Quote: OK, you remaining Obama fans: tell me why we should trust the biggest baiter and switcher in the history of the Presidency, particularly when he insists on unprecedented levels of secrecy? Because he has nice teeth and cute kids?
We mention in another post tonight how the Administration is being remarkably tight-lipped about the progress-towards-completion of the health care exchanges that will be fully or jointly run by the Federal government (34 in total). But the mere failure to make normal disclosures pales next to the "all secrecy all the time" that appears to be the Administration's default.
We've mentioned before the unheard-of steps the Administration is taking to keep a large, and potentially important trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, under wraps. We say "trade deal" but that is already a misnomer. International trade is already substantially liberalized. Based on what little information has been wrestled from the Administration, the TPP is most important a means for financial firms and multinationals to undermine nation-based regulations.
An overview from an earlier post:
Apparently Obama wants to make sure his corporate masters get as many goodies as possible before he leaves office. The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the US-European Union "Free Trade" Agreement are both inaccurately depicted as being helpful to ordinary Americans by virtue of liberalizing trade. Instead, the have perilous little to do with trade. They are both intended to make the world more lucrative for major corporations by weakening regulations and by strengthening intellectual property laws…
One of the most disturbing aspects of both negotiations is that they are being held in secret….secret, that is, if you are anybody other that a big US multinational who has a stake in the outcome.
[Dean] Baker describes in scathing terms why these types of deals are bad policy:
…these deals are about securing regulatory gains for major corporate interests. In some cases, such as increased patent and copyright protection, these deals are 180 degrees at odds with free trade. They are about increasing protectionist barriers…
And this sort of erosion of the right to regulate will most assuredly extend to financial services. Dodd Frank? The Brown-Vitter bill that some see as a great new hope for tougher financial regulation? They are already unworkable under existing trade agreements. As Public Citizen noted:
One of the most controversial WTO agreements is the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)…One of the most controversial service sectors covered by the GATS is finance….
Taken as a whole, the WTO's limits on financial service sector regulation are expansive. These rules not only guarantee foreign financial firms and their products access to U.S. markets, but also include numerous additional rules that limit how our domestic governments may regulate foreign firms operating here:
No new regulation: The United States agreed to a "standstill provision" which requires that we not create new regulations (or reverse liberalization) for the list of financial services bound to comply with WTO rules. Translated out of GATSese, this means that the United States has bound itself not to do what Congress, regulators and scholars deem necessary create new financial service regulations…
The draft text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a NAFTA-style FTA under negotiation between the United States and 10 Pacific Rim countries, contains the same limits on financial regulation as the WTO, and more. In addition, these rules would be privately enforceable by foreign financial firms that could "sue" the U.S. government in foreign tribunals, which would be empowered to order payment of unlimted sums of U.S. taxpayer money if they saw our laws as undermining such firms' "expected profits." Also, even as the International Monetary Fund has officially shifted from opposition to qualified endorsement of capital controls, which are used to avoid destabilizing floods of speculative money into and out of countries, the TPP would ban the use of these important regulatory tools. Despite years of pressure from former House Financial Services Committee Chair Rep. Barney Frank to permit capital controls, the Obama administration is the strongest promoter of this ban in the TPP.
Back to the current post. Now get this: the draft text of the TPP is classified. This is simply unheard of for a trade deal. The US Trade Representative has been providing summaries of the US position on key issues to Congress but that falls way short of adequate disclosure. Congressmen almost never have the time (even where they have the ability) to read long agreements in full and parse how key sections work (which often mean going back to definitions and in some cases, existing law). So keeping most staffers and third parties with expertise away assures that (until the last minute) the discussion and "clarifications" of the provisions under negotiation will come only from parties that are already in the tank.
As anyone who has been involved in legal-related drafting knows, the actual language is critical. General terms and concepts that sound innocuous can serve as Trojan horses for all sorts of clever "gotcha" provisions. The plan is clear: Obama intends to spring a long, dense agreement on Congress, with the claim that all these other countries are on board and it can't be changed. The TPP is intended to be a cramdown.
Zack Carter of the Huffington Post reported today:
Members of Congress have been provided with only limited access to the negotiation documents. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) told HuffPost on Monday that he viewed an edited version of the negotiation texts last week, but that secrecy policies at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative created scheduling difficulties that delayed his access for nearly six weeks. The Obama administration has barred any Congressional staffers from reviewing the full negotiation text and prohibited members of Congress from discussing the specific terms of the text with trade experts and reporters. Staffers on some committees are granted access to portions of the text under their committee's jurisdiction.
"This, more than anything, shows the abuse of the classified information system," Grayson told HuffPost. "They maintain that the text is classified information….they tell me that they don't want me to talk to anybody about it because if I did, I'd be releasing classified information…
"What I saw was nothing that could possibly justify the secrecy that surrounds it…
"Having seen what I've seen, I would characterize this as a gross abrogation of American sovereignty," Grayson told HuffPost. "And I would further characterize it as a punch in the face to the middle class of America. I think that's fair to say from what I've seen so far. But I'm not allowed to tell you why!"
Now it's not hard to imagine that the six weeks of scheduling delays were "dog ate my homework" level excuses by the USTR to put off Grayson as long as possible.
Now it may be that the low-level drumbeat of complaints (including a petition last month) is what led the USTR to allow Grayson to see the draft text. After all, it's a non-concession concession. What have they given up since the draft's bizarre, unjustifiable classified status means Grayson can make almost no use of what he's learned. So the Administration may have decided to throw critics a few bones to give them a talking point or two ("see, we have let interested Congressmen see the draft text"). Or it may be that the pact is close to being final and the Administration is on the verge of pushing it through Congress (that seems unlikely, given that Japan just joined the negotiations, but one never knows for sure).
But in any event, these secret negotiations reveal how Obama is systematically stripping away our few remaining democratic protections so he can hand the country, lock, stock, and barrel, over to major corporate interests. The sooner ordinary citizens wake up to what a menace his policies are to their well-being, the better.
But he's a typical corporate shill. Almost all pols are. It's a rare one that can't be readily bought, I think.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), branded as a trade agreement and negotiated in unprecedented secrecy, is actually an enforceable transfer of sovereignty from nations and their people to foreign corporations.
As of December 2012, eleven countries were involvedAustralia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United Stateswith the possibility of more joining in the future due to inclusion of an unusual "docking agreement."
While the public, US Congress, and the press are locked out, 600 corporate advisors are meeting with officials of signatory governments behind closed doors to complete text for the world's biggest multinational trade agreement, which aims to penalize countries that protect their workers, consumers, or environment.
Leaked text from the thirty-chapter agreement has revealed that negotiators have already agreed to many radical terms, granting expansive new rights and privileges for foreign investors and their enforcement through extrajudicial "investor-state" tribunals. Through these, corporations would be given special authority to dispute laws, regulations, and court decisions. Foreign firms could extract unlimited amounts of taxpayer money as compensation for "financial damages" to "expected future profits" caused by efforts to protect domestic finance, health, labor, environment, land use, and other laws they claim undermine their new TPP privileges.
There is almost no progressive movement or campaign whose goals are not threatened, as vast swaths of public-interest policy achieved through decades of struggle are targeted. Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, reported that once this top-secret TPP is agreed to, its rules will be set in stone. No rule can be changed without all countries' consent to amend the agreement. People of the world will be locked into corporate domination.
Censored #3
Trans-Pacific Partnership Threatens a Regime of
Corporate Global Governance
Kevin Zeese, "Obama's Employment Creation' Program: Massive Outsourcing of American Jobs," Global Research, September 10, 2012, http://www.globalresearch.ca/obamas-empl...bs/5304005.
Lori Wallach, "Breaking '08 Pledge, Leaked Trade Doc Shows Obama Wants to Help Corporations Avoid Regulations," Democracy Now!, June 14, 2012, http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/14/br..._trade_doc.
Andrew Gavin Marshall, "The Trans-Pacific Partnership: This Is What Corporate Governance Looks Like," Truthout, November 20, 2012, http://truth-out.org/news/item/12857-the...looks-like.
Lori Wallach, "Can a Dracula Strategy' Bring Trans-Pacific Partnership into the Sunlight?," Yes! Magazine, November 21, 2012, http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/c...o-sunlight.
The Abbott Coalition looks set to sign off on the highly secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership later this month, but what will it mean for ordinary Australians? Dr Matthew Mitchell reports. Initial nations involved in the TPP; it may include more later.
WHAT SORT of "Trade Agreement" manages to both criminalise internet use and force coal seam fracking onto communities?
The answer to this is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a pact that has the ominous potential to achieve both these corporate objectives and many more.
Of course, we cannot know the exact effects of the TPP, as the negotiations over the past few years have been held in secret. However, two leaked chapters out of the 26 or more under negotiation have caused more than their fair share of concern.
One of these chapters threatens to undermine both our existing domestic and international legal systems, throwing away the protections and rights achieved over hundreds of years.
How? Through tribunals linked to a system of International Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS). The one in the TPP led to an open letter signed by prominent Australian judges, lawyers, politicians and academics insisting that the government should not sign an agreement that includes ISDS. The letter states:
…the increasing use of this mechanism to skirt domestic court systems and the structural problems inherent in the arbitral regime are corrosive of the rule of law and fairness.'
But ISDS is most definitely included in the proposed TPP put forward by United States negotiators.
The Gillard government made it clear that Australia would not sign another trade agreement that included international dispute settlement by tribunals. This followed Australians being burnt by an agreement that has allowed Phillip-Morris to take Australia to an international tribunal over its plain packaging laws, even though our own High Court already decided against Phillip-Morris.
Other countries are experiencing equally serious consequences.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is being used by gas and oil company Lone Pine Resources to sue Canada over Quebec's moratorium on fracking. A trade agreement was also used to sue Ecuador for USD $1.77 billion.
The Coalition's trade policy document indicates that Abbott's government will sign the TPP with acceptance of ISDSs because the Coalition is
…open to utilising investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clauses as part of Australia's negotiating position.'
Not only that, but it says it will
…fast track the conclusion of free trade agreements.'
Tom J. Donohue, CEO and President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told CNBC that the TPP deal will be completed in a month.
Added to the threat of ISDSs are many other concerns, including those raised by the leaked chapters.
For instance, based on the leaked IP chapter, Aaron Bailey of OpenMedia.ca is concerned about the new powers that may be given to massive international media organisations [IA emphasis]:
The TPP seeks, among other things, to rewrite the global rules on intellectual property enforcement that would give Big Media new powers to lock users out of our own content and services, provide new liabilities that might force ISPs to police our online activity, and give giant media companies even greater powers to shut down websites and remove content at will. It also encourages ISPs to block accused infringers' Internet access, and could force ISPs to hand over our private information to big media conglomerates without appropriate privacy safeguards. You can see a more complete list of new restrictions below, but it appears that the TPP would turn all Internet users into suspected copyright criminals. In fact it appears to criminalize content sharing in general.
A statement by a U.S. trade representative at the recent ASEAN meeting in Brunei said that the TPP Ministerial Meeting held at the APEC meeting in Bali in early October would be a "milestone" and that the aim was to finish the TPP agreement "by the end of the year".
President Obama is scheduled to address the APEC leaders, including Tony Abbott, on October 7.
Before Prime Minister Abbott signs this agreement, Australians deserve to know what rights we may be signing away. Upcoming Information sessions on the TPP:
This is hugely important and, clearly horrific. It waves farewell to even the pretence of democracy and legally underpins corporate despotism. If you, as a citizen, don't like what they do and stop it, you will have to "reimburse" them from your tax dollars - for "future profits" that could easily run into trillions, depending on the definition of "future".
This is the thin wedge under the door. Start with the southern hemisphere and then slowly move it northwards to the indutsrialized nations.
Actually, this was first presented well over a decade ago in the UK and was chased off at that time (I can't remember its name then though).
Magda Hassan Wrote:The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), branded as a trade agreement and negotiated in unprecedented secrecy, is actually an enforceable transfer of sovereignty from nations and their people to foreign corporations.
As of December 2012, eleven countries were involvedAustralia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United Stateswith the possibility of more joining in the future due to inclusion of an unusual "docking agreement."
While the public, US Congress, and the press are locked out, 600 corporate advisors are meeting with officials of signatory governments behind closed doors to complete text for the world's biggest multinational trade agreement, which aims to penalize countries that protect their workers, consumers, or environment.
Leaked text from the thirty-chapter agreement has revealed that negotiators have already agreed to many radical terms, granting expansive new rights and privileges for foreign investors and their enforcement through extrajudicial "investor-state" tribunals. Through these, corporations would be given special authority to dispute laws, regulations, and court decisions. Foreign firms could extract unlimited amounts of taxpayer money as compensation for "financial damages" to "expected future profits" caused by efforts to protect domestic finance, health, labor, environment, land use, and other laws they claim undermine their new TPP privileges.
There is almost no progressive movement or campaign whose goals are not threatened, as vast swaths of public-interest policy achieved through decades of struggle are targeted. Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, reported that once this top-secret TPP is agreed to, its rules will be set in stone. No rule can be changed without all countries' consent to amend the agreement. People of the world will be locked into corporate domination.
Censored #3
Trans-Pacific Partnership Threatens a Regime of
Corporate Global Governance
Kevin Zeese, "Obama's Employment Creation' Program: Massive Outsourcing of American Jobs," Global Research, September 10, 2012, http://www.globalresearch.ca/obamas-empl...bs/5304005.
Lori Wallach, "Breaking '08 Pledge, Leaked Trade Doc Shows Obama Wants to Help Corporations Avoid Regulations," Democracy Now!, June 14, 2012, http://www.democracynow.org/2012/6/14/br..._trade_doc.
Andrew Gavin Marshall, "The Trans-Pacific Partnership: This Is What Corporate Governance Looks Like," Truthout, November 20, 2012, http://truth-out.org/news/item/12857-the...looks-like.
Lori Wallach, "Can a Dracula Strategy' Bring Trans-Pacific Partnership into the Sunlight?," Yes! Magazine, November 21, 2012, http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/c...o-sunlight.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
We already have APEC as a trade zone. Just don't need this at all. It is horrific in its implications. Our current poodle will jump at the chance to bring this in unchanged. Same in NZ.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
![[Image: TPP.png]](http://www.independentaustralia.net/Wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/TPP.png)