Senate Hands a Victory to Obama on Trade Pact
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandO...
In reality, almost all legislation is written behind closed doors today (a public Git-for-Law would be a wonderful project), and is then sponsored by a member of Congress and goes (usually) to Committee.
Non-trade agreements with foreign powers are also negotiated "behind closed doors", because the negotiations themselves tend to be quite sensitive, and the negotiating positions of each country are also considered highly sensitive.
The real issue is probably that the Trade Advisory Committees are not required by law to be balanced between corporate interests and public advocacy groups (there are multiple representatives from such groups, although it's not currently well balanced).
The procedure section shows Congress to have the ability to pass it to committees for at most 45 days and then they have at most 15 days after that to vote on it.
That seems to imply that it would be public for a maximum of 2 months, but I don't know much about this area.
Edit: Sec. 6 contains the public notice requirements: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/995...
# Executive Actions - Negotiation 1. 90 day notification to begin negotiations 2. Negotiations begin 3. Negotiations conclude 4. 180 day notification prior to signing agreement 5. 90 day notification of intention to sign agreement 6. 60 days prior to signing, release of agreement text (first 2 months) 7. 30 days after notification of intention to sign, submission of Advisory Committee Reports 8. Agreement signed (not law yet)
# Reporting and Mock Markup 9. 60 days after agreement is signed, list of required changes in law due 10. 105 days after agreement is signed, USITC report due 11. Mock markups (no time schedule) 12. 30 days prior to implementing legislation, final text submitted (3rd month)
# Congressional Consideration and Implementation 13. Implementing bill introduced in House and Senate (no timeline) 14. Within 45 days, House Ways and Means must report bill 15. Within 15 days, House must vote on bill 16. Within 15 days, Senate Finance Committee must report bill 17. Within 15 days, Senate must vote on bill 18. Bill signed into public law (no timeline) 19. President implements bill by proclamation (no deadline)
So the Bill can spend a MAXIMUM of 90 days in the House and Senate; however, prior to even getting there, the text of the bill must have been public for a MINIMUM of 90 days (which is like 4-5 months in Congress time).
So even at hyper speed, the text would be public for 3 months, and in reality at least 4 months. More likely, the text will be public for 6-8 months before it is passed.
Source: Congressional Research Service (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33743.pdf)
So not only it completely defeats the point (if you can't make amendments) it gives a joke of a time in comparison with years of development of such agreements when all kind of nasty stuff can be sneaked it which can change local laws. In short - it's not a democratic process at all, it's a farce of institutionalized corruption.
With regard to the timeline, it takes a lot longer to negotiate terms with multiple actors, where a single sentence or word could be debated for days and months, than it takes to read and understand the effects of the final text.
It's easily fixable - make negotiations public to begin with. Doesn't WIPO follow such practice anyway? So, the only reason not to make it public is to hide something that public will not accept. It should be a simple rule - any negotiations which affect the legal system should be public. Period. And stuff like TPP clearly does affect laws.
Trade deals happen between whole countries, not individual businesses. Each company compromises many hundreds of businesses. In any trade deal, there will be winner companies and loser companies. The negotiators for each country need to strike terms so that the wins pay for the losses and then some. It's much harder to do that if all the big companies that stand to lose from a deal get a veto vote early in the process.
Personally: I think the reason people resort to "undemocratic" and "backdoor" rhetoric is because they realize that once the treaty is put to a "it's this treaty or no treaty" vote, it will inevitably pass. The people who want a more "open" process really want more hooks earlier in the process to hold the whole treaty hostage to their interests. They can do that early in the process because the stakes are very low ("accede to our demands or the negotiation will be delayed"). They can't do that once the treaty is finalized ("accede to our demands or there will be no free trade agreement").
That's not a value judgement. Many of those interests are extremely worthy. But they should be argued on their merits, and not through a misleading appeal to democratic process. Democratic process sometimes seems like what many of TPP's opponents seem to be afraid of. (ducking)
(I have no idea if I personally support TPP. I'm a LeVeyan liberal Democrat; "Do What's Best For The Public School System Shalt Be The Whole Of The Law".)
That's exactly what undemocratic means here. I.e. democratic process reduced to rubberstamping farce.
> The people who want a more "open" process really want more hooks earlier in the process to hold the whole treaty hostage to their interests.
People want laws to have democratic oversight instead of rubberstamping of shady deals. Saying that there is some formal approval is completely irrelevant when you admit that it can't change anything.
> That's not a value judgement. Many of those interests are extremely worthy. But they should be argued on their merits
That would be an argument of democracy vs plutocracy.
One way you can see that's the case: the same rubber-stamping Congress would have been rubber-stamping away had the negotiations been completely open.
I'm just rephrasing what you said yourself:
> they realize that once the treaty is put to a "it's this treaty or no treaty" vote, it will inevitably pass.
That's rubberstamping. If you don't like the term, call it a fake democratic process.
> One way you can see that's the case: the same rubber-stamping Congress would have been rubber-stamping away had the negotiations been completely open.
No, because the amount of public input is significant here. Reducing it is exactly the goal of backroom deals.
It's explained here pretty well: http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/
It's also hard to comprehend:
* It has an extended segment about the trade deficit between the US and China and its impact on the valuation of the Yuan, despite the fact that China is not a party to the TPP.
* It argues that TPP will enable the US to outsource jobs to Asia, but the US already can outsource jobs to Asia, and for the most part has outsourced every job that's economical to outsource.
* Something about how the finance industry is a sentient evil robot, and now, to understand how that applies to the TPP, let's replace the robot with a country... let's say China.
If this is where you're getting your information on TPP, it's no wonder you're emotional about it. Try Dean Baker at CEPR. Don't worry: he also fiercely opposes TPP.
No one argues that TPP contains SOPA like censorship proposals (those were already leaked). And despite claims that agreements like TPP can't change laws, there is concrete evidence to the contrary. That's how garbage like DMCA-1201 was introduced.
Nobody disagrees that TPP will motivate changes to IP laws in other countries besides the US, as that is the intent of the IP provisions in TPP.
Even the EFF seems to acknowledge that TPP's effects are not on US law, but rather export US law elsewhere.
Here is a recent example: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150611/15533031317/house...
It doesn't really matter whether US or other countries only are affected. Stuff like corporate sovereignty circumvents local legal system by design which is a pretty crooked concept no matter what country it is in.
Nobody is arguing that trade agreements never force the US to change their laws. That would be a silly argument! (Are the US's laws just "always right"?) And, indeed, as I've said repeatedly, a big part of the point of the TPP is to get other countries to harmonize their IP laws with those of the US --- so certainly nobody has argued that the TPP doesn't change laws in other countries.
But you just made a direct appeal to the idea that the TPP would change US law, and backed it up using a section of the DMCA is an example.
Can you find a source specifying how the TPP would change US law?
It's about a trade agreement which demonstrates that trade agreements can change laws even against obvious reasons not to. Q.E.D. Now check bad aspects of TPP which go beyond current law, and you can reasonably assume that local laws can change to match that as well. I already brought you DMCA-1201 as another example.
And you can assume that it would be much harder to fix what's already bad in the law, because of such agreement even if it doesn't change that. I.e. it just preserves that bad. For example TPP requires certain copyright length. It means that current reforms in US in that aspect (shortening of the copyright) could be easily stalled with an argument "but international trade agreement obligations!".
So, any claims that such trade agreements have no effect on the law is simply a lie.
So who cares if it doesn't de jure, if it has a very major potential to do it de facto. It's all about the risk and impact, not about what it formally declares.
It's like saying, hey, we have a label that it's safe. Don't mind if it actually injures anyone.
It's perfectly reasonable to be opposed to exporting our laws to other countries. But that's not what you said: you said you were concerned that the TPP will change US law, which is why you cited that weird Techdirt article, why you brought up the DMCA, and why you're trying to distinguish between "de facto" and "de jure" changes.
Aren't there SOPA like provisions in TPP? SOPA was rejected in US. Now if TPP is passed, its supporters can backport SOPA in US law claiming it's an "international obligation" and the law "has to be harmonized". Why is it unlikely? That's exactly what happened with DMCA in the past. It was imported after being initially rejected, under pretense that it's an "international obligation".
But since it's secret, you can't claim it changed either. So leaked version is a good base for sinking the whole thing into oblivion. And it only highlights the point that it's necessary for such things to be transparent to begin with. Next time they'll keep it open if they don't want opposition based on invalid assumptions.
Specific issue #1: the TPP, like a bunch of other trade agreements, includes semi-binding arbitration. Enact a system of regulated free trade and you generate disputes. But there's no meaningful international legal system (a "world trade court" that can resolve those disputes. Trade dispute resolution is therefore extrajudicial. (TPP's arbitration is "semi-binding" in that TPP arbitrators have authority only to impose fines; they can't change our laws).
Specific issue #2: a key goal of TPP is to harmonize worldwide IP laws with those of the US. But much of the world has lax IP laws compared to the US, specifically for drugs. Dean Baker at CEPR --- a credible and fiercely liberal economist --- believes drug regulation will increase prices in the US (by how much, I haven't really seen estimates). Pretty much everyone believes that if TPP is actually enforced for pharma, it will increase drug prices in the rest of the world, and also squeeze out companies that have carved niches for themselves by arbitraging the different patent regimes to manufacture drugs that are still on-patent in the US.
Background issue #1: modern free trade agreements always involve IP regulations, and IP is a valence issue on Internet forums: most vocal Internet commenters ambiently oppose all IP regulation. TPP doesn't significantly alter IP law in the US, but it does further ratify that law, taking us steps away from reforming them. If you think IP reform was in the cards, you don't like TPP.
Background issue #2: the US economy is, by design, owned by large companies; those companies are in turn mostly owned by large investment firms. A plurality of the stakeholders in those firms are "wealthy elites" (not scare quoting). Free trade agreements that the US supports are designed to juice the economy, and thus improve outcomes for big companies. "Wealthy elites" have far more direct exposure to investment upside than "workers". So there's a natural concern about conflict-of-interest: TPP will benefit the wealthy more than it will the working class.
There are reasonable rebuttals to all these points, but you asked for the liberal brief against TPP, and I think that's a solid summary of it.
On the other hand, it might be reasonable to assume that the barriers to that were already so low that jobs that can be exported to Asia already have been.
Is it too late to make a 'hope & change' joke without sounding cliché?
The legal process no longer concerns itself with the average citizen, why then does the average citizen show concern over the law?
From leaks it suggests it involves companies suing governments for cash settlement.
Also, you are rather naive if you think 'free trade' means free trade, it will be nothing of the sort, it will raise barriers and make many goods and services more expensive.
How do you know TPP fines are settled between governments? TPP is still ongoing, and is secret. How can I be more clear?
As for your opinion about free trade, it hardly deserves a response, please consult a dictionary because you are not using the word correctly.
http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-i-know-cause-i-won-both...
So at this point, he's beholden not to the common voters, but to the wealthy who also helped him get into office (and who, unlike the common voters, he can still benefit from in the years to come)
This isn't specific to Obama, but is the game of a career in politics.