Secret TPP Negotiaons: UCA immunized against governments

[Nbadan]

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/politi...ics%252Bnation

[Nbadan]

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/...ll-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]

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/newsro...use-trade-vote

[boutons_deux]

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 Hepa is 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. 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 cir stances 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 compe ors 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 compe ors.

And drug companies often misled the public 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. 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 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-b...b_7640974.html

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

[boutons_deux]

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

[cantthinkofanything]

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

[boutons_deux]

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/ite...dicare-edition

[boutons_deux]

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]

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

[boutons_deux]

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 bull 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]

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 compe ion from cheaper generic drugs, possibly transcending the patent protections in U.S. law.

The highly technical 90-page do ent, 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, hepa is 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 compe ion 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...-pharma-000126



Is the White House going to bat for Big Pharma wo

[boutons_deux]

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

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 do ents 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]

Wikileaks Exposes How TISA Will Gut Financial Regulations All Over the World

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. 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, 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, 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 ins utions, 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 compe ion” 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 compe ion” 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/...+capitalism%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]

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

The current draft includes 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 that these requirements would undermine critical public health efforts by keeping medicines out of reach, especially in less wealthy nations.

In those countries, drug companies are seeking to impose stringent patent rules, keeping drug prices high for as long as possible for the patent holders by delaying generic drug entry in those markets. Strict patent rules are already in place in the United States and are a key reason why drug prices are significantly higher here than in other TPP nations. For this reason alone, U.S. negotiators should advocate for pro-consumer policies 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 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 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/iss...affordability/

[boutons_deux]

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

[boutons_deux]

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 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]

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/...0RZ0ZV20151005

[boutons_deux]

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]

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 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

TPP is not about trade. 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, 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 that pass anti-smoking laws of any kind. Last year, the US floated 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]

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

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

the TPP will similarly lock in an anti-cir vention 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. 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. Cir venting TPMs will be prohibited but exceptions will apply to ensure that people can still cir vent 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, cir vention should be considered legal as the default, and the problem should only come in if the cir vention was done for the purpose of actual infringement.

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

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...freedoms.shtml

[boutons_deux]

Hillary says today she's against TPP

[boutons_deux]

TPP: Big Pharma’s 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/...rmas-big-deal/

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

[Winehole23]

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

[boutons_deux]

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 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. The TPP would open markets in countries that currently protect domestic farmers with tariffs. Japan, for example, agreed 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 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 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, 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, Americans commonly cite a desire to reduce the environmental and social impacts of industrial-scale meat production: everything from animal cruelty to fouled water and air to labor abuses at slaughterhouses and pillaged local economies. An export boom will only intensify those trends.

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philp...huanghui-china

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

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

[Winehole23]

not so much about tariff barriers as about corporations suing countries over "anti-compe ive" 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, 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 Ins ute. "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/20...dy-wrong.shtml