UN Experts Say TPP and Fast Track Threaten Human Rights

Sorry, but I still prefer the current state of affairs than having secret pacts that diminish the sovereignty of my country in favor of big transnationals, that only look for themselves, justify everything with a "we only look after our investors interest" and don't know the meaning of morality. The Philip Morris - a company that sells products that kill people - case against Australia is a clear example on how bad things end up with this kind of pacts.

>The intent is to stop things like what happens in South America, where they look around, see an oil company sitting there that is majority foreign owned and nationalise it to fix a balance of payments issue[2]

This was normally done to channel the vast oil wealth into the country where it could help people rather than into the pockets of wealthy foreigners.

Call it 'fixing a balance of payments issue if you will'. Or, call it "helping the poor". It's both.

>First world countries with strong court systems already have these protections in place. This is aimed at other countries who don't have quite as strong a rule of law.

Foreign corporations will be able to sue the American government for lost profits under the TPP. This will undoubtedly be used to try and stifle new labor & environmental protection laws.

>Agreements are negotiated in secret.

Sure. When you've got something you desperately want to hide from the public.

As someone who has benefitted a whole lot from nationalized industries, I feel it would be immoral for me to deny other countries the same opportunity.

For me, the shareholders in an oil company are less important than the inhabitants of the oil rich countries.

"The intent is to stop things like what happens in South America"

... so the intent is to stop the people of economically poor but resource rich countries from having a say in whether or not they continue to have their natural resources exploited by wealthy foreigners?

That doesn't sound positive to me at all.

Those other trade deals were negotiated in secret before being presented to Congress for a vote, or to the public if it was a simple bilateral agreement without treaty powers.

Do we negotiate nuclear policy iwth Iran on live TV with a big audience in the room? Of course not. Do we negotiate clogal warming agreements in public? No. The whole point of international negotiation is to sit down and be able to work out your differences in a de-politicized manner and then submit an agreement to legislatures for approval.

I swear, I've never seen so much paranoid bullshit as I have about his TPP thing. This is diplomacy, not fucking reality TV.

How do you know this? I follow economics blogs and the general reaction concerning TPP is that the secrecy hype is overblown and that it's largely just a mundane trade agreement with a few nasty provisions like the copyright stuff, but the good parts outweigh the bad.

I'd be hard-pressed to argue with their opinion without actually reading the agreement, not to mention the years of education and exposure to global geopolitics I'd need to actually understand what the provisions being argued over mean and why they exist.

Geopolitics is nuclear science that everyone seems to think is a bikeshed.

Enough to talk about it at Nike.

He's absolutely involved. He's the President. If he opposed this, he could fire anyone he wanted. Also, several aspects of thes negotiations are classified which would make it unlikely that any of this originated at a 'lower level.' The U.S. Trade represenative is an ambassador level appointment which means he was hand-picked by Obama. If this lack of transparency bothers you then you should be voting for Rand Paul or Ted Cruz and against Hilary Clinton. Remember Clinton has been the queen of opacity in terms of releasing information to the public. With Clinton, government will run like this as a default. She stonewalls at Congressional investigations, destroys email servers that could be evidence in criminal investigations.. And on and on. Almost anyone is better in terms of secrecy and disclosure than a Clinton. Obama is a close second: the closed door everything about this administration is disgusting; additionally his appointment of Loretta Lynch as AG is especially horrible considering her views on civil asset forfeiture. I think the Chinese Central Committee has more transparency than the Obama administration.

Know about it? He's all over it:

http://infojustice.org/archives/32657

And he complains that critics have a “lack of knowledge of what is going on in the negotiations”

How rich. Of course they have a lack of knowledge since he has kept everything secret. The only thing we know about what is actually being negotiated is because of some leaks.

Obama has just been at Nike HQ arguing for the deal and fast track. Check out the video... he's criticizing legislators for being ignorant of a deal _that is kept secret from them_. All I hear is "just trust me," from a politician.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/business/nike-to-create-jo...

People are incredulous when they themselves are skeptical. But it can still be incredible "that Obama...". The thing that is incredible is the occurrence or the circumstance. 'Incredible' is actually the correct word in the top-level comment. The author is incredulous because they find it incredible.

How can you be completely against something that, by your own admission, you are unfamiliar with? Would you have been "completely against" North Korea and the U.N. signing an armistice in 1953 while it was still being negotiated?

That's just absurd. The rational thing is to be neutral about it until it comes in front of Congress for a vote. At that point you can read it and decide whether you want your representative to support or oppose it.

No arguments here. Lots of countries, the US included, have historically utilized protectionist polices that benefit local industries at the expense of higher prices for local citizens and undeserved profits for local industry. My point, besides the fact that I'm personally in favor of free trade, is that the TPP in reality has little to do with free trade. From an analysis by Dean Baker:

"The actual trade barriers between the United States and the countries in these deals, with few exceptions, are already quite low. This means that there is little to be gained by lowering them still further."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/the-trade-agreement...

This is what Washington Thinktanks and Defense Officials are saying about the TPP. I'm not really advocating the TPP as much as I am trying to bring awareness about what the TPP is for.

First, thank you for taking the time to write a thoughtful reply.

China is definitely not a boogeyman. I hope my comment did not imply it is/was. :)

It's better to understand the comment by the idea that the US does not want a multi-polar world and will act in accordance. The Wolfowitz Doctrine (and friends) quite clearly state that the US Grand Defense Strategy is to prevent other superpowers from forming. The US will be chasing its interests rather than its ideals in this case.

If you look through my other comments you will see that my conception of international happenings is broader than American politics.

But here, for the discussion of American politics and legislation - whether Fast Track will be passed etc - it is enough to understand why the US, rightly or wrongly, wants the TPP.

While many, including myself, are likely to agree that a US hegemony is a questionable way to run the world, this doesn't allow us insight into what the TPP is about for the United States. The TPP is about preventing the 'second pole'.

The US and Japan just formed a collective defense pact which required them to reinterpret their Constitution. The number of military vessels, wargaming, intelligence, etc being pointed at China has nothing to do with it's being a boogeyman. As Einstein right said Nationalism is an infantile disease: the meales of mankind.... this measels shows itself again with another fight for power and influence.

My understanding is that Fast Track prevents amending a bill endlessly, not that it simply prevents debate. Is that not the case?

Same reason you'd use the similar rules for BRAC: By forcing politicians to take an up-or-down vote on measures of national importance you get the best chance at a vote on the merits of the bill in question, without parochial concerns creeping in.

You'd never expect members of Congress from Florida to vote in favor of a bill that takes away a military base at Jacksonville, for instance, no matter how much excess capacity is resident at the base. For instance Naval Station Mayport has not had a carrier homeported there for years ever since the USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) was decommissioned. So all of the infrastructure at the base dedicated to carrier-centric concerns could be shuttered and possibly save the taxpayers some money, but doing so would forestall the option of adding a carrier later, and would probably reduce the number of personnel assigned to the base.

Alternately you could assign a nuclear carrier to the base to make use of the infrastructure present, but you'd need to make further upgrades to handle nuclear carriers, and assigning a carrier to Mayport would necessarily mean removing it from Norfolk.

Guess which state's delegation has successfully prevented the use of funds to expand Mayport's carrier capabilities? Hint: They are north of North Carolina and south of Maryland.

Now a bill like a free trade bill is practically the definition of a bill easily tainted with parochial concerns. That's the reason there was a similar outcry over NAFTA while it was being drafted, when "experts" at the time were stridently predicting the impending implosion of the American economy, with wording that would have made Steinbeck sound like a happy-go-lucky author.

It's telling when the zeal over free trade turns even progressive icons like Bernie Sanders into racists that resort to turning Vietnamese (as one example) into a sub-class of humanity compared to Americans. It's also telling when the worst accusation that can be laid against the proposal to date is that "it's still being negotiated in secret!!!1", as if that wasn't also the method used to negotiate most major international agreements.

The final proposal may turn out to be bad, and in that case I'll be the first to recommend vetoing the proposal as a whole. But simplified trade authority approval procedures are precisely the right thing to do, as otherwise you end up with "ratification" bills that ratify something completely different than what had been agreed, usually with a Ted Stevens-style "Bridge to Nowhere" attached right on top.

To force Congress into an up-or-down vote on the merits of the whole package instead of pointless thread-pulling that will cause an agreement to founder. There are 12 countries that are a party to the TPP. If we are to wait for 12 legislatures to debate and amend and re-amend then nothing will ever get done; there are times when a simple yes or no vote is more appropriate.

It's like people don't seem to understand the point of having an executive branch in the first place. This sort of thing is precisely why we have one, and why the Constitution specifically empowers the President to negotiate treaties 'with the advice and consent of the senate' - not with the endless amendments and horse-trading of Congress as a whole that bedevils a great deal of domestic legislation.

The general complaint is that this isn't transparent, but it's fully within the law.

That's not true. Link to the draft section?

This is also helpful, and is non-partisan congressional research: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33743.pdf

What people don't get is that we've had TPA since the 70s:

""""" For more than 30 years, Congress has granted the President TPA/fast track authority, agreeing to consider trade agreement implementing legislation expeditiously and to vote on it without amendment, provided the President meets certain statutory negotiating objectives and consultation requirements, and the implementing bill contains the necessary and limited qualifying provisions. TPA strikes a delicate balance by clarifying how Congress chooses to exercise its constitutional authority over a particular aspect of trade policy, while presumably giving the President additional negotiating leverage by effectively assuring U.S. trade partners that a final agreement will be given timely and unamended consideration by Congress. """"

No, that is absolutely, totally untrue. Please, educate yourself on the basics before making such foolish claims: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_track_%28trade%29