Most Americans have not heard of TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). For that matter, I'd say that ninety-percent of Germans know little to nothing about TTIP.
What is TTIP? Well.....there are two huge trading blocks in the world besides China. There is the US and there's the EU (instead of grabbing single countries like France or Germany....it makes sense to palatalize Europe into one solid block.
Both the US and Europe have worked hard to keep each out of their own markets. This strategy has been going on since the 1950s. The US car industry played every single card to prevent European-manufactured cars from entering.....with various gimmicks worked magic. The Germans did the same thing. My 1997 Dodge Dakota truck could only be German-tagged if I messed around with removing the original light and got a German-approved light (roughly 250 dollars of work/material)....making the appearance look tramped-up but passing their stupid rules.
Eventually, a decade ago as the EU arrived and took charge over individual governments in Europe....there was a way now to build a single list of import rules and perhaps build a friendly trading situation.
So, TTIP is this series of meetings where they sit and discuss cheese, pork, booze, beer, cars, motorcycles, whiskey, stockings, toys, candles, butcher knives, cat food, glasses, mattresses, peanuts, coffee, and milk. The idea is that somehow....you might reach an agreement where X amount of products might be legally and quickly brought into both markets.
Naturally, there are companies fighting this tooth and nail. There are union groups fighting this. There are anti-capitalists fighting this. They fight in both the US and Europe over this.
The grand fear is that standards now accepted as 'normal' will dissolve....like in the production of food, use of labor, and environmental standards achieved over the past decades.
Polling within Germany has taken place and the trend currently shows for each two Germans against the TTIP idea.....there's only one German in favor of it. But the knowledge of the three Germans to start with? It's questionable.
This weekend, several thousand anti-TTIP folks showed up in German cities and did a somewhat organized protest. Fair weather helped, and the social media scene carried the message out to various movements....getting to the place where the news media could assess success or failure of the Saturday action.
The problem with the German crowd? Most who say they are anti-TTIP.....harp on the coming negatives. If you ask them what products they build or manufacture....there's a puzzling look on their face. Then you ask how they did when things relaxed in the 1970s and they were now selling their products to Austria, Italy or the Netherlands? Did they relax their production standards, change their use of labor, or accept problems to their environmental standards? No.
You see....if you make or build something of a quality nature, and people want it.....then you don't ask questions about customers. If you manufacture chocolate bunnies......you really don't care who the hell eats the chocolate bunnies except they eat them in abundance, order in bulk, and you profit with the sale of each chocolate bunny.
If you distill German booze of an exceptional quality....you really don't care who drinks the booze or to what degree.....just that they drink in abundance, order in bulk and you profit in some way from the whole transaction.
If you made German sex-toys....you really don't care about the living standards of your customer, their lifestyle or such.....just that they buy your toys in abundance, order in bulk, and you profit in some way from the sale.
I see the TTIP crowd as fairly naive. They don't know their business....they don't know how to grow it.....they don't know their customers....and they distrust business operations even more than government people.
The odds of both the US and EU negotiations people for TTIP screwing up or harming each other? I'm assuming that both are working hard to screw over each other.....getting more specialized German pork into the US, than cheap US pork coming into Germany. I'm also assuming that the Germans are trying hard to get their stupid chocolate Kinder Eggs with toys inside approved for US sales, while they sit and agree to allow Hersey's chocolate to be brought in bulk form into Germany.
You can bet that somewhere in time.....maybe in 2015 or 2016.....TTIP will finally wrap up and become reality. Your local US grocery will suddenly feature forty products that come out of mostly Italy or France. Your booze distributor will suddenly have a dozen German beers or distilled beverages. And some German shop will suddenly feature cheap American-made chocolate. Only time will tell if any of this is a wise business move or simply a product line doomed for failure.
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