Extreme Secrecy Eroding Support For Trans-Pacific Partnership

schwit1 writes with news that political support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership is drying up because of the secrecy involved in developing it. Members of Congress can read the bill if they want, but they need to be located in a single room within the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center, and they can't have their staff with them. They can't have a copy, they can't take notes, and they can only view one section at a time. And they're monitored while they read it. Unsurprisingly, this is souring many members of Congress on the controversial trade agreement.

"Administration aides say they can’t make the details public because the negotiations are still going on with multiple countries at once; if for example, Vietnam knew what the American bottom line was with Japan, that might drive them to change their own terms. Trade might not seem like a national security issue, they say, but it is (and foreign governments regularly try to hack their way in to American trade deliberations)."

Comments

Re:Laws that need to be made in secret

[Zocalo]

Well, that's the reason being claimed by the proponents of the bill anyway. It does kind of make sense why it would need to be a secret of you accept that as fact; if the US has agreed to pay an import duty rate of 10% to one country, and another is only getting 8%, then the latter might want 10% too. In international trade, that could be worth billions of dollars per annum, so it's in the US' best interests not to disclose that until the deal is done and documents have been signed.

However.

We have no assurances that is *all* that is being protected by this cloak of secrecy. There could easily be all sorts of other things squirrelled away in there that people will jump all over if it's made public - legal provisions for extending the US idea of justice to other nations; extradition arrangements, tweaks to copyright / trademark / patent legislation, and so on. Sure, some of that might also come under the same kind of preferential setup as in the example above, but without even a redacted version of the proposed legislation available how are people to have any confidence that at all is the case and there is little to worry about? Not disclosing the precise percentages are is one thing, but not even disclosing what the high level details are is something else entirely and just furthers the joke that the "most transparent administration ever" claim has now become.

Re:the rigamarole is political, not diplomatic

[IamTheRealMike]

Yep. These things don't seem to be as complex as you'd imagine.

When the Doha round failed at the WTO, lots of trade negotiators gave up. They thought it was hopeless. Eventually they narrowed the scope dramatically and produced a new deal (the Bali round) on reducing red tape imposed on importers/exporters. It was one of those "negotiators up until early hours of the morning, multi-day cramfest" kind of things. So I figured it'd be some horribly complex document I'd need years of legal training to understand.

Lol, nope. The agreement is here. The requirements are unbelievably trivial. Some of the things agreed to are, for instance, that import rules should be available on the internet, and if they change whilst a ship is sailing, the rules at the time of departure apply not the time of arrival. Other rules specify that when governments make decisions they should actually be issued in writing, and ports should do customs inspections on perishable goods before non-perishable.

The mind-numbing obviousness of what was agreed is sad. Reading it is quite depressing as it makes you realise how hopelessly inept and corrupt some countries must be.

Apparently one of the reasons the Doha round failed was an inability to agree on what units to use when weighing things. I mean seriously, wtf?

These things don't seem to justify the elaborate theatre that goes into them.