What a great deal has been said about this agreement by several of our Canadian friends because they have the heartbreaking experience of NAFTA (the 25th anniversary Mexico-U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement). For example, we will mention a couple of points that the Canadian Maude Barlow, who has been at the United Nations, highlights. On the one hand, he argues that family debts have risen to historic levels and, on the other, that the profits of large companies, like the wages of their managers, have experienced enormous increases. Of course, considering that the income of the families has not increased.

In connection with this, the CEOE, the Spanish Institute of Economic Studies and the Chamber of Commerce launched in October 2015 the TTIP report, which states that private consumption would increase by 0.98% per year and workers’ wages by just 0.72%. Although it is a report on TTIP, it is also useful for CETA because after all, the United States and Canada are related to NAFTA, and it is enough for a U.S. company to have an office in Canada to achieve its objectives with TTIP. So, according to this study, which would lead to indebtedness similar to what has happened in Canada hitzarmenak.Gehigarri, the report says that agriculture will get worse; it also got worse with NAFTA and it is clear that with CETA it would also suffer huge damages.

Approaching the house, looking at the situation in reality, it is necessary to emphasize that we already suffer from salary drops and the figures mentioned can be worsened. It has been clearly said that matter is not created or destroyed, but transformed. Therefore, in order for large companies to increase their economic revenues, citizens must experience a drop in revenues. Just look at what is written in the report that Reunidos has finally released, linking it to the increase in poverty: Eight people accumulate as much wealth as 3.6 billion people, or half of the world’s total population, compared to 388 in 2010. In addition, despite the many victims of poverty, women are the ones who have to endure it the most. For CETA is a red carpet for multinational companies and it opens the way for them to do what they want without any hindrance, where poverty would have a huge increase.

For example, the Canadian company Edgewater threatened the Spanish government to resort to private arbitration tribunals 2015ean.Badirudi, with tensions in a gold mine in Galicia and with the matter still in the air, that CETA would impose enormous facilities for the government to pay millions of euros in compensation. In other words, because the multinational company has not managed to get things out of the way it wants in its exploitation to be thin, we citizens should give it money from our own pockets.

Both Canada and several EU governments (with Spain at the top of the list) have on the table a large number of private juries similar to the one mentioned, where some have been lost (in the case of Canada, it has already had to pay $117.5 million to the giant companies). They want to impose these private juries (formerly called ISDS and now ICS) on both national and international juries, which would brutally crush both human rights and ecology.

Faced with this situation, we cannot allow them to be used as puppet citizens and we must break the ropes. The CETA itself, although it has been approved in the European Parliament and is in operation on a provisional basis, still has to be approved in the Parliaments of both European nations and several countries. So we can keep it and thus not allow a few to do what they want to the detriment of the majority. The CETA is about to vote in the Spanish Congress and it needs to be answered. To this end, in the meeting that we will hold on June 3 in San Sebastián at 13:00 in the Plaza de Gipuzkoa, in the alley that will be held in Bilbao at 12:30 in the morning starting from the Sacred Heart, what other mobilizations may be there, we must join in demanding that the political parties that we have in the Basque Country and that are present in the congress clearly vote for the CETAriez.

*Signatories are members of the TTIP/CETA campaign