Secret TPP Negotiaons: UCA immunized against governments [Archive]

boutons_deux

11-13-2013, 11:43 AM

Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)

The TPP is the forerunner to the equally secret US-EU pact TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), for which President Obama initiated US-EU negotiations in January 2013. Together, the TPP and TTIP will cover more than 60 per cent of global GDP. Both pacts exclude China.

Since the beginning of the TPP negotiations, the process of drafting and negotiating the treaty’s chapters has been shrouded in an unprecedented level of secrecy. Access to drafts of the TPP chapters is shielded from the general public. Members of the US Congress are only able to view selected portions of treaty-related documents in highly restrictive conditions and under strict supervision. It has been previously revealed that only three individuals in each TPP nation have access to the full text of the agreement, while 600 ’trade advisers’ – lobbyists guarding the interests of large US corporations such as Chevron, Halliburton, Monsanto and Walmart – are granted privileged access to crucial sections of the treaty text.

WikiLeaks’ Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange stated: “The US administration is aggressively pushing the TPP through the US legislative process on the sly.” The advanced draft of the Intellectual Property Rights Chapter, published by WikiLeaks on 13 November 2013, provides the public with the fullest opportunity so far to familiarise themselves with the details and implications of the TPP.

(https://wikileaks.org/tpp/pressrelease.html)The 95-page, 30,000-word IP Chapter lays out provisions for instituting a far-reaching, transnational legal and enforcement regime, modifying or replacing existing laws in TPP member states. The Chapter’s subsections include agreements relating to patents (who may produce goods or drugs), copyright (who may transmit information), trademarks (who may describe information or goods as authentic) and industrial design.

The longest section of the Chapter – ’Enforcement’ – is devoted to detailing new policing measures, with far-reaching implications for individual rights, civil liberties, publishers, internet service providers and internet privacy, as well as for the creative, intellectual, biological and environmental commons. Particular measures proposed include supranational litigation tribunals to which sovereign national courts are expected to defer, but which have no human rights safeguards. The TPP IP Chapter states that these courts can conduct hearings with secret evidence.

The IP Chapter also replicates many of the surveillance and enforcement provisions from the shelved SOPA and ACTA treaties. (https://wikileaks.org/tpp/pressrelease.html)

https://wikileaks.org/tpp/pressrelease.html (https://wikileaks.org/tpp/pressrelease.html)

Winehole23

11-13-2013, 02:31 PM

special tribunals for qualifying firms, secret evidence is allowed, no human rights curbs are included, the treaty is presented to the US Senate as a finished product after it has been negotiated in secret -- what could go wrong?

Winehole23

12-09-2013, 09:43 AM

http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/1294_001.pdf

Winehole23

12-09-2013, 09:46 AM

One of the most controversial provisions in the talks includes new corporate empowerment language insisted upon by the U.S. government, which would allow foreign companies to challenge laws or regulations in a privately run international court. Under World Trade Organization treaties, this political power to contest government law is reserved for sovereign nations. The U.S. has endorsed some corporate political powers in prior trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, but the scope of what laws can be challenged appears to be much broader in TPP negotiations.

"The United States, as in previous rounds, has shown no flexibility on its proposal, being one of the most significant barriers to closing the chapter, since under the concept of Investment Agreement nearly all significant contracts that can be made between a state and a foreign investor are included," the memo reads. "Only the U.S. and Japan support the proposal."

Under NAFTA, companies including Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical and Eli Lilly have attempted to overrule Canadian regulations on offshore oil drilling, fracking, pesticides, drug patents and other issues. Companies could challenge an even broader array of rules under the TPP language.

New standards concerning access to key medicines appear to be equally problematic for many nations. The Obama administration is insisting on mandating new intellectual property rules in the treaty that would grant pharmaceutical companies long-term monopolies on new medications. As a result, companies can charge high prices without regard to competition from generic providers. The result, public health experts have warned (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/13/wikileaks-global-health_n_4269337.html), would be higher prices around the world, and lack of access to life-saving drugs in poor countries.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/08/tpp-trade-agreement_n_4409211.html

boutons_deux

12-09-2013, 09:52 AM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/08/tpp-trade-agreement_n_4409211.html

It would be really wonderful proof of how the (Senate) Repugs are 100% for the 1%/VRWC/UCA if they vote to approve of THIS abortion.

Winehole23

01-30-2014, 11:25 AM

fast track authority may not get a vote in the Senate

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) appears not to have been swayed by President Barack Obama's State of the Union appeal to Congress to push through trade deals, declaring flatly on Wednesday that he opposes so-called fast-track authority for the White House.

Fast track, known formally as Trade Promotional Authority, essentially requires Congress to give international trade agreements negotiated by the president an up-or-down vote with no chance for amendments.
The fast-track authority lapsed during the administration of George W. Bush, and Obama would like to revive it in hopes of passing his ambitious and murky Trans-Pacific Partnership pact, which many opponents on the left (http://www.citizen.org/tppaction) and right (http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/democrats-scramble-to-block-new-world-order/) fear will undermine the United States' ability to maintain its own labor and environmental protections.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/29/harry-reid-fast-track_n_4689240.html

boutons_deux

01-30-2014, 12:08 PM

fast track authority may not get a vote in the Senate

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/29/harry-reid-fast-track_n_4689240.html

So no fast track.

But what happens when/if the TPP becomes a bill in Congress, and it becomes public info rather than a secret held only by negotiators and 100s of corporate representatives?

boutons_deux

06-19-2014, 04:50 PM

WikiLeaks Reveals Global Trade Deal Kept More Secret Than the Trans-Pacific Partnership

The whistleblower and transparency website WikiLeaks (http://www.wikileaks.org/) published on Thursday the secret draft text of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex, a controversial global trade agreement promoted by the United States and European Union that covers 50 countries and is opposed by global trade unions (http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org/en/article/international-trade-services-agreement-tisa-why-proposed-free-trade-agreement-fta-services-d) and anti-globalization activists.

Activists expect the TISA deal to promote privatization of public services in countries across the globe, and WikiLeaks said the secrecy surrounding the trade negotiations exceeds that of even the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) that has made headlines in the past year.

Demonstrations erupted in Geneva (http://www.world-psi.org/en/anti-tisa-demonstration-geneva-28-april-2014) in April as diplomats met in secret for the sixth round of negotiations over TISA, which would cover international trade in a wide range of service industries ranging from finance and telecommunications to transportation and even local utilities such as water. Protesters demanded that the draft text be released, but it has remained secret until now.

Public Services International (PSI), a global trade union federating public service workers in 150 countries, has reported that TISA (http://www.world-psi.org/sites/default/files/documents/research/en_tisaresearchpaper_hqp_internal.pdf)threatens to allow multinational corporations to permanently privatize vital public services such as healthcare and transportation in countries across the world.

"This agreement is all about making it easier for corporations to make profits and operate with impunity across borders," said PSI General Secretary Rosa Pavanelli in response to the leak. "The aim of public services should not be to make profits for large multinational corporations. Ensuring that failed privatizations can never be reversed is free-market ideology gone mad."

http://truth-out.org/news/item/24486-wikileaks-tisa-global-trade-deal-kept-more-secret-than-the-trans-pacific-partnership

Winehole23

06-25-2014, 08:10 AM

David Cay Johnston has more on the same:

WikiLeaks last week again pierced the veil of official secrecy that surrounds global trade negotiations. The peek it gave us should alarm everyone.

Big Business and national governments wanted to conceal the terms of the proposed Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) while keeping consumers, unions, environmentalists and the vast majority of businesses in the dark. Thanks to WikiLeaks, they failed.

The draft agreement WikiLeaks released (https://wikileaks.org/tisa-financial/press.html) on June 19 is fresh, written in May. It is a model of secret law, blatant in its disregard for transparency, democratic process and history. Its opening page says the terms are to remain secret for five years after negotiations formally end or the proposed new rules take effect. Talks to refine that agreement were to resume Monday in Geneva.

Even the secrecy-shrouded Trans Pacific Partnership (http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/12/jobs-employment-freetradeagreementstpp.html) that President Barack Obama and his Big Business allies want to ram through Congress without changes and only perfunctory debate does not include a five-year veil of secrecy after adoption. WikiLeaks has released (https://wikileaks.org/tpp/) a portion of TPP draft documents to the public.

It is impossible to obey a law or know how it affects you when the law is secret. And that is what this agreement would be, a new rulebook for trade in services — principally banking, insurance and trusts.
The 18-page draft agreement involves 50 nations, which produce more than two-thirds of officially measured global economic activity. That means the consequences of the new rules would be enormous, especially for those living in the more than 140 countries not taking part in the talks. Whether people can get loans or buy insurance and at what prices as well as what jobs may be available will be affected by any new trade rules.

Keeping us in the dark
The TISA leak marked the second anniversary of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s taking refuge in Ecuador’s London Embassy, demonstrating that he may be cornered but he has not given up the fight for open government.

If this is the first you have heard of this agreement, it is not surprising. Not one of the five big American newspapers — The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and USA Today — wrote a word about the document. Ditto the major TV networks.

Why the secrecy? Why shut down the marketplace of ideas?

The answer becomes obvious upon reading the draft: It is intended to subvert the creation, by governments, of rules that benefit all of society and instead make sure the rules enhance the power of the financial services industry and reduce its accountability.

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/6/wikileaks-trade-inservicesagreementsecrecy.html

boutons_deux

08-04-2014, 06:16 AM

"corporate sovereignty" takes a blow from Germany

Germany U-Turns, Torpedoes Corporate Sovereignty Charter in Trade Agreements With US and Canada, Resistance Grows

German EU diplomats confirmed in Brussels on Friday that the [German] federal government could not sign the agreement with Canada “as it is now negotiated.” Germany is, in principle, ready to initial the agreement in September, but the chapter on the legal protection of investors is “problematic” and currently not acceptable.

As the Transnational Institute (http://www.tni.org/sites/www.tni.org/files/download/vattenfall-icsid-case_oct2013.pdf) reports, Germany currently heads the list of states to have signed such agreements, with a total of 139 signed BITs, of which 130 have entered into force. In the vast majority of these agreements investors have the right to apply for international arbitration (investor-state arbitration) when they feel there has been an alleged breach of a treaty provision. This right of action was increasingly included in BITS from the 1980s onwards, but it wasn’t until the end of the 1990s that investors began to widely and offensively sue host states.

Since then, nearly 400 known arbitration cases have been launched under these agreements. However, due to the acute lack of transparency and accountability of the international arbitration system, the total number of cases remains unknown.

What is known, thanks to recent figures published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, is that almost half of new ISDS cases in 2013 were filed against developed countries – most of them against EU member states, including Germany. In the last decade it has been sued twice for billions of euros a piece – and what’s more, by the same company!

An Expensive Battle Over Germany Energy Policy

That company is Berlin-based energy giant Vattenfall AG, a subsidiary of Vattenfall AB, which is wholly-owned by the Swedish state. Vattenfall’s first complaint, for €1.4 billion, came on the back of Germany’s decision to reduce the damaging effects of carbon dioxide emissions from a coal-fired power plant owned by Vattenfall.

Then, following the Fukushima disaster, Germany decided to close a nuclear power plant also owned by Vattenfall, which hit back by taking the country to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. The Swedish firm claims that it has suffered no less than €3.7 billion in losses and lost profits resulting from the government’s decision to phase out nuclear power.

Interestingly, neither of Vattenfall’s challenges argues that its power plants are actually safe or environmentally sound; the sole focus is on protecting investors from losing money. As I wrote in “The Global Corporatocracy Is Just A Few Strokes of a Pen From Completion (http://ragingbullshit.com/2014/06/21/the-global-corporatocracy-is-just-a-few-strokes-of-a-pen-from-completion/),” it is this exclusive focus on investor rights – at the expense of all other considerations – that is at the root of all that is wrong with the new generation of “free” trade treaties:

If allowed to take universal effect, the system will impose above you, me, and our governments a rigid framework of international corporate law designed to exclusively protect the interests of corporations, relieving them of all financial risk and social and environmental responsibility.

http://wolfstreet.com/2014/08/01/germany-u-turns-torpedoes-corporate-sovereignty-charter-in-trade-agreements/

so if a company/investors thinks a govt policy cost it money, under these "corporate sovereignty" agreements, a company/investors can fleece that govt's taxpayers.

fuck corporations to hell

corporations NEVER had, or have any "social and environmental responsibility". Their only responsibility is to make profits, and abuse, even break, the spirit of any law that reduces their profits.

boutons_deux

11-10-2014, 04:44 PM

Election Results Indicate Huge Mandate for New Trade Pacts

Let's just be clear what these trade deals are about. They have nothing to do with "free trade," in spite of the fact that the media routinely use that term to help sell TPP and TTIP. The formal trade barriers in the form of tariffs and quotas are already very low. This means that the traditional argument of gains from trade does not apply. These pacts are about putting in place a set of pro-business rules and regulations that would never pass through the normal political process.

To start with the most egregious example, one of the main goals of the United States is to establish a system of special courts that would override the legal system in each country, including the United States. These investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals would have the final say on most matters involving conflicts with foreign investors.

The rationale for a system of ISDS is that foreign investors may be wary about investing in a country without a tradition of an independent judiciary that can be trusted to treat them fairly. While this may be an arguable position in some cases, does anyone really think that German, Dutch or US courts can't be trusted to treat foreign investors fairly?

In addition to establishing this extra-legal structure, these deals would also limit the ability of national and state governments to impose environmental regulations, workplace safety regulations, food safety regulations and Internet privacy regulations. It could also limit the ability to have labor regulations like a higher minimum wage or rules on paid sick days.
The pacts are also likely to include a number of protectionist measures that will raise costs and reduce trade and growth. In particular, the pharmaceutical industry is trying to increase the length and scope of government granted patent monopolies. This will mean more drugs like Sovaldi selling for $84,000 a treatment, when the generic version can be sold for a few hundred dollars. And, they want longer and stronger copyright protection so they can imprison people (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/technology/the-unrepentant-bootlegger.html) for sharing music and videos without permission.

TPP and TTIP are everything that people hate about Washington. They are deals being crafted in secret by business interests for business interests. They are never going to be subject to any serious political debate involving the public at large. And the leaders of both political parties are in cahoots on the trade deals and the route for pushing them through Congress.

Just to be clear, there are trade deals that could boost growth and benefit most of the public. We could eliminate licensing rules that make it difficult for foreign professionals like doctors and lawyers from practicing in the United States. Bringing the pay of our professionals down to levels in Europe and Canada would save consumers hundreds of billions of dollars a year and provide a real boost to growth. We can also have trade agreements that reduce rather increase patent protection, saving us hundreds of billions of dollars on prescription drugs and other items.

But that would be the structure of trade agreements negotiated in the public interest. That is not we see in the United States. We instead get the elite media and politicians shoving TPP and TTIP down our throats regardless of how people vote.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27337-election-results-indicate-huge-mandate-for-new-trade-pacts

Winehole23

01-10-2015, 01:12 PM

http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/sandersustrletter.pdf

Winehole23

01-10-2015, 01:17 PM

Tariffs are already low. Negotiations now involve such things as intellectual property, financial regulations, labor laws, and rules for health, safety, and the environment.

It's no longer free trade versus protectionism. Big corporations and Wall Street want some of both.

They want more international protection when it comes to their intellectual property and other assets. So they've been seeking trade rules that secure and extend their patents, trademarks, and copyrights abroad, and protect their global franchise agreements, securities, and loans.

But they want less protection of consumers, workers, small investors, and the environment, because these interfere with their profits. So they've been seeking trade rules that allow them to override these protections.
Not surprisingly for a deal that's been drafted mostly by corporate and Wall Street lobbyists, the TPP provides exactly this mix.

http://robertreich.org/

boutons_deux

01-10-2015, 01:57 PM

Vetoing TTP and its Atlantic accomplice TTIP would rank up with ACA, imo, as Barry's pro-99% legacy, but he seems ready to sign both.

TTP and TTIP = US middle classed get (even more) raped into the lower class.

boutons_deux

01-10-2015, 02:20 PM

TTP and TTIP both expand "investor state dispute settlement" powers such that investors can further shake down governements(taxpayers) for $100Ms and probably many $10Bs over the years.

TTP and TTIP consecrate, enshrine supra-state BigCorps as the supreme powers on the planet, with govts(people) as weak, bullied accomplices. iow, Na'vi gonna win big. Sky People gonna own, take down all the Home Trees.

boutons_deux

01-10-2015, 05:10 PM

Congressional Leaders Reject Wall Street’s Push for Deregulatory “Trade” Pacts (http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2014/12/congressional-leaders-reject-wall-streets-push-for-deregulatory-trade-pacts.html)

As proposed, both pacts would include controversial foreign investor privileges (http://www.citizen.org/investorcases)that would empower some of the world’s largest banks to demand U.S. taxpayer money for having to comply with U.S. financial stability policies.

Including such provisions in the TPP could expose American taxpayers to billions of dollars in losses and dissuade the government from establishing or enforcing financial rules that impact foreign banks. The consequence would be to strip our regulators of the tools they need to prevent the next crisis.

Rep. Waters and Reps. Lacy Clay, Keith Ellison, and Raúl Grijalva sent a similar letter (http://democrats.financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2014.12.01_house_letter_to_administration_on_finan cial_services_in_ttip.pdf) to Froman that called for ISDS to be excluded from TAFTA to safeguard financial stability, stating:
Private foreign investors should not be empowered to circumvent U.S. courts, go before extrajudicial tribunals and demand compensation from U.S. taxpayers because they do not like U.S. domestic financial regulatory policies with which all firms operating here must comply.

Warren, Baldwin, and Markey made clear in their letter that such anachronistic rules must not be inserted into a binding pact:

To protect consumers and to address sources of systemic financial risk, Congress must maintain the flexibility to impose restrictions on harmful financial products and on the conduct or structure of financial firms. We would oppose including provisions in the TPP that would limit that flexibility.

So did Representatives Waters, Clay, Ellison, and Grijalva:

TTIP should also not replicate rules from past trade agreements that restrict the use of capital controls, which the International Monetary Fund and leading economists have endorsed as legitimate policy tools for preventing and mitigating financial crises. Nor should TTIP include provisions that could limit Congress’ prerogative to enact a financial transaction tax to curb speculation while generating revenue.

We believe it is highly inappropriate to include terms implicating financial regulation in an industry-dominated, non-transparent “trade” negotiation. Financial regulations do not belong in a framework that targets regulations as potential “barriers to trade.” Such a framework could chill or roll back post-crisis efforts to re-regulate finance on both sides of the Atlantic whereas further regulation of the sector is much needed.

http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/

======================

Bill Black: Obama’s Vain Search for a TPP “Legacy” (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/01/bill-black-obamas-vain-search-tpp-legacy.html)

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/01/bill-black-obamas-vain-search-tpp-legacy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capi talism%29

boutons_deux

01-30-2015, 12:37 PM

Let's Take Apart the Corporate Case for Fast Track Trade Authority

The promoters of fast track say we need it to push “trade” agreements through Congress to expand trade and increase exports. “What we’re going to do through this trade agreement is open up markets,” Froman told Congress Tuesday, “and then level the playing field so we can protect workers, protect American jobs and then ensure a fair and level playing field by raising labor and environmental standards, raising intellectual property rights, standards and enforcement, making sure that we’re putting disciplines on state-owned enterprises that pose a real threat to workers.”

Saying that 95 percent of the world’s markets are outside the U.S. implies that we need TPP and other agreements because we are currently not selling goods to 95 percent of the world. This is patently false. We sell goods and services around the world already. In fact, it contradicts other corporate arguments for these agreements like, “More than 38 million American jobs already depend on trade.”

This argument deceives people about the very nature of these agreements. Most of the objections being voiced over these coming agreements are about non-trade issues.

Only five of TPP’s 29 chapters deal with what people understand as “trade.”

So an argument that TPP and similar agreements will “expand trade” masks what the bulk of these agreements are really about, which is getting governments off the backs of the giant corporations and protecting their profits from competition and democratic regulation.

Just one example of this is the “investor-state dispute settlements” provision, which I have called “corporate courts (http://ourfuture.org/20140915/corporate-courts-a-big-red-flag-on-trade-agreements).” This part of “NAFTA-style” trade agreements, including TPP, allows corporations to sue governments that pass laws and regulations that interfere with profits.

Similar clauses in trade agreements around the world have, for example, enabled tobacco companies to sue governments (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-15815311) for trying to protect the health of their citizens. Under TPP these suits will be adjudicated by corporate attorneys, not democratically constituted courts.

Other examples are expanded copyright and patent protection for the giant multinationals, which will increase the cost of pharmaceutical products and potentially restrict the freedom of the Internet.
Obviously the corporate advocates of these agreements want this, so they are using distraction, diversion and shiny promises of increased trade and more jobs to sell the agreements.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/29/lets-take-apart-corporate-case-fast-track-trade-authority

boutons_deux

02-04-2015, 11:50 AM

Ten Tall Tales on Trade: Fact-Checking Obama's Top Trade Official

http://www.truth-out.org/images/images_2015_02/2015_0202from_.jpg

Last week was a difficult for U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Michael Froman. He had to go before Congress and explain how the administration's plan to expand a trade model that has offshored U.S. manufacturing jobs and exacerbated middle class wage stagnation (http://citizen.org/documents/prosperity-undermined.pdf) fits with President Obama's stated "middle class economics" agenda.
Inconveniently for Mr. Froman, it does not (http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2015/01/obama-vs-obama-the-state-of-the-unions-self-defeating-trade-pitch.html).

That did not stop Froman from trying to paint the last two decades of Fast-Tracked (http://citizen.org/fast-track), pro-offshoring trade deals – and the administration's plan for more of the same – as a gift to the middle class.
The facts he cited to support this depiction actually sounded great. They just didn't have the added advantage of being true.

Here's a rundown of the top 10 fibs and half-truths that Froman uttered before the Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee last week in his sales pitch for the administration's bid to expand the NAFTA "trade" pact model by Fast-Tracking through Congress the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (http://citizen.org/tpp).

1. Fast Track Puts Congress in the Driver's Seat (of a Runaway Car, without Brakes or a Steering Wheel)

Froman: "[Fast Track] puts Congress in the driver's seat to define U.S. negotiating objectives and priorities for trade agreements."

Okay, let's go with this analogy. If reviving Fast Track puts Congress in the driver's seat, it also removes the brakes and steering wheel. Reviving Fast Track would empower the administration (http://www.citizen.org/documents/no-acceptable-fast-track.pdf) to negotiate and sign a sweeping "trade" pact like the TPP – implicating everything from the cost of medicines to the safety of food to the reform of Wall Street – before Congress had any enforceable say over the deal's contents, even if they contradicted Congress' stated negotiating objectives. Goodbye steering wheel. Congress' role would be relegated to an expedited, no-amendments, limited-debate vote on the already-signed deal. Goodbye brakes.

Also, if we're talking about Fast Tracking the TPP (http://www.citizen.org/documents/10-reasons-why-america-cannot-afford-fast-track.pdf), the car is already going 60mph. As a couple of members of Congress pointed out to Froman, the administration has been negotiating the TPP for more than five years, and Froman himself stated that TPP negotiations are in their endgame. Even if Froman's assertion were true that Fast Track allows Congress to define priorities for trade agreements (rather than ensuring that such priorities are not enforceable), it's a little late for members of Congress to be naming priorities for a deal that has been under negotiation since 2009 and that Froman hopes to close in the coming months.

2. A Trade Surplus with Our FTA Partners (Does Not Appear in Official Government Data)

Froman: "You take all of our FTA partners as a whole, [and] we have a trade surplus. And that trade surplus has grown." Froman also claimed that the United States has a trade surplus in manufactured goods with its FTA partners. And he tried to use red herrings to explain away the surging U.S. trade deficit with Korea under the Korea FTA.

These claims defy official U.S. government data. Data (http://dataweb.usitc.gov/) from the U.S. International Trade Commission show that the United States has a $180 billion U.S. goods trade deficit with all free trade agreement (FTA) partners (in 2013, the latest year on record). In manufactured goods, the United States has a $51 billion manufacturing trade deficit with all FTA partners. Froman claimed otherwise, in part, by counting billions of dollars' worth of "foreign exports" – goods produced abroad that simply pass through the United States without alteration before being "re-exported." These goods, by definition (https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/reference/definitions/#F), do not support U.S. production jobs.

Contributing to our FTA deficit is the 50 percent surge in the U.S. goods trade deficit with Korea (http://www.citizen.org/documents/Korea-FTA-USTR-data-debunk.pdf) in just the first two years of the Korea FTA, which literally was used as the U.S. template for the TPP. This deficit increase, owing to a drop in exports and rise in imports, spells the loss of more than 50,000 American jobs in the FTA's first two years, according to the ratio used by the administration to claim the pact would create jobs. Froman tried to explain away the ballooning U.S. trade deficit under the Korea FTA as due to decreases in corn and fossil fuel exports. But even if discounting both corn and fossil fuels, U.S. annual exports to Korea still fell under the FTA, and the annual trade deficit with Korea still soared. Product-specific anomalies cannot explain away the broad-based downfall of U.S. exports to Korea under the FTA, which afflicted nine of the top 15 U.S. sectors that export to Korea. The disappointing results also cannot be blamed on low growth in Korea since the FTA. Though Korea's growth rates in the last several years have not been spectacular, the economy has still grown since the FTA (3 percent in 2013), as has consumption (2.2 percent, adjusted for inflation, in 2013). Koreans are buying more goods, just not U.S. goods.

3. We Wish to Ensure Access to Affordable Medicines in the TPP (but Big Pharma Won't Let Us)

Froman: "In negotiations, like TPP, we are working to ensure access to affordable life-saving medicines, including in the developing world, and create incentives for the development of new treatment and cures that benefit the world and which create the pipeline for generic drugs."

These words play politics with people's lives. They cloak the tragic reality that if the TPP would take effect as USTR has proposed, with leaks showing even greater monopoly protections for pharmaceutical corporations (http://www.aflcio.org/content/download/146881/3760211/file/TPP-Joint+Letter+Dec+17+2014+FINAL.pdf) than in prior pacts, people would needlessly die for lack of access to affordable medicines. A new study (http://ssrn.com/abstract=2536254) finds, for example, that the TPP would dramatically reduce the share of Vietnam's HIV patients who have access to life-saving antiretroviral medicines. The study reveals that while 68 percent of Vietnam's eligible HIV patients currently receive treatment, U.S.-proposed monopoly protections for pharmaceutical corporations in the TPP would allow only 30 percent of Vietnam's HIV patients to access antiretrovirals. As a result, an estimated 45,000 people with HIV in Vietnam who currently receive antiretroviral treatment would no longer be able to afford the life-saving drugs.

Froman also indicated in the Senate hearing that USTR is pushing to include a special monopoly protection for pharmaceutical firms that contradicts the Obama administration's own stated objectives for reducing the cost of medicines in the United States (http://www.citizen.org/documents/TPP-threats-to-US-healthcare.pdf). President Obama's budget proposes to reduce a special monopoly protection for pharmaceutical firms with regard to biologic medicines – drugs used to combat cancer and other diseases that cost approximately 22 times more than conventional medicines (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/opinion/08so.html?_r=0). To lower the exorbitant prices and the resulting burden on programs like Medicare and Medicaid, the Obama administration's 2015 budget would reduce the period of Big Pharma's monopoly protection for biologics from 12 to seven years. The administration estimates this would save taxpayers more than $4.2 billion (http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2015/assets/budget.pdf) over the next decade just for federal programs. However, Froman suggested last week that USTR continues to push for the 12 years of corporate protection in the TPP, which would lock into place pharmaceutical firms' lengthy monopolies here at home while effectively scrapping the administration's own proposal to save billions in unnecessary healthcare costs.

4. Most Exporters are Small Businesses (that Have Endured Slow and Falling Exports under FTAs)

Froman: "15,600 firms export from Pennsylvania. Almost 90 percent of them are small and medium sized businesses. And the question is whether with these trade agreements we can create more opportunities for these kinds of businesses."

Implying that exporting is mainly the domain of small businesses because they make up most exporting firms is like implying that the NBA is a league of short people because most NBA players are shorter than 7 feet tall. The reason small and medium enterprises (defined as 500 employees or less) comprise most U.S. exporting firms is simply because they constitute 99.7 percent of U.S. firms overall (http://citizen.org/documents/prosperity-undermined.pdf) (in the same way that those of us below 7 feet constitute more than 99 percent of the U.S. population). The more relevant question is what share of small and medium firms actually depend on exports for their success. Only 3 percent of U.S. small and medium enterprises export any good to any country. In contrast, 38 percent of large U.S. firms are exporters. Even if FTAs actually succeeded in boosting exports (which they don't, per the government data noted below), exporting is primarily the domain of large corporations, not small businesses.

As for whether "with these trade agreements we can create more opportunities" for small firms, the record of past FTAs suggests not. Under the Korea FTA, U.S. small businesses have seen their exports to Korea decline even more sharply than large firms (a 14 percent vs. 3 percent downfall in the first year of the FTA). And small firms' exports to Mexico and Canada under NAFTA have grown more slowly than their exports to the rest of the world. Small businesses' exports to all non-NAFTA countries grew over 50 percent more than their exports to Canada and Mexico (74 percent vs. 47 percent) during a 1996-2012 window of data availability. The sluggish export growth owes in part to the fact that small businesses' exports grew less than half as much as large firms' exports to NAFTA partners (47 percent vs. 97 percent from 1996-2012).

5. We Try to Be Transparent (with the Corporate Advisors Who Can Access Secret Texts)

Froman: "And to ensure these agreements are balanced, we seek a diversity of voices in America's trade policy. The Administration has taken unprecedented steps to increase transparency… We have held public hearings soliciting the public's input on the negotiations and suspended negotiating rounds to host first-of-a-kind stakeholder events so that the public can provide our negotiators with direct feedback on the negotiations."

"A diversity of voices" is an odd way to describe the more than 500 official trade advisors with privileged access to secretive U.S. trade texts and U.S. trade negotiators. About nine out of ten of these advisors explicitly represent industry interests. Just 10 of the more than 500 advisors (less than 2 percent) represent environmental, consumer, development, food safety, financial regulation, Internet freedom, or public health organizations. It's little wonder that so many of these groups, excluded from setting the content of the TPP, have denounced leaked TPP texts as presenting threats to the public interest. And as for the claim of "unprecedented steps to increase transparency," the reality is closer to the opposite (http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2013/06/for-once-we-have-some-good-news-after-years-of-calling-for-release-of-the-secretive-draft-text-of-the-trans-pacific-partner.html). When the Bush administration negotiated the last similarly sweeping trade pact – the Free Trade Area of the Americas – USTR published the negotiating text online for anyone to see amid negotiations. In a step backwards from the degree of transparency exhibited by the Bush administration, the Obama administration has refused repeated calls from members of Congress and civil society organizations to release TPP texts. This secrecy limits the utility of the public hearings and stakeholder events that Froman touts, as it is difficult to opine on a text you are prohibited from seeing.

boutons_deux

02-04-2015, 11:50 AM

6. Supporting Manufacturing and Higher Wages (Is a Goal in Spite of Our Trade Policies)

Froman: "In 2015, the Obama Administration will continue to pursue trade policies aimed at supporting the growth of manufacturing and associated high-quality jobs here at home and maintaining American manufacturers' competitive edge."

The only objectionable word in this sentence is "continue." Since NAFTA, we have endured (http://www.bls.gov/ces/) a net loss of nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs – one out of every four – and more than 57,000 manufacturing facilities. While not all of those losses are due to NAFTA, the deal's inclusion of special protections for firms that relocate abroad certainly contributed to the hemorrhaging of U.S. manufacturing. The U.S. manufactured goods trade balance with Canada and Mexico in NAFTA's first 20 years changed from a $5 billion surplus in 1993 to a $64.9 billion deficit in 2013. The U.S. Department of Labor has certified (under one narrow program) more than 845,000 specific U.S. workers (http://www.citizen.org/taadatabase) – many of them in manufacturing – as enduring "trade-related" job losses since NAFTA due to the offshoring of their factories to Mexico or Canada, or import competition from those countries. And under just two years of the Korea FTA, U.S. manufacturing exports to Korea have fallen. Overall, the United States has a $51 billion trade deficit in manufactured goods with its 20 FTA partners. Reviving manufacturing and reviving Fast Track for the NAFTA-expanding TPP are incompatible.

Froman: "At a time when too many workers haven't seen their paychecks grow in much too long, these jobs typically pay up to 18% more on average than non-export related jobs."

Froman neglects to mention a key reason that too many workers haven't seen their paychecks grow: NAFTA-style deals have not only incentivized the offshoring of well-paying U.S. manufacturing jobs, but forced these workers to compete for lower-paid service sector jobs, which has contributed to downward pressure on wages (http://citizen.org/documents/prosperity-undermined.pdf) even in non-offshoreable sectors. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about three out of every five displaced manufacturing workers who were rehired in 2014 experienced a wage reduction. About one out of every three displaced manufacturing workers took a pay cut of greater than 20 percent. As increasing numbers of American workers, displaced from better-paying jobs by current trade policies, have joined the glut of workers competing for non-offshoreable jobs in retail, hospitality and healthcare, real wages have actually been declining in these growing sectors. A litany of studies has produced an academic consensus (http://www.citizen.org/documents/memo-trade-and-us-income-inequality.pdf) that such trade dynamics have contributed to the historic increase in U.S. income inequality – the only debate is the degree to which trade is to blame. The TPP would not only replicate, but actually expand, NAFTA's extraordinary privileges for firms that relocate abroad (http://www.citizen.org/documents/Leaked-TPP-Investment-Analysis.pdf) and eliminate many of the usual risks that make firms think twice about moving to low-wage countries like Vietnam – a TPP negotiating partner where minimum wages average less than 60 cents an hour, making the country a low-cost offshoring alternative to even China.

7. The TPP Supports an Internet that Is Open (to Lawsuits for Common Online Activity)

Froman: "We will continue to support a free and open Internet that encourages the flow of information across the digital world."

Repetition of this platitude has failed to assuage the concerns of Internet freedom groups that point out that leaked TPP texts do not support Froman's assurances (https://www.eff.org/files/2014/07/08/ispliability_letter_print-fnl-9july2014.pdf). In a July 2014 letter, an array of Internet service providers, tech companies, and Internet freedom groups wrote to Froman about leaked TPP copyright terms, some of which resemble provisions in the defeated Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which could "significantly constrain legitimate online activity and innovation." Noting the deal's terms on Internet service provider liability, the groups stated, "We are worried about language that would force service providers throughout the region to monitor and policy their users' actions on the internet, pass on automated takedown notices, block websites and disconnect Internet users."

8. Our Exports Have Grown (More Quickly to Non-FTA Countries)

Froman: "Our total exports have grown by nearly 50 percent and contributed nearly one-third of our economic growth since the second quarter of 2009. In 2013, the most recent year on record, American exports reached a record high of $2.3 trillion..." "By opening rapidly expanding markets with millions of new middle-class consumers in parts of the globe like the Asia-Pacific, our trade agreements will help our businesses and workers access overseas markets..."

U.S. goods exports grew by a grand total of 0 percent in 2013 (http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2014/02/2013-trade-data-usitc-corrections-of-last-weeks-census-data-show-why-obamas-tpp-fast-track-quest-is-.html). The year before that, they grew by 2 percent. As a result, the administration utterly failed to reach President Obama's stated goal to double U.S. exports from 2009 to 2014. Most of the export growth Froman cites – which is less than half of the administration's stated objective – came early in Obama's tenure as a predictable rebound from the global recession that followed the 2007-2008 financial crisis. At the abysmal export growth rate seen since then, we will not reach Obama's stated goal to double 2009's exports until 2054, 40 years behind schedule.

Froman ironically uses this export growth drop-off to argue for more-of-the-same trade policy (e.g. the TPP). The data simply does not support the oft-parroted pitch that we need TPP-style FTAs to boost exports. In the first two years of the Korea FTA, U.S. exports to Korea have fallen 5 percent. Overall, growth of U.S. exports to countries that are not FTA partners has exceeded U.S. export growth to countries that are FTA partners (http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2014/02/2013-trade-data-usitc-corrections-of-last-weeks-census-data-show-why-obamas-tpp-fast-track-quest-is-.html) by 30 percent over the last decade. That's not a solid basis from which to argue, in the name of exports, for yet another FTA.

And if we're seeking to export to those countries that are growing the fastest, then the TPP is the wrong trade pact. Of the TPP countries with which we do not already have an FTA, all but one are actually growing more slowly (http://databank.worldbank.org/data/home.aspx) than the per capita growth rate of the East Asian and Pacific region overall.

9. Increases in Food Exports (Have Been Swamped by a Surge in Food Imports)

Froman: "In 2013, U.S. farmers and ranchers exported a record $148.7 billion of food and agricultural goods to consumers around the world."

Yes, U.S. food exports have increased, but not nearly as much as food imports (http://www.citizen.org/documents/food-under-nafta-wto.pdf). In 2013, the total volume of U.S. food exports stood just 0.5 percent higher than in 1995, while imports of food into the United States had more than doubled (growing 115 percent since 1995). Existing FTAs have contributed to the imbalanced food trade. The average annual U.S. agricultural deficit with Canada and Mexico under NAFTA's first two decades reached $975 million, almost three times the pre-NAFTA level. And under the first two years of the Korea FTA, U.S. agricultural exports to Korea plummeted 34 percent. Smaller-scale U.S. family farms have been hardest hit. About 170,000 small U.S. family farms have gone under since NAFTA and NAFTA expansion pacts have taken effect, a 21 percent decrease in the total number.

10. The TPP Takes Heed of NAFTA's Mistakes (and Builds on Them)

Froman: "I think the President has made clear that as we pursue a new trade policy, we need to learn from the experiences of the past and that's certainly what we're doing through TPP and the rest of our agenda. For example, when he was running for President, he said we ought to renegotiate NAFTA. What that meant was to make labor and environment not side issues that weren't enforceable, but to bring labor and environment in the core of the agreement and make them enforceable just like any other provision of the trade agreement consistent with what Congress and the previous administration worked out in the so-called May 10th agreement."

When candidate Obama said in 2008 that he would renegotiate NAFTA – a pact that had become broadly unpopular (http://www.citizen.org/documents/polling-memo.pdf) for incentivizing the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing jobs – most people probably didn't imagine that he meant expanding those offshoring incentives further. But the TPP would extend further NAFTA's extraordinary privileges for firms that relocate abroad (http://www.citizen.org/documents/tpp-nafta-on-steroids-infographic.png) to low-wage countries (like TPP negotiating partner Vietnam). Most people also probably would not expect "learning from the experiences of the past" to lead to an expansion of the monopoly protections that NAFTA gave to pharmaceutical corporations, thereby reducing the availability of generics and increasing the cost of medicines. But Froman himself stated last week that such corporate protections – antithetical to textbook notions of "free trade" – are part of the TPP's NAFTA-plus provisions.

And though Froman touts the May 10 deal as an improvement over NAFTA for labor rights, a recent government report has shown the May 10 provisions to be ineffective at curbing labor abuses in FTA partner countries. A November 2014 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found broad labor rights violations across all five surveyed FTA partner countries (http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/666787.pdf), regardless of whether or not the FTA included the labor provisions of the vaunted May 10 deal, including unionist murders in Colombia and impunity for union-busting in Peru. Several of the TPP negotiating partners are notorious labor rights abusers – four of them were cited in a recent Department of Labor report for using child and/or forced labor (http://www.dol.gov/ilab/reports/pdf/TVPRA_Report2014.pdf). Vietnam, meanwhile, outright bans independent unions. Why would incorporation of the same terms that have failed to curb labor abuses in existing FTAs be expected to end the systematic labor rights abuses of TPP partners?

And despite the May 10 deal's environmental provisions, the TPP's extraordinary investment provisions (http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=5411) would empower thousands of foreign firms to bypass domestic courts, go before extrajudicial tribunals, and challenge new domestic environmental protections as "frustrating their expectations." Corporations have already used such foreign investor privileges under existing U.S. FTAs to attack a moratorium on fracking, renewable energy programs, and requirements to clean up oil pollution and industrial toxins (http://www.citizen.org/documents/egregious-investor-state-attacks-case-studies.pdf). Tribunals comprised of three private attorneys have already ordered taxpayers to pay hundreds of millions to foreign firms for such safeguards, arguing that they violate sweeping FTA-granted investor privileges that the TPP would expand. Provisions, such as those in the May 10 deal, that call for countries to enforce their environmental laws sound hollow under a TPP that would simultaneously empower corporations to "sue" countries for said enforcement.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/28863-ten-tall-tales-on-trade-fact-checking-obama-s-top-trade-official

boutons_deux

02-05-2015, 04:34 PM

New Trade Data Come at the Worst Possible Time for Obama (http://www.thenation.com/blog/197273/new-trade-data-come-worst-possible-time-obama)

President Obama’s push for a massive new trade deal with Asia is predicated on the idea it will help everyday Americans: that it will “level the playing field for the middle class,” in Obama’swords (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/02/obama-trade-ruben-gallego-114892.html). But as the debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership enters its endgame, newly released government data about the US trade deficit shows recent trade deals have done the opposite of what was promised—and have inflicted added damage on American jobs.

The Census Bureau’s annual trade data for 2014 (http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/current_press_release/ft900.pdf), released Thursday morning, shows the US trade deficit in 2014 jumped 6 percent to $505 billion in 2013. This increase received a late boost from the December 2014 numbers, which showed at 17.1 percent increase in the trade deficit—resulting in the biggest trade imbalance since December 2012.

A country’s trade balance is a crucial economic indicator; a nation that is exporting far more goods than it is importing is generally in good economic health. Conversely, a country that is increasingly importing more than it exports—as is the case with the United States—is watching valuable dollars and jobs flow overseas.

The data shows a small, 1 percent growth in US exports for 2014, though the domestic oil and gas boom accounts for much of that. US manufacturing exports fell by more than $5 billion in 2014, and the US goods trade deficit rose to $736.8 billion. (More on that number in a minute; it doesn’t tell the full story.)

There’s a simple explanation for the widening trade deficit: the US dollar is strong, and there’s weak growth overseas, which would naturally depress exports.

But congressional critics of the TPP seized on a broader point on Thursday morning— robust promises about the benefits of past trade deals have turned out to be empty.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/197273/new-trade-data-come-worst-possible-time-obama

boutons_deux

02-13-2015, 11:31 AM

Doctors warn of healthcare impact from Pacific trade pact

Doctors and health professionals from both sides of the Pacific on Thursday said they worry that a major regional trade pact could result in higher medical costs and urged a full assessment of the pact's impact on healthcare.

In a letter to be published in The Lancet medical journal, academics and medical associations from seven of the 12 countries negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership voiced their concerns over the deal, which seeks to cut tariffs and set common standards on intellectual property.

"Rising medicine costs would disproportionately affect already vulnerable populations, obstructing efforts to improve health equity within and between countries," they wrote in the letter.

"We call on our governments to publicly release the full (TPP) draft text, and to secure independent and comprehensive assessments of the health and human rights consequences of the proposed agreement for each nation."

With the TPP talks nearing completion, one of the thorniest outstanding issues is the monopoly period for biologic drugs, which include some of the latest cancer treatments, such as Roche Holding AG's Herceptin for breast cancer and Merck & Co's Gardasil for cervical cancer.

The United States protects biologics for 12 years, while Japan protects them for eight years and Australia for five. Some other countries like Chile have no special protections at all.

The issue is particularly difficult for Australia and New Zealand, which have taxpayer-funded subsidy schemes for medicines. Costs could balloon if cheaper generic drugs are slower to come to market.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/12/us-trade-medicines-idUSKBN0LG34120150212?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews

boutons_deux

04-21-2015, 05:58 AM

Newly Leaked TTIP Draft Reveals Far-Reaching Assault on US/EU Democracy

Mammoth deal an even greater boon to corporate power than previously known, warn analysts

The European Commission's latest proposed chapter (http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/reconstructed_ec_proposal_regulatory_cooperation_m arch_2015_0.pdf) (pdf) on "regulatory cooperation" was first leaked to Friends of the Earth and dates to the month of March. It follows previous leaks (http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/03/12/united-states-ttip-big-business-constitution-europe) of the chapter, and experts say the most recent iteration is even worse.

"The Commission proposal introduces a system that puts every new environmental, health, and labor standard at European and member state level at risk. It creates a labyrinth of red tape for regulators, to be paid by the tax payer, that undermines their appetite to adopt legislation in the public interest,"

Regulatory cooperation refers to the "harmonization of regulatory frameworks between the E.U. and the U.S. once the TTIP negotiations are done," ostensibly to ensure such regulations do not pose barriers to trade,

"cooperation," in fact, allows corporate power to trample democratic protections, from labor to public health to climate regulations, while encouraging a race to the lowest possible standards.

The newest version of the regulatory cooperation chapter reveals that the European Commission is angling to impose even more barriers to regulations.
The chapter includes a "regulatory exchange" proposal, which will "force laws drafted by democratically-elected politicians through an extensive screening process,"

"Laws will be evaluated on whether or not they are compatible with the economic interests of major companies," the organization explains. "Responsibility for this screening will lie with the 'Regulatory cooperation body,' a permanent, undemocratic, and unaccountable conclave of European and American technocrats."

"What we are looking at here is potentially endless procedures at every step of the regulatory process, including once the legislation has been adopted,"

it would take power away from legislators and regulators and give it to this group of technocrats that is not elected and operates in secrecy,"

roposals for regulatory cooperation carry the threat of lowering standards in the long and short term, on both sides of the Atlantic, at the state and member state/European levels. They constrain democratic decision-making by strengthening the influence of big business over regulation."

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/04/20/newly-leaked-ttip-draft-reveals-far-reaching-assault-useu-democracy

TPP and TTIP would be essentially bloodless coups-d'etats, replacing national sovereignty with BigCorp and capitalists' rent-seeking.

If country passed a regulation that hurt, or prevented corporate profit, they would be sued and adjudicated in a secret, extra-judicial panel run by corrupt corporate lawyers.

boutons_deux

05-04-2015, 11:34 PM

TTP/TTIP are NOTHING A BIGCORP coup d'etat

Only members of the House and Senate are currently allowed to view the text of the deal, and even they are forbidden from discussing what it contains.

As a new report fromPolitico published Monday details (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/secrecy-eroding-support-for-trade-pact-critics-say-117581.html), "If you’re a member who wants to read the text, you’ve got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving."

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/05/04/secrecy-over-tpp-fuels-growing-opposition-congress

Nbadan

05-05-2015, 01:03 AM

Representative Alan Grayson of Florida has released a video explaining the monstrous trade deals that could be passed in secret if Fast Track authority is granted to President Obama

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=249&v=B7yX90EN5bM

boutons_deux

05-05-2015, 05:18 AM

Obama is lying when he says TPP and TTIP are not secret. They very obviously are being kept very secret. Even Congress was not allowed to the coup d'etat documents for years, until the last few months, and then only the highly restrictive conditions above, and then even Congress must keep the document secret from the public.

boutons_deux

05-12-2015, 03:12 PM

TPP loses

Procedural vote on debating fast-track legislation fails 53-45, with most Democrats in opposition (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/12/1384263/-Procedural-vote-on-debating-fast-track-legislation-fails-53-45-with-most-Democrats-in-opposition)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/12/1384263/-Procedural-vote-on-debating-fast-track-legislation-fails-53-45-with-most-Democrats-in-opposition?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos %29#

boutons_deux

05-12-2015, 03:36 PM

The 10 Biggest Lies You’ve Been Told About the Trans-Pacific Partnership

1. 40 PERCENT:

The President and his team have repeatedly described TPP as a deal involving nearly 40 percent of global GDP (https://ustr.gov/tpp/overview-of-the-TPP) [8]. This tells only part of the story. First of all, the U.S. by itself represents 22 percent of global GDP; a bill naming a post office would involve that much. Second, we already have free trade agreements with six TPP partners – Canada, Mexico, Australia, Singapore, Chile and Peru – and between them and us, that’s 80 percent of the total GDP in this deal. The vast majority of the rest is represented by Japan, where the average applied tariff is a skinny 1.2 percent, per the World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/TM.TAX.MRCH.WM.AR.ZS) [9].

You can see this paragraph in graphic form here (http://daviddayen.tumblr.com/post/118708311201?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma) [10]. The point is that saying TPP is about “40 percent of GDP” intimates that it would massively change the ability to export without tariffs. In reality it would have virtually no significance in opening new markets. To the extent that there’s a barrier in global trade today, it comes from currency manipulation (http://ourfuture.org/20140622/what-is-currency-manipulation) [11] by countries wanting to keep their exports cheap. The TPP has no currency provisions (http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/11/the-strong-dollar-is-hurting-u-s-manufacturing-theres-a-lesson-in-there-for-the-tpp/) [12].

2. JOB CREATION:

Saying, as the White House has, that the deal would support “an additional 650,000 jobs (http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/american-alliances-international-cooperation-by-john-f--kerry-2015-01#4bxmfbYemSPg1fzI.99) [13]” is not true. This figure came from a hypothetical calculation of a report (http://bookstore.piie.com/book-store/6642.html) [14] by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which the Institute itself said was an incorrect way to use their data. “We don’t believe that trade agreements change the labor force in the long run,” said Peter Petri, author of the report, in a fact check (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/01/30/the-obama-administrations-illusionary-job-gains-from-the-trans-pacific-partnership/) [15] of the claim.

The deal is actually more about building up barriers than taking them down. Much of TPP is devoted to increasing copyright and patent protections (http://www.cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/the-problem-of-protectionism-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership) [16] for prescription drugs and Hollywood media content. As economist Dean Baker (http://www.cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/the-problem-of-protectionism-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership) [16] notes, this is protectionist, and will raise prices for drugs, movies and music here and abroad.

3. EXPORTS ONLY:

The Administration constantly discusses trade as solely a question of U.S. exports. A recent Council of Economic Advisors report (https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/cea_trade_report_final_non-embargoed_v2.pdf) [17] touts: Exporters pay higher wages, and export industry growth translates into higher average earnings. But the Economic Policy Institute points out that this ignores imports (http://www.epi.org/blog/cea-report-is-simply-not-that-relevant-to-current-trade-policy-debates/) [18], and therefore the ballooning trade deficit (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/first-quarter-gdp-likely-negative-trade-deficit-soars.html) [19], which weighs down economic growth and wages. Talking about trade without discussing both imports and exports is like relaying the score of a ballgame by saying “Dodgers 4.” It is literally a half-truth. Recent trade deals have in fact increased the trade deficit (http://www.brown.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/brown-statement-following-presidents-visit-to-nike-facility) [20], such as the agreement with South Korea. Senator Sherrod Brown notes that the deal has only increased exports by $1 billion since 2011, while increasing imports by $12 billion, costing America 75,000 jobs.

4. MOST PROGRESSIVE:

Obama has called TPP “the most progressive trade deal in history (http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/28/politics/obama-abe-trade-trans-pacific-partnership/) [21].” First of all, so did Bill Clinton and Al Gore (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121670/obamas-tpp-arguments-mimic-gores-nafta-defense) [22], when talking about NAFTA in 1993. Second, there’s reason to believe TPP doesn’t even clear a low bar for progressive trade deals. The Sierra Club, based on a leaked TPP environmental chapter, said that the deal is weaker (http://action.sierraclub.org/site/DocServer/TPP_Enviro_Analysis.pdf?docID=14842) [23] than the landmark “May 10 agreement” (https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/factsheets/2007/asset_upload_file127_11319.pdf) [24] for deals with Peru, Panama and Colombia, struck in 2007. Key Democrats who devised labor and environmental standards for those agreements, like Rep. Sander Levin, believe (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-sander-/an-open-letter-to-progres_b_7257776.html) [25] that TPP falls short. Even if the chapters were up to par, consistent lack of enforcement (http://www.ticotimes.net/2015/05/10/op-ed-lets-see-a-trans-pacific-partnership-that-respects-workers-rights) [26] of the rules makes them ineffective. The U.S. Trade Representative has actually claimed the Colombia free trade agreement is positive because only one trade unionist in the country is being murdered every other week (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/04/u-s-trade-rep-office-helpfully-explains-28-trade-unionists-murdered-colombia-last-year.html) [27]. Labor groups can only ask the White House to enforce labor rights violations, and for the past several years, the Administration simply hasn’t (http://www.ticotimes.net/2015/05/10/op-ed-lets-see-a-trans-pacific-partnership-that-respects-workers-rights) [26]. So when Obama says violators of TPP will face “meaningful consequences,” based on the Administration’s prior enforcement, he’s lying.

5. CHANGING LAWS:

On the controversial topic of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), where corporations can sue sovereign governments for monetary damages for violating trade agreements that hurt the company’s “expected future profits,” the White House has engaged in a shell game. They say (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/05/08/obama_democratic_critics_of_free_trade_policy_are_ wrong.html) [28], “No trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws.” But the point of a corporation suing the United States or any trade partner is to put enough financial pressure on a government to force them to alter the law themselves. So ISDS doesn’t “cause” a change in law only in the narrowest sense. Even third-party countries have curtailed regulations in reaction to ISDS rulings, as New Zealand did (http://www.asiapathways-adbi.org/2015/03/investor-state-dispute-settlement-rule-of-law-or-law-of-the-jungle/) [29] with their cigarette packaging law, awaiting the outcome of a dispute between the tobacco industry and Australia (a suit that continues (http://doaneline.com/opinion/article_3d66aa66-b7da-11e4-9dce-8f3f114c5b69.html) [30] despite an initial victory for Australia).

6. NEVER LOST:

The White House assumes that the only thing America cares about with ISDS is the upsetting of our own laws. So they’ve stressed that the U.S. has never lost an ISDS case (http://www.railrode.net/wp-admin/v) [31]. This is irrelevant. What ISDS does is offer bailout insurance policy to multinational corporations. If they run into discrimination or regulatory squeezing by a foreign government, they can use an extra-judicial process to recoup their investment. Workers screwed over by trade agreements have no ability to sue governments; only corporations get this privilege.

The United States attracts businesses through our relative rule of law. When that insurance is granted to countries like Vietnam and Malaysia, it weakens our competitive advantage, and makes it simple for countries to outsource their operations. Their investment is protected, as is their ability to exploit cheap labor. This makes it impossible for America to compete.

7. WEAKENING DODD-FRANK:

Obama reacted strongly to Senator Warren’s charge that a future President could overturn financial regulations or other rules through trade deals. “I’d have to be pretty stupid,” Obama told Yahoo News (https://www.yahoo.com/politics/why-obama-is-happy-to-fight-elizabeth-warren-on-118537612596.html?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma) [4], to “sign a provision that would unravel” signature achievements like Dodd-Frank. I suppose he is, then, because modern trade agreements often seek to “harmonize” regulations, effectively setting a regulatory ceiling. This harmonization could, as Warren says (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/05/11/elizabeth-warren-fires-back-at-obama-heres-what-theyre-really-fighting-about/) [7], “punch holes in Dodd-Frank without directly repealing it,” by forcing regulators to roll back capital or leverage requirements.

European negotiators want a trade agreement with the U.S. called the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) to include a chapter “harmonizing” financial regulations. So far the Obama Administration has rejected this, while admitting the potential for regulatory harm. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told Congress (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/obama-aides-elizabeth-warren-trade-117703.html) [32] in December 2013, “Normally in a trade agreement, the pressure is to lower standards” on regulations, “and that’s something that we just think is not acceptable.” A future President might find it acceptable, and today’s vote on “fast-track” authority would give trade deals an expedited process, with no amendments or filibusters by Congress, for six years (http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-05/warren-says-dodd-frank-will-be-casualty-of-fast-track-trade-bill?cmpid=yhoo) [33], outlasting the current Administration. Scott Walker or Jeb Bush may decide it’s perfectly appropriate to undermine regulations in trade deals.

8. STOPPING CHINA:

President Obama frequently casts TPP as a way to “contain” China. “If we don’t write the rules for trade around the world, guess what, China will,” he said on Friday (http://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2015/05/08/obama-says-trade-deal-lets-us-write-the-rules-not-china/26970847/) [34]. This is so facile as to be totally meaningless. China is a major Pacific Rim economy, and will have a presence regardless of our actions. As former Clinton Defense Department official Chas Freeman writes (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/why-tpp-is-high-risk-low-reward-117658.html#.VVDpjFbTEpH) [35], “China has been and will remain an inseparable part of China’s success story.” Plus, as I’ve written in Salon (http://www.salon.com/2015/04/21/obamas_deal_with_the_devil_the_dangerous_treaty_th at_has_him_teaming_with_the_gop/) [36], weak “rule of origin” guidelines could allow China to import goods into TPP member countries without any tariffs, while freed from following any TPP regulations.

9. SECRET DEAL:

Obama has angrily dismissed the notion that TPP is a “secret” deal, saying that everyone will have public access to the TPP text for at least 60 days before a final vote. This is not the point opponents are making. The vote on fast track would severely limit Congressional input into the deal. And right now, members of Congress can only see the text in a secure room (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/secrecy-eroding-support-for-trade-pact-critics-say-117581.html#ixzz3ZAKixRFj) [37], without being able to bring staffers or take notes, or even talk about specifics in public. That makes the deal effectively secret during the fast track vote. “The president has only committed to letting the public see this deal after Congress votes to authorize fast track,” Warren told Greg Sargent (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/05/11/elizabeth-warren-fires-back-at-obama-heres-what-theyre-really-fighting-about/) [7]. The President wants to filibuster-proof the bill in secret, then employ pretend transparency on TPP after that.

10. JUST A POLITICIAN:

This idea from Obama that everybody opposing fast-track is acting like a mere “politician,” aside from demonizing the concept of representing constituents, neglects the fact that he’s a politician too. His interest in building a legacy, when practically nothing else has the potential to pass Congress the next two years, is a political interest. His possible interest in rewarding campaign contributors who would benefit from TPP is also political, or his desire to earn the respect of the Very Serious People who always support trade deals. Since Obama has a large platform and will not publicly debate any opponent (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/us/politics/obama-calls-elizabeth-warren-absolutely-wrong-on-trans-pacific-trade-deal.html?_r=0) [38] on trade, he can float above it all, acting like a principled soul only wanting to better the country rather than a transactional ward heeler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_heeler) [39]. This may be the biggest lie, that Obama’s somehow superior to everyone else in this debate.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/10-biggest-lies-youve-been-told-about-trans-pacific-partnership

Winehole23

05-12-2015, 11:03 PM

TPP losestl;dr

can it come up again?

pgardn

05-12-2015, 11:09 PM

Big Liz Warren showing off some strength.

Pretty impressive butt kicking.

Nbadan

05-12-2015, 11:25 PM

Good to see there is still a party that cares about saving American jobs...

Senate Democrats handed President Obama a stinging rebuke on Tuesday, blocking consideration of legislation granting their own president “fast track” power to complete a major trade accord with 11 nations in the Pacific Rim.

The Senate vote on a procedural motion to begin debating the bill to give the president “trade promotion authority,” was 52 to 45 in favor, eight short of the 60 needed for passage. Republicans and pro-trade Democrats said they will try to negotiate a trade package that can clear that threshold.

But the vote Tuesday presented Mr. Obama what might be a no-win situation. He may have to accept trade enforcement provisions he does not want to get the trade legislation through the Senate, but those same provisions might doom the Pacific trade negotiations that legislation is supposed to boost.

That is especially true for a measure demanding a crackdown on currency manipulation, which is strongly opposed by Japan and Malaysia, two of the 12 nations trying to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest trade accord in a generation.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/business/senate-vote-obama-fast-track-trade-deal.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
99

Nbadan

05-12-2015, 11:27 PM

Is Sen. Warren now the de facto leader of the Dem party?

Winehole23

05-12-2015, 11:37 PM

no way

Nbadan

05-12-2015, 11:39 PM

PP is a huge deal, negotiated in secret since c. 2005 during Bush by 600 corporate trade reps. Behind closed doors. The TPP's EU part, the T-TIP, has been actively protested by Europeans for some time.

This wide reaching corporate coup d'état will capture the neoliberal economic global Jewel in the Crown. Lobbying and pressure on TPP-opposed Dems., and increased news coverage now are to finalize Fast -Track passage of the Trade Agreement very soon.

Perennial WH financial figure, Larry Summers, Clinton's Treasury Secy. and Obama economic advisor cautioned Eliz. Warren in 2009 that there are only two kinds of people: insiders and outsiders. The one rule that insiders never break is talking against other insiders he said. Summers also recently told Warren to tone down criticism of proposed changes favoring banks in budget negotiations.

Marginalizing Warren serves several purposes for corporate centrists who view her as an annoyance or threat especially in obtaining the green light for the TPP. Obama said he was closer to a moderate Republican years back and so to some his fight for this trade deal is no surprise, for others it's puzzling and out of character.

Winehole23

05-12-2015, 11:44 PM

agree completely that Obama is a moderate Republican overall, not just in the area of trade: he kept Gates at DOD.

Nbadan

05-12-2015, 11:53 PM

If Obama is a moderate republican, then what does that make Hillary? That is what scares the shit out of Progressives and why Bernie Sanders is popular in those circles...also why progressives want to recruit Warren to run in 2016....remember this is the same group that co-opt Hillary in 2012

Winehole23

05-15-2015, 04:46 AM

If Obama is a moderate republican, then what does that make Hillary?Sure ain't a progressive, probably not even a commie. Might even be to the right of GWB,

(Medicare Part D 4ever!)

boutons_deux

05-18-2015, 08:55 AM

The Trojan Horse President

Stiglitz (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-secret-corporate-takeover-hidden-in-the-tpp-2015-05-13?page=2):

Fundamental to America's system of government is an impartial public judiciary, with legal standards built up over the decades, based on principles of transparency, precedent, and the opportunity to appeal unfavorable decisions. All of this is being set aside, as the new agreements call for private, non-transparent, and very expensive arbitration. Moreover, this arrangement is often rife with conflicts of interest; for example, arbitrators may be a "judge" in one case and an advocate in a related case.

If there ever was a one-sided dispute-resolution mechanism that violates basic principles, this is it. That is why I joined leading U.S. legal experts, including from Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley, in writing a letter to President Barack Obama explaining how damaging to our system of justice these agreements are.

Rules and regulations determine the kind of economy and society in which people live. They affect relative bargaining power, with important implications for inequality, a growing problem around the world. The question is whether we should allow rich corporations to use provisions hidden in so-called trade agreements to dictate how we will live in the twenty-first century. I hope citizens in the U.S., Europe, and the Pacific answer with a resounding no.

At the core of this Nobel Laureate's argument against the TPP deal is the simple fact that legal authority - basic, bedrock legal authority - would be transferred from the sovereign courts of the United States to multinational corporations if this "deal" comes to pass. Note well, also, this statement from Stiglitz: "Though corporations can bring suit, others cannot. If there is a violation of other commitments - on labor and environmental standards, for example - citizens, unions, and civil-society groups have no recourse."

Warren (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/05/11/elizabeth-warren-fires-back-at-obama-heres-what-theyre-really-fighting-about/):

The president has committed only to letting the public see this deal after Congress votes to authorize fast track. At that point it will be impossible for us to amend the agreement or to block any part of it without tanking the whole TPP. The TPP is basically done. If the president is so confident it's a good deal, he should declassify the text and let people see it before asking Congress to tie its hands on fixing it.

I understand that we want to be a nation that trades, that trade creates many benefits for us. But only if done on terms that strengthen the American economy and American worker. I should say the American family, because that's what this is really about.

A Republican President could easily use a future trade deal to override our domestic financial rules. And this is hardly a hypothetical possibility: We are already deep into negotiations with the European Union on a trade agreement and big banks on both sides of the Atlantic are gearing up to use that agreement to water down financial regulations. A six-year Fast Track bill is the missing link they need to make that happen.

Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders agrees (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/05/1355626/-Senator-Bernie-Sanders-The-Trans-Pacific-Trade-TPP-Agreement-Must-Be-Defeated):

Incredibly, while Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry and major media companies have full knowledge as to what is in this treaty, the American people and members of Congress do not. They have been locked out of the process.

The TPP follows in the footsteps of other unfettered free trade agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA and the Permanent Normalized Trade Agreement with China (PNTR). These treaties have forced American workers to compete against desperate and low-wage labor around the world. The result has been massive job losses in the United States and the shutting down of tens of thousands of factories. These corporately backed trade agreements have significantly contributed to the race to the bottom, the collapse of the American middle class and increased wealth and income inequality. The TPP is more of the same, but even worse.

TPP will allow corporations to outsource even more jobs overseas; Service Sector Jobs will be lost; manufacturing jobs will be lost; US sovereignty will be undermined by giving corporations the right to challenge our laws before international tribunals; wages, benefits, and collective bargaining will be threatened; our ability to protect the environment will be undermined; food safety standards will be threatened; prescription drug prices will increase, access to life saving drugs will decrease, and the profits of drug companies will go up; and Wall Street would benefit at the expense of everyone else.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/30815-the-trojan-horse-president

The hyper-secret TPP/TTIP are Barry's biggest, dumbfounding fuckups.

Repugs, tea baggers, etc are OUTRAGED at UN, Sharia, World Govt taking over American sovereignty, but Senate Repugs are lining up to hand American sovereignty to BigCorp, and not even, not only American BigCorp.

boutons_deux

05-18-2015, 02:26 PM

From a Democracy For America, DFA, newsletter:

There's a big -- brand new -- attack on Medicare that's just been added in the Senate to the Fast Track bill for the TPP. The bill would cut a whopping $700 million from Medicare, hurting seniors who need access to health care.

That's right, Republicans insisted on cutting Medicare spending to pay for a Trade Adjustment Assistance program that Democrats got added to the bill in order to support workers who lost their jobs due to trade deals like the TPP.

========================

Republicans Use TPP Trade Deal To Slash Medicare

http://www.politicususa.com/2015/05/18/republicans-tpp-agreement-slash-medicare.html

boutons_deux

05-19-2015, 08:29 AM

Elizabeth Warren Details Obama's Broken Trade Promises

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) issued a report Monday morning detailing decades of failed trade enforcement by American presidents including Barack Obama, the latest salvo in an ongoing (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/24/obama-tears-into-elizabet_n_7137854.html) public feud between (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/25/elizabeth-warren-tells-ob_n_7142850.html) Warren and Obama over the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Obama has repeatedly insisted the TPP will include robust labor protections, and has dismissed Warren's criticisms as "dishonest," "bunk" and "misinformation." On Monday, Warren fired back, showing that Obama simply has not effectively enforced existing labor standards in prior trade pacts. According to the report, a host of abuses, from child labor to the outright murder of union organizers, have continued under Obama's watch with minimal pushback from the administration.

"The United States does not enforce the labor protections in its trade agreements," the report reads, citing analyses from the Government Accountability Office, the State Department and the Department of Labor.

Warren's report undercuts an Obama public relations offensive that has repeatedly characterized TPP as "the most progressive trade deal in history."

labor unions and other critics say these measures have been ineffective. The AFL-CIO has been pressing for action on Guatemalan violations for Obama’s entire term in office, and the dispute remains unresolved. Meanwhile, as Warren's report documents, Guatemala remains one of the most dangerous places in the world for union workers. In 2013 and 2014, according to the AFL-CIO, 17 labor activists were murdered in Guatemala while the Obama administration pursued diplomatic action. Three of the slain union workers were reportedly killed during a dispute with a local government over unpaid back wages.

Much of Warren's trade critique has focused on the capacity for free trade pacts to undermine financial regulations. Last week, Canadian Finance Minister Joe Oliver gave a speech arguing that a key tenet of Obama's 2010 Wall Street reform lawviolates (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/14/canada-volcker-rule_n_7285098.html) the North American Free Trade Agreement.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/18/elizabeth-warren-obama-broken-trade-promises_n_7302734.html?ncid=newsltushpmg00000003

boutons_deux

05-19-2015, 09:06 AM

currency manipulation is not punished in TPP, as US (auto) mfrs struggle to export when US$ is strong

Car States Balk at Trade Pact

Opponents say president’s push could cost jobs and not result in a more open Japanese market

By WILLIAM MAULDIN

May 18, 2015 6:22 p.m. ETPresident Barack Obama’s Pacific trade agreement is raising alarms not only in Michigan and surrounding states dominated by Detroit’s Big Three, but also farther south where backers of Japanese car makers worry about the fate of current and future plants in the region.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/car-states-balk-at-trade-pact-1431987742

boutons_deux

05-19-2015, 10:40 AM

The Mis-selling of TPP

One of the great blog posts of all time was from Daniel Davies (http://blog.danieldavies.com/2004_05_23_d-squareddigest_archive.html), who declared — apropos of Iraq — that

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.

It’s a good dictum; and if you see a lot of lies, or at least misdirection, being used to sell a policy you should be very, very concerned about said policy.

And the selling of TPP just keeps getting worse.

William Daley’s pro-TPP op-ed (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/opinion/free-trade-is-not-the-enemy.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region) in today’s Times is just awful, on multiple levels. No acknowledgment that the real arguments are not about trade but about intellectual property and dispute settlement; on top of that a crude mercantilist claim that trade liberalization is good because it means more exports; some Dean Baker bait with numbers — $31 billion in trade surplus! All of 0.2 percent of GDP!

But what really annoyed me, even if it’s not necessarily the worst bit, was this:

But today, of the 40 largest economies, the United States ranks 39th in the share of our gross domestic product that comes from exports. This is because our products face very high barriers to entry overseas in the form of tariffs, quotas and outright discrimination.

Actually, no. We have a low export share because we’re a big country. Here’s population versus exports as a percentage of GDP for OECD countries:

(http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2015/05/19/the-mis-selling-of-tpp/#modal-lightbox)http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/05/19/opinion/051915krugman4/051915krugman4-superJumbo.png
(http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2015/05/19/the-mis-selling-of-tpp/#modal-lightbox)
(http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2015/05/19/the-mis-selling-of-tpp/#modal-lightbox)Population isn’t the only determinant — geography matters too, as the contrast between Luxembourg (in the middle of Europe) and Iceland shows. But claiming that the relatively low US export share says anything at all about trade barriers makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

If this is the best TPP advocates can come up with, this is not looking like a good idea.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krugman/2015/05/19/the-mis-selling-of-tpp/

boutons_deux

05-19-2015, 10:47 AM

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.

.... as in: Repugs/PNAC in 2001-2003 telling LOTS OF LIES about Iraq

Nbadan

05-20-2015, 01:19 AM

Krugman's thinking about TPP
May 17 3:46 pm May 17 3:46 pm 124

I’m getting increasingly unhappy with the way the Obama administration is handling the dispute over TPP. I understand the case for the deal, and while I still lean negative I’m not one of those who believes that it would be an utter disaster.

But the administration — and the president himself — don’t help their position by being dismissive of the complaints and lecturing the critics (Elizabeth Warren in particular) about how they just have no idea what they’re talking about. That would not be a smart strategy even if the administration had its facts completely straight — and it doesn’t. Instead, assurances about what is and isn’t in the deal keep turning out to be untrue. We were assured that the dispute settlement procedure couldn’t be used to force changes in domestic laws; actually, it apparently could. We were told that TPP couldn’t be used to undermine financial reform; again, it appears that it could.

How important are these concerns? It’s hard to judge. But the administration is in effect saying trust us, then repeatedly bobbling questions about the deal in a way that undermines that very trust.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/?_r=0

boutons_deux

05-20-2015, 05:17 AM

Warren says she isn't against trade, but she should be, since she knows damn well that since capital flow controls were lifted and globalization was implemented since 1980, the WORLD's inequality, rich get incredibly richer and everybody else get poorer, has increased.

boutons_deux

05-21-2015, 10:31 AM

Hundreds of tech companies line up to oppose TPP trade agreement

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/20/hundreds-tech-companies-oppose-tpp-trade-agreement

boutons_deux

05-21-2015, 10:55 AM

Senate Advances Fast-Track For Obama Trade Deals

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and lead sponsor of the measure. He nevertheless argued for passage, saying

the nation’s “economic health and prestige are on the line here." :lol :lol :lol :lol

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/21/senate-trade-vote_n_7353138.html?ir=Politics&utm_campaign=052115&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Alert-politics&utm_content=FullStory&ncid=newsltushpmg00000003

boutons_deux

05-22-2015, 02:26 PM

Obscure Government Document Shows Elizabeth Warren Is Right About TPP

It's worth pointing out that the United States already trades heavily with the other 11 nations included in the TPP talks. As Paul Krugman says (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/this-is-not-a-trade-agreement/?_r=0), “this is not a trade agreement.

It's about intellectual property and dispute settlement; the big beneficiaries are likely to be pharma companies and firms that want to sue governments.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been particularly critical of the so-called Investor State Dispute Settlement provisions (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/05/11/elizabeth-warren-fires-back-at-obama-heres-what-theyre-really-fighting-about/), which would empower corporations to use international courts to sue the U.S. government and others who are enacting regulations and protections that harm their profits.

The Obama administration is arguing that the deal is instead about trade and increasing American exports abroad. They have set up a web page (https://ustr.gov/unitedstatesoftrade) on the U.S. Trade Representative's (USTR) site listing the benefits of exports from each of the fifty states in order to argue for the Trans-Pacific agreement.

Yet an obscure government document put out by that very same office makes Warren's case for her.

The office puts out an annual report on “foreign trade barriers” around the world, going country by country to list complaints the U.S. government has about their laws with respect to commerce.

If you read the 2015 report (http://combined.pdf/), you'll quickly see that

many of the complaints are about laws designed to promote environment, labor, and anti-monopolistic practices – and relate only vaguely to the larger issue of trade and tariffs. The complaints seem more focused around opposing regulations that restrict the rights of multi-national corporations and their investors.

http://www.alternet.org/obscure-government-document-shows-elizabeth-warren-right-about-tpp?akid=13131.187590.gkC3jW&rd=1&src=newsletter1036748&t=1

Obama is FUCKING LYING about TPP/TTIP.

boutons_deux

06-04-2015, 03:05 PM

WikiLeaks Releases Secret Documents Related to Controversial US Trade Pact

Document dump regarding Trade in Services Agreement comes day after organization put $100,000 bounty on documents from series of US trade treaties

Among the text leaked on Wednesday are Tisa’s annex on telecommunications services, an amendment that would standardize regulation of telecoms across member countries, according to WikiLeaks. Other documents in the batch of files relate to e-commerce, transportation of living people and regulation of financial services corporations.

Unions, which fear heavy job losses once long-standing trade protections are dismantled, reacted with dismay following publication of the previously hidden documents.
Public sector unions have sought protections for state funded services that could be threatened by increased competition. One proposal from Turkey that came to light following a previous leak of documents would endorse health tourism across all the countries covered by the deal.

Under the Turkish plan, people with health problems in the US and Europe would be encouraged to visit neighbouring countries for cheaper treatment, with the cost being reimbursed by their own health service or insurance provider. The plan implied that Turkey hopes to become a major provider of health services to Europe’s ageing population, paid for by European taxpayers.

“The irony of the text containing repeated references to transparency, and an entire annex on transparency requiring governments to provide information useful to business, being negotiated in secret from the population exposes in whose interests these agreements are being made,”

http://www.alternet.org/wikileaks-releases-secret-documents-related-controversial-us-trade-pact?akid=13179.187590.kD-Vys&rd=1&src=newsletter1037371& (http://www.alternet.org/wikileaks-releases-secret-documents-related-controversial-us-trade-pact?akid=13179.187590.kD-Vys&rd=1&src=newsletter1037371&t=5)t=5 (http://www.alternet.org/wikileaks-releases-secret-documents-related-controversial-us-trade-pact?akid=13179.187590.kD-Vys&rd=1&src=newsletter1037371&t=5)

As 10Ks of US citizens have discovered, medical tourism is a great way to screw the American health care system rather than be screwed.

boutons_deux

06-08-2015, 09:21 PM

“Chocolate makers accused of leveraging ‘loophole’ on child slavery” [Confectionary News (http://www.confectionerynews.com/Commodities/Cocoa-child-slavery-Chocolate-industry-talks-TPP-laws)].

Right now, 19 U.S. Code § 1307 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/1307) prohibits importation of goods made by slave labor, except when “goods, wares, articles, or merchandise so mined, produced, or manufactured” cannot be made in sufficient quantities in the US to meet domestic demand.

However, this pro-slavery provision could not be abolished without setting up a trade barrier, so TPP would freeze it in place.

Another way of looking at the TPP, I suppose, is that if Lincoln’s United States had signed the TPP, it would have had to compensate British cotton manufacturers for “lost profits” from passing the Fourteenth Amendment.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/200pm-water-cooler-6815.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capi talism%29

benstanfield

06-09-2015, 11:55 AM

TPP is primarily foreign policy, NOT economics. Both the US and China want hegemony over Asian markets. US planners will gladly create more unemployed and throw them in prison so long as they create an effective counterbalance to Chinese power in the region.

I'm not saying I support it, but it's important to think about it in the right context. That's Warren's misunderstanding (at least publicly). She's making a public case about how TPP might not be "good" for middle/lower class Americans when she knows damn well that that isn't the goal. Call me cynical, but all it's doing is winning her points in the next election cycle. She isn't stupid, and she knows exactly what the people writing TPP are thinking: Pure military power isn't going to stop China, and if you're a typical US planner that's basically your chief concern for the next decade. TPP is a power grab for American multinational corporations that gives the US a huge foothold in Asia while being amenable to Chinese power in many respects. In their eyes, the inner-city poor can be dealt with quietly and domestically by John Rambo cops and Netflix.

Hell why am I posting here?

boutons_deux

06-09-2015, 12:32 PM

Hell why am I posting here?

to give us all lots of LOL

boutons_deux

06-09-2015, 01:50 PM

"TPP is primarily foreign policy, NOT economics."

bullshit

America thinks it can control, confront China in Asia, extend America's imagined hegemony to control China? :lol

America has already handed it balls to China as prime manufacturer of 1000s US products, $100Bs/year. USA can contain China? :lol

TPP/TTIP are being sold as "trade agreements", but only a minority of the articles touch trade.

The majority are elevating corporate, capital, investor power above sovereign countries' powers.

TPP subverts any country's regulations to the least common denominator among the signatories.

And then there is the ISDS Kangaroo, extrajudicial "court" to screw countrys' taxpayers out of $Bs.

benstanfield :lol

boutons_deux

06-09-2015, 04:33 PM

Doggett Challenges USTR for Not Enforcing Environmental Obligations in Past Trade Agreements

In the run-up to the controversial vote on Fast Track trade promotion authority, the administration has repeatedly claimed that the Trans Pacific Partnership will be a “21st century” trade agreement that holds countries to high environmental standards.

However, in a June 5, 2015 letter (http://webiva-downton.s3.amazonaws.com/877/68/7/5891/Doggett_Ltr_to_USTR_RE_Peru_Illegal_Logging_060520 15.pdf) to Michael Froman, the U.S. Trade Representative, Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Texas, demonstrated how

the U.S. has failed to hold countries accountable to “binding” environmental commitments in past trade deals. In particular, Doggett detailed the repeated failure of the USTR to follow through on the comprehensive five year audit required by U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement Forest Annex.

Bill Waren, senior trade analyst at Friends of the Earth, had this to say:

Congressman Doggett is an environmental champion and a real scholar of international trade law. His devastating and accurate analysis demonstrates Michael Froman’s dereliction of his duty to enforce the Forest Annex of the U.S.-Peru free trade agreement. As we approach a vote on Fast Track, Congress needs to look at the evidence: the USTR has failed to enforce one of the few provisions in a U.S. trade deal that was designed to help rather than hurt the planet. Congress should not fall for Froman’s empty environmental promises; the TPP is designed to benefit big business and Wall Street, not the environment.

For more background:

June 5, 2015 letter (http://webiva-downton.s3.amazonaws.com/877/68/7/5891/Doggett_Ltr_to_USTR_RE_Peru_Illegal_Logging_060520 15.pdf) from Congressman Doggett to Michael Froman

June 4, 2015 report (http://webiva-downton.s3.amazonaws.com/877/04/2/5896/Implementation_and_Enforcement_Failures_in_the_US-Peru_Free_Trade_Agreement_FTA_Allows_Illegal_Loggi ng_Crisis_to_Continue.pdf) from Environmental Investigation Agency detailing the U.S.’s failure to enforce the environmental obligations in the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2015/06/09/doggett-challenges-ustr-not-enforcing-environmental-obligations-past-trade

It looks like the Dems are rounding up a few more Dems to vote up the TPP fast track. We're probably screwed for decades.

Clipper Nation

06-09-2015, 04:40 PM

"Most transparent administration ever."

boutons_deux

06-09-2015, 04:51 PM

"TPP is primarily foreign policy, NOT economics"

:lol

TPP, TTIP are hyper-secret for Congress and public, but written by BigCorp, BigFinance, their lobbyists, lawyers, etc, TO ENRICH THEMSELVES.

Clipper Nation

06-09-2015, 05:12 PM

"TPP is primarily foreign policy, NOT economics"

:lol

TPP, TTIP are hyper-secret for Congress and public, but written by BigCorp, BigFinance, their lobbyists, lawyers, etc, TO ENRICH THEMSELVES.

It's almost as if statism and big government are easily corrupted!

boutons_deux

06-09-2015, 07:22 PM

It's almost as if statism and big government are easily corrupted!

... already done. USA is corporatocracy,not a democracy.

Politicians run for office to get (more) wealthy, for the insder deals while in Congress, and much more lucrative consulting, lobbying, quid pro quo corporate jobs after Congress.

Clipper Nation

06-09-2015, 07:27 PM

... already done. USA is corporatocracy,not a democracy.

Politicians run for office to get (more) wealthy, for the insder deals while in Congress, and much more lucrative consulting, lobbying, quid pro quo corporate jobs after Congress.
And yet libtards such as yourself think MORE government is the solution.

boutons_deux

06-09-2015, 07:29 PM

And yet libtards such as yourself think MORE government is the solution.

gotta separate government, the civil service, from Congress and political appointees, includes ELECTED judges. two totally different animals.

Blizzardwizard

06-09-2015, 08:00 PM

And yet libtards such as yourself think MORE government is the solution.

It is. But not the bullshit US government of Obama, defined and working for the private sector corporatists and the 1%.

Clipper Nation

06-09-2015, 08:55 PM

It is. But not the bullshit US government of Obama, defined and working for the private sector corporatists and the 1%.
That's the inevitable result of big government. Power corrupts - that's why the Founders limited it and put in so many checks and balances to begin with.

boutons_deux

06-10-2015, 09:57 AM

What Is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Really All About

In 2025, according to this model, the baseline Gross Domestic Product for the US is $20,273bn. Under TPP11, this falls (very slightly) to $20,268.0bn. Perhaps this is a rounding error, but the fact that the increase in trade could lower US GDP should give us pause.

No matter how you look at it, the positive impact on GDP (measured at 2007 relative prices) is miniscule: roughly $40 billion in a total economy of $20 trillion, i.e., 0.2 percent.

When you strip out the distractions, TPP comes down to essentially three things:

A free trade agreement with Japan. We need to see the details of that, including the FDI dimension, to understand if there will be GDP gains for the US or not. The impact on US inequality and median wages also remains at best unclear.
Investor State Dispute Settlement. This is of very dubious value to residents of the United States, at least unless the administration agrees to introduce greater safeguards against abuse.
Greater protection for pharmaceutical patents. This will almost certainly reduce access to affordable medicines, both in the US and in our trading partners.

There are also vague claims about improving labor and environmental standards. But, as far as outsiders can discern, any agreement along these dimensions will not require actions before TPP goes into effect. Enforceability of such clauses after the fact is typically weak or nonexistent.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31299-what-is-the-trans-pacific-partnership-really-all-about

Blizzardwizard

06-10-2015, 10:36 AM

That's the inevitable result of big government. Power corrupts - that's why the Founders limited it and put in so many checks and balances to begin with.

The almost instant result of no government is corruption and virtually zero distribution of wealth.

Clipper Nation

06-10-2015, 12:55 PM

The almost instant result of no government is corruption and virtually zero distribution of wealth.
Nice fallacy, but nobody's asking for no government, just an efficient government that abides by the Constitution.

boutons_deux

06-10-2015, 02:02 PM

Nice fallacy, but nobody's asking for no government, just an efficient government that abides by the Constitution.

yeah, right. Repugs austerity is producing INEFFICIENT govt, regs not enforced, and just ask the 100Ks of tax filers who couldn't get through to the Repug-demolished IRS.

Repugs denying the vote to Ms of citizens isn't "Constitutional"

Blizzardwizard

06-10-2015, 03:45 PM

Nice fallacy, but nobody's asking for no government, just an efficient government that abides by the Constitution.

BS, Libertarians spam all over the internet painting government as some evil dictatorship that denies them of "meh liberties and meh freedoms :cry." You conservatives would much rather have a government with minute control so the rich businessmen could run free and not pay taxes and not pay fair wages to their workers.

boutons_deux

06-10-2015, 03:58 PM

U.S. Shifts Stance on Drug Pricing in Pacific Trade Pact Talks, Document Reveals

Facing resistance from its Pacific trading partners, the Obama administration is no longer demanding protection for pharmaceutical prices under the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, according to a newly leaked “transparency” annex of the proposed trade accord.

But American negotiators are still pressing participating governments to open the process that sets reimbursement rates for drugs and medical devices. Public health professionals, generic drugmakers and activists opposed to the trade deal, which is still being negotiated, contend that it will empower big pharmaceutical firms to command higher reimbursement rates in the United States and abroad, at the expense of consumers.

They also say it could expose international markets to the direct consumer appeals that Americans have experienced.

“It was very clear to everyone except the U.S. that the initial proposal wasn’t about transparency; it was about getting market access for the pharmaceutical industry by giving them greater access to and influence over decision-making processes around pricing and reimbursement,” said Deborah Gleeson, a lecturer at the School of Psychology and Public Health at La Trobe University in Australia, who has seen the leaked document. And even though it has been toned down, she said, “I think it’s a shame that the annex is still being considered at all for the T.P.P.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/business/international/us-shifts-stance-on-drug-pricing-in-pacific-trade-pact-talks-document-reveals.html

iow, TPP/TTIP is all about BigCorp, capitalists sucking wealth from govts (taxpayers) and citizens. Has fuck all to with "trade"

Clipper Nation

06-10-2015, 06:54 PM

BS, Libertarians spam all over the internet painting government as some evil dictatorship that denies them of "meh liberties and meh freedoms :cry."
Depends on which type of libertarians you're talking to. There's the anarchists who actually do want no government, but most mainstream libertarians (like myself) are minarchists, who are content with a constitutionally-limited "nightwatchman state."

boutons_deux

06-11-2015, 01:15 PM

WikiLeaks has published another portion of the text of the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

The text reveals that the TPP would

give major pharmaceutical companies more power over public access to medicine,

weaken public health care programs and

prevent Congress from passing reforms to lower drug costs.

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/video_leaked_tpp_text_reveals_increased_corporate_ control_20150611?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+Truthdig+Truthdig%253A+Dril ling+Beneath+the+Headlines

boutons_deux

06-12-2015, 02:51 PM

House DEMS KILL TPP Fast track.

boutons_deux

06-12-2015, 03:39 PM

House DEMS KILL TPP Fast track.

temporarily

boutons_deux

06-17-2015, 08:39 AM

Awesome Power Is On the Verge of Being Handed Over to Private Banks If TPP Passes

In March 2014, the Bank of England let the cat out of the bag: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it. So wrote David Graeber (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/18/truth-money-iou-bank-of-england-austerity) in The Guardian the same month, referring to a BOE paper called "Money Creation in the Modern Economy (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q102.pdf)." The paper stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong. The result, said Graeber, was to throw the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

The revelation may have done more than that. The entire basis for maintaining our private extractive banking monopoly may have been thrown out the window. And that could help explain the desperate rush to "fast track" not only the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), but the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA would nip attempts to
implement public banking and other monetary reforms in the bud.

The Banking Game Exposed

The BOE report confirmed what money reformers have been saying for decades: that banks do not act simply as intermediaries, taking in the deposits of "savers" and lending them to borrowers, keeping the spread in interest rates. Rather, banks actually create deposits when they make loans. The BOE report said that private banks now create 97 percent of the British money supply. The US money supply is created in the same way.

Graeber underscored the dramatic implications:

. . . [M]oney is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There's really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it.

Politically, said Graeber, revealing these facts is taking an enormous risk:

Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.

On June 3, 2015, WikiLeaks released 17 key documents (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121967/whats-really-going-trade-services-agreement) related to TiSA, which is considered perhaps the most important of the three deals being negotiated for "fast track" trade authority. The documents were supposed to remain classified for five years after being signed, displaying a level of secrecy that outstrips even the TPP's four-year classification.

TiSA involves 51 countries, including every advanced economy except the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The deal would liberalize global trade in services covering close to 80% of the US economy, including financial services, healthcare, education, engineering, telecommunications, and many more. It would restrict how governments can manage their public laws, and it could dismantle and privatize state-owned enterprises, turning those services over to the private sector.

TiSA picks up where the Financial Services Agreement left off, opening yet more doors for private banks and other commercial service industries, and slamming doors on governments that might consider opening their private banking sectors to public ownership.

Blocking the Trend Toward "Remunicipalization"

In a report from Public Services International called "TISA versus Public Services: The Trade in Services Agreement and the Corporate Agenda (http://www.world-psi.org/sites/default/files/en_tisa_versus_public_services_final_web.pdf)," Scott Sinclair and Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood note
that the already formidable challenges to safeguarding public services under GATS will be greatly exasperated by TiSA, which blocks the emerging trend to return privatized services to the public sector.

Communities worldwide are reevaluating the privatization approach and "re-municipalizing" these services, following negative experiences with profit-driven models. These reversals typically occur at the municipal level, but they can also occur at the national level.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/awesome-power-verge-being-handed-over-private-banks-if-tpp-passes?akid=13218.187590.2MiJNB&rd=1&src=newsletter1037924&t=3

iow, if the Repugs miraculously refuse to OBSTRUCT The Great Socialist Kenyan Muslim Satan Obama and are pushing hard WITH OBAMA for TPP, TISA, TTIP, you absolutely know that passing these agreements will protect/enable/enrich BigCorp, capitalists, finance, the 1% while screwing the 99% and the planet.

LIAR Ayn-Rand-licker Paul Ryan was on NPR this morning LYING by omission of the nasties that result from TPP, TISA, TTIP

benstanfield

06-18-2015, 09:55 AM

http://www.c-span.org/video/?326582-1/us-house-debate-vote-tpa

Interesting stuff. Louise Slaughter with no regard for human life.

boutons_deux

06-18-2015, 10:39 AM

http://images.dailykos.com/images/148685/large/1243ckCOMIC-trans-pacific-partnership.png?1434463214

Nbadan

06-18-2015, 01:58 PM

temporarily

bamm....boutons right again...

House revives Obama’s trade agenda with passage of fast track bill
Source: Washington Post

The House voted to resurrect the centerpiece of President Obama’s trade agenda Thursday, six days after his fellow Democrats dealt him a dramatic setback after a monthslong lobbying effort.

Thursday’s 218-208 vote to grant Obama “fast track” authority to negotiate trade deals — including the controversial 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership — is a win for the president, but it is not yet a victory.

It is the first in a complicated series of moves to get around a blockade set up by liberal House Democrats against the president’s trade agenda. The original plan was complicated enough — four separate bills, two of them packaged in one piece for the Senate, but then split apart for House consideration into four votes.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-trade-agenda-relying-on-vanishing-commodity-trust-is-key/2015/06/18/b4532da2-1536-11e5-9518-f9e0a8959f32_story.html?wpisrc=al_alert-COMBO-politics%252Bnation

Nbadan

06-18-2015, 02:16 PM

Corporations paid senators a small bundle to Fast-Track the TPP bill

Using data from the Federal Election Commission,this chart shows all donations that corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP made to US Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate:

Out of the total $1,148,971 given, an average of $17,676.48 was donated to each of the 65 “yea” votes.

The average Republican member received $19,673.28 from corporate TPP supporters.

The average Democrat received $9,689.23 from those same donors.

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2015/06/corporations-paid-very-small-bundle-to.htmlhttp://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/corporations-paid-senators-small-bundle.html

Now we see that the Democrats are the "lesser of two evils" because they'll do the same evil for less money.

Nbadan

06-18-2015, 02:19 PM

Sanders Statement on House Trade Vote...

“I am extremely disappointed but not surprised that the House put the interests of powerful multi-national corporations, drug companies and Wall Street ahead of the needs of American workers.

“I will work to defeat the measure once and for all when the bill returns to the Senate. This disastrous trade deal is opposed by all of organized labor in America, virtually every environmental group in the country and many religious groups. They all know that it will make it easier for corporations to abandon the United States and move good-paying American jobs to low-wage countries overseas.

“I believe that trade is good but we need a new approach that benefits the working families and not just corporate America.”

Link:http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-statement-on-house-trade-vote

boutons_deux

06-23-2015, 09:11 AM

The TPP, Drug Patents, and President Clinton

There are many serious issues raised by the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but the one that may have the greatest long-term impact is its provisions on drug patents. The explicit purpose is to make patent protection stronger and longer. While these provisions are likely to lead to higher drug prices in the United States, they will have their greatest impact in the developing world.

In most developing countries, drugs are far cheaper than in the United States. This is especially the case in India. The country has a world-class generic industry that produces high-quality drugs that typically sell for a small fraction of the price in the United States. For example, the generic version of the Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi can be purchased in India for less than $1,000 a treatment. The patent protected version sells in the United States for $84,000.

The U.S. drug industry desperately wants to eliminate this sort of price gap, which can exceed a ratio of one hundred to one. While India is not in the TPP, the goal of TPP proponents is to expand the pact over time so that India would eventually be included and therefore be subject to its strong patent rules.

This should have everyone very worried. The patent system is a horribly outmoded method of financing research that dates from the 15th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_patent_law). The idea is that the government provides an incentive for innovation by giving the inventor a patent monopoly over use of the innovation for a period of time. This is problematic for the all the reasons that government enforced monopolies are generally a bad idea, but the problems in the case of prescription drugs are especially serious.

A patent on a prescription drug can mean that a pharmaceutical company controls the patient's access to something that is essential to their health or even their life. In such circumstances they will pay pretty much whatever they have to, or are able to, in order to get the drug.

This creates a situation analogous to negotiating payments for firefighters at the point when they show up at your burning house with your family inside. Most of us would pay whatever was necessary to get the firefighters to rescue our families and be thankful for their help.

If we actually did pay our firefighters this way, not only would we have some extremely rich firefighters, we would also get poor quality fire protection and prevention. We would expect the firefighter companies to set up stations near rich people's houses so that they would be best situated to get to a fire first. They may even take to sabotaging competitors by deliberating creating traffic jams to obstruct their path to especially lucrative fires. And needless to say, our firefighters would have very little interest in doing anything to promote fire safety, since they don't get paid for fire prevention.

This is pretty much the story of drug development under the patent system. Drug research is skewed to focusing on the diseases and conditions that are the biggest problem for affluent people.

The research is highly secretive, since drug companies do not want to provide any advantages to their competitors.

And drug companies often misled the public (http://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/patent-monopolies-and-the-costs-of-mismarketing-drugs) about the safety and effectiveness of their drugs. Needless to say, they don't waste their time pursuing treatments like nutrition and exercise, since these don't offer the possibility of patent monopolies.

Ideally, we would be looking to switch to more efficient mechanisms for financing drug research. Joe Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has proposed a prize system, where the government would buy up promising patents and then place them in the public domain so that the new drugs could be produced and sold as generics. Another alternative would be to finance the research (which could be done by private companies) directly, and then have the findings immediately available for other researchers.

If we had a government committed to better public health and reducing waste in the economy we would be looking to more efficient alternatives to the patent system (http://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/financing-drug-research-what-are-the-issues). Instead we have this quixotic quest in the TPP to preserve the patent system for centuries into the future and make the whole world suffer from its wastefulness.

In this respect, President Obama seems destined to duplicate and extend one of the worst mistakes of the Clinton administration. In 1994, at the urging of pharmaceutical industry, President Clinton put the TRIPS provisions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement) into the Uruguay Round of the WTO. This required countries throughout the developing world to have U.S.-style patent and copyright law.

Now President Obama is prepared to make these patents longer and stronger with the TPP. Perhaps President Obama plans to follow in the footsteps of President Clinton, using his post-presidency to run around the world with billionaires, raising money to try to undo some of the damage he did to the state of the world's health care during his presidency. That is not a very proud legacy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/the-tpp-drug-patents-and_b_7640974.html

I read where Kraz Kruz :lol on Breitbart :lol says he will vote against TPP, leaving a margin of only 2 Senators for pasage.

boutons_deux

06-23-2015, 10:58 AM

Senate passes TTP, planet on track to being raped even more by BigCorp, capitalists.

cantthinkofanything

06-23-2015, 11:23 AM

Senate passes TTP, planet on track to being raped even more by BigCorp, capitalists.

http://i.imgur.com/9Gbyux9.gif

boutons_deux

06-23-2015, 04:39 PM

Killing a Nation With Euphemisms: TPP-Eats-Medicare Edition

This week, legislation to give President Obama fast-track trade agreement authority (TPA) will take its star turn in the GOP-controlled Senate. The cloture vote is said to be taking place on Tuesday, and if the 60-vote threshold is reached, the final vote on the bill will happen the same day, or on Wednesday.

More importantly, however, is the following vote, scheduled for Wednesday or Thursday, on "Trade Adjustment Assistance," (TAA), also known as the "We sent your job to a Pacific Rim sweatshop in a country with no labor laws where people work for $2 a day during 18-hour shifts making the clothes you used to be able to afford before we laid you off, so here's ten dollars so you can take in a movie and get your mind off things, but no popcorn for you" bill.

In other words, TAA is a bill to provide "assistance" for all the people who are absolutely going to lose their jobs if the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) passes ... and the passage of that trade bill is what all this TPA and TAA mishigas has been about.

"Trade Adjustment Assistance" ... isn't language just such wonderfully malleable putty? It would not in any way surprise me if, somewhere in the dank bowels of a building in Washington DC, there exists a think tank solely dedicated to the crafting and deployment of crass yet terribly effective euphemisms. "The Clear Skies Initiative," also known as "Let the polluters pollute as much as they want." "No Child Left Behind," also known as "Conformity over creativity and critical thinking." "PATRIOT Act," also known as "We're watching you, bub."

And now, this. You're not fired, laid off, outsourced, downsized, removed, erased, kicked to the curb, bounced, deleted, expunged, cut, dismissed, chucked, or even screwed. Nope. You've been "trade adjusted," right out onto the sidewalk with a box of your stuff in your arms and a disorienting buzzing noise rattling the inside of your skull. Such a kind euphemism for so traumatic an event. The boys in the bowels of that building sure put the work in on that one.

Let's say the TPA survives cloture and is passed ... and let's even say that Mitch McConnell trips over his soul in the men's room and actually allows a vote on TAA, and it survives cloture and then passes ... guess what? The money to "assist" people who suffer "trade adjustment" upon passage of the TPP will come from ...

Wait for it ...

Wait for it ...

Medicare!

That's right! Probably the most successful, well-run social program in US history will take it in the teeth to help support people who lose their jobs to the trade bill that necessitated this "assistance" in the first place.

... and here's the best part. The original plan was to "sequester" - another brilliantly vile euphemism - about $700 million per year from Medicare to fund "assistance" for everyone who gets "trade adjusted" by the TPP. Republicans balked at the number, not because it was stealing from Medicare, but because it was Just Another Government Welfare Program Argle Bargle Blah. After a series of negotiations between congressional Democrats, Republicans and the White House, they settled on carving out $450 million per year to "assist" the "trade adjusted."
It's beautiful, in the way an avalanche on a snow-capped mountain is beautiful before it buries and smothers you.

First, the very existence of the TAA bill means these people in DC know the trade bill will be a job-destroyer in the US. Otherwise they wouldn't bother, period.

Second, $700 million per year isn't nearly enough to help all those who will have to hit the bricks once their jobs go away, so $450 million is basically a bad joke.

Third - and this is where the true poetry of evil finds its clarion cry - everyone put on the street by the TPP will someday qualify for a Medicare that is less capable of serving them, because the program has been compensating for the way they lost their job in the first place.

The politicians in DC are working hammer and tong to take millions of people to the cleaners, coming and going.

If you lose your job to the TPP, you will get insufficient "assistance," followed by less-funded Medicare support. If you don't lose your job, you'll still be dealing with the smoking hole in Medicare funding made by the trade bill that caused your neighbor to lose her house after she lost her job.

Like as not, the TPA bill will sail through the Senate this week. US steelmakers, who have been embroiled in a fight to see tariffs imposed on rival imports from overseas, have been promised serious attention from the Senate GOP in exchange for their support of the TPA, and by proxy the TPP.

Democratic Senators Bill Nelson and Ron Wyden have pledged their support to the TPA bill. Their votes, along with the twelve other Senate Democrats who voted for fast-track authority last month, virtually assure that the cloture threshold will be reached with votes to spare. The rest is just counting.

As for the "Trade Adjustment Assistance" bill? That's up to Mr. McConnell to bring to a vote, and even if he does, and even if it passes, it's a button Band-Aid on a gaping wound ... and, by the bye, it isn't as if the US job market is going gangbusters right now. The last thing we need is a trade "deal" that kneecaps job availability. Ask the Millennial with the business degree, but only after he serves you your coffee over a corporate formica countertop. Be sure to tip well; he needs whatever he can get to pay down his student loans.

Upon absorbing these grim realities, many people I speak to express some variation of the sentiment, "This country is falling apart." I disagree ... this country is coming together, after many long years of spending on corporate lawyers and corporate congresspeople, around a new corporate paradigm.

I say "new," but in truth, it's actually ancient. Ask the pharaohs, the Stuart Kings, the dynasties, the empires. There is the aristocracy, and there are the muddling masses pitching buckets of piss out of their windows onto the street, laying their shoulders to the foundation block of the pyramid, or dying on a sword in a war they didn't want to fight, because it is how it is, it is what it is, so get in line, you.

Never fear. The boys in the bowels will concoct a euphemism for this, and we'll all feel much better.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31521-killing-a-nation-with-euphemisms-tpp-eats-medicare-edition

boutons_deux

06-23-2015, 06:59 PM

If you rightwingnuts have any doubts, with BigCorp, BigFinance, BigPharma writing TPP in secret and pushing passage, we just know Humans-Americans are gonna get screwed, and foreigners will start paying $Bs more for BigPharma witch potions, etc, etc.

Clipper Nation

06-23-2015, 07:09 PM

Boutons_shill doing mental gymnastics to blame Obummertrade solely on "the VRWC."

boutons_deux

06-23-2015, 07:19 PM

Boutons_shill doing mental gymnastics to blame Obummertrade solely on "the VRWC."

You Lie

Obama is screwing up too, and screwing Human-Americans. He's been fed some bullshit about "pivoting" against China, about denying China the power to "write the rules" of Pacific trade. China will whatever TF it wants, like create the AIIB and pull in a lot of US allies.

TPP isn't trade deal in any way except as smokescreen, it's promotion of BigCorp above the power of sovereign states. It's also yet another trade deal that is US job killer.

boutons_deux

07-01-2015, 09:16 AM

Leaked: What'sLeaked: What's in Obama's trade deal

Is the White House going to bat for Big Pharma worldwide?in Obama's trade deal

A recent draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal would give U.S. pharmaceutical firms unprecedented protections against competition from cheaper generic drugs, possibly transcending the patent protections in U.S. law.

The highly technical 90-page document, cluttered with objections from other TPP nations, shows that U.S. negotiators have fought aggressively and, at least until Guam, successfully on behalf of Big Pharma.

The draft text includes provisions that could make it extremely tough for generics to challenge brand-name pharmaceuticals abroad. Those provisions could also help block copycats from selling cheaper versions of the expensive cutting-edge drugs known as “biologics” inside the U.S., restricting treatment for American patients while jacking up Medicare and Medicaid costs for American taxpayers.

“There’s very little distance between what Pharma wants and what the U.S. is demanding,” said Rohat Malpini, director of policy for Doctors Without Borders.

Advocates for the global poor, senior citizens, labor unions and consumers as well as the generics industry have accused the administration of abandoning that balance, pushing a pharmaceutical-company agenda at the expense of patients and taxpayers.

The draft chapter covers software, music and other intellectual property issues as well, but its most controversial language involves the rights of drug companies. The text reveals disputes between the U.S. (often with support from Japan) and its TPP partners over a variety of issues—what patents can cover, when and how long they can be extended, how long pharmaceutical companies can keep their clinical data private, and much more. On every issue, the U.S. sided with drug companies in favor of stricter intellectual property protections.

Some of the most contentious provisions involve “patent linkage,” which would prevent regulators in TPP nations from approving generic drugs whenever there are any unresolved patent issues. The TPP draft would make this linkage mandatory, which could help drug companies fend off generics just by claiming an infringement.

The U.S. already has mandatory linkage, but most other TPP countries do not, and Bresch argued that U.S. law includes a number of safeguards and incentives for generic companies that have not made it into TPP.
“With all due respect, the USTR has…cherry-picked the single provision designed to block generic entry to the market,”

Generics are thriving in the U.S. despite linkage, saving Americans an estimated $239 billion on drugs in 2013.

But the U.S. is the world’s largest market, and advocates fear that generic manufacturers may not take on the risk and expense of litigation in smaller markets if TPP tilts the playing field against them.

The opponents are also worried about the treaty’s effect on the U.S. market, because its draft language would extend mandatory patent linkage to biologics, the next big thing in the pharmaceutical world. Biologics can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for patients with illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis B and cancer, and the first knockoffs have not yet reached pharmacies. The critics say that extending linkage to biologics—which can have hundreds of patents—would help insulate them from competition forever.

“We consider this the worst-ever agreement in terms of access to medicine,” he said. “It would create higher drug prices around the world—and in the U.S., too.

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/06/tpp-deal-leaked-pharma-000126

Is the White House going to bat for Big Pharma wo

boutons_deux

07-02-2015, 11:08 AM

Just Before Round of Negotiations on the Proposed “Trade in Services Agreement (TISA),” Wikileaks Releases Second Set of Updated Secret Documents

As governments around the world implement the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis by re-regulating financial firms to prevent another crisis, the leaked TISA rules could require countries – including the world’s largest financial centers – to halt and even roll back financial regulations.

Indeed, TISA would expand deregulatory “trade” rules written under the advisement of large banks before the financial crisis, requiring domestic laws to conform to the now-rejected model of extreme deregulation that led to global recession,” noted Ben Beachy, Research Director at Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and author of the analysis on the leaked Financial Services proposed text.

According to analysis provided by the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF), the secret documents predict a power grab by transport industry players at the expense of the public interest, jobs and a voice for workers.

Specifically they reveal a potential and continuing threat to seafarers’ wages and conditions, should the agreement be adopted.

The Maritime Annex does acknowledge the sectoral standards adopted by the UN bodies but fails to recognise these are minimum protections, stating that in cases where parties ‘apply measures that deviate from the above mentioned international standards, their standards shall be based on non-discriminatory, objective and transparent criteria.’

The recent leak of the TISA Annex on e-commerce once again demonstrates that trade negotiations are playing an important role in shaping the future of internet governance. Because these negotiations are closed, they are a poor forum for making internet policy, leading to policy that naturally favors businesses with major lobbying operations in Geneva and Washington DC, rather than the sort of open and multi-participant forums deciding issues on the merits we would prefer,” said Burcu Kilic, a lawyer at Public Citizen, who co-authored the analysis on the subject.

“Privacy is a fundamental human right central to the maintenance of democratic societies. TISA includes requirements that could damage privacy protections.

TISA responds to major corporate lobbies’ desire to deregulate services, even beyond the existing World Trade Organization (WTO) rules.

“This leak exposes the corporate aim to use TISA to further limit the public interest regulatory capacity of democratically elected governments by imposing disciplines on domestic issues from government purchasing and immigration to licensing and certification standards for professionals and business operations, not to mention the regulatory process itself,” said Deborah James of the OWINFS network, which has coordinated global civil society opposition to the proposed TISA since its inception.

This leak justifies warnings from global civil society about the privatization and deregulation impacts of a potential TISA since our first letter on the issue, endorsed by 345 organizations from across the globe, in September 2013.

At that time, OWINFS argued that “[t]he TISA negotiations largely follow the corporate agenda of using “trade” agreements to bind countries to an agenda of extreme liberalization and deregulation in order to ensure greater corporate profits at the expense of workers, farmers, consumers and the environment. The proposed agreement is the direct result of systematic advocacy by transnational corporations in banking, energy, insurance, telecommunications, transportation, water, and other services sectors, working through lobby groups like the US Coalition of Service Industries (USCSI) and the European Services Forum (ESF).”

Today’s leaks prove the network’s arguments beyond a shadow of a doubt.

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2015/07/02/just-round-negotiations-proposed-trade-services-agreement-tisa-wikileaks

boutons_deux

07-08-2015, 08:29 AM

Wikileaks Exposes How TISA Will Gut Financial Regulations All Over the World (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/07/don-quijones-wikileaks-exposes-how-tisa-will-gut-financial-regulations-all-over-the-world.html)

TiSA is arguably the most important – yet least well-known – of the new generation of global trade agreements. According to WikiLeaks, it “is the largest component of the United States’ strategic ‘trade’ treaty triumvirate,” which also includes the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP).

“Together, the three treaties form not only a new legal order shaped for transnational corporations, but a new economic ‘grand enclosure,’ which excludes China and all other BRICS countries” declared WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in a press statement (https://wikileaks.org/tisa/press.html). If allowed to take universal effect, this new enclosure system will impose on all our governments a rigid framework of international corporate law designed to exclusively protect the interests of corporations, relieving them of financial risk, and social and environmental responsibility.

Thanks to an innocuous-sounding provision called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (http://ragingbullshit.com/2014/06/21/the-global-corporatocracy-is-just-a-few-strokes-of-a-pen-from-completion/), every investment they make will effectively be backstopped by our governments (and by extension, you and me); it will be too-big-to-fail writ on an unimaginable scale.

As WOLF STREET previously reported (http://wolfstreet.com/2014/12/25/leaked-secret-negotiations-to-let-big-brother-go-global/), one explicit goal of the TiSA negotiations is to overcome the exceptions in GATS that protect certain non-tariff trade barriers such as data protection. For example, the draft Financial Services Annex of TiSA, published by Wikileaks in June 2014, would allow financial institutions, such as banks, to transfer data freely, including personal data, from one country to another – in direct contravention of EU data protection laws.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. According to the treaty’s Annex on Financial Services, we now know that TiSA would effectively strip signatory governments of all remaining ability to regulate the financial industry in the interest of depositors, small-time investors, or the public at large.

1. TiSA will restrict the ability of governments to limit systemic financial risks.

TiSA’s sweeping market access rules conflict with commonsense financial regulations that apply equally to foreign and domestic firms. One of those rules means that any governments that seeks to place limits on the trading of derivative contracts — the largely unregulated weapons of mass financial destruction that helped trigger the 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis — could be dragged in front of corporate arbitration panels and forced to pay millions or billions in damages.

2. TiSA will force governments to “predict” all regulations that could at some point fall foul of TiSA.

The leaked TISA text even prohibits policies that are “formally identical” for domestic and foreign firms if they inadvertently “modif[y] the conditions of competition” in favor of domestic firms:

For example, many governments require all banks to maintain a minimum amount of capital to guard against bank collapse. Even if the same minimum is required of domestic and foreign-owned banks alike, it could be construed as disproportionately impacting foreign-owned banks… This common financial protection could thus be challenged under TISA for “modifying the conditions of competition” in favor of domestic banks, despite governments’ prerogative to ensure the stability of foreign-owned banks operating in their territory.

3. TiSA will indefinitely bar new financial regulations that do not conform to deregulatory rules.

Signatory governments will essentially agree not to apply new financial policy measures which in any way contradict the agreement’s emphasis on deregulatory measures.

4. TiSA will prohibit national governments from using capital controls to prevent or mitigate financial crises.

As we are seeing in Greece right now, capital controls are terrible. But for a government facing the complete breakdown of the financial system, they serve as a last resort for restoring some semblance of order. Even the IMF, which urged countries to abandon capital controls in the Washington Consensus years of the 1990s, recently endorsed capital controls as a means of maintaining the stability of the financial system. But if TiSA is signed, the signatory governments will be prohibited from using them:

The leaked texts prohibit restrictions on financial inflows – used to prevent rapid currency appreciation, asset bubbles and other macroeconomic problems – and financial outflows, used to prevent sudden capital flight in times of crisis.

5. TiSA will require acceptance of financial products not yet invented.

Despite the pivotal role that new, complex financial products played in the Financial Crisis, TISA would require governments to allow all new financial products and services, including ones not yet invented, to be sold within their territories.

6. TiSA will provide opportunities for financial firms to delay financial regulations.

If signed, TISA will require governments to address financial firms’ criticism of a regulatory proposal when publishing a final version of the regulation. Even then, governments would be obliged to wait a “reasonable time” before allowing the new regulation to take effect. In the United States, such requirements have produced delays sometimes lasting years in the enactment of urgently needed financial and other safeguards. If the same process is applied across the globe, it would make it almost impossible for government to constrain the activities of the world’s largest banks.

What that would likely mean is that when (not if) a new global financial crisis takes place in the not-too-distant future, the banks will once again be on hand to lead efforts to clean up and rebuild with taxpayer money the very sector that they themselves have destroyed. Lather, rinse, repeat. Only this time, on an even grander scale.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/07/don-quijones-wikileaks-exposes-how-tisa-will-gut-financial-regulations-all-over-the-world.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capi talism%29

iow, GlobalCorp/GlobalFinance use TPP/TTIP/TISA as a masquerade about "trade", but they are really about subjugating governments (taxpayers, citizens) to UNCHALLENGEABLE powers of GlobalCorp/GlobalFinance.

boutons_deux

07-30-2015, 02:44 PM

Pharmaceutical Provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Threaten Drug Access and Affordability

The current draft includes (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/big-pharma-trade-deal-118664.html) sweeping protections for drug companies as part of the agreement’s intellectual property chapter. And unless negotiators agree to significant changes to the draft agreement, the TPP will raise drug prices and hinder access to critical medications—especially in developing countries. It’s not surprising that this area remains unresolved. Other TPP countries such as Australia and New Zealand recognize (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/business/international/issues-mount-as-negotiators-gather-to-wrap-up-trans-pacific-trade-pact.html) that these requirements would undermine critical public health efforts by keeping medicines out of reach, especially (http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2015/05/08/the-trans-pacific-partnership-a-threat-to-global-health/) in less wealthy nations.

In those countries, drug companies are seeking (https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/03/13/tpp-lobby/) to impose stringent patent rules, keeping drug prices high for as long as possible for the patent holders by delaying (http://www.amfar.org/uploadedFiles/_amfarorg/Articles/On_The_Hill/2015/IB_TPP_Brief_RC_050615.pdf) generic drug entry in those markets. Strict patent rules (http://www.wsj.com/articles/drug-patents-poseamajor-hurdle-to-pacific-trade-deal-1422848007) are already in place in the United States and are a key reason why drug prices are significantly higher (http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/32/4/753.full) here than in other TPP nations. For this reason alone, U.S. negotiators should advocate for pro-consumer policies :lol :lol and reject the pharmaceutical industry’s push for greater patent and other regulatory protections.

But for those who take a narrower view and believe that the TPP should only be assessed from a U.S. perspective, there is still reason for concern. The current draft also would tie the hands of policymakers who wish to address the skyrocketing prices of drugs in America.

Once the TPP is ratified, the federal government will not be able to enact laws that are inconsistent with the TPP without violating the treaty. Even if a future Congress and president agreed that these pro-industry laws should be reformed, a drug company could then sue the United States for billions of dollars using a dispute process also included in the current agreement. This scenario shows why the pharmaceutical industry has pushed so aggressively for certain policies to be included in the TPP.

For example, leaked versions of the TPP include (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/big-pharma-trade-deal-118664.html) a 12-year exclusivity period for expensive biologic drugs—drugs made from living cells. These medications are becoming more common and make up about 40 percent (http://www.biopharma.com/FDA_2012_approvals_article.pdf) of all drugs currently under development. Today, a generic version of a biologic—called a biosimilar—can enter the market after the exclusivity period is over.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2015/07/30/118290/pharmaceutical-provisions-of-the-trans-pacific-partnership-threaten-drug-access-and-affordability/

boutons_deux

08-01-2015, 08:14 AM

U.S., Pacific Rim trade talks fail over dairy, sugar

Top trade officials for the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim countries on Friday failed to conclude a major free-trade agreement -- a setback for President Obama and his bid to clinch a deal that has been marked by repeated challenges at home and abroad.

Expectations were high that this week's meetings in Hawaii would yield a final agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which has been years in the making, but negotiators were unable to resolve differences over such long-standing issues as market access for dairy and sugar.

But negotiators this week couldn't get past traditional trade issues involving sensitive products. Dairy was a key stumbling block, officials said, with Canada reluctant to bend to pressure from the U.S. and New Zealand to open up its protected dairy industry. Meanwhile, the U.S. was feeling heat from Canada and Australia to allow more sugar imports.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-trade-talks-fail-20150731-story.html (http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-trade-talks-fail-20150731-story.html)

boutons_deux

08-12-2015, 10:59 AM

Will Trans-Pacific trade deal go up in smoke over anti-tobacco proposal?

Big Tobacco is pushing back against a strict anti-smoking provision in the massive Trans-Pacific trade deal — and it has enlisted the support of the most powerful Republican in the Senate.

The ire of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other tobacco-state lawmakers throws a wrench into the delicate negotiations to close the agreement and secure congressional approval. President Barack Obama sees the deal as essential to securing his economic legacy.

Until now, McConnell has been among the president’s staunchest allies on the pact, which includes the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Japan and eight other Pacific Rim nations and would cover 40 percent of the world’s economic output.

While the Kentucky Republican stopped short of pulling his support, he warned in a letter (https://www.politicopro.com/f/?f=41411&inb) that U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman should “not set a new precedent for future U.S. trade negotiations by negatively carving out a specific American agricultural commodity — in this case tobacco.” That exemption would bar tobacco companies from the right to sue nations over laws they contend are damaging, such as anti-smoking measures.

Tobacco, McConnell wrote, is the second-highest agricultural export in Kentucky, which sold $300 million of the commodity in 2013 alone.

Despite the warnings from McConnell and other lawmakers, sources close to the talks say Froman pushed ahead with discussions on a tobacco exclusion with several countries, including Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia, during last month’s talks in Hawaii. “USTR was clear tobacco had to be treated differently, and there was general agreement on that,” an industry source said of the discussions in Maui.

Froman broached the tobacco exclusion discreetly in separate meetings with trade ministers. Although the issue wasn’t settled, observers say it helps that the other countries are taking the lead, allowing Washington to focus on other difficult-to-resolve areas, such as dairy market access and drug patent protections.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/will-trans-pacific-trade-deal-go-up-in-smoke-over-anti-tobacco-proposal-121272.html?hp=t4_r

Winehole23

10-05-2015, 08:51 AM

deal reached, will Congress ratify?

Pacific trade ministers have reached a deal on the most sweeping trade liberalization pact in a generation that will cut trade barriers and set common standards for 12 countries, an official familiar with the talks said on Monday.http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/05/us-trade-tpp-idUSKCN0RZ0ZV20151005

boutons_deux

10-05-2015, 09:02 AM

it's the one time I support Repugs' scorched earth obstructionism of Obama.

Earliest Congressional vote is Feb.

btw, his appointees for USPS board are as stupid as his support for TPP/TTIP/TISA. One's a privatizer, and the other is payday lender asshole. Obviously, Warren's talk about letting USPS be a retail bank is the target

boutons_deux

10-05-2015, 11:20 AM

But also that it won't be public for maybe a month or so. And then there will be some debate over it, but thanks to Congress caving (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150623/15365731438/fast-track-moves-forward-now-fight-is-tpp-directly.shtml) in on fast track authority, Congress has almost no ability to point out flaws in the agreement.

They can only give it a clean yes or no vote.

In the announcement, negotiators (not surprisingly) played up all the tariffs that will be wiped out by this agreement. That's the one part that I'm fine with. Trade tariffs are a mostly bad idea, and getting rid of them is fine. But the

(https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150422/23441830765/if-you-really-think-tpp-is-about-trade-then-your-analysis-is-already-wrong.shtml)TPP is not about trade (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150422/23441830765/if-you-really-think-tpp-is-about-trade-then-your-analysis-is-already-wrong.shtml). That's just a pretext.

The key parts are really about regulations and investment.

Another point of contention was on the infamous corporate sovereignty provision (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131024/11560725004/what-does-isds-mean-corporate-sovereignty-pure-simple.shtml), officially called "investor state dispute settlement" (ISDS), which is a boring sounding name for saying that foreign companies can take entire countries to special tribunals if they feel that new regulations in those countries negatively impact profits. These tribunals are a joke and put corporate interests over sovereign country interests.

The one real "compromise" here is that the agreement apparently excludes tobacco companies. As we've noted a few times in the past, tobacco companies have used these corporate sovereignty provisions in other trade agreements to sue countries (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150216/17390930032/john-oliver-highlights-ridiculousness-corporate-sovereignty-provisions.shtml) that pass anti-smoking laws of any kind. Last year, the US floated (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141014/17563128833/ustr-hoping-to-keep-corporate-sovereignty-provisions-if-it-excludes-big-tobacco-deal.shtml) this compromise idea, that if tobacco companies were excluded, the rest of ISDS would remain in place. And it sounds like that's what happened.

What a "legacy" for President Obama: "compromising" in a way that helps big companies sue countries that pass bad legislation, drive up the price of drugs, decrease access to culture... and look the other way on human trafficking.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151005/07013132437/after-pulling-all-nighter-negotiators-finish-tpp-dont-expect-to-see-text-while.shtml

boutons_deux

10-07-2015, 02:07 PM

TPP Also Locks In Broken Anti-Circumvention Rules That Destroy Your Freedoms

forcing participants into a "life plus 70 years" copyright term,

the TPP will similarly lock in an anti-circumvention clause.

It takes away our freedom to tinker with devices that we own. It also makes it illegal to do things that pretty much everyone agrees should be perfectly legal.

Earlier this year, some in Congress introduced a bill to fix Section 1201 (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150417/16180330704/bill-introduced-to-fix-broken-dmca-anti-circumvention-rules.shtml). However, that may not be possible after the TPP is agreed to. Again, the details matter, but here's what New Zealand has to say about this issue:

New Zealand has, however, agreed to extend its existing laws on technological protection measures (TPMs), which control access to digital content like music, TV programmes, films and software. Circumventing TPMs will be prohibited but exceptions will apply to ensure that people can still circumvent them where there is no copyright issue (for example, playing region-coded DVDs purchased from overseas) or where there is an existing copyright exception (for example, converting a book to braille).

So, yes, it appears there will be certain exceptions allowed, but again that gets the equationentirely backwards.

At best, circumvention should be considered legal as the default, and the problem should only come in if the circumvention was done for the purpose of actual infringement.

Starting from the position of "no circumvention" and then backdooring in "exceptions" massively hinders innovation by requiring permission before certain innovations are allowed.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151006/17213732458/tpp-also-locks-broken-anti-circumvention-rules-that-destroy-your-freedoms.shtml

boutons_deux

10-07-2015, 03:38 PM

Hillary says today she's against TPP

boutons_deux

10-07-2015, 03:45 PM

TPP: Big Pharma’s Big Deal (http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/07/tpp-big-pharmas-big-deal/)

That’s because the TPP will extend patent protection for brand-name drugs, thereby preventing similar generic drugs (which are far less costly) from entering the market. This will drive up the prices.
Judit Rius Sanjuan, legal policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders, told vox.com that TPP creates patent-related obligations in countries that never had them before. People in “Peru, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Mexico” will be especially affected, she said. “They’ll face higher prices for longer periods of time.”

provisions in the TPP agreement will affect health-care budgets and drug access in all signatory countries, but especially the poorest. “She said as many as 40,000 people in Vietnam, the poorest country in the agreement, could stop getting drugs to fight HIV because of provisions that will boost the price of [pharmaceutical] therapy.

Other countries like Canada will also be hit with higher costs. The Council of Canadians says that if the TPP is ratified, “[p]harmaceutical patents will be extended, delaying the release of more affordable generic drugs and adding $2 billion to our annual public health care bill.”

“a clear corporate handout that would greatly affect international access and most definitely cause preventable deaths. The clear objective here is to increase industry profits, plain and simple. This is not surprising, that’s what private industry does, but there is a serious moral dilemma here.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/07/tpp-big-pharmas-big-deal/

:lol BigCorp has NO morals, no ethics, no patriotism, no obligation to anything except profits.

Winehole23

10-09-2015, 03:03 AM

it's the one time I support Repugs' scorched earth obstructionism of Obama

boutons_deux

10-09-2015, 04:22 AM

The Meat Industry Is Licking Its Chops Over Obama's Massive Trade Deal

The US meat industry scored a big victory this week when world leadershammered out an agreement (https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2015/october/summary-trans-pacific-partnership) that would reduce trade barriers across the Pacific: from the United Sates, Canada, Mexico, Peru, and Chile on this side to Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam, and Singapore on the other.

So how would the TPP affect Big Meat in the United States? The industry is currently facing stagnant domestic demand for its product as Americans eat less meat (http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/06/factory-farms-keep-getting-bigger). The TPP would open markets in countries that currently protect domestic farmers with tariffs. Japan, for example, agreed (http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-tpp-agreement-atlanta-1.3254569) to slash its tariff on imported beef from 38 percent to 9 percent over the next 15 years—likely making it much easier for American importers to gain a foothold.

In a press release (http://www.nppc.org/2015/10/nppc-confident-tpp-deal-good-for-u-s-pork/%20http://www.nppc.org/2015/10/nppc-confident-tpp-deal-good-for-u-s-pork/) celebrating the TPP, the National Pork Producers Council declared that the trade pact "could increase US pork exports over time exponentially."

The National Chicken Council, meanwhile, crowed (http://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/ncc-statement-on-conclusion-of-tpp-negotiations/) that the TPP "represents a significant opportunity to expand US chicken exports and bring increased economic benefits to chicken farmers and companies across the country."

The United States Cattleman's Association, facing severely declining US beef demand (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-04/beef-isn-t-for-dinner-anymore-as-americans-devour-cheaper-pork), hailed it in an emailed statement as "welcome news to a domestic industry in need of expanding international market access and reduction of tariffs in the countries included."

when asked why they're eating less meat (http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/06/27/155837575/why-theres-less-red-meat-served-on-many-american-plates), Americans commonly cite a desire to reduce the environmental and social impacts of industrial-scale meat production: everything from animal cruelty (http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/06/giant-california-company-foster-caught-video-abusing-chickens) to fouled water (http://environmentalintegrity.org/archives/7009) and air (http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/121-a182/) to labor abuses at slaughterhouses (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/hormel-spam-pig-brains-disease) and pillaged local economies (http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/11/industrial-scale-hog-farming-screws-small-towns). An export boom will only intensify those trends.

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/10/trans-pacific-partnership-tpp-meat-and-gmo-industries-shuanghui-china

So USA wastes its water and land raising feed for exported animal flesh, is stuck with their animal shit, farts, air, land, water pollution, antibiotic resistance.

the TTP fucking sucks for everybody and everything except the BigCorp, BigFinance, BigPharma, etc and their investors that wrote TPP (and TTIP, etc)

Winehole23

10-09-2015, 11:49 AM

not so much about tariff barriers as about corporations suing countries over "anti-competitive" regulation of labor, safety and the environment, while providing beefed up enforcement for patents and intellectual property:

Perhaps an even better explanation comes from Tim Lee over at Vox, who goes into the history of these agreements (https://www.vox.com/2015/4/17/8438995/why-obamas-new-trade-deal-is-so-controversial), noting that the "free trade" stuff has mostly already been taken care of, as there aren't that many meaningful tariffs/trade barriers left. Instead, trade agreements have become a sort of secret playground for big corporations to abuse the process and force favorable regulations to be put in place around the globe. He discusses the history and how organized labor, the copyright industries, the pharmaceutical industries and more now basically use trade agreements as a secretive, anti-democratic process to force through regulations they want.

As the opportunities for trade liberalization have dwindled, the nature of trade agreements has shifted. They're no longer just about removing barriers to trade. They've become a mechanism for setting global economic rules more generally.

This trend is alarming to Simon Lester, a free trader at the Cato Institute. "We've added in these new issues that I'm skeptical of," he says. "It's not clear what the benefits are, and they cause a lot of controversy."

And this system for setting global rules has some serious defects. We expect the laws that govern our economic lives will be made in a transparent, representative, and accountable fashion. The TPP negotiation process is none of these — it's secretive, it's dominated by powerful insiders, and it provides little opportunity for public input.

If you make the facile assumption that the TPP is actually about free trade, then you might be confused about all the hubbub about it. If you actually take the time to understand that much of what's in there has nothing to do with free trade and, in fact, may be the opposite of free trade, you realize why there's so much concern.https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150422/23441830765/if-you-really-think-tpp-is-about-trade-then-your-analysis-is-already-wrong.shtml

Winehole23

10-09-2015, 11:53 AM

http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/

boutons_deux

10-09-2015, 11:55 AM

the "labor protections" in for works in foreign countries haven't been enforced in earlier agreements and won't be enforced in TPP.

boutons_deux

10-09-2015, 12:06 PM

What the TPP means for agricultural greenhouse gas emissions

negotiators might end protections for U.S. sugar producers. Of course that didn’t happen. There were also suggestions that Canada might throw open its highly regulated milk market (http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/blame-canadas-dairy-cartel-for-our-expensive-milk-and-cheese-867). That didn’t happen either.

The TPP opened North America’s door to imports of milk (in Canada) and sugar (in the U.S.), but just a crack. It seems that North American farmers are giving away very little, and getting a lot in return.

Contrast that with milk and sugar. Canada is letting 3.25 percent of its milk come from imports, and it’s promising to pay $4.3 billion (http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-tpp-dairy-analysis-1.3257280) to make up for farmers’ loses. The U.S. will allow 65,000 metric tons of sugar in per year without tariffs from the other partner countries (and only if Mexico can’t provide it). “We don’t see ourselves as being harmed economically by these provisions,” Jack Roney, an economist with the American Sugar Alliance, told Capital Press (http://www.capitalpress.com/Nation_World/Nation/20151006/sources-tpp-wouldnt-hurt-no-cost-us-sugar-program). “The volumes involved are really not large enough to have a significant effect.”

The crops with lobbyists and political connections seem to have gotten help. Sugar isn’t a particularly large part of the American economy, but I’m not surprised that it didn’t have to make significant concessions, because sugar growers have long had outsized sway in Washington, D.C. There are a few wonderfully over-the-top examples of the sugar industry making its political clout visible.

plopping aseptically sealed, unrefrigerated boxes of milk on container ships turns out to have a small climate impact compared to the milk production itself (even with meat, which must be kept cold, transportation is a tiny part of the greenhouse-gas footprint (http://beeflambnz.com/Documents/Farm/A%20greenhouse%20gas%20footprint%20study%20for%20e xported%20New%20Zealand%20beef.pdf)).

In New Zealand, dairies generally graze cattle on clover and ryegrass year round, which provides climate benefits (http://www.researchgate.net/publication/228348136_First_life_cycle_assessment_of_milk_prod uction_from_New_Zealand_dairy_farm_systems). A United Nations assessment (http://www.fao.org/docrep/012/k7930e/k7930e00.pdf) found that producing a kilogram of milk in the U.S. produced nearly twice the amount of greenhouse gases as producing a kilogram of milk in New Zealand.

hat greener production practices are more efficient, and therefore cheaper — does tend to apply to meat and dairy (http://grist.org/food/the-practical-case-for-producing-meat-more-efficiently/), so increasing meat exports from the U.S. could be good for greenhouse gas emissions in the long term.

https://grist.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/screen-shot-2015-10-07-at-3-52-32-pm.png?w=660&h=489

free trade is just about eliminating tariffs. But in practice, “free trade” too often favors the rich and powerful. Instead of everyone booting their trade barriers and subsidies, it’s often the poor countries that drop their trade barriers, while, in return, the rich countries protect their constituent industries a tiny bit less.

http://grist.org/politics/what-the-tpp-means-for-agricultural-greenhouse-gas-emissions/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=daily-horizon

boutons_deux

10-09-2015, 01:42 PM

As TPP Deal Inked, Guatemala Labor Case Unmasks Free Trade's Empty Promises

But to see through the hollow rhetoric, you just have to look at the example of the first-ever labor case brought under a free trade agreement - which is about to wrap up, likely in the midst of the TPP debate in Congress.

In December, an arbitration panel will issue its ruling on a complaint brought by the US under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) against the Guatemalan government for failing to effectively enforce its labor laws.

It's taken years to bring just one case this far, and the potential penalty is a mere slap on the wrist.

Snail's Pace

It's been seven years since the AFL-CIO, together with six Guatemalan unions, first submitted a complaint to the Department of Labor. They accused Guatemala of failing to protect workers' legally guaranteed rights - to association, collective bargaining, and acceptable conditions - by not conducting inspections, registering unions, or ensuring compliance with court orders.

Only 2 percent of Guatemala's working population belongs to a union. It has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world for union activists. The AFL-CIO reported that 72 Guatemalan unionists had been murdered since CAFTA went into effect, as of August 2014, with near-total impunity for their assassins.

The slow pace of the CAFTA case is "a huge detriment to workers in Guatemala," said Stephen Wishart, Central America director for the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center. "Their rights are being violated in the same ways that were presented back in 2008."

The delays have simply given the Guatemalan government an opportunity to "put make-up on the problems," said Homero Fuentes, of a Guatemalan labor standards monitoring organization called COVERCO.

After deciding to accept the case, the US held consultations with the Guatemalan government, but failed to reach an agreement. In 2011 the US requested the establishment of the arbitration panel, which is supposed to protect workers' rights under CAFTA.

The panel was finally constituted in 2012 - but was put on hold six months later, when Guatemala signed an Enforcement Plan, agreeing to add more labor inspectors and increase the Ministry of Labor's budget for enforcement.

But Guatemala failed to act on most of the plan. Finally last September, the US requested that the panel be reconstituted. The first hearing was held in June.

"A lot of people would argue that the timing of that is not coincidental - we're in the middle of a huge trade debate," said Cassandra Waters, a Global Workers Rights Fellow at the AFL-CIO.

Violence Unaddressed

Anti-union violence isn't among the complaint's charges. The US government argues that's a problem that falls outside the scope of free-trade pacts.

The AFL-CIO disagrees. "There's nothing in these agreements that prevents them from taking up violence," said Waters. "Guatemala is required to enforce its laws related to freedom of association - and that would include investigating murders of trade unionists."

The violence, coupled with other failures to enforce labor law, make it extraordinarily difficult for Guatemalan workers to form unions.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33179-as-tpp-deal-inked-guatemala-labor-case-unmasks-free-trade-s-empty-promises

of course, St Ronnie and his neocon controllers fucked up El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatamala in the 1980s when "social justice" and "union movements" were take as Communist infiltrations. The CIA empowered, financed, equipped right-wing groups that emasculated "leftist" govts and then stayed on to run the countries as de facto govts.

ElNono

10-09-2015, 07:17 PM

EFF: the Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared

Wikileaks has released the finalized Intellectual Property text (https://wikileaks.org/tpp-ip3/) of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which international negotiators agreed upon (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/10/05/1432236/trans-pacific-partnership-trade-deal-is-reached) a few days ago. Unfortunately, it contains many of the consumer-hostile provisions (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/final-leaked-tpp-text-all-we-feared) that so many organizations spoke out against beforehand. This includes the extension of the copyright term to life plus 70 years, and a ban on the circumvention of DRM. The EFF says, "If you dig deeper, you'll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding. That paragraph on the public domain, for example, used to be much stronger in the first leaked draft, with specific obligations to identify, preserve and promote access to public domain material. All of that has now been lost in favor of a feeble, feel-good platitude that imposes no concrete obligations on the TPP parties whatsoever." The EFF walks us through all the other awful provisions as well — it's quite a lengthy analysis.

Winehole23

10-10-2015, 02:12 AM

in principle, treaty level agreements between countries moot local regulations. I believe -- I could be wrong, who would know at all, but for Wikileaks? -- they can be amerced as restraint of trade in the dispute mechanism, if they adversely affect projected profits.

could be nasty. Australia and Japan can afford to sue us. hell, lotta rich companies can, especially if they have a treaty that encourages them to, and a tribunal specially designed to try the disputes.

boutons_deux

10-10-2015, 04:42 AM

"could be nasty"

BigCorp wrote TPP, elevating itself to have power over sovereign states, so it will not be "could", but most certainly WILL BE nasty. Once they have that power, they will use it.

boutons_deux

11-07-2015, 10:47 AM

Full Text Of TPP Released: And It's Really, Really Bad

from the no-wonder-they-were-hiding-it dept

But the problems with the TPP run deep: Despite earlier promises from both the USTR and Australia that intellectual property would not be subject to the "corporate sovereignty" provisions (which they call "investor state dispute settlement" or ISDS), they absolutely are (http://www.keionline.org/node/2358). And this is amassive problem. It means that any country that's a member of the TPP can effectively nevermove its intellectual property rules in the direction of better benefiting the public -- because some foreign company will claim that this takes away their expected profits. Section 9.1 lists "intellectual property" (http://www.mfat.govt.nz/downloads/trade-agreement/transpacific/TPP-text/9.%20Investment%20Chapter.pdf) as the type of asset that is a part of the ISDS process.

We already know what a mess this can create. Remember Eli Lilly is currently using NAFTA's corporate sovereignty provisions to demand half a billion dollars (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130723/05101823898/eli-lilly-decides-it-was-not-greedy-enough-now-suing-canada-500-million.shtml) from Canada, after Canada rejected two of its patents because Canada realized the drugs that Eli Lilly had tried to patent did not deliver the benefits the company claimed when trying to get the patent. Canada said that was a good reason to reject the patent. Eli Lilly claimed that this was taking away its assets and demanded half a billion dollars.

What's kind of amazing here is that we've spent years warning about problems with the "intellectual property" chapter and the "investment" chapter individually, and the absolute worst part of this agreement is the way the negotiators tied them together in a ridiculous and dangerous way. This is much, much worse than many of the things we feared would be in the agreement, and it's made even worse by the fact that the USTR directly promised this would not be in the agreement.

KEI warns that at least part of the e-commerce provision can be read to ban a requirement for open source software (http://keionline.org/node/2363), which would seem to undermine certain open source licenses, like the GPL. Michael Geist notes that the document confirms that Canada basically has agreed to wipe out (http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/11/official-release-of-tpp-text-confirms-massive-loss-to-canadian-public-domain/) many useful copyright reforms from a few years ago, and to extend its copyrights yet again, robbing the public of the public domain. Of course, that raises the question of whether or not someone could make an ISDS claim that Canada is taking away their "investment" in Canada... Oh, who am I kidding. ISDS doesn't apply to the public... just to companies.

There are also, as expected, serious problems for affordable medicine and healthcare (http://msfaccess.org/about-us/media-room/press-releases/statement-msf-official-release-full-text-trans-pacific), privacy (https://www.citizen.org/pressroom/pressroomredirect.cfm?ID=5723),surveillance (https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/662227415129825280) and more. Despite claiming to demand "nondiscriminatory treatment of digital products" and "cross border transfer by electric means" of information -- an anti-censorship/blocking provision -- the agreement lets Malaysia off the hook (https://twitter.com/fightfortheftr/status/662337060339097600/photo/1) on such requirements.

In addition to that, last month we wrote about how it appeared that the negotiators had carved tobacco out of the ISDS section (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151005/15595532440/tpp-tobacco-carveout-bring-together-strange-bedfellows-while-highlighting-problems-tpp.shtml), but upon reading the whole thing, people are pointing out that it's not actually true (https://twitter.com/Sean_Fiil_Flynn/status/662364324783112192), as it makes that part voluntary for countries to decide themselves.

In short, the TPP appears to be a massive mess, and in some ways worse than we feared. According to some, concurrent with the release,

President Obama told Congress of his intent to sign the TPP, which started the 90-day clock for Congress to "review" the agreement --

conveniently making sure that much of the debate is limited by the end-of-the-year holidays,

long Congressional "recesses" that happen around this time, and

other key end-of-the-year business.

In short, this agreement that was negotiated in near total secrecy (unless you were a big corporate lobbyist) is a really bad deal, and the administration is going to play every trick it can come up with to get it approved. Now would be a good time to let your elected officials know that they need to vote against the TPP.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151106/07051932731/full-text-tpp-released-really-really-bad.shtml
BigCorp wrote TPP so we (the smart, concerned ones) absolutely know everybody and everything else will get raped.

Bernie says he will do everything he can to block TPP, while Hillary has flipped from supporter to somewhat non-supporter.

If TPP slips by Congress and is signed by Obama, it will be a huge SHIT STAIN on Obama's legacy.

TPP isn't about "trade" as Obama LIES, it's about increasing the rights, powers of BigCrop to screw everybody and everything else.

and 6000 pages are allowed only a Congressional debate limit of 20 hours

boutons_deux

11-07-2015, 10:53 AM

Statement by MSF on the official release of the full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement

Today’s official release of the agreed TPP text confirms that the deal will further delay price-lowering generic competition by extending and strengthening monopoly market protections for pharmaceutical companies.

The TPP is a bad deal for medicine: it’s bad for humanitarian medical treatment providers such as MSF, and it’s bad for people who need access to affordable medicines around the world, including in the United States.

At a time when the high price of life-saving medicines and vaccines is increasingly recognized as a barrier to effective medical care, it is very concerning to see that the U.S. government and pharmaceutical companies have succeeded in locking in rules that will keep medicine prices high for longer and limit the tools that governments and civil society have to try to increase generic competition.

For example, if enacted, the TPP will not allow national regulatory authorities to use existing data that demonstrates a biological product’s safety and efficacy to authorize the sale of competitor products, even in the absence of patents.

The TPP would also force governments to extend existing patent monopolies beyond current 20-year terms at the request of pharmaceutical companies, and to redefine what type of medicine deserves a patent, including mandating the granting of new patents for modifications of existing medicines.

The provisions in the TPP text will not only raise the price of medicines and cause unnecessary suffering, but they also represent a complete departure from the U.S. government’s previous commitments to global health, including safeguards included in the U.S.’s 2007 ‘New Trade Policy.’

http://msfaccess.org/about-us/media-room/press-releases/statement-msf-official-release-full-text-trans-pacific

boutons_deux

11-07-2015, 10:57 AM

TPP has provision banning requirements to transfer of or access to source code of software

The TPP E-Commerce chapter has a provision banning requirements to transfer or provide access to software source code. This applies to "mass market software."

Article 14.17: Source Code

1. No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such software, in its territory.

2. For the purposes of this Article, software subject to paragraph 1 is limited to mass-market software or products containing such software and does not include software used for critical infrastructure.

3. Nothing in this Article shall preclude:

(a) the inclusion or implementation of terms and conditions related to the provision of source code in commercially negotiated contracts; or

(b) a Party from requiring the modification of source code of software necessary for that software to comply with laws or regulations which are not inconsistent with this Agreement.

4. This Article shall not be construed to affect requirements that relate to patent applications or granted patents, including any orders made by a judicial authority in relation to patent disputes, subject to safeguards against unauthorised disclosure under the law or practice of a Party.

I'm wondering how the GPL fares here, and

how much money Microsoft spent lobbying to get this included in the TPP, or

if the NSA has a role in this.

One aspect of this provision is that governments cannot insist on source code transparency, for mass market software, even to address concerns over security or interoperability.

http://keionline.org/node/2363

boutons_deux

11-07-2015, 12:53 PM

The clock is ticking on a time bomb that could blow up a free internet: the TPP

Its 30 chapters and 6,194 pages cover a dizzying range of policy questions that have nothing to do with tariffs, imports or exports.

Thanks to, among other things, its dramatic expansion of copyright enforcement, the agreement poses a grave threat to our basic right to access information and express ourselves on the web, and could easily be abused to criminalize common online activities and enforce widespread internet censorship.

To fully grasp the impending trainwreck here, it’s important to understand that copyright laws have a profound effect on what internet users can see and do online. The US regime of copyright enforcement has been repeatedly co-opted (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/12/copyright-law-tool-state-internet-censorship) by special interests to censor legitimate content from the web.

Copyright laws have been used to attack (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130814/09424724172/more-copyright-censorship-straight-pride-group-uses-dmca-to-take-down-their-own-responses-to-reporter.shtml) LGBTQ websites, censor (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151103/16042732709/copyright-as-censorship-sketchy-food-scanning-company-abuses-dmca-to-censor-critical-reporting.shtml) investigative journalism and scrub homemade videos from the net just because of the music in the background.

Many of the scariest scenes in the TPP script take place in the intellectual property chapter (http://www.mfat.govt.nz/downloads/trade-agreement/transpacific/TPP-text/18.%20Intellectual%20Property%20Chapter.pdf). This section exports the most draconian aspects of the United States’ broken copyright system and forces them onto the rest of the world, without requiring (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/final-leaked-tpp-text-all-we-feared) “fair use” provisions that are necessary to protect free speech.

One provision (https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/662275771449393152) demands that TPP member countries enforce copyright terms 70 years after the death of the creator. This will keep an immeasurable amount of information, art and creativity locked away from the public domain for decades longer than necessary, and allow for governments and corporations to abuse copyright laws and censor content at will, since so much of what’s online will be subject to copyright for decades.

TPP even prescribes a mechanism for that censorship to occur. A section that can best be described as “Zombie-Sopa (http://sopastrike.com/)”, due to its similarity to the failed Stop Online Piracy Act, would require internet service providers (ISPs) to play “copyright cops” and create systems for hastily taking down internet content upon a copyright holder’s request, even without a court order.

It then entices ISPs to comply by rewarding them with legal immunity in the event that they “inadvertently” take down something they shouldn’t have. To put the nail in the coffin, the deal requires countries to enforce heavy-handed criminal sanctions and fines for copyright infringement that are wildly disproportionate to the actual damages done to copyright holders.

The TPP affects website owners too, and threatens online privacy by requiring countries to publish databases of real names and addresses associated with certain web domains. This is particularly dangerous for dissenting voices in repressive countries, but it will also leave many average website owners exposed to scammers, online harassers and trolls.

The corporate wish-list continues.

A dangerously broad “trade secrets” section endangers whistleblowers and journalists by prescribing harsh penalties for anyone accessing or exposing corporate secrets (or wrongdoing) “through a computer network”. Another article vaguely criminalizes tinkering with, unlocking or modifying your phone or other devices you own.

The most shocking revelation in the finalized text isn’t in the intellectual property chapter itself, but in a provision that includes intellectual property enforcement in the troubling Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) scheme. ISDS allows corporations to sue governments in secretive international tribunals if they feel that a nation’s local laws are “unfairly” limiting their ability to make money hand over fist.

In the shadow of a well-documented media blackout (http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/02/05/study-media-leave-viewers-in-the-dark-about-tra/197932), so much of the discussion, criticism and organizing around TPP has happened over the web. It’s terrifying to think that this agreement, if ratified, will not only trample our rights, but could also fundamentally break the most powerful tool we have to raise awareness about the urgent issues of our time, expose the secrets of the corrupt and powerful, and amplify the voices of the millions struggling for a better world.

Fortunately, TPP is not yet a done deal. Before it becomes law it has to be ratified by each country’s lawmakers, including the US Congress. If you’re concerned about how TPP might affect the future of the internet, now might be a good time to use the internet to contact your representatives (http://fightthetpp.org/), while its still a free and open place.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/06/clock-ticking-time-bomb-blow-up-free-internet-tpp

rmt

11-07-2015, 01:35 PM

What do you know - something I agree with you on. I'm against anything that hurts American workers be it H1-B visas, illegal immigration and these stupid trade deals.

boutons_deux

11-17-2015, 04:49 PM

President Obama's Forum: High Theater on High Drug Prices

The Obama administration is sponsoring a forum this week on the problem of high drug prices. The purpose is presumably to express concern about a rapidly growing problem for both people in the United States and around the world. It seems likely that the point is to quite literally express concern, as opposed to taking substantive steps towards addressing an enormous problem that not only takes an economic toll, but threatens people's health and lives.

The reasons for skepticism are obvious.

First and foremost, the Obama administration has placed higher drug prices at the center of its trade agenda. As was widely reported, the last major sticking point in reaching an agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was the Obama administration's insistence on longer periods for maintaining the exclusivity on test data for biosimilar drugs.

This exclusivity means a monopoly period in which drug companies can charge high prices because there are no competitors. The Obama administration went to the mat for the pharmaceutical industry on this issue, putting aside concerns in other areas. For example, the pursuit of the pharmaceutical industry's agenda meant that currency management - which has led to the huge US trade deficit and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs - was not an item addressed in the TPP.

In addition to the administration's willingness to do the pharmaceutical industry's bidding, the class of excluded characters also indicates a lack of seriousness on this issue. There are a number of groups that have been working for decades to increase the accessibility of drugs around the world, most notably Doctors Without Borders. It seems that none of the representatives of these groups will be present at the forum.

There also have been many academics who have been working to develop alternative systems of research financing so that drugs could be sold in a free market without government granted monopolies, like patent protection and data exclusivity. The most notable person in this group is Joe Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate, who also was not on the guest list.

Any honest discussion of high drug prices should include some consideration of alternative financing mechanisms. After all, fans of free trade everywhere know that a 10 or 20 percent tariff on clothes or cars is bad news. Such tariffs lead to economic waste and encourage corruption, as is explained in the economics textbooks.

Patent monopolies typically raise the price of drugs by 10 or even 100 times the free market price. This is equivalent to tariffs of 1,000 or 10,000 percent. Everything the economics textbooks say about 10 or 20 percent tariffs applies to the protection given drug companies, except the impact is hugely greater since the size of the effective tariff is so much larger. How could a serious forum on drug prices not deal with this fundamental issue?

There are alternative financing mechanisms to patent monopoly already in existence. The government spends more than $30 billion a year funding biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health. Everyone familiar with the output from this research, especially the drug companies, agrees that this is money very well spent. This funding certainly could be expanded.

There is also much research financed by private foundations and charities. Working with other organizations and drug companies, Doctors Without Borders has developed a number of new drugs and treatments. This research has benefited hundreds of millions of people, but cost less (http://www.dndi.org/images/stories/pdf_aboutDNDi/DNDiModel/DNDi_CostOfDev_FactsFigures) than one tenth of what the pharmaceutical industry claims it costs them (http://csdd.tufts.edu/news/complete_story/pr_tufts_csdd_2014_cost_study) to develop a single drug.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33683-president-obama-s-forum-high-theater-on-high-drug-prices

boutons_deux

12-03-2015, 02:44 PM

BigCorp doing the dirty in Geneva, secretly

Secret trade talks could weaken climate targets set in Paris, warn campaigners

Secret trade talks in Geneva could outlaw subsidies for renewable energy, undermining climate discussions in Paris (http://www.theguardian.com/world/paris) that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions, anti-poverty campaigners have warned.

The Geneva summit involving 22 countries including the US, Mexico, Australia and the 28 EU member states, aim to create a “level playing field”, with the possible consequence that

fracking companies could dispute subsidies for solar or wind power. ( anybody smell a BigCarbon rat? )

Unions and anti-poverty campaigners said the implications for developing world economies that want to promote investment in renewable energy would prove disastrous.

According to leaked documents (https://wikileaks.org/tisa/), a draft chapter of the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) (http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/tisa/) would, if adopted, force governments to accept “technological neutrality”. Disputes over subsidies to renewables would be

resolved in a tribunal system outside national government control.

“This chapter shall apply measures affecting trade in energy related services, irrespective of the energy source dealt with, technology used, whether the energy source is renewable or non-renewable, and whether the service is supplied onshore or offshore,” says the draft obtained by WikiLeaks (http://www.theguardian.com/media/wikileaks).

the proposals as drafted would leave “elected policymakers unable to encourage renewable energy over non-renewable, clean over dirty, or local over imported”.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/dec/03/secret-trade-talks-climate-targets-paris-genevaA

boutons_deux

12-07-2015, 12:13 PM

WTO Authorizes Over $1 Billion in Sanctions Unless U.S. Guts Popular Country-of-Origin Meat Labels, Disproving Obama Claim That Trade Pacts Can’t Undermine Public Interest Policies

Today’s World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling against the U.S. country-of-origin meat labels (COOL) that consumers rely on to make informed choices about their food provides a glaring example of how trade agreements can undermine U.S. public interest policies, Public Citizen said today. How the Obama administration responds to the WTO ruling will have a significant impact on its efforts to build congressional and public support for the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

In his May 2015 speech at Nike headquarters, President Barack Obama said that critics’ warnings that the TPP could “undermine American regulation – food safety, worker safety, even financial regulations” was “just not true.” He said: “They’re making this stuff up. No trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws.”

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2015/12/07/wto-authorizes-over-1-billion-sanctions-unless-us-guts-popular-country-origin

that's TAXPAYERS' $1B

boutons_deux

12-28-2015, 05:15 PM

Capitalists fucking over countries without going to court

Transnational Companies Sue Developing States

Explosion

The world of investment arbitration is very intransparent. After a few months' research, journalists working for the Dutch magazines Oneworld and De Groene Amsterdammer have published a number of stories about the hidden world of ISDS. The stories are accompanied by an interactive map, showing all ISDS claims ever filed against a state. The database behind this map contains information about the disputes, the awards and the members of the tribunals.

What is remarkable is the rise of the popularity of ISDS. Whereas in 2000 just 15 claims were filed, in 2014 alone nearly 70 new claims saw the light. By 2014,therewere a total of 629 ISDS cases filed. This may turn out to be even more, because not all cases are public. The number of billion-dollar claims is growing.

Canada, the US and Mexico are on the top list of most-sued states. The reason is NAFTA, the free trade agreement of which ISDS is a part. However, the US has never lost a case. If we exclude the cases won by the state, a completely different picture emerges: Argentina, Venezuela, India, Mexico, Bolivia. In other words, developing and emerging countries. Many of these countries have now come to the conclusion that this arbitrationsystemisunfair, or even neocolonial.

Dutch Sandwich

Where do the claims originate from? In the list of home countries of investors the US is still number one, but in the last few years they have been surpassed by Western Europe. In 2014, more than half of all claims were filed by Western European investors. Claimant country number one is the Netherlands, with more claims than the United States.

However, a closer look at the companies involved shows that more than two-thirds of all Dutch claims have actually been filed by so-called mailbox companies. They choose to settle in the Netherlands for its attractive network of investment treaties, 95 in total, which are deemed investor-friendly.

"This is known as the Dutch sandwich," says George Kahale III, an American top lawyer, who defends states in large investment cases. "You put a Dutch holding in between, and you can call yourself Dutch. This is how the system is misused."

White Men

In 88per cent of the cases, the researchers found the names of the arbitrators involved. From this a picture emerges of a highly select club of men - and two women - who are assigned time and again to judge. A top-15 of arbitrators have been involved in a striking 63 per cent of all cases. In 22 per cent of the cases, even two members of the top-15 were involved, which means that they have been able to make or break the case.

"This is not strange," says Bernard Hanotiau, a Belgian arbitrator who is also a member of the top-15. That a few arbitrators dominate the scene, he says, is just because they are the best ones. "If you look for lung cancer specialists in Belgium, you also end up with a small group. We are specialists."

Yet this is problematic. After all, the arbitrators are not judges who have sworn an oath and have been appointed publicly. Most of them are commercial lawyers, who even continue to act as counsels next to their work as arbitrators. It is possible that a state is condemned by a judge whose law firm partner is a lawyer for an investor in a comparable case. The possibility of conflicts of interest is big.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34192-companies-sue-developing-states-through-western-europe

diego

12-28-2015, 09:22 PM

the problem with this system is that no matter what sanction happens taxpayers here or there will always be left holding the bag, makes it real easy to grease the wheels and hop everyone on board.

still, like other WTO judgements in the past, or ICJ for that matter, the US will do whatever it likes and no one will be able to do anything about it. china too for that matter. corporations are so clearly behind this deal, where are all the free market libertarians and patriotic neocons outraged at this? All the little countries got sold out by their politicians, myself included.

boutons_deux

01-07-2016, 10:49 AM

ISDS/NAFTA being used by foreign predators to shakedown US taxapayers for $15B

TransCanada's Pathetic Keystone XL Lawsuit Could Galvanize Resistance to New Trade Agreements

The lawsuit won't do anything to help get the pipeline built, it's too late for that. The only purpose is for TransCanada to get compensated for the billions of dollars it wasted on this boondoggle in the first place. It's a greedy and pathetic move, but I guess that's what we've come to expect from the fossil fuel industry.

TransCanada is bringing their lawsuit under NAFTA, otherwise known as the North American Free Trade Agreement. More specifically, they're using a complex and opaque process known as the investor-state dispute system, which allows corporations to bring lawsuits against countries that they feel are unfairly blocking the free flow of trade. TransCanada's accusation is that the Obama Administration rejected Keystone XL for purely symbolic reasons, rather than its impact on the climate, and therefore the company has been discriminated against.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/07/transcanadas-pathetic-keystone-xl-lawsuit-could-galvanize-resistance-new-trade

boutons_deux

02-04-2016, 05:28 PM

TPP is signed but hurdles remain

Signed and sealed but not yet delivered, the Trans-Pacific Partnership will now be put through the wringer in member countries for ratification.

The 12 ministers in Auckland yesterday for the signing were relentlessly positive about its likely benefits to their economies and to the ease of trade in goods and services.

Malaysia was so enthusiastic the deal passed a vote in Parliament last week, even though it didn't need its approval. And in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam it will just require the consent of the state president.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11584767

boutons_deux

02-04-2016, 05:30 PM

Study: The Trans-Pacific Partnership Will Cost US a Half Million Jobs, Drag Down GDP

Economic researchers with Tufts University's Global Development and Environment Institute said Monday that widely cited projections claiming the TPP will boost economic activity in the US are "based on unrealistic assumptions."

Instead, the economists noted, the 12-nation Pacific Rim trade deal will likely lead to the loss of 448,000 jobs from the US workforce, while lowering GDP by more than a half-percentage point over the next decade.

The report (http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/wp/16-01Capaldo-IzurietaTPP_ES.pdf) also estimates that TPP will cause labor's share of income to decline by 1.3 percent, increasing inequality in the United States.

It noted, however, that this would not be unique to the US - that new income going to workers in all TPP signatories is expected to drop as a result of the deal, according to the analysis, widening the gap between the global rich and poor.

The Tufts researchers also found that while the US job market is projected to take the biggest hit, the TPP would lead to 771,000 job aggregate losses over the next ten years in all member nations.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34661-study-tpp-will-cost-us-a-half-million-jobs-drag-down-gdp

rmt

02-04-2016, 05:45 PM

boutons_deux

02-04-2016, 05:56 PM

So, with this projected loss of US jobs, do you approve of Obama signing it?

no, it's one of his biggest fuckups

Winehole23

02-06-2016, 04:12 PM

About an hour ago, representatives from 12 different nations officially signed the Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP) agreement (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11584254) in Auckland, New Zealand. The date, February 4th (New Zealand time) is noteworthy, because it's 90 days after the official text was released (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151106/07051932731/full-text-tpp-released-really-really-bad.shtml). There was a 90 day clock (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-tpp-obama-idUSKCN0SU1YB20151105) that was required between releasing the text and before the US could actually sign onto the agreement. The stated purpose of this 90 day clock was in order to allow "debate" about the agreement. Remember, the entire agreement was negotiated in secret, with US officials treating the text of the document as if it were a national security secret (unless you were an industry lobbyist, of course). So as a nod to pretend "transparency" there was a promise that nothing would be signed for 90 days after the text was actually released.

So... uh... what happened to that "debate"? It didn't happen at all. The TPP was barely mentioned at all by the administration in the last 90 days. Even during the State of the Union, Obama breezed past the TPP with a quick comment, even though it's supposedly a defining part of his "legacy." But there's been no debate. Because there was never any intent for an actual debate. The 90 day clock was just something that was put into the process so that the USTR and the White House could pretend that there was more "transparency" and that they wouldn't sign the agreement until after it had been looked at and understood by the public.https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160203/15151133510/countries-sign-tpp-whatever-happened-to-debate-we-were-promised-before-signing.shtml

Winehole23

02-06-2016, 04:13 PM

Of course, the signing is a totally meaningless bit of theater. The real fight is over ratification. The various countries need to ratify the TPP for the agreement to go into effect. Technically, the TPP will enter into force 60 days after all signers ratify it... or, if that doesn't happen, within two years if at least six of the 12 participant countries ratify it and those six countries account for 85% of the combined gross domestic product of the 12 countries. Got that? In short, this means that if the US doesn't ratify it, the TPP is effectively dead. The US needs a majority of both houses of Congress to approve it, similar to a typical bill. And that's no sure thing (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/trade-officials-sign-tpp-its-still-lawmakers-reject-it) right now. Unfortunately, that's mainly because a group of our elected officials are upset that the TPP doesn't go far enough in helping big businesses block competition, but it's still worth following.

Winehole23

02-06-2016, 04:26 PM

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160128/07180633449/when-even-wall-street-journal-calls-out-ustrs-misleading-propaganda-about-tpp.shtml

boutons_deux

02-25-2016, 07:14 AM

TTIP Enters New and Dangerous Stage As Democracy is Dismantled in Secret

TTIP negotiations continue in the shadows in both America and the EU and they enter a new and dangerous stage as existing legal barriers that would inhibit certain types of (harmful) trade are dismantled in favour of a new set of rules termed ‘regulatory cooperation’. It sounds collaborative, it is, but just not in the public interest.

What this really means is that decades of regulations passed by governments, legislated upon for public interest and safety reasons are being swept aside. These new regulations that the public and journalists are barred from being a party to include the demolition of environmental protections, safety at work regulations, food safety and other laws designed to protect and defend public safety.

Any new regulations that EU states would want to impose in future are now facing considerable barriers and hurdles that could take years to negotiate and the system is clearly being designed to be onerous and just plain difficult to favour corporate interests above public interest.

Corporate Observatory, whose raison d’être is exposing the power of corporate lobbying in the EU has recently published its latest report “Dangerous Regulatory Duet (http://corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/attachments/regulatoryduet_en021.pdf)” which exposes how a new framework being implemented under regulatory cooperation through TTIP will allow bureaucrats and big business to attack the public interest.

The report highlights some examples of how big business and the governments of America and the EU have conspired to destroy these safeguards. Here are some excerpts from this lengthly and enlightening report;

Recently, the European Court of Justice struck down the so-called Safe Harbour agreement, which was concocted under what is termed “regulatory cooperation”. The Court argued that the agreement did not safeguard citizens’ rights to data privacy.

In 2004, big US financial institutions managed to secure an agreement that would allow them to operate in the EU while being monitored by US supervisory authorities. As a consequence, when the financial crisis reached its peak in 2008, it was revealed that neither US nor EU financial authorities had any idea what assets the US insurance giant AIG had on its books. The collapse of this corporation marked a key drama in the crisis, and led to a bailout of 186 billion dollars.

A proposal on ‘electroscrap’ chemical waste was watered down in 2002. It can be argued that the precautionary principle was sidelined in this case, as the final version made it impossible for member states to adopt a ban even when a substance is deemed dangerous.
A proposal to move faster on ozone-depleting substances was struck down in 2000.

etc etc

http://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/ttip-enters-new-and-dangerous-stage-as-democracy-is-dismantled-in-secret/

boutons_deux

02-25-2016, 07:17 AM

Trade Agreement Trumps Climate Accord: WTO Rules Against India Solar Program

WASHINGTON - Today in a lawsuit brought by the United States, a World Trade Organization tribunal ruled that India’s national solar energy program violates international trade law because it provides incentives for creation of local green jobs. Many U.S. states have similar programs.

Bill Waren, senior trade analyst at Friends of the Earth had this statement:

Friends of the Earth is dismayed that climate policy is being made by an international trade tribunal. The government of India reasonably provided some preferences for local producers of solar energy in order to convert from a carbon economy to a green economy. The WTO decision, finding India’s solar energy program a violation of international trade law, is an outrage. Trade law trumps the Paris climate accord.

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2016/02/24/trade-agreement-trumps-climate-accord-wto-rules-against-india-solar-program

Corporate trade policies trump sovereign nations' laws and regulaitons.

BigCorp is gonna (continue) to fuck us and everything.

boutons_deux

06-06-2016, 07:34 PM

Bill Black: The Lie That “China Wins” if the TPP Kangaroo Tribunals are Stopped (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/bill-black-the-lie-that-china-wins-if-the-tpp-kangaroo-tribunals-are-stopped.html)

CEOs, however, have not given up on their dream of being able to rig the international system through the creation of kangaroo tribunals that can, effectively, destroy effective regulation and the enforcement of rules to protect the public. As I explained in my most recent column (http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2016/05/stop-calling-deals-help-ceos-pillage-impunity-free-trade.html) on this subject, “trade” is simply the pretext for this assault on the rule of law and national sovereignty. President Obama plans to try to get the TPP approved by the lame duck Senate after the November elections.

The “serious people (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/03/opinion/the-right-asian-deal-trans-pacific-partnership.html)” of the lame stream media are encouraging the lame ducks to vote for the CEOs’ dream deal. One of their principal claims is “If T.P.P. falls apart, China wins. It’s as simple as that.” TPP is deliberately opaque, complex, and crafted in secrecy by the CEOs’ lobbyists to be the opposite of “simple.”

It has nothing to do with China winning or losing.

TPP is all about Article 9 (https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/TPP-Final-Text-Investment.pdf) of the TPP, which allows CEOs to rig the system so that the CEOs win and the people and nations lose. If the TPP becomes law Chinese CEOs win because the kangaroo tribunals of Article 9 will intensify the global “race to the bottom” that is eviscerating what remains of the rule of law even in nations that are not parties to the TPP.

Article 9 is the “rule of law” only in the sense that it specifies that the “rule of law” does not apply to the kangaroo tribunals that can impose billions of dollars in penalties on a nation for the high crime of trying to discourage smoking. Article 9 is designed to bypass one of the most important requisites of national sovereignty – a nation’s laws and judicial system.

Article 9 is authoritarian diktat – by the CEOs of multinational corporations. CEOs share a community of interest to block effective regulation and enforcement against corporate crimes and abuses.

Article 9, by contrast, was drafted by the CEOs’ lobbyists to be enforceable.

It allows CEOs to sue before kangaroo tribunals to issue massive (enforceable) financial penalties against any signatory nation that adopts rules to protect its people from even life-threatening criminal acts by corporate officials as long as the kangaroo tribunal decides the rules are “arbitrary.”

The kangaroo tribunal decisions and penalties are subject to no meaningful right of appeal, so any supposed “legal standard” is simply Potemkin propaganda.

Article 9 creates a new profit center for the CEOs of multinational corporations – suing the nations that sign the TPP and similar deals. That puts the Treasury and the general public at risk, but it will maximize the CEOs’ bonuses at our expense.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/bill-black-the-lie-that-china-wins-if-the-tpp-kangaroo-tribunals-are-stopped.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capi talism%29

boutons_deux

07-09-2016, 07:32 PM

Sanders’ TPP stance shot down by Democrat platform committee

A trade deal fight led by U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Saturday failed to fully materialize as rival and presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton announced a compromise to expand mandatory healthcare funding over the next decade.

At a meeting of the Democratic Party draft platform committee in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday, supporters of Sanders were unable to influence the committee to adopt strong language opposing the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact, marking a powerful blow to the efforts by the U.S. senator from Vermont to push the party further to the left.

“We did everything we could to win that vote,” said Sanders policy adviser Warren Gunnels. “It was very disappointing.”

Instead of a condemnation specific to the TPP, the committee reached language saying they would oppose “trade agreements that do not support good American jobs.” :lol

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/sanders-tpp-stance-shot-down-by-democrat-platform-committee/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story% 29

Wasserman-Shultz and her sycophants are pro-TPP and no doubt Hillary will sign it.

Winehole23

09-03-2016, 03:45 PM

Buzzfeed has a six-part series on ISDS:

The crisis was setting off alarms at the highest levels of Bill Clinton’s White House. If the administration got this wrong, it could lose hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and spark a backlash against one of the president’s hard-won achievements (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3037597-NAFTA-Signing-and-Ratification.html), the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The Justice Department even warned that failure “could severely undermine our system of justice.”

All of this over a small-time spat in Mississippi between funeral home companies.https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/homegrown-disaster (https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/homegrown-disaster?utm_term=.fjynmM4ap#.flKp7k4lV)

Winehole23

09-03-2016, 03:47 PM

The facts of the Mississippi case read like a farce — complete with a bombastic plaintiff’s attorney who called himself the “Giant Killer” and traveled in a private jet he named Wings of Justice.

But there was nothing remotely humorous about the demand for $725 million that the US suddenly faced.

As government lawyers traded anxious memos, groping for some way to make the case go away, the Justice Department offered a blunt assessment (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3035502-Justice-Department-Position-Statement.html#document/p4/a315819) of ISDS — one that flatly contradicts what the trade representative has told the American public.

“NAFTA does not simply protect foreign investors from discrimination,” the department concluded. “It provides foreign investors and foreign companies with more rights than Americans have and arguably gives foreign companies an advantage over domestic companies.”

Since the Mississippi funeral home case ended in 2004, the stakes have only grown. The US is staring at a new ISDS suit (http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/259329.pdf) demanding more than $15 billion. If the US loses major cases — which ISDS lawyers told BuzzFeed News is only a matter of time — then it could find itself grappling with the same grim choice (https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/the-billion-dollar-ultimatum?utm_term=.vpqVGAljBR#.vgd9dqrjKB) other nations hit with massive ISDS judgments have faced: pay out tens of billions of dollars to private companies or roll back democratically enacted laws.

“I think the US fooled itself into thinking that it wouldn’t be sued because its laws were so investor-friendly,” said José Alvarez, a former State Department lawyer. “The US didn’t anticipate just how creative investment lawyers can be.”

Winehole23

09-03-2016, 03:54 PM

legacy of NAFTA:

But just this year, TransCanada filed a $15 billion ISDS claim against the US (http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/259329.pdf), arguing that the Obama administration’s rejection of the company’s controversial Keystone XL pipeline was unfair and discriminatory. The massive project would have a “minimal environmental impact,” a company spokesperson said, and the denial actually was motivated by politics.

In January, another Canadian company accused the United States of violating NAFTA and threatened to hit the US with a separate ISDS suit. Northern Dynasty Minerals had proposed digging out gold and copper from the Pebble Mine (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/internal-memos-spur-accusations-of-bias-as-epa-moves-to-block-gold-mine/2015/02/15/3ff101c0-b2ba-11e4-854b-a38d13486ba1_story.html), which sparked fierce opposition because it’s located in one of Alaska’s biggest salmon-spawning grounds. After the Environmental Protection Agency said it planned to veto the project, the company’s DC-based lawyer dispatched a letter to the State Department warning, “Since the NAFTA’s entry into force over 21 years ago, the United States — in contrast to its Mexican and Canadian partners — has never lost” an ISDS claim. “I am writing with regard to a case that we believe would change that result, should it go to arbitration.”

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a Northern Dynasty spokesperson said the EPA’s attempt to block the mine before the company even got to apply for permits was “premature” and “unprecedented.”

These companies don’t allege that they built a pipeline or excavated a mine, only to see it stolen by the US government — the kind of outright expropriation that ISDS was originally set up to check. Instead, these suits strike at US environmental policies, which these companies say have been applied in ways that unfairly harm their businesses.

boutons_deux

09-04-2016, 09:03 AM

NAFTA / TPP / TTIP were written by BigCorp lawyers to protect/enable/enrich BigCorp (and BigCapital with its $100Bs, if not $Ts, sloshing around the planet in an eyeblink chasing gains, extracting wealth).

boutons_deux

09-08-2016, 05:05 PM

No Law Is Above BigCorp

More Than 200 Prominent Scholars Decry TPP’s ‘Frontal Attack’ on Law and Democracy

More than 200 legal and economic scholars—including President Barack Obama’s Harvard Law School mentor Laurence Tribe—have penned a letter (http://www.truthdig.com/newswire/2016/09/07/white-house-spotlights-conflict-democratic-presidential-and-congressional) to Congress warning that the pro-corporate Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS (http://www.truthdig.com/news/2016/08/30/how-isds-playground-ultra-wealthy-corrupt-and-criminal)) regime enshrined in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP (http://www.truthdig.com/tag/TPP)) “threatens the rule of law and undermines our nation’s democratic institutions.”

As ISDS “threatens to dilute constitutional protections, weaken the judicial branch, and outsource our domestic legal system to a system of private arbitration that is isolated from essential checks and balances,” the academics urge (http://www.citizen.org/documents/isds-law-economics-professors-letter-Sept-2016.pdf) (pdf) lawmakers to reject the TPP, despite the Obama administration’s full-court press (http://www.truthdig.com/news/2016/08/16/obama-provokes-progressive-outrage-all-out-tpp-push) to pass the trade agreement during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress.

The signatories—who also include Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz (http://www.truthdig.com/news/2016/08/24/stiglitz-blasts-outrageous-tpp-obama-campaigns-corporate-friendly-deal), former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, and Columbia University Professor and UN Senior Adviser Jeffrey Sachs (http://www.truthdig.com/views/2015/11/08/tpp-too-flawed-simple-yes-vote)—note that concerns they outlined in a March 2015 letter opposing the inclusion of ISDS provisions in the TPP and other multinational trade deals were ignored.

In fact, they write, “the final TPP text simply replicates nearly word for word many of the problematic provisions from past agreements, and indeed would vastly expand the U.S. government’s potential liability under the ISDS system.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/more_than_200_prominent_scholars_decry_tpps_201609 08?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+Truthdig+Truthdig%253A+Dril ling+Beneath+the+Headlines

With a Repug Congress and a Repug President, TPP/TTIP would already be international law.

boutons_deux

09-20-2016, 01:46 PM

TTIP 2.0? New Leak Exposes Threats of Lesser-Known TISA Trade Deal

'The deal, a spiritual and practical sibling of the much-maligned TTIP and TPP free trade agreements, is designed to drive deregulation across the vast global services sector'

"It's a sad day for democracy when ordinary people are dependent on leaks to learn about the far-reaching consequences of toxic trade deals that are being cooked up behind closed doors,"

"Somehow TISA is also even more secret than the notoriously covert CETA, TTIP and TPP deals, with

parties unable to release details of negotiations until five years after it has taken effect,"

TISA is a turbo-charged privatization and deregulation deal that will enormously benefit corporations at the expense of ordinary people and democracy itself,"

the highly secretive deal—currently being negotiated by 50 nations around the world—affirm that with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) (http://www.commondreams.org/tag/ttip) on the ropes, other such "democracy-wrecking" deals are looming (http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/08/31/ttip-falters-campaigners-warn-against-democracy-wrecking-sister-deals).

Countries that sign up to TISA will be required to lock-in liberalization and could be prevented from rolling back failed policies due of two key clauses—the 'standstill' and 'ratchet' clauses.

The standstill clause freezes the extent of liberalization in certain sectors, which means the markets of TISA state can never be less liberalized than they were at the time they signed the deal.

Meanwhile the ratchet clause — which sometimes appears in other trade agreements—stops countries from reintroducing trade barriers that had been previously and unilaterally removed.

Together these two clauses

undermine the ability of governments to ever reverse the liberalization of services, even if elected on a mandate to do it.

That means they could be stopped from testing liberalizing policies, since there would be no way to reversing them if things went awry.

In order to make the objectives of the Paris Agreement a reality and in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions to the point where the worst impacts of climate change can be avoided, governments must be allowed to interfere and use all policy tools available to them.

Arbitrarily locking governments into deregulation could have hugely negative impacts on their capacity to implement the kind of climate policies we need to stay within 1.5 degrees.

"We now know that TISA will undermine COP21, further deregulate the financial sector, stop failed privatizations being brought back into public hands, and undermine data privacy laws,"

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/09/20/ttip-20-new-leak-exposes-threats-lesser-known-tisa-trade-deal

The power and wealth of planetary, mulit-national, supra-national BigCorp now vastly exceed the countervailing power of any one country or any grouping of countries.

BigCorp intends to fuck the planet, to fuck its citizens into unfuckable fuckedness.