The United States is isolated in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations | Hacker News Reader

The United States is isolated in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations

washingtonpost.com

151 pointsAmadou47 comments

Is there no end to what the US Govt will do for large lobby groups?

Here the US seems to be opposing the rights of Lat-Am countries to use emergency measures to protect their citizens against "Chagas disease" because that would deny its pharma companies a lucrative & desperate market.

>> Take the following snippet, from Article QQ.A.5:

>> (a) The obligations of this Chapter do not and should not prevent a Party from taking measures to protect public health by promoting access to medicines for all, in particular concerning cases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, [US oppose: chagas] and other epidemics as well as circumstances of extreme urgency or national emergency.

>> Here, "[US oppose: chagas]" indicates the word "chagas" is disputed, with the United States opposing its inclusion in the treaty. This is a reference to Chagas disease, a form of trypanosomiasis, a parasitic disease primarily affecting Latin America. U.S. opposition can probably be attributed to pressure from the pharmaceutical industry.

Most of the US position has been set by large lobby groups. They're the only one who have been allowed access to the negotiations or draft text until this leek.

The listed diseases were listed as exempt no matter what; any other disease in an emergency was listed as exempt. Therefore with the us wording patent-knockoff chagas cures would be allowed in a chagas emergency.

Still, we need a better way to fund drug research. These treaties should be doing things like cooperative payments towards research. But that wouldn't be "free trade" so the ayn rand/milton friedman/greenspan zealots would have a fit =(

> with the us wording patent-knockoff chagas cures would be allowed in a chagas emergency.

I'm not clear what you meant by that. Are you saying the US objection was to allow generics treatment of Chagas in any form?

FYI - here is the WHO fact sheet on Chagas disease. Seems like a major public health issue for Lat-Am countries.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs340/en/index.htm...

The US is requiring Lat-Am countries to enforce US patents on Chagas treatments, rather than let them be manufactured locally at lower cost.

>"Is there no end to what the US Govt will do for large lobby groups?"

This is not an issue. "Large lobby groups" also include organizations such as the EFF, ACLU, unions, and foundations such as the Gates Foundation. And let's not forget the biggest lobby group of all: the American citizenry. If you ever wrote your elected representative to vote a certain way, you are lobbying.

>"...because that would deny its pharma companies a lucrative & desperate market."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this doesn't make sense. HIV/AIDS is also a lucrative desperate market with no vaccine currently available. Heck, why is the US okay with malaria being on there even?

Also, wouldn't the Latin-Am governments purchase supplies and any future vaccines from the pharma companies? In a national emergency, the government throws more money at the issue. So, when there is a Chagas vaccine, the Latin-Am government can throw more money at the pharma company who is producing the vaccine. How is the pharma industry benefiting from the US striking out Chagas?

> "taking measures to protect public health by promoting access to medicines for all"

actually means "break the patent". We did just that here in Brazil in the 90s with some AIDS drugs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Brazil#Drug_patent...

Okay I see. Thank you for the link.

let's not forget the biggest lobby group of all: the American citizenry

Does the citizenry have the same level of access to negotiating parts of the TPP as the lobby groups who paid admission? IIRC, the citizenry have been completely cut out of the process. They didn't even know the contents of the TPP. What r0h1n possibly implied is that the US Govt backs interests that are paid for.

>Does the citizenry have the same level of access to negotiating parts of the TPP as the lobby groups who paid admission?

If they wanted it, yes.

Are you serious? You do realise that the only reason you've gotten to read this article was because someone leaked the negotiating draft, right?

While lobbying groups have had direct access to the negotiations, it took someone violating confidentiality for journalists to even be able to tell you what's being discussed.

If senator's phone lines were crammed-full of citizens demanding knowledge of the negotiations, then the citizens would get that knowledge. But they don't. No one cares or even knows about this.

When the executive negotiates without Congress's participation, citizens don't get a say in the process. We don't get to review the agreement, or pressure our representatives into changing or rejecting it. However, special industry groups do, including the RIAA, as advisors to USTR.

- http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120508/17174518835/time-t...

P.S. The TPP stands for Trans Pacific Partnership. A US senator means jack shit to someone in Japan, Australia etc.

> "Large lobby groups" also include organizations such as the EFF, ACLU, unions, and foundations such as the Gates Foundation. And let's not forget the biggest lobby group of all: the American citizenry.

Gag me with a spoon. This is tendentious Pollyannaism. The EFF and ACLU are tiny compared to first tier lobbying firms, and operate on a fraction of their budgets. If you are not paying to play at the level of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars you can write a note some intern might read and ignore. That's not a functioning representative government.

>And let's not forget the biggest lobby group of all: the American citizenry.

Why do you think the TPP drafts and negotiations were kept secret? Exactly so that only lobby group that should EVER count was kept disenfranchised.

> Is there no end to what the US Govt will do for large lobby groups?

Clearly, from the snippet you reference, the US Govt is striking a compromise. If there were no end, the US would oppose the whole section, not just the inclusion of chagas.

This is rich. So developing countries ought to be happy because the US does not oppose all their efforts to control large-scale public epidemics using emergency measures, but only some. Pray tell me, how is this a "compromise" for anyone other than US pharma companies angry at being denied the ability to milk poorer governments?

Please remember: this exemption isn't for all medication or treatment, but for "HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other epidemics as well as circumstances of extreme urgency or national emergency"

>* If there were no end, the US would oppose the whole section, not just the inclusion of chagas.*

What benevolence!

I don't find this a very plausible argument. Malaria and TB aren't big problems in the states either, so why not treat them the same way? TB drugs ain't cheap.

Given that nearly the entire US Gov't gets high on its pharmaceutical supply daily, it shouldn't be any surprise that Pharmaceutical, Inc. is running the US Gov't on a junky supply line.

There is little that can be done except stop providing massive profits to drug dealers. Good luck with that.

United States and Japan are relatively isolated in their negotiating positions. This could bode poorly for the United States as it seeks to shape the TPP to its liking.

Actually this bodes well for the USA. The greatest enemy of the USA on these IP issues is the powerful and moneyed insider lobbies that want to destroy our freedom for a few more dollars. If the US negotiators who are controlled by those interests might be frustrated, that's the best news the American people could get.

In another word, US lobby industry has met its greatest challenge so far and it's called other nations?

I wonder how US lobby firms will deal with foreign nations...

It would be nice if the news stopped using the term "The United States" for all these sorts of stories and instead qualified them more precisely. e.g.

"US special interest groups representing the intellectual property lobby isolated in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations"

It would also be good to to that for other countries as well, of course.

If not for the fact that these groups act with consent of the government elected by the people of the United States.

Actually, Congress hasn't been allowed to see the treaty either.

Ignoring for a second the subject matter, I think it's fantastic to see network analysis used in a (non-academic) major publication.

It is about time the insights that can give are made available to a wider audience.

I'd love to see the techniques Bret Victor uses in his "Ladder of Abstraction"[1] essay applied here especially if they were combined with the beauty of the NY Times "Snowfall" visualisations[2].

Anyway, well done Washington Post!

[1] http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...

> This graph indicates that the core overlap of negotiating positions currently includes New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, and Malaysia, although the direct connection between New Zealand and Singapore is weaker than the others.

Maybe that's because the 12-country TPP, initiated in 2010, is an expanded version of the 4-country TPSEP (Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership) agreement from 5 yrs earlier among Chile, New Zealand, Singapore, and Brunei. Their overlapping negotiating positions were cemented 5 years earlier than the other 8 countries.

> Counting up sole-country proposals, we might have expected the United States to take first place; in reality, it turns out to be Canada, with the United States and Japan following well behind. Of course, this chart doesn’t tell us what Canada is proposing or opposing on its own. It could well be that Canada is the sole party capable of opposing controversial provisions.

Maybe this is because the most recent countries to join the negotiations were Japan (March 2013), Canada, and Mexico (both October 2012).

The article doesn't mention this fact, instead speculates "It could well be that Canada is the sole party capable of opposing controversial provisions". I would expect better from the Washington Post.

This is probably more high level academic analysis than the TPP has had in the previous two years of negotiations, and it shows why open access to the treaty can provide great benefit to both the people negotiating it and the people who will be governed by it.

Great point!

Thank you for dragging the TPP treaty into the light Wikileaks!

Humanity may very well owe you for this.

Practicing your overstatements?

Not for the people who would end up dying of Chagas because they can't afford medicine.

In what way? Politics need to be open in order for a healthy democracy to thrive.

I think the distinctive feature about Japan and the US is that both governments are (through very different mechanisms) under the sway of their own internal pressure groups. This makes them unable to take a reasonable bargaining stance.

Perhaps this is a symptom of Japan's and America's waning power? In the past, they could afford to take less reasonable stances because they were dominant in their respective spheres, so their political classes had no incentive to clean things up.

There are a number of options for the US. It could, for example, not be involved in the trade talks (it wasn't originally); it could make demands that crash them; it could make ludicrous demands and have them acceeded to; or it could negotiate as a partner to the other members.

I suspect that the only two outcomes that are regarded as succesful is a multilateral treaty on US terms, or no multilateral treaty at all. The last thing the US wants is a multilateral treaty between East Asian and Pacific nations, which the US regards as its back yard.

Not really surprising. A lot of "big" nations from G8 and other places you'd expect to see are plain missing from this mess, and those left, while many are smaller, even they aren't thrilled at being pushed into this clearly US benefiting gig. The US' international cohesive power is on the wane and this is great demonstration.

When you do business with the US, you see it very clearly: The US is a world on their own. So big that they don't need to establish connections as they already have the connections between their States, some of them(most of them) bigger than Chile or New Zealand.

I really look forward to the day the rest of the world doesn't give a crap about whatever the US does. A decadent hegemony in decline that doesn't even realize how infantile it looks.

>The United States is isolated in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations

School bully and his group of 30 rugby playing pals is isolated on negotating taking the lunch boxes of nerds.

I was somewhat disappointed by the articles inherent bias towards the US. There is no reason why the US should place its strong IP laws and history of pharmaceutical innovation in jeopardy during the opening salvos of an international treaty negotiations.

This brings up an interesting question. what is the BATNA of these countries. That is, what is their recourse if nobody can agree?

So now we know why this is being done in secret, so the US can push morally indefensible positions such as that over Chagas disease on behalf of big pharma.

What's wrong with being alone in pushing an issue? Is this middle school?

I imagine that after SOPA and ACTA, those other countries didn't listen to every US request anymore, and were embolden to have their own requests.

JESUS CHRIST their layout is annoying!

I'm sorry I couldn't even read the article because there's so much CSS garbage on that page!

Irony: increased openness for a president who promised change.

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