Apathy seems to be the current political climate because people around the world have been brain-washed by our politicians and media for so long that they have lost the power - or didn't want it - to think for themselves - AND ACT ON IT!!!
The items posted below are those that have appeared in media in articles, letters and other online resources, and will hopefully provide the latest overview of the=is most disastrous of plots to subvert our democracies, enfeebled as they already are, by emasculating them altogether.
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Business call for government to open up Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations
Date
March 4, 2015 - 1:47AM The Age
Peter Martin
Economics Editor, The Age
Australia's largest business organisation has called for the government to open up the negotiation of trade deals such as the Trans Pacific Partnership.
As the Trade Minister Andrew Robb responded to criticism of his actions in keeping the text of the Trans Pacific agreement secret, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said it wanted negotiations to be monitored in real time by the Productivity Commission and wanted draft texts disclosed to registered community and business organisations as happens in the US.
Criticised for keeping the negotiations secret in a so-called health impact statement released by the University of NSW Centre for Health Equity Training Research and Evaluation, Mr Robb said the text of the agreement would be made public as soon as it was agreed between the 12 nations.
"The text will not be kept secret. Once it is agreed between participants, it will be made public and also subjected to parliamentary scrutiny," he said.
"Since 2011, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has conducted more than 1000 briefings with interested stakeholders, including groups representing health, pharmaceuticals, consumers and unions."
The ACCI wants negotiating drafts to be shown to community and business groups who would then be under an obligation to keep them confidential.
Negotiators would retain their power to conclude deals without reference to the parliament but would be required to "properly consider and balance the merits of civil society's views at all phases of negotiation".
In Australia the parliament can accept or reject but cannot amend agreements negotiated by the minister.
The ACCI also wants the direct costs to the government of negotiating treaties to be clearly identified in future budgets. Its director of trade and international affairs Bryan Clark said the Australian community had no idea how much money had been spent negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership and so was unable to judge the worth of exercise.
Mr Robb said last month Australia takes 22 specialists to each negotiation backed up by teams at home. The US takes 80.
Mr Clark said Australia collected no data on how trade deals were actually used after they were completed and was unable to quickly support businesses that found the concessions negotiated were not offered when their goods arrived at docks in other countries.
The chamber's submission to the Senate's inquiry into the treaty-making process says Australian negotiators do little to ensure that each new trade treaty is consistent with existing ones leading to a mish-mash of overlapping treaties that interfere with each other.
Trans Pacific Partnership: Written in secret, in the interests of corporations
Date
March 4, 2015 Letters The Age
The TPP will damage far more than our medicine prices ("Trade deal's bitter pills", 3/3). This "NAFTA on steroids" is less about free trade than about giving corporations power over national governments' laws and regulations. It has been largely written in secret by multinationals with their interests at heart. No longer will we be able to refuse products that don't adhere to our environmental regulations ("dolphin safe", chemical use, certification labels), child labour laws, health regulations (cigarette plain packaging, food labelling) and a range of protections we take for granted. Under the TPP, a tribunal comprising lawyers from the corporate giants will be set up to rule on such matters. If we disagree, we will be slapped with sanctions. Any changes to the TPP need agreement by all countries. It is the most insidious, regressive, undemocratic agreement yet penned. It should not be signed.
David Blair, Healesville
Ratification just a formality
Mr Robb's claims that "the TPP text will not be kept secret. Once it is agreed between participants, it will be made public and also subjected to parliamentary scrutiny prior to any final ratification" are weasel words. The process is that Cabinet authorises the final negotiated text to be signed before it is publicly released. It is then reviewed by a parliamentary committee, but the text cannot be changed. Parliament only votes on the implementing legislation, not the whole text. This means large parts of the text not requiring legislation – such as foreign investor rights to sue governments (ISDS) and any restrictions on future legislation – are not debated or approved by Parliament. Ratification only comes at the end of this process, after the legislation, and is just a formal exchange of letters before the agreement comes into force. If we want any meaningful public debate of the final text, it must be released before Cabinet decides to sign it.Patricia Ranald, Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network
We need IP protection
Critics of the TPP trade negotiations, particularly in relation to intellectual property provisions and medicines, have raised concerns that don't tell the complete story. In Australia, we have scientists, clinicians and some great companies working to help develop the newest medicines. But we lack sufficient commercial investment and a globally competitive intellectual property (IP) regime to help protect the work.I sit on a number of biotech boards and the key question that always arises relates to the strength of IP in relation to a new therapy. IP is at the core of any life sciences company valuation, and as such, the period of the patent and/or the data exclusivity is of paramount importance when we assess which companies or projects we will invest in. Enhanced IP protection for medicines is not a choice between cheap drugs and enriching pharmaceutical firms. It is a choice between helping Australia to be a leader in the next scientific revolution or waiting and hoping someone else will do the job.
Dr George Morstyn, Brighton
Robb's claims eerily familiar
Mr Robb says "I am not going to do something that I think is not in the public interest". This comforting statement sounds eerily like other meaningless promises from this government – the PM's promise to govern for all Australians, Joe Hockey's to produce an even-handed budget and Christopher Pyne's "improvements" to tertiary education. At least these policies had to be vetted by the Senate, where many have quite rightly run into a brick wall. So Mr Robb's view of what is in the public interest may differ dramatically from the rest of us. Public, independent scrutiny is necessary before we are locked into this agreement.Peter Thomson, Richmond
When ethics run distant second to greed
On rising anti-Semitism (Comment, 2/3), the most extensive study of the Gentiles who saved Jews from the Holocaust isolated one core factor: the strong values rescuers had learnt growing up. Aristotle recognised that "moral excellence comes about as a result of habit". The ancient Greeks understood that integrity develops in individuals only by personal effort and in societies by sustained communal striving. Yet, neo-conservative free-market ideology, which has already delivered two world wars and the Depression, jettisons the common good and promotes individual gain as the greatest virtue. Ruthlessness, greed and dishonesty pay the biggest dividends, extinguishing ethics from the top down. In Plato's words, this puts a lie in people's souls.The life-protecting forces of conscience, empathy, fairness, compassion and respect become quaint anachronisms. People who live ethically finish last in a morally bankrupt society.
Rising anti-Semitism and other violence evoke the canary in the coal-mine alarm. It is consistent with the dearth of leadership, from workplaces to the world stage, that champions and rewards ethical values.
Barbara Chapman, Hawthorn
AND ANOTHER THING...
Politics
A "free" trade agreement? To give overseas companies
"free" control of critical aspects of the government of our
country?Diana Snape, Balwyn
Are ministers and bureaucrats who sign trade deals that compromise or destroy our sovereignty guilty of treason?
Graeme Madigan, Brighton
So, big business sending billions of dollars overseas protects Australian employment? What a novel idea.
Adrian Peniston-Bird, Hawthorn
Put skids on TPP
TPP Letter in The Age 110315Thanks, Peter Martin, for pointing out the pitfalls of signing the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement (Comment, 10/3). Senator Elizabeth Warren, a possible Democrat nominee for the 2016 US presidential election, wrote recently in The Washington Post that the only beneficiary would be multinationals and that the agreement would undermine the sovereignty of nations via the "Investor-State Dispute Settlement" clause, a feature of TPP.
Warren cites examples of how companies use ISDS to harm nations: a French company sued Egypt because Egypt raised its minimum wage, and a Swedish company sued Germany because it decided to phase out nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster, while a Dutch company sued the Czech Republic because the Czechs didn't bail out a bank that the company partially owned. Philip Morris is trying to use ISDS to stop Uruguay from implementing regulations intended to cut smoking rates. Australians must insist the government put the skids on the TPP.
Bill Mathew, Parkville
Do Corporations Really Need More Rights? Why Fast Track for the TPP Is a Bad Idea
Nation of change 140315
The TPP won't expand U.S. exports, thus creating jobs and opportunities for small businesses—it will instead strengthen corporate rule. The international agreement undermines democracy, economic justice, the environment, human health and small business.
Published: March
14, 2015 | Authors: David Korten
| YES!
Magazine | Op-Ed
President Obama is currently pressing members of
Congress to pass Fast-Track authority for a trade and investment agreement
called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). If Fast Track passes, it means that
Congress must approve or deny the TPP with minimal debate and no amendments.
Astonishingly, our lawmakers have not seen the agreement they are being asked
to expedite.
The rulings of these tribunals pre-empt national
laws and the decisions of national courts.
The TPP is presented as an agreement to increase U.S.
exports and jobs. But what is really at stake is democracy—in the United
States as well as in the 11 other Pacific
Rim countries that are parties to the TPP.
Given past agreements on which the TPP is
modeled, including the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA), TPP provisions
will likely have significant implications for nearly every aspect of American
life—including intellectual property rights, labor and environmental
protections, consumer safety and product labeling, government procurement, and
national resource management. Given the way these agreements are crafted, we
can be quite certain that the implications will favor corporate profits over
human well-being. And once the agreement is approved, its provisions will trump
national and local laws, including the U.S. Constitution, and will not be
subject to review or revision by any national legislative or judicial
body—including the U.S. Supreme Court.
It is expected that the TPP will include an
Investor State Dispute Settlement provision that gives foreign corporations the
right to sue governments for lost profits due to laws—such as environmental
standards and safeguards for workers—they claim deprive them of revenue they
might otherwise have received. Such claims are settled in tribunals comprised
of trade lawyers whose identities are secret. The rulings of these tribunals
pre-empt national laws and the decisions of national courts and are not subject
to review by any national judicial or legislative body.
Also in the mold of NAFTA and similar previous
pacts, the TPP is being drafted in secret. The main players at the negotiating
table are trade officials from the party countries and representatives from the
world’s largest global corporations.
Since negotiations began in 2005, the public,
press, and members of Congress and their staff have been denied access to the
TPP meetings and to drafts of the agreement. In stark contrast, according to a
2014 report by The Washington Post, 566 advisory
group members can view and comment on proposals. Of these members, 480
represent industry groups or trade associations and dominate the most important
committees.
The secret gatherings of unelected government
officials and corporate representatives in which agreements like the TPP are
negotiated have become de facto transnational legislative bodies, drafting
international laws the democratically elected legislative bodies of signatory
countries then rubber stamp.
President Obama’s assurance that this time will
be different carries little credibility.
Because such sweeping provisions supersede the
U.S. Constitution, one might expect that their approval by the U.S. Congress
would require the same high bar as a constitutional amendment. At a bare
minimum, approval should be subject to the same review, debate, and approval
process considered essential for any normal piece of legislation. Yet our
elected representatives have time after time voted to approve such agreements under
expedited rules that trade away the rights of people in favor of the rights of
global corporations.
President Obama recently appeared on Seattle’s
KOMO TV news making the claim that the
TPP will expand U.S. exports, thus creating jobs and opportunities for small
businesses. President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and President
George W. Bush all made the same promises on similar previous agreements.
But expanded trade not only means more exports;
it also means more imports. Previous similar agreements have produced greater
growth in U.S.
imports than growth in U.S.
exports. The result is a net loss of jobs, especially industrial jobs with good
pay and benefits, and the closure of many small businesses. President Obama’s
assurance that this time will be different carries little credibility, based on
this historical experience.
These agreements are written by global corporations
such as Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, ExxonMobil, British
Petroleum, HSBC, and JPMorgan. These companies are not in the business of
creating jobs and benefiting small businesses. They are in the business of
maximizing their own profits. In regard to small businesses, the agenda is to
capture their markets, buy them out, or squeeze them to the bone as captive
suppliers and contractors.
Because these trade and investment agreements are
not in the public interest, their corporate and governmental sponsors go to
great lengths to keep the negotiations secret. If the TPP provisions were truly
beneficial, there presumably would be no need to press the members of Congress
to expedite approval under Fast Track rules before the public and members of
Congress have seen the text.
Members of Congress will surely receive copies of
the TPP documents before their final vote on the actual agreement. But these
agreements are typically more than a thousand pages of detailed legalese
meaningful only to experienced trade lawyers. If past experience is any guide,
our lawmakers will have little time to read the agreement, let alone do a
meaningful assessment of its implications or discuss it with constituents
before it is called to a vote.
The time has come to end the use of international
agreements to strengthen corporate rule. In the case of the TPP, passing no
agreement is better than passing one that undermines democracy, economic
justice, the environment, human health, and small business. We have no need of stronger
protections for corporate rights. Rejecting Fast Track will create the
opportunity for a long-overdue public conversation on a new framework for
international trade and investment agreements that strengthen democracy, hold
global corporations accountable to the public interest, secure worker rights,
raise working conditions, and strengthen environmental protections in every
signatory country.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus has just
released a report called “Principles
for Trade: A Model for Global Progress.” The principles it outlines provide
an excellent starting point for such a conversation:
- Protect the authority of national legislative bodies to set trade policy
- Restore balanced trade
- Put workers first
- Stop currency manipulation
- Secure each nation’s right to give preference to national procurement
- Protect the environment for future generations
- Prioritize consumers above profits
- Assure the right of national judicial systems to settle legal disputes with investors.
- Secure affordable access to essential medicines and services
- Respect human rights
- Provide a safety net for vulnerable workers
As the vote on Fast
Track approaches, this is a good time for citizens to call for a national
and global public conversation about economic policies that put the interests
of living people, living communities, and living Earth ahead of corporate
profits.
It is also the right time for each of us to let
our members of Congress know where we stand on Fast Track and the TPP and that
we are paying close attention to how they vote.
We can have democracy and a prosperous, just, and
sustainable human future. Or we can have corporate rule. We cannot have both.
David Korten is co-founder and board chair of
YES! Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group,
president of theLiving Economies
Forum, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, and a
member of the Club of Rome. His books include the international
best-seller When
Corporations Rule the World, which will be released in an updated 20th
anniversary edition in June 2015.
Bio: David Korten is co-founder and board chair of YES!
Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, president of the Living
Economies Forum, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, and a
member of the Club of Rome. His books include the international best-seller
When Corporations Rule the World, which will be released in an updated 20th
anniversary edition in June 2015.
Tags
In 1983, Australia and New Zealand signed a trade agreement. The Australia-New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement ran to 24 pages. Additional annexes came in at 47 pages. Fast forward to 2004, and Australia signed a trade agreement with the United States that came in at 271 pages. I'll leave it to the interested reader to count the annexes, but Annex 2-B, for the US only, comes in at 560 pages. You get the idea.
Right now negotiators are sweating over another tome: the Trans Pacific Partnership. This is an agreement that covers 12 countries, $28 trillion in gross domestic product, and 800 million people (notably absent from the agreement is China). It appears to be continuing the trend towards complexity. The US takes 80 specialists to each negotiation, Japan 120, and Australia 22.
It is difficult to see documents with 500-page annexes leading to a simple, open system of world trade.
Clearly, somewhere along the way, we decided that bigger is better. The Trans Pacific Partnership has been touted as a "gold-standard" trade agreement. It is apparently going to include provisions on intellectual property, investor protection, along with ... well, many things, I guess. Nothing has been made public yet. Nothing will be until it is signed. We won't know, for example, if there will be provisions on currency manipulation.
This all represents quite a change for Australian trade policy. Once upon a time, it was all about trade. Negotiating on intellectual property and other mutations wasn't even contemplated. And when negotiating, it was all about getting a global deal done. It's time to return to those roots.
Let's start with the shift to bilateralism and regionalism. During the heady days of the 1980s, we were told that tariffs were generally bad, and free trade good. It would seem, then, that any agreement that brought tariffs down, whether it be multilateral or not, would be progress. That's not quite right.
Suppose that we import cars from the US and China and each face a tariff of 50 per cent. Now suppose we reduce the tariff on cars from China. There is a chance Chinese cars will crowd out US cars, but not actually lead to a substantial decline in price. If that happens, cars in Australia do not become much cheaper to buy, and the government misses out on tariff revenue. This is a well-known problem of trade liberalisation that is not multilateral. Economists call it trade diversion.
Trade diversion might, in part, be why we do not seem to have experienced large gains from the trade agreements already negotiated. In fact, the political process may tilt the field towards trade-diverting agreements. That was the conclusion of Elhanan Helpman, of Harvard University, and Gene Grossman, of Princeton University, in a paper they published in the world's top economics journal, the American Economic Review. They concluded "trade diversion [of an agreement] will enhance [its] political viability while contributing to an inefficient allocation of resources in the two partner countries".
The shift towards issues outside of trade is even more troubling. The benefits of free trade of goods and services have firm theoretical foundations. There's a theorem, called the "first fundamental theorem of welfare economics", that lays out general conditions under which free trade is efficient. Sounds important, doesn't it? It is.
Unfortunately for the proponents of expanding the scope of trade agreements, there is no similarly theoretically robust reason why, for example, intellectual property rules need to be harmonised. In fact, it's the opposite. In a paper written nearly 10 years ago, once again in the American Economic Review, Grossman and Edwin Lai, of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, concluded "harmonisation of patent policies is neither necessary nor sufficient for global efficiency". All harmonisation does is shift gains from the users of intellectual property to the producers.
Similar concerns pervade the other non-trade aspects of the Trans Pacific Partnership. Investor-state dispute settlement provisions would allow foreign investors to sue the Australia government, even though Australia's legal system and protections are already strong. This is not the kind of thing one finds in an economics textbook on market efficiency.
The desire to pursue trade agreements is understandable, given the problems the World Trade Organisation is having. There are hopes that trade agreements are a stepping stone to global free trade. It is possible, but difficult to sustain when looking at the complexity of these agreements. It is difficult to see documents with 500-page annexes leading to a simple open system of world trade.
As much as it might be hard to accept, the best course of action might be just to go back to the World Trade Organisation and focus on trade and our multilateral tradition. Progress might be slow, but at least when change is made, it is likely to be beneficial.
Dr Leon Berkelmans is director, international economy at the Lowy Institute for international policy.
The battle lines are being drawn over the TPP and
TPA. If you are confused, well, that is exactly what many of the most powerful
corporations in the U.S.,
and around the world, are counting on. Trade policy is arcane, complex and long
the domain of economists and technocrats. But the real-world implications of
these dry texts are profound. President Obama wants to pass the TPP, which is a
broad trade agreement between the U.S.
and 11 other countries in the Pacific Rim: Australia,
Brunei, Canada,
Chile, Japan,
Malaysia, Mexico,
New Zealand, Peru,
Singapore and Vietnam.
In order to expedite the process, President Obama is seeking the second
acronym, TPA, or Trade Promotion Authority, also called “fast-track.” Fast-track
gives the president authority to negotiate a trade deal, and to then present it
to Congress for a yes-or-no vote, with no amendments allowed. A growing
coalition is organizing to oppose TPP and the president’s request for
fast-track. The outcome of this conflict will reverberate globally for
generations to come.
The TPP negotiations have been held in secret.
Most people know what little they do because WikiLeaks, the document disclosure
and whistle-blower website, released several chapters more than a year ago.
Members of Congress also have been given limited access to briefings on the
negotiations, but under strict secrecy rules that, in at least one instance
recently, include the threat of imprisonment if details leak.
The TPP would be an expanded version of earlier
trade agreements, like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement,
involving the U.S.,
Canada and Mexico.
NAFTA went into effect on Jan. 1, 1994,
and was so harmful to the culture and economy of the indigenous people of Chiapas,
Mexico, that they
rebelled on that very day, in what is known as the Zapatista Uprising. Attempts
to create a global trade deal, under the auspices of the World Trade
Organization, provoked one of the largest protests against corporate power in
history, in Seattle in late 1999.
Thousands of protesters locked arms and literally blocked delegates from
getting to the ministerial meeting. As unexpected solidarity between union
members and environmentalists flourished in the streets, despite widespread
police violence, the WTO talks collapsed in total failure.
The TPP, if passed, would implement trade rules
that make it illegal for governments to create and enforce regulations on
everything from environmental standards, to wage and labor laws, to the
duration of copyrights. A law prohibiting the sale of goods made in sweatshops
in Vietnam
could be ruled illegal, for example, as a barrier to trade. Or certification
requirements that lumber not be harvested from old-growth forests in Malaysia
could be overturned.
Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade
Watch program is one of the leading critics of TPP:
“It’s a delivery mechanism for a lot of the
things [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell and the Republicans like. So,
for instance, it would increase the duration of patents for Big Pharma and, as
a result, give them windfall profits but increase our medicine prices. It could
roll back financial regulation on big banks. It could limit Internet freedom,
sort of sneak through the back door the Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA,” Wallach
explained. “It would give special privileges and rights for foreign
corporations to skirt around our courts and sue the U.S.
government to raid our treasury over any environmental, consumer health law
that they think undermine their expected future profits, the so-called
‘investor-state’ enforcement system. Plus, it would have the NAFTA-style rules
that make it easier to offshore jobs, making it easier to relocate to low-wage
countries.”
The TPP, she went on, “was negotiated with the
assistance of 600 corporate advisers, official corporate trade advisers in the U.S.
The agreement has been the initiative of the Obama administration. It was
started by [President George W.] Bush, but instead of turning it around and
making it something different, the Obama folks picked it up and, frankly, have
made it even more extreme.”
Grass-roots activists are organizing against the
TPP and fast-track. They work on diverse issues ranging from human rights and
Internet freedom to fair trade, labor rights and the environment. The moneyed
interests in Washington have the
ear of the president, so they need only whisper. Now people must raise their
voices, in unison, and demand to be heard.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
(c) 2015 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
Like this article:
Authors
Bio: Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!,"
a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North
America. She is the author of "Breaking the Sound Barrier,"
recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.
Tags
Don’t Keep the Trans-Pacific Partnership Talks Secret
COLUMBUS,
Ohio — WHEN WikiLeaks recently released
a chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, critics and proponents of
the deal resumed wrestling over its complicated contents. But a cover page of
the leaked document points to a different problem: It announces that the draft
text is classified by the United States
government. Even if current negotiations over the trade agreement end with no
deal, the draft chapter will still remain classified for four years as national
security information. The initial version of an agreement projected by the
government to affect millions
of Americans will remain a secret until long after meaningful public debate is
possible.
National security secrecy may be
appropriate to protect us from our enemies; it should not be used to protect
our politicians from us. For an administration that paints
itself as dedicated to transparency and public input, the insistence on
extensive secrecy in trade is disappointing and disingenuous. And the secrecy
of trade negotiations does not just hide information from the public. It
creates a funnel where powerful interests congregate, absent the checks,
balances and necessary hurdles of the democratic process.
Free-trade agreements are not just about
imports, tariffs or overseas jobs. Agreements bring complex national regulatory
systems together, such as intellectual property law, with implications for free
speech, privacy and public health.
The level of secrecy employed by the
Office of the United States Trade Representative is not typical of how most
international agreements are negotiated.
It’s not even how our negotiating
partners say they want to operate. Yet it is the way that the Obama
administration handles trade deals, from a failed anti-counterfeiting
agreement more than two years ago to the TPP today. The trade
representative’s office keeps trade documents secret as national security
information, claiming that negotiating documents — including work produced by United
States officials — are “foreign government
information.”
The justification for secrecy in trade is
that negotiations are like a poker game: Negotiators don’t want to reveal their
hand too soon, or get pressured by concerned domestic constituencies. But the
trade representative’s office takes this logic too far. After being forced to
turn over documents in a 2002 lawsuit, it began regularly classifying trade
documents. Now the office uses classification to invoke the national security
exemption to open government law. Yale
Law School’s
Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic is challenging this behavior in a lawsuit. (I submitted
testimony in the case.)
The peculiarity of this secretive
approach is becoming more apparent as our foreign negotiating partners push
toward transparency in trade. The European Union now voluntarily
releases its side of trade negotiations in an effort to be as transparent
as possible; New Zealand
officials pressed
for greater transparency in previous trade negotiations with the United
States.
Secrecy has real costs. Because the
negotiating process combines a general shield from the public with privileged
access for industry advisers, the substance of American free trade agreements
does not represent truly national interests. It represents the interests
of those members of industry who sit on the office’s Industry
Trade Advisory Committees, which have regular access to negotiating
information.
Recent Comments
fritzrxx
16 hours ago
Free foreign trade benefits are articles of faith, with
theoretical economists.No denying free trade hugely benefits less developed
nations....
Eric
16 hours ago
The Republicans are trying to do and end-run around our
democracy to obtain favorable terms for their wealthy donors. A few rich...
BDR
16 hours ago
Sir Humphrey Appleby noted that the purpose of the
Official Secrets Act was not to protect secrets, but to protect officials. The
real...
One justification for keeping trade
negotiations in the executive branch is that it can keep lobbyists at bay. But
the current system brings those entities inside, using classification to keep
out citizens and competitors. Perhaps in response to these sorts of criticisms
in 2014, the Obama administration announced
the creation of a new public interest advisory committee. But that committee
would be given less direct access than industry groups, and couldn’t discuss
some issues with the public.
Secrecy also delegitimizes trade
agreements: The process has been internationally criticized as undemocratic.
The European Parliament, for example, rejected
the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in large part over legitimacy concerns.
In some of our trading partner countries, citizens have objected to trade
agreements by calling them undemocratic. And they rightly fear that the
American commitment to these agreements is weak because the United
States public might rebel once the texts are
released.
Congress is soon likely
to consider whether to authorize an up-or-down vote on a trade deal, with
what’s known as “fast track” legislation. Free trade now involves dozens of
areas with complex subject matter, and the agency responsible for negotiating
it often fails to tap key expertise. The discussion over the trade negotiating
authority is not a question of which is better: the executive branch or the
legislative branch. It’s a question of whose input we’re getting on decisions
that reach far beyond trade — into questions on the price of generic drugs or
whether websites will have to monitor users online.
As it considers fast track here, Congress
must address the secrecy, and the views of the privileged advisers, that shaped
the agreement. Otherwise, “fast” will be little more than a euphemism for
“avoid the public, and benefit the fortunate few.”
Margot
E. Kaminski is an assistant professor of law at Ohio
State University
and a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale
Law School.
Gold standard trade deal is littered with pitfalls
Date
April 15, 2015 - 12:45AM
the age
Leon Berkelmans
Trade deals were once about securing global trade. So, a shift
towards negotiating issues other than trade is troubling.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott meets with leaders of Trans-Pacific
Partnership Agreement at the US Embassy in Beijing.
In 1983, Australia and New Zealand signed a trade agreement. The Australia-New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement ran to 24 pages. Additional annexes came in at 47 pages. Fast forward to 2004, and Australia signed a trade agreement with the United States that came in at 271 pages. I'll leave it to the interested reader to count the annexes, but Annex 2-B, for the US only, comes in at 560 pages. You get the idea.
Right now negotiators are sweating over another tome: the Trans Pacific Partnership. This is an agreement that covers 12 countries, $28 trillion in gross domestic product, and 800 million people (notably absent from the agreement is China). It appears to be continuing the trend towards complexity. The US takes 80 specialists to each negotiation, Japan 120, and Australia 22.
It is difficult to see documents with 500-page annexes leading to a simple, open system of world trade.
Clearly, somewhere along the way, we decided that bigger is better. The Trans Pacific Partnership has been touted as a "gold-standard" trade agreement. It is apparently going to include provisions on intellectual property, investor protection, along with ... well, many things, I guess. Nothing has been made public yet. Nothing will be until it is signed. We won't know, for example, if there will be provisions on currency manipulation.
This all represents quite a change for Australian trade policy. Once upon a time, it was all about trade. Negotiating on intellectual property and other mutations wasn't even contemplated. And when negotiating, it was all about getting a global deal done. It's time to return to those roots.
Let's start with the shift to bilateralism and regionalism. During the heady days of the 1980s, we were told that tariffs were generally bad, and free trade good. It would seem, then, that any agreement that brought tariffs down, whether it be multilateral or not, would be progress. That's not quite right.
Suppose that we import cars from the US and China and each face a tariff of 50 per cent. Now suppose we reduce the tariff on cars from China. There is a chance Chinese cars will crowd out US cars, but not actually lead to a substantial decline in price. If that happens, cars in Australia do not become much cheaper to buy, and the government misses out on tariff revenue. This is a well-known problem of trade liberalisation that is not multilateral. Economists call it trade diversion.
Trade diversion might, in part, be why we do not seem to have experienced large gains from the trade agreements already negotiated. In fact, the political process may tilt the field towards trade-diverting agreements. That was the conclusion of Elhanan Helpman, of Harvard University, and Gene Grossman, of Princeton University, in a paper they published in the world's top economics journal, the American Economic Review. They concluded "trade diversion [of an agreement] will enhance [its] political viability while contributing to an inefficient allocation of resources in the two partner countries".
The shift towards issues outside of trade is even more troubling. The benefits of free trade of goods and services have firm theoretical foundations. There's a theorem, called the "first fundamental theorem of welfare economics", that lays out general conditions under which free trade is efficient. Sounds important, doesn't it? It is.
Unfortunately for the proponents of expanding the scope of trade agreements, there is no similarly theoretically robust reason why, for example, intellectual property rules need to be harmonised. In fact, it's the opposite. In a paper written nearly 10 years ago, once again in the American Economic Review, Grossman and Edwin Lai, of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, concluded "harmonisation of patent policies is neither necessary nor sufficient for global efficiency". All harmonisation does is shift gains from the users of intellectual property to the producers.
Similar concerns pervade the other non-trade aspects of the Trans Pacific Partnership. Investor-state dispute settlement provisions would allow foreign investors to sue the Australia government, even though Australia's legal system and protections are already strong. This is not the kind of thing one finds in an economics textbook on market efficiency.
The desire to pursue trade agreements is understandable, given the problems the World Trade Organisation is having. There are hopes that trade agreements are a stepping stone to global free trade. It is possible, but difficult to sustain when looking at the complexity of these agreements. It is difficult to see documents with 500-page annexes leading to a simple open system of world trade.
As much as it might be hard to accept, the best course of action might be just to go back to the World Trade Organisation and focus on trade and our multilateral tradition. Progress might be slow, but at least when change is made, it is likely to be beneficial.
Dr Leon Berkelmans is director, international economy at the Lowy Institute for international policy.
A Trade Rule that Makes It Illegal to Favor Local Business? Newest Leak Shows TPP Would Do That And More
The newest leaked text is full of dense legal jargon. But a close reading makes its corporate agenda crystal clear.
Published: April
17, 2015 | Authors: David Korten
| Yes!
Magazine | News Report
Secret negotiations on the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP), a trade and investment agreement involving 12 nations of the
Pacific Rim, are coming to a close, and President Barack
Obama will soon submit the final agreement to the U.S. Congress for approval.
Here are the Cliffs Notes in simple English.
Presumably, he will urge the deal’s passage with
the same unsubstantiated and misleading claims
his administration has offered all along: that the TPP will support
Made-in-America exports, enforce fundamental labor rights, promote strong
environmental protection, and help small business.
But a newly leaked document belies those claims.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s text consists of a number of chapters, among
the most important of which is the one on investments. On March 25, WikiLeaks
released a confidential draft of that chapter dated January 20. The draft
contains instructions indicating that it will be declassified only “Four years
from entry into force … or, if no agreement enters into force, four years from
the close of the negotiations.”
A quick reading of the leaked chapter makes it
clear why TPP sponsors have gone to great lengths to keep their negotiations
secret. The document substantiates claims by opponents that the TPP is a
corporate-rights agreement designed to facilitate the export of U.S.
jobs, allow corporations to sue governments for enacting labor and
environmental protections, make it illegal for governments to favor local
businesses, and advance the colonization of national economies by global
corporations and financiers.
As problematic as this chapter is, we can be
thankful that it is out in the open. Now the need is to understand what all the
legalese means.
The leaked document includes many technical
details decipherable only by trade lawyers. Here are the Cliffs Notes in simple
English.
1. Favoring local ownership is prohibited
Let’s start with the Investment Chapter’s section
on how the TPP’s member countries should treat foreign investors:
Each Party [country] shall accord to investors of
another Party treatment no less favorable than that it accords, in like
circumstances, to its own investors with respect to the establishment,
acquisition, expansion, management, conduct, operation, and sale or other
disposition of investments in its territory.
Put in plain English, the above paragraph means
that signatory countries renounce their right to favor the domestic ownership
and control of the lands, waters, and other productive assets and services
essential to the lives and well-being of their people.
The 12 countries further renounce their right to
favor locally owned businesses, corporations, cooperatives, or public
enterprises devoted to serving their people with good local jobs, products, and
services. They must instead give equal or better treatment to global
corporations that come only to extract profits.
2. Corporations must be paid to stop polluting
Another provision limits what member countries
can do in regard to corporate investments:
No Party may expropriate or nationalize a covered
investment either directly or indirectly through measures equivalent to
expropriation or nationalization (“expropriation”), except: (a) for a public
purpose; (b) in a nondiscriminatory manner; (c) on payment of prompt,
adequate, and effective compensation [emphasis added] … ; and (d) in
accordance with due process of law.
This provision may sound reasonable, until you
look at the chapter’s definition of “investment,” which includes “the
expectation of gain or profit.” This odd definition means that a corporation
can sue a signatory nation if the country deprives the corporation of expected
profits by enacting laws that prohibit the company from selling harmful
products, damaging the environment, or exploiting workers. Other language in
the chapter makes it clear that this applies to actions at all levels of
government.
In other words, a country in the TPP has every
right to stop a foreign corporation from harming its people and the
environment—but only if the country compensates the corporation for the expense
of not harming them.
Similar provisions are already on the books in
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). According to Public Citizen’s Trade
Watch.
Foreign firms have won more than $360 million in
taxpayer dollars thus far in investor-state cases brought under NAFTA. Of the
11 claims currently pending under NAFTA, demanding a total of more than $12.4
billion, all relate to environmental, energy, land use, financial, public
health and transportation policies—not traditional trade issues.
3. Three lawyers will decide who’s right in secret tribunals
The leaked chapter also describes how
disagreements will be settled:
Unless the disputing parties otherwise agree, the
tribunal shall comprise three arbitrators, one arbitrator appointed by each of
the disputing parties and the third, who shall be the presiding arbitrator,
appointed by agreement of the disputing parties.
The arbitrators are private lawyers who are not
accountable to any electorate. They are empowered by the TPP to order unlimited
public compensation to aggrieved investors. The proceedings and the identities
of the tribunal members are secret, and the resulting decisions are not subject
to review by any national judicial system.
According to The New York Times, NAFTA
tribunals, on which the ones in the TPP are modeled, even
have the power to overturn judgments of national courts—including the U.S.
Supreme Court. John D. Echeverria, a law professor at Georgetown
University, has called this method
of dispute settlement “the biggest threat to United
States judicial independence that no one has
heard of and even fewer people understand.”
4. Speculative money must remain free
Yet another provision prohibits restrictions on
movement of money from one country to another:
Each Party shall permit all transfers relating to
a covered investment to be made freely and without delay into and out of its
territory. …
Forms an investment may take include: (a) an
enterprise; (b) shares, stock, and other forms of equity participation in an
enterprise; (c) bonds, debentures, other debt instruments, and loans; (d)
futures, options, and other derivatives.
Thus, the TPP guarantees the right of speculators
to destabilize national economies through the manipulation of exchange rates
and financial markets, without interference from national governments.
In so doing, the TPP strips national governments
of the right to limit speculation in favor of investment in strong, stable, and
productive national economies.
5. Corporate interests come before national ones
Another passage assures that corporations need
bear no obligation to serve the interest of the people who live in the
countries where they do business:
No Party may … impose or enforce any requirement
or enforce any commitment or undertaking: (a) to export a given level or
percentage of goods or services; (b) to achieve a given level or percentage of
domestic content; (c) to purchase, use or accord a preference to goods produced
in its territory, or to purchase goods from persons in its territory.
The article continues on with six additional
provisions, which together prohibit governments from requiring that a foreign
investor be under any obligation to serve the host country’s people or national
interest.
The 12 countries would renounce their right to
favor locally owned businesses
Obama administration officials say these
provisions are needed to level the playing field for American companies doing
business abroad. This raises an important question: What is an American
company?
The Institute for Policy Studies reports
that U.S.
corporations and their subsidiaries currently hold $2.1 trillion in profits
offshore to avoid paying taxes to the government of the United
States. These include highly profitable
companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, General Electric, Exxon Mobil, and
Chevron. One wonders on what basis we should consider these globe-spanning,
tax-dodging, job-exporting corporations to be American.
Approval of the TPP means sacrificing our
democracy and our right to manage our markets and resources for the public
good. And for what gain? To secure rights for corporations—which claim an
American identity only when convenient—to exploit the peoples and resources of
other countries that have signed the same nefarious agreement.
Bio: David Korten is co-founder and board chair of YES!
Magazine, co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, president of the Living
Economies Forum, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, and a
member of the Club of Rome. His books include the international best-seller
When Corporations Rule the World, which will be released in an updated 20th
anniversary edition in June 2015.
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Obama and Republicans Agree on the Trans-Pacific Partnership … Unfortunately
There’s an important issue out there you
may never have heard of, which is just what its proponents would like. That’s
the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), currently being pushed by the Obama
administration and its corporate (and mostly Republican!) allies. It’s a
blatant attack on labor, farmers, food safety, public health and
even national sovereignty.
And the details of the deal are largely
secret. Other than
what’s been leaked, the public has no access to its contents, and even
members of Congress don’t know much. (On the other hand, “cleared advisers,”
mostly corporate lawyers, have full access.) That’s because the TPP is way too
important to its sponsors to allow little details like congressional or public
input to get in its way, even though constitutional authority over trade is
granted to the legislative, not the executive, branch.
Mark Bittman
Nutrition, agriculture and health policy.
This is a bipartisan effort if ever there
was one; George
Will has called the TPP “Obama’s best idea.” Thus we see the
administration, along with pro-business Democrats and Republicans, trying to
bulletproof the deal. Last week, a bill was introduced that would give the
president “fast-track authority” on the TPP. If that passes, Congress could
vote only up or down on the deal, not amend it. That’s quite a bit of
presidential power for a scheme that would have a striking impact on the global
economy — and the food on our table.
The TPP is little more than enhanced
corporation power branded as free trade. It gives corporations the right to
challenge government regulations and seek compensation if they think they’ve
been treated unfairly by any of the 12 Pacific Rim
nations in the deal. (China
is currently, but not necessarily permanently, excluded; part of the thinking
behind the TPP is to lock up an agreement with these partners before China
does.)
Even if you look “only” at food and the
environment, the TPP should be ripped apart and put back together with public
and congressional input. The pact would threaten local food, diminish labeling
laws, likely keep environmentally destructive industrial meat production high
(despite the fact that as a nation we’re eating less meat) and probably
maintain high yields of commodity crops while causing price cuts.
It would certainly weaken food safety.
For example, more than 90 percent of our seafood is imported, a figure that
includes fish that were caught domestically and sent overseas for processing
before coming back in, which makes the inspection process even
more complicated. All told, that’s more than five billion pounds of imports
annually, and according to the Center for Food Safety, just 90
federal inspectors guarantee its safety. (The Food and Drug Administration
inspects less than 2 percent of imported seafood.) By reducing restrictions on
Southeast Asian imports, the TPP would allow more fish containing chemicals
that are illegal in domestic aquaculture to reach our shores; by making
inspections less effective, it would virtually guarantee that those chemicals
make it to our tables.
The agreement would even allow countries
to challenge one another’s laws, so that “equivalency” may simply mean that the
least powerful regulations become the norm. The United
States would have no special standing: If
our laws are seen as restraining trade or limiting profits, they could
be challenged in special courts, per the TPP’s “investor state” clause. Philip Morris is suing
Uruguay over that country’s antismoking laws under just such circumstances;
there are several
examples of American companies’ flouting local laws and citing trade
agreements as an excuse; and Mexico has been sued repeatedly for theoretically
diminishing investor profits.
When individual governments have little
say, corporate “efficiency” amounts to the global economy’s being run as an
ill-regulated business model (an equally egregious trans-Atlantic agreement is
currently being negotiated). The projected benefits to the public – as usual,
“job creation” leads the list — are mythical, and you
don’t have to take my word for it.
Historically, trade laws were geared to
enrich the “mother” country — look at the 19th-century Opium Wars in China,
which forced open illegal markets so Britain
and its allies could benefit. Between World War II and the 1990s, free trade
arguably benefited the economies of the countries involved. But the new laws,
starting with 1994’s North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), recognized
that capital is now mobile — it doesn’t “live” anywhere — and owes no
allegiance to any flag; only shareholders matter.
Nafta is the paradigm of what are most
accurately called deregulation deals. It promised better jobs in both the United
States and Mexico.
Instead, as well-paid workers in the United
States were losing jobs to worse-paid
workers in Mexico,
badly paid Mexican workers were losing jobs to worse-paid workers in China,
which in turn put more pressure on workers in the United
States.
In fact, if you wanted to single out a
culprit for income stagnation and the decline of the power of labor in the United
States, Nafta would be a good candidate. It
allowed large corporations to move where tax breaks were best and environmental
regulations weakest, while forcing labor to compete against lower global wages.
While likely not the only cause, since its passage collective and
individual gains have been nearly frozen in Mexico;
in the United States,
the story is much the same.
The situation may be most dire for
Mexican farmers. Millions have been displaced, many emigrating north for menial
jobs. Meanwhile, imports of American corn (a basic staple in the form of
tortillas for 5,000 years), increased
fourfold. Imports of wheat, rice, cotton and soybeans have increased
similarly. In brief, Mexican farmers have gone to work for transnational
companies, whether in Mexico,
the United States
or elsewhere. Nor did this do much good for farmers to the north, who have seen
corn prices fluctuate wildly, leaving them to scramble to maximize yields,
which in turn causes environmental damage.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich
called the TPP “Nafta
on steroids” (“corporate coup
d’état” is also good). As the economist Dean
Baker said to Bill Moyers, “This really is a deal that’s being negotiated
by corporations for corporations, and any benefit it provides to the bulk of
the population of this country will be purely incidental.” At this point,
nothing about Obama should surprise us, but it’s worth noting that in 2008, as
a presidential candidate, he said, “I voted against Cafta, never supported
Nafta, and will not support Nafta-style trade agreements in the future.”
Recent Comments
JoMo
28 minutes ago
Once again, the REAL
issue facing all of us is sitting, sadly, quietly and behind the curtain of our
denial; climate change/global warming!...
Daniel A. Greenbum
28 minutes ago
According to Paul Krugman, who is mildly against the TPP,
says it just is not worth the effort both sides are putting into it. I am...
Lorraine R
28 minutes ago
Obama said in the Chris Matthews interview that Elizabeth
Warren is “wrong” on fast tracking the TPP and he is “right.” What he meant
is...
All of which is making for some very odd
alliances and demonstrating that “far right” and “far left” labels are
increasingly useless. That’s because this is a struggle between transnational
corporations and just about everyone else.
Of course, some Republican opposition
could be crafty positioning, so that when the TPP is found to cost jobs and
endanger public health rather than create them and assure it, cynics could
simply say, “I told you so.” But in this case Obama has asked for the bad
publicity. And although Hillary Clinton’s husband was the architect of this
kind of policy, and she worked hard for the TPP while secretary of state, she’s
now
backing away from what may well be a losing proposition.
That’s the good news: The opposition to
fast-tracking appears strong. As Patrick Woodall, a senior policy advocate for
Food & Water Watch, said to me, “The forces pushing fast-track are huge,
but there is unbelievable public opposition, and at this point the wind is at
our back.”
There is such a thing as a good trade
agreement, though it’s barely conceivable that Obama and Congress could
negotiate one. We could imagine, for example, something that did away with tax
havens for corporate profits. (For a detailed
analysis of this, see this paper from the Economic Policy Institute.)
But even to have a shot, fast-track must
be defeated, and a solid debate must be opened among well-informed
representatives, with plenty of public input. More exploitation of labor, fewer
public health regulations, more facile production of useless goods and bad food
— that is not the direction the global economy needs to go.
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