural persons restricted to intra-corporate transfers by corporations, not individuals)
Other countries are under a lot of pressure to be like us.
These shifts are intended to eventually basically impact everybody everywhere (all around the world) especially in all quasi public service jobs, including teachers, grad students, everybody in research who gets grant money, every job that is a bit less corporate. The public job as we know it will go away, except for those who make up the governments themselves, we will see the end of the stable public job, the end of respected professions, and everybody's labor will be seen as a commodity, a standardized input, an interchangeable part in a machine, with licenses and advanced degrees all accepted everywhere in the intra-corporate transferee context, and equivalent, this will push smaller businesses out, think global chains, even in areas now thought of as private. Much like what has been done in the Middle East with the "kafala" system of corporate sponsoirship (much like indentured servitude). others will end up having to compete with global corporations that pay almost nothing that get an entitlement to win whenever public money is involved, and to do an end run around the whole 20th century as far as regulation. Countries will have to change their laws if they don't comply. Or face huge sanctions. (entities like the WTO cant reach in and change national alws directly, just sanction them things worth billions of dollars until they do)
Basically, it will be a great time to be rich and wading in cash.
Not so good for everybody else. People will be on their own and without money, they will be non-entities in a way that people were not under democracy in the pre-WTO era.
You are missing one key ingrediant when it comes to the Enron scam, deregulation. In the US in the 1960s we there was a push for deregulation. Happened witht the phone company (AT&T), airlines, financial/banking and real estate. (See a pattern here? With deregulation comes major scams and swindles).
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