TPP negotiations threaten to forcibly commercialise state-owned bodies | Hacker News Reader

TPP negotiations threaten to forcibly commercialise state-owned bodies

thesaturdaypaper.com.au

61 pointswalterbell19 comments

From http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/07/30/tpp-canada-cbc_n_790...

".. foreign entities could sue the government of Canada for subsidizing a Crown corporation if that foreign entity can prove it’s at a competitive disadvantage because of those subsidies ... State-owned corporations “are almost always state-owned because they have functions other than those that are merely commercial, such as guaranteed access to important services” or social and cultural functions ... “The very mission of the CBC – telling the bilingual and multicultural story of Canada – will be reduced to simple profit making."

TPP negotiations are scheduled to conclude today. There will be a live-streamed press conference in ~15 hours, https://ustr.gov/tpp/maui-livestream

Curiously enough a friend in Germany got "Live straming is not available in your country due to licensing issues" error on this video. As he said, `pretty [much] sums it up'.

I have followed news about the TPP for a while, since this great cartoon [1] grabbed my attention a few years ago. Without exception, coverage since then has been negative, describing a collection of rules that will benefit large corporations at the expense of just about everyone, the OP's article just being the most recent. I have tried finding articles in favor of it, just to get a more balanced perspective, but no luck.

How one earth is this thing still going forward? Is there any hope of stopping it?

[1] http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/

This comic is staggeringly misleading. Here's a shotgun blast of problems with it:

* China is not a party to the TPP; China's absence from the treaty is practically its defining attribute. Yet the comic allocates large amounts of space to China's relationship with the US and the US trade deficit, neither of which are targets of the TPP.

* The comic is many, many pages long and only begins talking about the TPP at the very end. In that discussion of the TPP, there appear to be a total of just two panels actually based on any text from the TPP, despite extraordinary claims made about the breadth of the TPP earlier.

* It has an extended segment on US job exports, as if the TPP somehow changes the fact that every job that could be viably exported to Asia already has been. The US does not need the TPP to outsource manufacturing to Asia.

* The most important goals the US appears to have in the TPP is to harmonize intellectual property rules across the Pacific Rim. There is a very reasonable, very important argument against making Asian IP law more like the US, which is that medical care across Asia depends on lax IP laws. What does this comic have to say about intellectual property? They're coming for our music downloads!!!

* It has an extended segment about an evil robot that alternately represents either the finance industry or (once again) China and never connects it to the TPP or, for that matter, reality --- it's a pure appeal to emotion. "Modern finance is scary; reject the TPP!" The segment isn't even internally consistent! This is the lead-off argument the comic poses against TPP, and it boils down to "finance is friendly right now but might not be in the future; China".

* Despite the domain name, no economist seems to have had a hand in its authorship. The author himself is not an economist.

Like I said last time this came up: if you're looking for coherent opposition to the TPP, there are great economists you can read to get that information. I'd start with Dean Baker at CEPR. Please: oppose the TPP for real reasons, not because some bullshit comic told you to.

> China is not a party to the TPP; China's absence from the treaty is practically its defining attribute.

What do you think of RCEP, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/just-when-you-thought-..., the TPP-like agreement for Asia, including China?

  How one earth is this thing still going forward?

I wrote to my MP about it. He said "UK has already signed 91 trade deals using the same kind of [investor-state dispute resolution] [...] many people who are against TTIP are actually against free trade. This is crazy."

Personally I didn't find that a very convincing argument, but there you go.

The scope of the new (TPP/TTIP/TISA/RCEP) trade treaties are much broader and include new disputes related to fast-evolving digital rights, which cross borders more easily than slower moving, geographically tied industries like farming.

Here is a list of pre-TPP ISDS disputes between corporations and countries, in the areas of health, climate, energy, finance, environment and essential public services: http://www.isdscorporateattacks.org/#!attacks/c1cm0

Now imagine ISDS applied to copyright, software patents, data sovereignty, banking and payment regulation, and much more.

> I have tried finding articles in favor of it, just to get a more balanced perspective, but no luck

I believe that The Economist may have had some such. Try "The Economist TPP" in Google for some suggestions. For example, [1].

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21659716...

That is indeed a great cartoon.

It was, until he went off the rails by blaming everything on the 1%. He just got through talking about pundits who speak in absolutes, then turns around and employs the same tactics they do!

One word: corruption.

Here's a huge list of companies supporting TPP: http://tppcoalition.org/about/

That's a pretty broad list, spanning several major industries, and includes some of the top companies in the country.

To answer a question of why this is still going forward despite some vocal opposition with "corruption" is very lazy thinking.

If they all stand to profit from it and have influenced democratically elected governments to participate in it specifically without the people, doesn't it actually make corruption the more plausible cause?

Wait, nevermind. I forgot that giving government officials money is free speech now. Carry on. ;)

> If they all stand to profit from it and have influenced democratically elected governments to participate in it specifically without the people, doesn't it actually make corruption the more plausible cause?

What makes you think they have influenced democratically elected governments "specifically without the people"? In the US, 49% think it is a good thing, and 29% think it is a bad thing [1]. In most of the other countries involved, support is higher (see same link).

> Wait, wait, hold the phone. I forgot that giving government officials money is free speech now. Carry on.

Spending on TPP is greatly exaggerated [2].

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/23/americans-fa...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9968057

If you equate lobbying with corruption, which I kind of do then it's understandable.

In a way, these developments are not historically surprising. If you look at the gradual process of state consolidation in Europe since the Industrial Revolution, you'll see a pattern of changes in law that were done in the interest of expanding trade interests. Places like Italy or Germany had to integrate if they wanted to compete with states that could better exploit industrial economies of scale. Economic interests were powering national movements in most countries.

Now this process is happening at a higher scale. We are moving towards a fully-integrated system where industrial interests can reach the farthest corners of the world. It has to be expected that they would drive legislation towards harmonization. In fact, in some ways this is a good thing: if European companies can compete with US ones on a level playing field, it's better for everyone.

The problem is that political representatives are not properly exploiting this historical chance. These compromises are being done "towards the bottom" of available choices, consistently choosing options that would reduce rights and quality of life of average people on all sides. EU single-market integration was a similar process, and has delivered improved standards in many areas of life (note: I'm not talking about the Euro, but EU-wide regulation on safety, worker rights and so on); TPP looks like a simple money grab, a rush towards dismantling what is left of European-style welfare.

This is doubly disappointing because this sort of chance doesn't come along every year or even every generation.

...but it is still OK for the US to subsidise agriculture.

These treaties are just an hostile takeover of the corporate world on our fake democracies.

But yeah we can still vote for the best presidential liar ... huh ... candidate. So good to be free.

If you like your doctor...

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