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Is Public Debate of Trade Agreements Against the Public Interest?
onproton writes The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), currently being negotiated in secret, has been subject to numerous draft leaks that indicate these talks are potentially harmful to everything from public health to internet freedom. So why isn't the public involved, and why are the terms of the agreement being debated behind closed doors? According to New Zealand's current Trade Minister, Tim Groser, full disclosure of what is being discussed would likely lead to "public debate on an ill-informed basis before the deal has been done." Leaving one to question how revealing the full context and scope of the agreement talks would lead to an increase in misinformation rather than clarity.
There is a public debate. Every citizen of the Campaign-funding Corporations of America has the ability to vote, through their elected Lobbyists.
Oh, wait... now I see. Whoever submitted the story was referring to the form of government that the U.S. had around 1800.
So no public debate based on no disclosure is better than ill-informed debate based on full disclosure? He might as well have said that as a form of government, dictatorship is superior to democracy.
Using treaties and agreements negotiated in secrecy with other nations to do an end-run around the democratic process is *obviously* a subversion of everything a civilized country *should* stand for. Public debate is not actually a bad thing - but because of things like these the public interest is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
There is some place for secrecy in negotiation. If our negotiators are trying to get the best deal for us, they don't want to reveal what concessions they are willing to make until they have a sense of the concessions other parties are willing to make.
The problem is that, at least in the US, the trade negotiating agency has its priorities set by a limited number of industry advisory groups, and these groups are not representative of US interests. The composition of the groups is about 20 years behind the times, so as a result you have a trade agency pushing for copyright restrictions without thinking about how they will affect the technology industry.
The trade agency also expends a disproportionate amount of bargaining capital on intellectual property, thus reducing what it is able to accomplish in other areas, such as labor and environmental standards.
Finally, the trade agency writes its own interpretation of US law into free trade agreements. It's usually pretty close to what US law actually says, but sometimes it misinterprets it, or US law changes and the FTA text ends up saying something completely different.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is why it’s “secret”.
The majority of Congress is being kept in the dark as to the substance of the TPP negotiations, while representatives of U.S. corporations—like Halliburton, Chevron, PHRMA, Comcast, and the Motion Picture Association of America—are being consulted and made privy to details of the agreement. [...] More than two months after receiving the proper security credentials, my staff is still barred from viewing the details of the proposals that USTR is advancing. We hear that the process by which TPP is being negotiated has been a model of transparency. I disagree with that statement.[94]
Corporations don’t want the hassle of people complaining and/or some members of congress doing something about it.
That tells you right there it’s a bad thing.
Here’s something else.
they are concerned that the TPP focuses on protecting intellectual property to the detriment of efforts to provide access to affordable medicine in the developing world, particularly Vietnam, going against the foreign policy goals of the Obama administration and previous administrations.[79]
Read the entire wiki, then read this article to see exactly what might happen to who gets to set foreign policy.
Then. read this.
http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
"public debate on an ill-informed basis before the deal has been done."
It's a politician's job to inform us. If we are ill-informed they only have themselves to blame. Once the deal is complete it is extremely hard to impossible for the public to have any input because it then becomes a case of take it all or leave it all and there is always something good in there. This then allows some governments to use these treaties to ram extremely unpopular laws through which they can't get passed using the democratic process and, at the same time, foist them off on other nations whose people don't want them either.
Secret negotiations only work when you trust the people negotiating on your behalf to do so in your best interest. Let's face it, regardless of whichever country you are in, do you really trust your politicians to do that for you in this day and age?
So public disclosure of the terms is "likely to lead this to go immediately into the public debate on an ill-informed basis", and yet aren't secret terms and meetings guaranteed to result in ill-informed debate? If the agreement were truly in the public interest, then it sounds like Groser is saying is that the public is too stupid to be persuaded to support the agreement via educational campaigns. The reality is that these agreements are trying to achieve aims that are in the interests of corporations and other mega-donors, not further the interest of the people, and that's what they don't want known.
According to New Zealand's current Trade Minister, Tim Groser, full disclosure of what is being discussed would likely lead to "public debate on an ill-informed basis before the deal has been done."
"We have to pass it to find out what's in it!" - Nancy Pelosi
Of course, in context, what that quote meant was that she couldn't provide the final text of the Affordable Care Act before the scores of amendments had been voted on, because she couldn't somehow "know" exactly which ones would pass.
I suspect the same sort of thing would happen if all treaty negotiation had to happen in public. Inevitably diplomacy involves compromises. In a fully transparent process, at the first signs that a politician might be considering making a concession on the particular concern of some special interest group the politician would come under intense pressure. There would be no consideration of the wider gains and losses from the treaty as a whole, it would just be endless talking points along the lines of "why does Tim Groser want to destroy our farming industry and poison our kids by allowing in cheap antibiotic-laced US meat". Negotiations would reduce to politicians from different countries mouthing sound-bites at each other aimed at domestic audiences and nothing would ever get done.
The TPP isn't for American Citizens. It's for companies that are buying american politicians. That's why. It's very obvious..
- Kevin.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
I recently finished the book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. He makes a very good point that the "free" trade agreements themselves are frequently against the public good and primarily benefit entrenched corporations at the expense of developing nations and, often the workers in developed nations. Because the field of economics has been captured by the neo-liberal wing (not liberals in the sense of the word as used in the US.. . think 1700s' liberal) it is essential that the people impacted by these policies, not just those who stand to benefit, have a voice in the process. [link to book; no, I do not get a cut http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Sama... ]
Assuming you are American or from another developed country Free Trade probably isn't the goal. Free Trade will mostly benefit big corporations who will make more money by producing items in whatever country who's employees will work for the least. And those 3rd World Countries will benefit big time. Effectively wages and standard of living gets averaged out. Rich North Americans and Europeans get poorer as our jobs move out of our countries, and our money moves out of our economies.. Poor Africans and Asians get richer.
-Kevin
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
Contrary to Betteridge's law, the answer here is Yes
Despite all of America's faults our freedom of speech and self correcting form of democracy had always made me proud to be and American. These days however we seem to teeter on the edge of Fascism in order to preserve the interests of the top 1%.
The freedom of the internet and the cultural clash with ideologies like radical Islam seem to have created a perfect storm to motivate those at the top to grab what they can now and lock down everything to keep it for themselves in perpetuity.
Automation will increasingly make goods cheaper. Intellectual property is essentially free to distribute once created. Since there will be less profits in making goods going forward, the way to more riches is to lock up IP and make it artificially expensive. The ultimate cash-cow.
The top 1% decry the inheritance tax (death tax in rich parlance). By all measures class mobility in America is declining – lowering taxes for the rich is increasingly a scam to produce a new nobility, not a way to spur more hiring. It is not a coincidence I think that as tax rates for the rich have declined that the rich are pulling away year after year from the middle class. The advantages the rich have had over the last few decades never seem to trickle down to the middle class, so why always the argument the rich are needed to create jobs? The more we give the less we get.
Letter To Iran
Hearing this, I cannot help but thinking that our political systems reflect something called Inverted Totalitarianism.
Inverted totalitarianism is a term coined by political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in 2003 to describe the emerging form of government of the United States. Wolin believes that the United States is increasingly turning into an illiberal democracy, and uses the term "inverted totalitarianism" to illustrate similarities and differences between the United States governmental system and totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the nationalist Spain.
Wolin holds that the United States has been increasingly adopting totalitarian tendencies as a result of transformations undergone during the military mobilization required to fight the Axis powers in the 1940s, and the subsequent campaign to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War:[2]
He refers to the U.S. using the proper noun "Superpower", to emphasize the current position of the United States as the only global superpower.
While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots, Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries. It is Nazism turned upside-down, “inverted totalitarianism.” While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a “master race” (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the “ideal.”[6]
According to Wolin, there are three main ways in which inverted totalitarianism is the inverted form of classical totalitarianism.
- Whereas in Nazi Germany the state dominated economic actors, in inverted totalitarianism, corporations through political contributions and lobbying, dominate the United States, with the government acting as the servant of large corporations. This is considered "normal" rather than corrupt.[7]
- While the Nazi regime aimed at the constant political mobilization of the population, with its Nuremberg rallies, Hitler Youth, and so on, inverted totalitarianism aims for the mass of the population to be in a persistent state of political apathy. The only type of political activity expected or desired from the citizenry is voting. Low electoral turnouts are favorably received as an indication that the bulk of the population has given up hope that the government will ever help them.[8]
- While the Nazis openly mocked democracy, the United States maintains the conceit that it is the model of democracy for the whole world.[9] Wolin writes:
Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.[10]