The Trans-Pacific Partnership Corporate Coup in Disguise

[seemslikeadream]

The Trans-Pacific Partnership
We Won’t Be Fooled By Rigged Corporate Trade Agreements
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / October 2nd, 2013

This week, President Obama will attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Coordination (APEC) meeting in Bali, Indonesia where he is expected to announce his goal of having the Trans-Pacific Partnership signed into law by the end of 2013. Obama will host a meeting of the leaders of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) nations during the APEC conference.

The Obama administration has been negotiating the TPP in secret for more than three years. Unlike past trade agreements, the text of the TPP is classified and members of Congress have restricted access to it. If they do read the text, they are not allowed to copy it or discuss any specifics of it. However, more than 600 corporate advisers have direct access to the text on their computers.

The final formal round of negotiations was held in Brunei this August and since then, there have been informal meetings to try and finalize sections of the agreement. As far as the President is concerned, the TPP is entering the home stretch. All he needs now is for Congress to vote to grant him Fast Track, also known as Trade Promotion Authority, and it’s a done deal.

Fast Track would allow the President to sign the TPP before it goes to Congress. Members of Congress would then have a short time period to hold an up or down vote and would be prohibited from making amendments. Without Fast Track, which was used to pass NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO), it is unlikely that the TPP could be signed into law

This is because the TPP goes far beyond a trade deal. Only five of the twenty nine chapters contain provisions related to trade. The other chapters consist of provisions related to patent protections, investor state rights and finance deregulation, among others. The TPP is a backdoor corporate power grab to advance the stalled WTO agenda. Or as Sachie Mizohata writes in Asia Times, “The TPP is a Trojan horse, branded as a ‘free trade’ agreement, but having nothing to do with fair and equitable treatment. In reality, it is precisely ‘a wish list of the 1% – a worldwide corporate power’. “

We expect the President to return from Bali with increased enthusiasm to push for Fast Track. To accompany this push will be the usual misinformation campaign coming from supporters of the TPP. To prepare the public for the expected propaganda, we will look at what is being said and provide facts to counter their arguments.

As far as some members of Congress are concerned, as well as hundreds of civil society groups and a growing number of US residents, Fast Track and the TPP are not going to slide through Congress smoothly. Opposition to the TPP is growing as more people come to understand that the TPP is a rigged corporate trade deal and not fair trade that respects the needs of people and the planet.

What’s Wrong with Fast Track?

For most of the past 200 years, Congress negotiated trade policy and wrote the laws to oversee trade, as required in the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. This power was first transferred to the Executive Office when Nixon was granted Fast Track in 1974 as part of his consolidation of presidential power. Fast Track expired in 2007. Only 16 trade agreements have been passed using Fast Track, and some of these were the most unpopular and controversial agreements such as the WTO and NAFTA signed by President Clinton.

The previous Fast Track legislation required the President to submit both the trade agreement and implementing legislation to Congress for approval. According to a 2011 report by the Congressional Research Services, “The fast-track authority provides that Congress will consider trade agreement implementing bills within mandatory deadlines, with a limitation on debate, and without amendment…” In other words, Fast Track permits the President to negotiate an entire trade agreement over many years and then present it to Congress for an up or down vote within a short time period (60 to 90 days), with debate limited to twenty hours and no amendments.

Fast Track severely undermines the transparent and democratic process required to ensure that the full implications of the agreement are understood and are acceptable. Trade agreements require that laws, even down to the local level, are changed to be in compliance with provisions in them. For example, when the WTO was passed, which was fast tracked despite having been negotiated for over 10 years and containing thousands of pages, most members of Congress did not read or understand it. One of the requirements of the WTO was that Glass-Steagall had to be repealed. This removed the wall that protected traditional banking from risky investments and is partially responsible for the current economic crisis which started in 2008. Similarly, NAFTA was 1,700 pages including annexes and footnotes. NAFTA involved only three countries, the TPP includes 12. Congress cannot digest all of this information and consider its implications in such a short time.

Passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its sister, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (known as TAFTA) for which negotiations began in July, will require Fast Track to become law. Supporters of the TPP such as the US Chamber of Commerce and, of course, the office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) are promoting Fast Track with flimsy and false arguments. Basically, they boil down to these points:

1. The President should have Fast Track so he can negotiate job-creating agreements and boost trade and the economy.

2. It’s okay to give the President Fast Track because Congress is going to include negotiating objectives within the Fast Track law and Congress must vote on the agreement.

3. The President should have Fast Track because other presidents have had it.

So, let’s examine the facts. First, despite promises of American jobs, past free trade agreements have actually been huge job losers. NAFTA is responsible for the loss of nearly 700,000 jobs. The recent Korea Free Trade Agreement was promised to bring 70,000 new jobs, but lost 40,000 jobs in the first year alone instead, and Public Citizen estimates that nearly 160,000 jobs will be lost over the first seven years. In total, US free trade agreements over the past two decades have netted a loss of nearly five million American jobs. The Congress needs to hear testimony to closely question the claim that TPP and TAFTA will create jobs, when the evidence shows it will lose jobs.

In addition to the loss of jobs, free trade agreements have contributed to the stagnation of wages in the US. American workers cannot compete with extremely low wages in countries like China, Malaysia and Vietnam. A recent study predicts that the TPP will cause wages for 90 percent of American workers to decrease while wealth of the top one percent will soar. How can US workers compete with workers in Malaysia where the minimum wage is $1.24, Peru where it is $1.37 or Vietnam where it is 0.3 cents? The TPP will increase the race to the bottom that will further impoverish US workers.

The same study predicts that the TPP will only boost the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 0.1 percent. In fact, free trade agreements do not seem to work at all when it comes to expanding US exports. According to the data, overall the US trade deficit has increased by 440 percent with countries with which we have free trade agreements and has declined by seven percent with countries with which we do not have agreements. If we look at the outcome of a ‘21st century trade agreement,’ which is how the office of the USTR describes the TPP, like the Korea Free Trade Agreement, we find that “average monthly exports to Korea since the FTA have sunk 11% below the average monthly level before the FTA.“ TAFTA is expected to increase the US GDP by a mere 0.2 to 0.4 percent, which Public Citizen reports, is “a smaller contribution to GDP than was delivered by the latest version of the iPhone.”

Second, let’s look at Congressional oversight under Fast Track. Carol Guthrie from the office of the US Trade Representative recently wrote an email response to the producer of a video interview of Margaret Flowers in which she said:

“Checking in on your story on TPP – afraid there seems to be some misunderstanding about Trade Promotion Authority, sometimes known as ‘fast track.’ Under such a law, which lays out just how the Administration should consult with Congress on trade agreements, and in which Congress sets out negotiating objectives for the United States, there are indeed hearings and an up or down vote in Congress before the agreement can be implemented in law and enter into force. There are rules in TPA about whether or not the implementing legislation for an agreement can be amended, but it does not allow an agreement to become law or enter into force without Congressional approval. Glad to share more information as it’s helpful to you.”

Flowers wrote back immediately and asked if there was Fast Track legislation available for review and whether there would be full hearings on the content of the TPP and its implications and whether amendments would be allowed. That was on September 20 and no response has been received.

In the past, Fast Track has limited hearings and debate and has not allowed amendments. There have also been negotiating objectives in the past, and these have often been ignored. For example, labor rights were required under the WTO, but still were not included. Even when provisions such as worker protections are required in trade agreements, they are not enforced, as is recently demonstrated in Colombia where deaths of worker advocates have increased and there are massive strikes and protests. And in the case of the TPP, negotiating objectives enacted now, when the negotiation of the entire agreement is concluding, will have absolutely no effect. The negotiating objectives are merely window dressing designed to confuse labor unions, environmental groups and others who should strongly oppose TPP.

Members of Congress are overruled by the agreements when they do try to change the provisions. Ray Rogers writes, that trade agreements “have nullified the efforts of political leaders like Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) who introduced legislation in 1994 to ban the imports of products produced by brutal child labor. President Clinton’s U.S. Trade Representative informed him that his bill would violate the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which the United States is obliged to obey.” Thus, trade agreements tie the hands of Congress and undermine US sovereignty.

The definition of Congressional oversight by the office of the US Trade Representative falls far short of the degree of oversight necessary if Congress and the public are to have the ability to fully understand what is in the secret TPP and what the economic impact will be on the United States and nations around the world as well as how it will impact protection of workers, consumers and the environment. What we expect to see under the Fast Track process are limited hearings in which supporters of the TPP praise it and Congress members are not able to fully question or amend it. How could it be anything else when Members of Congress will not even have time to read the agreements?

Lastly, the idea that other presidents had fast track, so President Obama should too is embarrassing in its lack of logic. Most Presidents have not had Fast Track. And the agreements passed by Fast Track have caused the loss of US jobs, lowered wages and higher trade deficits. Congress must serve its Constitutional function as a check and balance to the power of the President and the branch of government responsible for regulating trade and passing legislation. Fast Track undermines the constitutional power of Congress and creates an imperial presidency.

Fortunately, the process to grant Fast Track trade authority this time around has slowed significantly. In February, 2012, then US Trade Representative Ron Kirk, in his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, included a request for Fast Track by the end of 2012 in order to complete TPP negotiations. Senators Max Baucus and Orrin Hatch urged the White House to request Fast Track trade authority last April. They expected to have a Fast Track bill passed in Congress by last June.

President Obama waited until August of this year to formally request Fast Track and as of the writing of this article no Fast Track bill has been introduced in Congress. A recent report in Politico stated, “Efforts by leaders of Senate Finance and House Ways and Means to craft a bipartisan TPA bill have taken longer than expected, prompting speculation the two panels may not be able to produce a package.”

Bipartisan opposition to Fast Track has already appeared in Congress. Alan Grayson (D-FL) voiced opposition and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) is gathering signatures from other members on a letter to the President opposing Fast Track. Michelle Bachman (R-MN) and Walter Jones (R-NC) have a similar letter to the President. Many groups are lobbying against Fast Track, including Public Citizen, environmental groups and labor. We are organizing Fair Trade Brigades to track congressional support for Fast Track through our Flush the TPP campaign. Everyone is encouraged to participate in that effort. This is a battle between the people and transnational corporate power. It is one the people can win; and we will stop the TPP if people mobilize and participate.

Don’t Fast Track this Train Wreck

As Mizohata wrote in Asia Times, the TPP is Trojan horse that is not about trade. We know this because only five of its 29 chapters are about trade. Ben Beachy reports that “The United States already has trade deals with six of the seven largest TPP negotiating economies, which constitute 90 percent of the combined GDP of the negotiating bloc.”

So, if we already have trade agreements with these countries and we know that trade deals don’t reduce our trade deficit, what is the reason for the TPP? It looks like a backdoor to the neo-liberal economic agenda that has been stalled under the WTO since the Battle of Seattle in 1999. The tremendous secrecy surrounding the TPP is because the policies that are being pushed through are both harmful to and unpopular with the American public. Fast Track is necessary to protect this secrecy because the TPP would not survive the light of day.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been one of the most outspoken members of Congress on the need for transparency. She wrote a letter to the President requesting that the text be made available to the public. Even members of Congress have restricted access to the text. Zach Carter writes that:

Some [members of Congress] have said they were insulted by the complex administrative procedures the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, or USTR, imposed to actually access the texts — barriers not imposed on unelected corporate advisers.

And, it is not only texts. When Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) sought to observe negotiations being held near his California Congressional District, the US Trade Representative would not allow it. While corporations have been allowed to participate throughout the process, a member of Congress who serves on committees dealing with energy, small businesses, foreign policy government oversight – which would all be impacted by the TPP – was blocked from merely observing. The disrespect showed to Congress by the Obama administration is something that will come back to haunt them. As Rep. Issa wrote: “Congress has a constitutional duty to oversee trade negotiations and not simply act as a rubber stamp to deals about which they were kept in the dark. While I had hoped the TPP would permit me to observe this round of the negotiation process firsthand, our efforts to open TPP negotiations up to transparency will continue.”

Looking at the office of the USTR website, one would think that the process of negotiating the TPP has been open and broad. They write that they are reaching out to a “broad cross-section of stakeholders” and they want to “set the stage for a deeper level of engagement with these and other stakeholders in the weeks and months ahead.” But these are empty promises and misleading statements as both Members of Congress and stakeholders know.

The actions of the USTR are designed to give the illusion of engagement while needs and interests of those affected by the TPP will be ignored. One of the authors, Kevin Zeese, participated in a stakeholder briefing last September. He found that questions from the stakeholders in attendance were not answered by the representatives and the entire event felt like a charade.

That is why last week we decided to expose the secret TPP and make the public’s demands for democracy and transparency more visible through spectacle protests. On Monday, September 23, eight of us wore work coveralls and hard hats and climbed scaffolding next to the USTR building. We draped the outside of their building with four large banners calling for democracy and transparency and calling the TPP what it is in reality, a global corporate coup against people and the planet. Our efforts told the whole city as the Washington Post reported on the protest calling it “one of the best ever.” The next day we spread the news by conducting a march featuring a 35 foot Fast Track train, going back to the US Trade Rep., the World Bank, White House, Chamber of Commerce, business district, Pennsylvania Ave. and Congress. Many tens of thousands of people now know about the secret trade deal.

It is up to the public and their representatives in Congress to demand that the full text of the TPP be released and that there be a democratic process of review. We must fully understand the effects of the TPP on employment, wages, the environment, Internet freedom, public health and safety and more. Jim Hightower outlines some of the major concerns in his newsletter, The Lowdown.

We cannot blindly accept the information coming from the USTR, President Obama and Big Business supporters of the TPP. They have misled the public before and they are doing it again to advance an agenda that puts profits before the needs of people and protection of the planet. The TPP will force smaller countries like Vietnam to change their entire economy by eliminating their publicly- supported enterprises and services and opening them up to the private sector and foreign investors. This will increase poverty and suffering while lining the pockets of the wealthy.

Countries negotiating with the United States need to realize that if the TPP becomes law they will be under the thumb of Monsanto, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wal-Mart and other US-based transnational corporations. They will have lost their sovereignty. Rodrigo Contreras, Chile’s lead TPP negotiator, recently up and quit to warn people of the dangers of TPP, highlighting how big financial institutions will dominate their governments and how the TPP “will become a threat for our countries: it will restrict our development options in health and education, in biological and cultural diversity, and in the design of public policies and the transformation of our economies. It will also generate pressures from increasingly active social movements, who are not willing to grant a pass to governments that accept an outcome of the TPP negotiations that limits possibilities to increase the prosperity and well-being of our countries.” The TPP will destroy the sovereignty of the nations who agree to its terms.

The destruction of sovereignty includes the United States. One of the most egregious outcomes of the TPP, if it passes, is the way it will undermine our national sovereignty as well as the ability of state and local governments to pass laws. All laws will have to be brought into compliance with the TPP. This means that public institutions like schools and hospitals can no longer give preference to buying local products and consumers may be barred from knowing whether the foods we buy contain GMOs. It means the “Buy America” laws will be illegal so Americans will be forced to spend their money on foreign products that create a massive trade deficit. And if we pass laws that interfere with expected corporate profits, those laws can be challenged in a special court, an international trade tribunal that operates outside of our legal system and that is staffed largely by corporate lawyers on leave from their corporate jobs. There will be no appeal to traditional courts from these rigged trade tribunals.

The TPP Unites Us and We can Stop It

The TPP will affect everything we care about. It is a cause that unites us, and if we work together to stop it, we will have won against the behemoth of transnational corporate power. A broad range of groups across the political spectrum are involved in stopping the TPP from becoming law. This includes Internet freedom, anti-GMO, health care, labor, faith, immigrant rights and environmental groups, among others.

We can stop the TPP. Indeed, 14 trade agreements have been prevented in the last dozen years. As more people know about it, the less popular it will become among politicians who will be held accountable for the TPP’s failures. It is up to the public to demand that our representatives put the interests of their constituents before the profits of their corporate campaign financiers. They must know that they will be held accountable for the detrimental consequences that are being predicted.

Public awareness and pressure are already having an effect. The media is starting to cover the TPP more and the process of granting Fast Track has been slowed. We can expect more propaganda to appear as the TPP falters and so we must prepare ourselves to repel it with the truth. And we must remember that no matter what we are told about it, no matter what protections we are told are included in it, we must have access to the text before it is signed and we must review and fully understand what its impacts will be. These demands are reasonable in a country that claims to be the greatest democracy on Earth.

And other countries are taking steps to demand transparency and democracy. Recently, the Parliament of Peru passed a resolution “requesting that the government open a “public, political, and technical debate” on the binding rules being negotiated in the TPP.” Protests in Japan have been widespread. The more we are visible in our concerns about the TPP, the more people in other nations will be emboldened to stand up to US imperialism and domination.

It is time to end the era of rigged corporate trade and begin fair trade that respects all people and the planet; and that is developed in an open and transparent manner. Join the Fair Trade Brigade either in Congress or where you live. Tell your member of Congress to vote “no” on Fast Track and pass a resolution locally that declares your community to be a fair trade zone. Visit FlushtheTPP.org for more information on what you can do.

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Jim Hightower: The Trans-Pacific Partnership Is a Corporate Coup in Disguise
What if our national leaders told us that communities across America had to eliminate such local programs as Buy Local, Buy American, Buy Green, etc. to allow foreign corporations to have the right to make the sale on any products purchased with our tax dollars? This nullification of our people's right to direct expenditures is just one of the horror stories in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

This is a super-sized NAFTA, the 1994 trade scam rammed through Congress by the entire corporate establishment. NAFTA promised the "glories of globalization": prosperity across our land. Unfortunately, corporations got the gold. We got the shaft — thousands of factories closed, millions of middle-class jobs went south, and the economies of hundreds of towns and cities were shattered.

Twenty years later, the gang that gave us NAFTA is back with the TPP, a "trade deal" that mostly does not deal with trade. Of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters! The other chapters amount to a devilish "partnership" for corporate protectionism:

—Food safety. Any of our government's food safety regulations (on pesticide levels, bacterial contamination, fecal exposure, toxic additives, etc.) and food labeling laws (organic, country-of-origin, animal-welfare approved, GMO-free, etc.) that are stricter than "international standards" could be ruled as "illegal trade barriers." Our government would then have to revise our consumer protections to comply with weaker standards.

—Fracking. Our Department of Energy would lose its authority to regulate exports of natural gas to any TPP nation. This would create an explosion of the destructive fracking process across our land, for both foreign and U.S. corporations could export fracked gas from America to member nations without any DOE review of the environmental and economic impacts on local communities — or on our national interests.

—Jobs. US corporations would get special foreign-investor protections to limit the cost and risk of relocating their factories to low-wage nations that sign onto this agreement. So, an American corporation thinking about moving a factory would know it is guaranteed a sweetheart deal if it moves operations to a TPP nation like Vietnam. This would be an incentive for corporate chieftains to export more of our middle-class jobs.

—Drug prices. Big Pharma would be given more years of monopoly pricing on each of their patents and be empowered to block distribution of cheaper generic drugs. Besides artificially keeping everyone's prices high, this would be a death sentence to many people suffering from cancer, HIV, AIDS, tuberculosis and other treatable diseases in impoverished lands.

—Banksters. Wall Street and the financial giants in other TPP countries would make out like bandits. The deal explicitly prohibits transaction taxes (such as the proposed Robin Hood Tax here) that would shut down speculators who have repeatedly triggered financial crises and economic crashes around the world. It restricts "firewall" reforms that separate consumer banking from risky investment banking. It could roll back reforms that governments adopted to fix the extreme bank-deregulation regimen that caused Wall Street's 2007 crash. And it provides an escape from national rules that would limit the size of "too-big-to-fail" behemoths.

—Internet freedom. Corporations hoping to lock up and monopolize the Internet failed in Congress last year to pass their repressive "Stop Online Piracy Act." However, they've slipped SOPA's most pernicious provisions into TPP. The deal would also transform Internet service providers into a private, Big Brother police force, empowered to monitor our "user activity," arbitrarily take down our content and cut off our access to the Internet. To top that off, consumers could be assessed mandatory fines for something as benign as sending your mom a recipe you got off of a paid site.

—Public services. TPP rules would limit how governments regulate such public services as utilities, transportation and education — including restricting policies meant to ensure broad or universal access to those essential needs. One insidious rule says that member countries must open their service sectors to private competitors, which would allow the corporate provider to cherry-pick the profitable customers and sink the public service.

Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch, correctly calls the Trans-Pacific Partnership "a corporate coup d'etat." Nations that join must conform their laws and rules to TPP's strictures, effectively supplanting U.S. sovereignty and canceling our people's right to be self-governing. Worse, it creates virtually permanent corporate rule over us.

Is it impossible to stop? Nope. There is also a broad, well-organized and politically experienced coalition of grassroots groups, which has stopped other deals and will do it again. We the people can protect our democratic rights from this threat of corporate usurpation. Check out globaltradewatch.org.

[seemslikeadream]

TPP: Corporate Power Tool of the 1%

Have you heard? The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “free trade” agreement is a stealthy policy being pressed by corporate America, a dream of the 1 percent, that in one blow could:

offshore millions of American jobs,
free the banksters from oversight,
ban Buy America policies needed to create green jobs and rebuild our economy,

decrease access to medicine,
flood the U.S. with unsafe food and products,
and empower corporations to attack our environmental and health safeguards.


Closed-door talks are on-going between the U.S. and Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam; with other countries, including China, potentially joining later. 600 corporate advisors have access to the text, while the public, Members of Congress, journalists, and civil society are excluded. And so far what we know about what's in there is very scary!

[NeonLX]

The Trans-Pacific Partnership
We Won’t Be Fooled By Rigged Corporate Trade Agreements
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / October 2nd, 2013

Who is this "We" that's referred to in the bolded part of the title?

Sorry, it's just me being sarcastic in a lame-assed attempt to bump this thread.

[seemslikeadream]

as of late we (all the members of this board) really do need from the wordsmiths here definitions/correct use of pronouns for the betterment of this board

Every pronoun must have a clear antecedent (the word for which the pronoun stands).

[seemslikeadream]

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the decline of American hegemony

Published: October 1, 2013
By Clyde Prestowitz — Foreign Policy

WASHINGTON — Just as events in Syria are demonstrating a huge shift in American foreign-policy doctrine in the Middle East, so are recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region signaling the same kind of shift there.

In Syria, it has become clear that the United States will no longer intervene just for the sake of enforcing its will wherever turmoil arises. Of course, this move is also a sign of the end of American hegemony. In the case of East Asia, the Obama administration’s major policy initiative has been the so-called “pivot to Asia,” and the centerpiece of that has been negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement. Although the free trade label sounds boring, the deal is not really about trade. Rather, it is about assuring Asian friends that America is still committed to them.

That’s what U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and the State Department have been saying for the past couple of years. It sounds good. Who can object to assuring our friends of our commitment to them? But that bland, motherhood-and-apple-pie reassuring veils something of deeper significance. As a high-ranking Singaporean official once explained to me, China “is like a new sun in the solar system, and all the planets 1 / 8countries 3 / 8 are readjusting their orbits.” His concern and that of most other countries in East Asia and the Pacific is that his country will become fixed in the Chinese orbit with no counterweight to allow some freedom of action. What he wanted was for America to be the counterweight against China. What Froman is really saying is that America will indeed act as the counterweight. This is an expression of American hegemony in East Asia and the Pacific.

That the TPP is not just about trade is signaled by the fact that the negotiations over it have been held in strict secrecy. Few, including members of U.S. Congress who eventually must sign off on the deal, have any idea of what is actually in the draft agreement. But what definitely is not there is any provision to deal with the problem of currency manipulation.

Let me briefly explain that. A number of countries, through a combination of jawboning and using government funds to buy dollars in the international currency markets, act to keep their own currencies artificially undervalued. This is a way to make their exports less expensive and their imports more expensive. It is totally at odds with any concept of free trade, but there are no provisions to deal with it in any of the free trade agreements Washington has negotiated. The World Trade Organization has some vague provisions that have never been enforced, and the same is true of the International Monetary Fund. Thus, a country can negotiate to reduce its tariffs from, say, 10 percent to 5 percent or even to 0. These are 50 percent or 100 percent reductions of the tariffs and would be hailed as a major move to free trade. But at the same time, the country could intervene in the currency markets to drive its currency down by 10 to 20 percent and thereby totally offset the effect of the free trade deal. Indeed, this is pretty much what Japan is doing now. While negotiating the TPP, Tokyo has managed to reduce the value of the yen by about 30 percent. Moreover, it has managed to do this without hearing any voice of complaint from its TPP negotiating partners. The other partners don’t complain because they mostly act in the same way. The United States doesn’t complain because, as I said, the deal is not about trade so much as about showing commitment to its Asian friends.

But last week saw what could be a very important development. Sixty senators wrote a letter to the U.S. president demanding that the problem of currency manipulation be addressed in the TPP negotiations before any deal is submitted to Congress for approval. This followed a similar action by members of the House of Representatives. The meaning of both actions is twofold. First, it signifies that as it now stands, the TPP deal may really not be able to gain passage through Congress. That is to say that the chances of its not being ratified are quite good. The second point of significance is that, as in the case of Syria, the U.S. Congress is telling the administration and the world that geopolitics no longer trump economic and domestic welfare considerations. Congress is saying that free trade deals now truly have to be about trade and not about reassuring allies of U.S. commitment to them. No longer will Congress agree to buy allies with distorted and lopsided trade deals.

The end of American hegemony will be mourned by many around the world and in America, but it is likely to be a very good thing for U.S. workers and the American middle class.

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"A Corporate Trojan Horse": Obama Pushes Secretive TPP Trade Pact, Would Rewrite Swath of U.S. Laws

As the federal government shutdown continues, Secretary of State John Kerry heads to Asia for secret talks on a sweeping new trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP is often referred to by critics as "NAFTA on steroids," and would establish a free trade zone that would stretch from Vietnam to Chile, encompassing 800 million people — about a third of world trade and nearly 40 percent of the global economy. While the text of the treaty has been largely negotiated behind closed doors and, until June, kept secret from Congress, more than 600 corporate advisers reportedly have access to the measure, including employees of Halliburton and Monsanto. "This is not mainly about trade," says Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. "It is a corporate Trojan horse. The agreement has 29 chapters, and only five of them have to do with trade. The other 24 chapters either handcuff our domestic governments, limiting food safety, environmental standards, financial regulation, energy and climate policy, or establishing new powers for corporations."

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: President Obama announced this week that the U.S. government shutdown would delay his upcoming four-country trip to Asia, but that negotiations on a controversial new trade agreement he hopes to sign by the end of the year will continue to move forward. Obama called the Philippines president Tuesday night to say he would miss his visit, and a spokesperson shared the news with reporters Thursday.

RICKY CARANDANG: Secretary Kerry ... he will go in place of President Obama. President Obama personally called President Aquino to tell him—to explain to him why he could not make the visit.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: John Kerry will attend Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings next week in Indonesia, where he’ll push for the completion of a sweeping new trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the largest international trade deal since the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. The administration hopes to pass the measure through Congress by the end of the year using its Fast Track authority to limit lawmakers to an up-or-down vote.

AMY GOODMAN: The TPP is often referred to by critics as "NAFTA on steroids" and would establishing a free trade zone that would stretch from Vietnam to Chile, encompass 800 million people—about a third of world trade and nearly 40 percent of the global economy. While the text of the treaty has been largely negotiated behind closed doors, more than 600 corporate advisers reportedly have access to the measure, including employees of Halliburton and Monsanto.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

Lori, welcome back to Democracy Now! Just explain what the TPP is.

LORI WALLACH: Well, one of the most important things to understand is it’s not really mainly about trade. I guess the way to think about it is as a corporate Trojan horse. The agreement has 29 chapters, and only five of them have to do with trade. The other 24 chapters either handcuff our domestic governments, limiting food safety, environmental standards, financial regulation, energy and climate policy, or establishing new powers for corporations.

For instance, there are the same investor privileges that promote job offshoring to lower-wage countries. There is a ban on Buy Local procurement, so that corporations have a right to do sourcing, basically taking our tax dollars, and instead of investing them in our local economy, sending them offshore. There are new rights to, for instance, have freedom to enter other countries and take natural resources, a right for mining, a right for oil, gas, without approval.

And then there’s a whole set of very worrisome issues relating to Internet freedom. Through sort of the backdoor of the copyright chapter of TPP is a whole chunk of SOPA, the Stop Online Privacy Act, that activism around the country successfully derailed a year ago. Think about all the things that would be really hard to get into effect as a corporation in public, a lot of them rejected here and in the other 11 countries, and that is what’s bundled in to the TPP. And every country would be required to change its laws domestically to meet these rules. The binding provision is, each country shall ensure the conformity of domestic laws, regulations and procedures.

Now, the only reason I know that level of detail is because a few texts have leaked, and I have been following the negotiations and grilling negotiators from other countries to try and find between the lines what the hell is going on; otherwise, totally secret.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Lori, about that secrecy, even members of Congress have been severely limited in what they can learn, and that’s only after the revelations about the total secrecy that this whole process began with. Could you talk about what members of Congress are allowed to know and how?

LORI WALLACH: Well, what’s really important for people to know—and this gets to what you started out with about Fast Track. Congress has exclusive constitutional authority over trade. It’s kind of like the Boston Tea Party hangover. After having a king just impose tariffs, in that case on tea, the founders said, "We need to put all things about trade, international commerce, in the hands of Congress, the most diffuse part of the elected representation, not the executive, the king." So Congress has all this authority. They’re supposed to be exclusively in control. But until this June, they were not even allowed to see the draft text.

And it was only after a big, great fuss was kicked up by a lot of members—150 of them wrote last year—that finally members of Congress, upon request for the particular chapter, can have a government administration official bring them a chapter. Their staff is thrown out of the room. They can’t take detailed notes. They’re not supposed to talk about what they saw. And they can, without staff to help them figure out what the technical language is, look at a chapter. This is in contrast to, say, even what the Bush administration did. The last time we had one of these mega-NAFTA expansion attempts was the Free Trade Area of the Americas. And in that instance, in 2001, that whole draft text was released to the public by the U.S. government on the official government websites. So, this is extraordinary secrecy, and members of Congress aren’t supposed to tell anyone what they’ve read. So, for instance, you know, Alan Grayson, who was one of the guys who helped to get the text released, Alan Grayson said, "I can tell you it’s very bad for the future of America. I just can’t tell you why." That’s obscene.

This would rewrite wide swaths of our laws. And again, it’s mainly not about trade. So, if we have this agreement in effect, for instance, it would be a big push for fracking. Now you would say, "Why fracking?" Because it doesn’t allow us to have bans on liquid natural gas exports. Or, if this were in effect, we couldn’t ensure the safety of the food we feed our families. We have to import, for instance, fish and shrimp that we know, from the limited inspection that’s done, is extremely dangerous from certain kinds of growing ponds that are contaminated, etc., in some of the TPP countries. Or, for instance, some of the financial reforms where the banksters were finally regulated would be rolled back. All of this, and it would be privately enforceable by certain foreign corporations.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about a bill that didn’t make it through Congress, but the question is, is it incorporated into TPP? And that’s SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. First explain what it is, and talk about where it fits in here.

LORI WALLACH: So, the Stop Online Piracy Act was a vehicle basically to take away some of our rights on the Internet. It would have criminalized what they call inadvertent, small-scale, non-commercial copying. And the example would be, for instance, Juan, I had you over to dinner. You liked the recipe I had. I happened to have taken it for $2 I paid for it off of a paid website. And you said, "Lori, can you send me that recipe?" And, of course, I said, "Yeah," and I sent it to you. That is officially a copyright violation. I should say, "You have to go pay $2 and get it yourself, Juan." But, in fact, it’s small-scale. I didn’t sell it. It’s not commercial. I didn’t send it to a lot of people.

That kind of activity, under SOPA, as well as any number of things we do all the time—making a copy, or like a buffer copy that our computer would make to look at a video, or breaking a digital lock—for instance, if we bought software, but we wanted to run it on Linux—all of those things would be considered criminal activities. We’d face huge fines, and our carriers—Google, etc.—would have to take us off of service, to black us out. So, a huge limit on Internet freedom.

That whole mess was defeated in Congress in a wonderful citizen uprising. A chunk of that is now stuck in the copyright chapter of SOPA—of TPP. So, they call TPP "son of SOPA." In a lot of countries around the TPP region, citizens have fought to have good laws that actually provide them access and don’t allow that kind of control. So, that is a chunk. To give you an idea of how varied the problems are, that’s a chunk of what is in there.

Now, the thing about that Fast Track you mentioned, Fast Track is not in effect. Fast Track is an extraordinary delegation of Congress’s authority. So if we don’t want unsafe food, offshore jobs, SOPA, SOPA, SOPA, limits on Internet freedom, the banksters gettings rolled back into deregulation, we have to make sure that Congress actually maintains its constitutional authority to make sure that before this agreement can be signed, it actually works for us. Fast Track is a delegation of authority. President Obama has asked for it, but it only happens if Congress gives it to him.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Lori, what’s been the Obama administration’s position on these negotiations in terms of tobacco? Could you talk about that specifically?

LORI WALLACH: Well, the whole approach of the Obama administration has really been, I don’t know, some combination of heartbreaking and infuriating, because when he was a candidate, President Obama promised he would replace the NAFTA model, and instead they’ve doubled down.

So the tobacco issue is one of those that’s the most gruesome. So, the TPP includes the very controversial investor-state system, which empowers individual corporations to directly sue governments—not in our courts, but in extrajudicial tribunals where three corporate attorneys act as "judges," and these guys rotate between being the judge and being the guys suing the government for the corporation. They’re empowered to give unlimited cash damages from us, the taxpayers, to these corporations for any government action—a regulatory issue, environment, health, safety—that undermines the investor’s expected future profits. Under that system, big tobacco companies have been attacking health regulations. And famously—infamously—these kinds of investor-state cases have extracted billions of dollars and undermined important laws. So, Philip Morris has used this to attack Australia, one of the TPP country’s plain-packaging-of-cigarette laws. So, a lot of the TPP countries are very worried that they would be basically handcuffed from being able to regulate for health around tobacco. So, the U.S. originally was going to offer an exception. Big tobacco came in and basically won the day. The U.S. pulled away what was a medium exception, put in something that’s really worse than nothing, and then Malaysia came in and actually offered a real exception, which the U.S. is opposing—just like the U.S. is opposing an exception to maintain financial regulations for prudential reasons, just like the U.S. is opposing a real exception to those investor tribunals with respect to health and the environment. It’s incredibly depressing.

The only good news is a bunch of the other countries have basically said, "Basta! We are not going to roll back these things." So the reason there isn’t a deal is because a lot of the other countries are standing up to the worst of these U.S. corporate-inspired demands. You can see the whole lay of this at ExposeTheTPP, http://www.exposethetpp. There are fact sheets on each of the ways, each aspect of your life the TPP could affect. And if you want to get down into the weeds and have long papers explaining and/or information from other countries, you can go to tradewatch.org. That’s tradewatch.org. Between those two sets of information, you’ll see there’s almost no part of your life or the things you care about that this agreement couldn’t undermine. And again, trade is the least of it.

AMY GOODMAN: Lori Wallach, we want to thank you very much for being with us. Lori Wallach is director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. When we come back, President Obama is about to hit a new milestone: two million people deported under his administration. We’ll talk about it. Stay with us.

[MayDay]

https://wikileaks.org/tpp/pressrelease.html

Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)
Today, 13 November 2013, WikiLeaks released the secret negotiated draft text for the entire TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. The TPP is the largest-ever economic treaty, encompassing nations representing more than 40 per cent of the world’s GDP. The WikiLeaks release of the text comes ahead of the decisive TPP Chief Negotiators summit in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 19-24 November 2013. The chapter published by WikiLeaks is perhaps the most controversial chapter of the TPP due to its wide-ranging effects on medicines, publishers, internet services, civil liberties and biological patents. Significantly, the released text includes the negotiation positions and disagreements between all 12 prospective member states.

The TPP is the forerunner to the equally secret US-EU pact TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), for which President Obama initiated US-EU negotiations in January 2013. Together, the TPP and TTIP will cover more than 60 per cent of global GDP. Both pacts exclude China.

Since the beginning of the TPP negotiations, the process of drafting and negotiating the treaty’s chapters has been shrouded in an unprecedented level of secrecy. Access to drafts of the TPP chapters is shielded from the general public. Members of the US Congress are only able to view selected portions of treaty-related documents in highly restrictive conditions and under strict supervision. It has been previously revealed that only three individuals in each TPP nation have access to the full text of the agreement, while 600 ’trade advisers’ – lobbyists guarding the interests of large US corporations such as Chevron, Halliburton, Monsanto and Walmart – are granted privileged access to crucial sections of the treaty text.

The TPP negotiations are currently at a critical stage. The Obama administration is preparing to fast-track the TPP treaty in a manner that will prevent the US Congress from discussing or amending any parts of the treaty. Numerous TPP heads of state and senior government figures, including President Obama, have declared their intention to sign and ratify the TPP before the end of 2013.

WikiLeaks’ Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange stated: “The US administration is aggressively pushing the TPP through the US legislative process on the sly.” The advanced draft of the Intellectual Property Rights Chapter, published by WikiLeaks on 13 November 2013, provides the public with the fullest opportunity so far to familiarise themselves with the details and implications of the TPP.

The 95-page, 30,000-word IP Chapter lays out provisions for instituting a far-reaching, transnational legal and enforcement regime, modifying or replacing existing laws in TPP member states. The Chapter’s subsections include agreements relating to patents (who may produce goods or drugs), copyright (who may transmit information), trademarks (who may describe information or goods as authentic) and industrial design.

The longest section of the Chapter – ’Enforcement’ – is devoted to detailing new policing measures, with far-reaching implications for individual rights, civil liberties, publishers, internet service providers and internet privacy, as well as for the creative, intellectual, biological and environmental commons. Particular measures proposed include supranational litigation tribunals to which sovereign national courts are expected to defer, but which have no human rights safeguards. The TPP IP Chapter states that these courts can conduct hearings with secret evidence. The IP Chapter also replicates many of the surveillance and enforcement provisions from the shelved SOPA and ACTA treaties.

The consolidated text obtained by WikiLeaks after the 26-30 August 2013 TPP meeting in Brunei – unlike any other TPP-related documents previously released to the public – contains annotations detailing each country’s positions on the issues under negotiation. Julian Assange emphasises that a “cringingly obsequious” Australia is the nation most likely to support the hardline position of US negotiators against other countries, while states including Vietnam, Chile and Malaysia are more likely to be in opposition. Numerous key Pacific Rim and nearby nations – including Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and, most significantly, Russia and China – have not been involved in the drafting of the treaty.

In the words of WikiLeaks’ Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange, “If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.”

Current TPP negotiation member states are the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei.

https://wikileaks.org/tpp/

[seemslikeadream]

MSF Responds to Leak of Trans-Pacific Partnership Text on Wikileaks

NOVEMBER 13, 2013

For the first time in more than two years, text from the intellectual property chapter of the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement negotiations has been leaked. Since 2010, the negotiations have been shrouded in secrecy, with none of the current 12 negotiating Pacific rim countries releasing text or information on a trade agreement that will ultimately impact the lives of at least half a billion people.

The TPP currently includes some of the harshest provisions against access to medicines ever included in a trade agreement with developing countries, gutting public health safeguards and leaving them unable to take the steps needed to protect the lives and health of their people above the profit of multinational pharmaceutical companies. For more information, please read MSF’s issue brief and recent statements here: http://www.msfaccess.org/tpp/

MSF Responds to the Leaked TPP Text:

"The leak of the secret text confirms that the US government continues to steamroll its trading partners in the face of steadfast opposition over terms that will severely restrict access to affordable medicines for millions of people. The US is refusing to back down from dangerous provisions that will impede timely access to affordable medicines.

It’s encouraging to see that some governments, including Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Singapore, are pushing back against some aspects of the US. position with their own proposal that better protects access to medicines; what is troubling is that the text also shows that some countries are willing to give in to the US government’s damaging demands. We urge countries to stand strong to ensure that the harmful terms are removed before this deal is finalised.”

—Judit Rius Sanjuan, US Manager, MSF Access Campaign

MSF is an international medical humanitarian organization working in over 70 countries worldwide. For more information on MSF analysis and concerns with the TPP visit http://www.msfaccess.org/tpp

[parel]

Thanks for being on top of this too, SLAD!

Leaked TPP Chapter: 5 Scary Provisions In WikiLeaks' Trans-Pacific Partnership Release
By Connor Adams Sheets
on November 13 2013 1:41 PM





The document details proposals for "international obligations and enforcement mechanisms for copyright, trademark and patent law, and includes the combined positions of all of the parties as they were by the end of August 2013," according to WikiLeaks, but at 30,000 words it is a dense and complicated read.

As such, a number of advocacy groups and independent organizations have begun parsing the 95-page chapter for provisions that could prove detrimental to the public good, and they have already found quite a few problematic passages.

First some background. The TPP is a secretive agreement currently being negotiated behind closed doors by representatives of the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Vietnam, Brunei and Australia.

Related


WikiLeaks Leaks TPP Chapter On Intellectual Property
4 Things To Know About The Trans-Pacific Partnership
Only 700 representatives of various corporations have access to the text, which has been amended twice since the version WikiLeaks released Wednesday was drafted. The governments of the countries involved in the negotiations are not able to view the text while it is being discussed by the corporations, meaning that the public will have little to no input on what will be included in the final version.

Now concerns about the TPP are rising as the chapter released Wednesday lays out a number of provisions that could prove harmful to the citizenry of the countries impacted by the agreement, which make up about 40 percent of the world economy.

Here are five of the scariest provisions included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Intellectual Property Chapter released Wednesday:

1. Chilling basic Internet use: The TPP's chapter on IP deals with a host of issues, but its potential impacts on basic Internet freedom and usage are perhaps the ones that would directly impact the most people in the short term. One of the biggest concerns about the agreement raised by the Internet freedom advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation centers around the concept of "temporary copies." Here's the text of the relevant section of the TPP's intellectual property chapter leaked Wednesday:

"Each Party shall provide that authors, performers, and producers of phonograms have the right to authorize or prohibit all reproductions of their works, performances, and phonograms, in any manner or form, permanent or temporary (including temporary storage in electronic form)."

The EFF wrote in a July analysis of the language -- which has not been amended in the intervening months -- that the provision "reveals a profound disconnect with the reality of the modern computer," which relies on temporary copies to perform routine operations, during which it must create temporary copies of programs and files in order to carry out basic functions. This is particularly so while a computer is connected to the Internet, when it will use temporary copies to buffer videos, store cache files to ensure websites load quickly and more.

"Since it’s technically necessary to download a temporary version of everything we see on our devices, does that mean—under the US proposed language—that anyone who ever views content on their device could potentially be found liable of infringement?" the EFF wrote. "For other countries signing on to the TPP, the answer would be most likely yes."

2. Limiting access to medicine: The countries which are party to the TPP will likely see access to affordable medicines fall if the document is ratified as it stands. Major pharmaceutical companies stand to increase profits dramatically if they can diminish the ability of consumers to purchase competing low-cost companies' medications, and the advocacy organization Public Citizen contends that the agreement would have just that effect:

"The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has proposed measures harmful to access to affordable medicines that have not been seen before in U.S. trade agreements," Public Citizen stated Wednesday. "These proposals aim to transform countries’ laws on patents and medical test data, and include attacks on government medicine formularies. USTR’s demands would strengthen, lengthen and broaden pharmaceutical monopolies on cancer, heart disease and HIV/AIDS drugs, among others, in the Asia-Pacific region."

The TPP would limit access to medicines by expanding medical patents' scope to include minor changes to existing medications; instituting patent linkage, a regime that would make it more difficult for many generic drugs to enter markets; and lengthening the terms of patents by forcing countries to extend patents' terms during lengthy review processes.

3. Extending patent protections to surgical methods: Another key portion of the newly released TPP chapter on intellectual property would extend patent protections to surgical methods, which are currently allowed to be excluded from patent law under the existing World Trade Organization framework, according to an independent analysis by the nonprofit organization Knowledge Ecology International.

As U.S. law currently stands, ”the performance of a medical or surgical procedure on a body” is currently exempted from various patent protections as they apply to medicines. Under the TPP, that exemption would undermined in many cases.

"The U.S. trade negotiators then proposed adding language that would permit an exception for surgery, but only 'if they cover a method of using a machine, manufacture, or composition of matter,'" KEI wrote on Wednesday. "The U.S. proposal, crafted in consultation with the medical devices lobby, but secret from the general public, was similar, but different from the U.S. statute, which narrowed the exception in cases involving 'the use of a patented machine, manufacture, or composition of matter in violation of such patent.'”

In layman's terms, the United States' TPP proposal would make it so that the patent protections exception would apply only to “surgical methods you can perform with your bare hands," according to Burcu Kilic, legal counsel to Public Citizen's Global Access to Medicines Program.



4. Lengthen copyright term protections: The preliminary version of the TPP would also rewrite the guidelines on international copyright law by lengthening the terms that copyright protections could be applied.

As it stands today under the international 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, copyright term protections are defined by country but capped at the life of the author of a work plus 50 years.

But under the TPP, longer copyright protections would likely be forced on countries that are parties to the agreement, the EFF pointed out in a discussion of a previous draft of the agreement that included similar language.

"The TPP could extend copyright term protections from life of the author + 50 years, to Life + 70 years for works by individuals, and either 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation for corporate owned works (such as Mickey Mouse)," the EFF wrote.

The foundation said that the new, longer copyright term protections serve "no empirical purpose," would do much more to bolster the profits of corporations than the artists they pay minimal royalties to, and would harm consumers by keeping works out of the public domain for far longer than under current law.

"The common justification for granting restrictive monopoly rights in copyright law is to provide an 'incentive' for people to generate material that can be enjoyed by the public," the EFF wrote. "But economists and law scholars who have studied this rationale have found that 'the optimal length of copyright is at most seven years.'"

5. Compelling Internet Service Providers to police copyright violations: Much of the TPP chapter that emerged on Wednesday concerns issues with copyright law and Internet operations, and one key provision brings these two realms together in another scary example of the proposed agreement's overreach.

The section in question "insists that signatories provide legal incentives for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to privately enforce copyright protection rules," according to an EFF analysis. "The TPP wants service providers to undertake the financial and administrative burdens of becoming copyright cops, serving a copyright maximalist agenda while disregarding the consequences for Internet freedom and innovation."

The provision goes far further than existing statutes in many of the countries that are party to the IPP by laying out three-strike rules that would require ISPs to terminate users' Internet access after three allegations of copyright infringement; requiring ISPs to filter online communications for possible instance of copyright infringement; obliging ISPs to block websites that may be engaged in copyright infringement; and potentially forcing ISPs to reveal identities of alleged online copyright infringers to the entities that hold the copyrights in question.

Click here to read the August draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Intellectual Property Chapter draft in its entirety.

[parel]

article is link rich.

WikiLeaks Reveals Provisions of Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Where Countries Oppose United States
By: Kevin Gosztola Wednesday November 13, 2013 11:22 am



Graphic posted on WikiLeaks’ page for its release of a chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement

There are twelve countries that have been involved in the ultra-secretive process of negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Six hundred corporate advisors have been given access to the text of this so-called free trade agreement while the public has been deprived of reading what is being negotiated on behalf of corporations. But that secrecy has been undermined significantly now that the media organization, WikiLeaks, has obtained and published a drafted copy of the intellectual property chapter in the agreement.

It was obtained after a TPP meeting in Brunei in August, and it shows country’s positions on the proposed provisions of the agreement.

According to the draft, the United States has been the most extreme negotiator in the process. The other eleven countries involved— Australia, Brunei, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam—have each pushed back on some of the most aggressive proposals for enforcement of intellectual property rights laws. However, Australia and New Zealand have often been more than willing to support the draconian measures proposed by the US.

The US has proposed “that its judicial authorities have the authority to order the seizure or forfeiture of assets the value of which corresponds to that of the assets derived from, or obtained directly or indirectly through, the infringing activity.” New Zealand is the only other country that supports this section.

The US has also proposed that each country apply “criminal procedures and penalties,” even “absent willful trademark counterfeiting or copyright or related rights privacy, at least in cases of knowing trafficking in” the following:

labels or packaging, of any type or nature, to which a counterfeit trademark 238 has been applied, the use of which is likely to cause confusion, to cause mistake, or to deceive; and counterfeit or illicit labels239 affixed to, enclosing, or accompanying, or designed to be affixed to, enclose, or accompany the following:
a phonogram,
a copy of a computer program or a literary work,
a copy of a motion picture or other audiovisual work,
documentation or packaging for such items; and
counterfeit documentation or packaging for items of the type described in subparagraph (b).]

This is only supported by the US.

“In civil judicial proceedings concerning patent infringement,” the US would like countries to be able to have their “judicial authorities” increase any “damages to an amount that is up to three times the amount of the injury found or assessed.” All countries involved in the negotiate process oppose this section.

Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, and Singapore each would like to be able to “limit the liability of, or the availability of remedies against, internet service providers” for copyright infringement that takes place on their communication networks. Both the US and Australia are opposed to this provision.

All countries except the US, Australia and Singapore oppose an entire section proposing a procedure for notifying internet service providers of copyright infringement.

The US and Australia want all countries negotiating to “ratify or accede” to the following agreements once the TPP is in force:

Patent Cooperation Treaty (1970), as amended in 1979;
Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1967);
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1971);
Convention Relating to the Distribution of Programme-Carrying Signals Transmitted by Satellite (1974);
Protocol Relating to the Madrid Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Marks (1989);
Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure (1977), as amended in 1980;
International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants [MX propose: (1961) as revised in 1972, 1978 or] (1991) (UPOV Convention);
Singapore Treaty on the Law of Trademarks (2006);
WIPO Copyright Treaty (1996); and
WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (1996).

All the other countries are opposed (though footnotes indicate Mexico might be willing to support and Singapore will follow consensus).

The US wants other countries involved in the TPP to ratify the Patent Law Treaty of 2000. All countries besides the US are opposed.

The drafted chapter, especially where it indicates what the US supports and opposes, clearly shows how the agreement is being negotiated on behalf of some of the most powerful corporations in the world, like Monsanto, which has patents on corn and wheat. The process is also being heavily influenced by Hollywood and the music industry.

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said the agreement reveals an effort to extend the “monopoly rights” of companies. It would serve corporations like Disney by making it easier to criminally prosecute individual for the downloading of films.

“If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs,” Assange declared in a press release.

Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), which reviewed the drafted chapter ahead of its publication, posted an analysis of the TPP. KEI found it confirmed their fears that “negotiating parties are prepared to expand the reach of intellectual property rights and shrink consumer rights and safeguards.” It is “bad for access to knowledge, bad for access to medicine, and profoundly bad for innovation.”

On secrecy around negotiations, KEI notes US negotiators “claim that the proposals need not be subject to public scrutiny because they are merely promoting US legal traditions. Other governments claim that they will resist corporate rights holder lobbying pressures. But the version released by Wikileaks reminds us why government officials supervised only by well-connected corporate advisors can’t be trusted.”

It would be easier for corporations to “limit competition” and “raise prices in markets for drugs.” Global standards for “obtaining patents” would be lowered, as rules would permit the filing of patents in developing countries, extend the term of patents for longer than 20 years and allow companies to rely on “test data” to prove drugs are “safe and effective.”

The US strongly supports measures that would expand or increase monopolies and make drugs “more expensive and less accessible,” according to KEI. It also would like to “change national and global norms” by expanding patents on “diagnostic, therapeutic, and surgical methods for the treatment of humans or animals.”

This section of the agreement shows there is clear tension between the US and other countries over patenting such methods:

[US: Consistent with paragraph 1] each Party [US propose; AU/NZ/VN/BN/CL/PE/MY/SG/CA/MX oppose: shall make patents available for inventions for the following] [NZ/CL/PE/MY/AU/VN/BN/SG/CA/MX propose: may also exclude from patentability]:

(a) plants and animals, [NZ/CL/PE/MY/AU/VN/BN/SG/CA/MX propose: other than microorganisms];

[JP oppose: (b)diagnostic, therapeutic, and surgical methods for the treatment of humans or animals [US propose; AU/SG/MY/NZ/CL/PE/VN/BN/CA/MX oppose: if they cover a method of using a machine, manufacture, or composition of matter]; [NZ/CL/PE/MY/AU/VN/BN/SG/CA/MX propose:] and

(c) essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals, other than non-biological and microbiological processes for such production.]
[MX propose: (d) and the diagrams, plans, rules and methods for carrying out mental processes, playing games or doing business, and mathematical methods as such; software as such; methods to present information as such; and aesthetic creations and artistic or literary works.]

Some of the countries would like to exclude the above from “patentability,” while the US, on behalf of medical companies, would like to patent the methods.

Additionally, disputes over copyrighted content distributed on the Internet would be settled by an international law and may be contrary to local laws of countries.

Expert in intellectual property law, Matthew Rimmer, told Philip Dorling of The Age in Australia, “The draft was ‘very prescriptive’ and strongly reflected US trade objectives and multinational corporate interests ‘with little focus on the rights and interests of consumers, let alone broader community interests.’”

“One could see the TPP as a Christmas wish-list for major corporations, and the copyright parts of the text support such a view,” Rimmer added.

The allure of being part of a major legal and economic bloc that includes the United States may be too much for countries. It has been the position of the United States to be the most zealous in its support of corporations and hopefully persuade other countries, who do not want to see the secret process fall apart, come around to endorsing extreme proposals.

Reprehensibly, US media organizations like The New York Times have endorsed the deal, “A good agreement would lower duties and trade barriers on most products and services, strengthen labor and environmental protections, limit the ability of governments to tilt the playing field in favor of state-owned firms and balance the interests of consumers and creators of intellectual property. Such a deal will not only help individual countries but set an example for global trade talks.”

The Times had not even read the deal. In fact, it indicated no opposition to the incredible secrecy around negotiations. Yet, days ago, it decided it would probably be good for the US and its relations with other Asian countries so let’s champion its great potential.

Thanks to WikiLeaks, it is now clear what the US aims to do with the TPP, and media organizations that have been silent about the deal and chosen to ignore what has been secretly happening between countries conspiring with the US on behalf of corporation should reconsider their decision to not cover this unfolding process.

[Wombaticus Rex]

3. Extending patent protections to surgical methods

What.

The.

Fuck.

[parel]

Militarization and The Trans-Pacific “Strategic Economic” Partnership

A Secret Deal Negotiated behind Closed Doors



At present, there are two little words left dangling off the title of a free-trade agreement that the U.S. has been involved with negotiating since 2009. The Trans-Pacific “Strategic Economic” Partnership Agreement, or what we generally call the TPP, has been mostly framed as a secret free-trade agreement that is being advised by 600 of the largest corporations undermining government regulations on the environment, labor, finance and other regulatory industries; a 21st-century neoliberal assault that aims to streamline the global supply chain and undermine the sovereign integrity of states.

What has received less attention is that this strategic economic partnership has in large part, taken the form of a policy initiative called the Pacific Pivot, a shifting of military resources into the Pacific.

The TPP was originally considered a pathfinder agreement for a Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) which grew out of APEC, and was signed in 2005 between Singapore, NZ , Chile, and Brunei. Officially, the U.S. agreed to enter talks with the TPP countries on the liberalization of trade in the financial services sector in January 2008, and the following September, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab announced that the U.S. would negotiate entry. In November 2009, Obama officially confirmed membership with the new expanded TPP partners and the U.S. launched negotiations “with the goal of shaping a regional agreement that will have broad-based membership and the high standards worthy of a 21st century trade agreement.”

In a November 2009 speech Obama gave while in Tokyo, he said, “the growth of multilateral organizations can advance the security and prosperity of this region. I know that the United States has been disengaged from many of these organizations in recent years. So let me be clear: Those days have passed. As a Asia Pacific nation, the United States expects to be involved in the discussions that shape the future of this region, and to participate fully in appropriate organizations as they are established and evolve.”

For context, agreements to enter TPP talks occurred before the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in mid-September of 2008 ignited the economic collapse of our financial sector. Within days, CEOs of many of the top U.S. corporations who lost their short-term investments with Lehman’s collapse threatened Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson of walking away from their posts unless the federal government bailed them out. A walk-out by the CEOs of the top fast-food and retail business chains would threaten the government of having to react to unprecedented unemployment. It was clear that if CEOs did not receive a bail out, a large percentage of the 99% who live off their service-sector jobs would suddenly stop receiving paychecks. On Oct. 1st, President Bush signed the $700 billion dollars Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). By March of 2009, within months of Obama’s presidency, the Federal Reserve committed $7.77 trillion dollars to rescue the financial system. When Obama won the presidency he not only inherited the financial collapse, but the TPP as well. Let that sink in for a minute.

NewPacific40m.ai

By 2011, the Trans Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership had expanded to nine countries, and at the APEC meeting in Hawaii, it was announced that Canada and Mexico were joining and most suspected that it was just a matter of time before Japan would join talks.

Today, with it’s current 12-nation membership, the combined GDP of TPP countries is more that $26 trillion dollars, representing over a third of global GDP.

During APEC 2011, Obama unveiled his Pacific Pivot, a shifting of 60% of U.S. military resources from Iraq and Afghanistan, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The policy was addressed by Hillary Clinton in a Foreign Policy op-ed a month earlier, called “America’s Pacific Century,” in which she outlined a six-point plan. These include: 1) strengthening bilateral security alliances; 2) deepening our working relationship with emerging powers; 3) engaging with regional multilateral institutions; 4) expanding trade and investment; 5) forging a broad-based military presence; and 6) advancing democracy and human rights.

Further, Clinton described the progress of the TPP as bringing coherence to the U.S. regulatory system and the “efiiciency of supply chains,” and hopes that the TPP agreement will eventually form the regional interaction of an FTAAP.

National Security adviser Tom Donilon said, “the shift in focus toward the Asia-Pacific region isn’t just a matter of military presence. Rather, he added, it’s an effort to harness all elements of U.S. power: military, political, trade and investment, development and values.”

NATO too, has refocused its attention to the Pacific, emphasizing a reliance upon U.S. maritime security. Even as recently as the August 2013 issue of “Atlantic Voices,” the Atlantic Treaty Association’s Journal analyst Miha Hribernik highlights key areas of cooperation between NATO and the Asia Pacific. In the Path Ahead for NATO Partners in the Asia-Pacific, he writes, “The North Korean threat or the unpredictable Sino-Japanese stand-off over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands could even entangle NATO directly. In the event of escalation and US involvement, Washington could possibly invoke Article 4 – or even Article 5 – of the North Atlantic Treaty and involve the other 27 allied countries. For all intents and purposes, NATO has one foot in the Pacific at any given time.”

Since the announcement of the U.S. joining the TPP, the U.S. has been in the midst of aligning new partnerships in the Pacific. In 2010, I posted an article here called “Clinton and the Colonial Paradigm” which outlined the 6-point military/strategic alliance that the U.S. had been forming in the Pacific with partners that include the Pacific Island Forum. This alliance includes the cooperation of Pacific Island partners in the assertion of the “Pacific Plan,” a regional development and investment proposal asserted by the Pacific Island Forum. Whether it was intended to or not, the Pacific Plan serves as the latest blueprint for colonial hegemony facilitated by Obama’s announcement of a “Pacific Pivot.”

“STRATEGIC”

I want to briefly address this word “strategic,” as it is often elusive like a Chesire Cat, sometimes visible sometimes not. “Strategic” is an example of a word that has a very precise meaning in the context of international agreements, yet it is often overlooked. The Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau comprise the Freely Associated States (FAS). They were originally listed as Trust Territories, territories that had belonged to the Axis power in WWII, to be administered for decolonization along with the other Allied held, Non-Self-Governing Territories. In 1947, the FAS were reclassified as a United Nations Strategic Trust Territory to be administered by the United States. Although they should have been afforded the same rights for self-determination as the other 62 countries that gained their independence as a result of the UN decolonization process, their sovereignty was limited because of the insertion of that little word “strategic.” Despite its often glaring omission in the FAS’s designation as Trust Territories, the U.S. had taken up military stewardship over the strategic role of “protecting the inhabitants against the loss of their lands and resources.”

“ECONOMIC COOPERATION”

As an FTAAP, the TPP was meant to be a potentially APEC-wide free-trade agreement. APEC, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation has often been described as “four adjectives in search of a noun.” However, the term “economic cooperation,” much like “strategic” has a very precise meaning, too. The 1948 Economic Cooperation Act (ECA), aka the “Marshall Plan” was as much a military and strategic international agreement as it was a development/aid and investment strategy. The ECA provided development and aid to war torn Europe in exchange for its commitment to US-free market trade rules, which is arguably the rod that pulled the Iron Curtain of the Cold War. The USSR was working off an entirely different development and economic stabilization model that was “inter-dependent” of states trading resources to build their own infrastructure and labor programs towards full-employment.

“Economic Cooperation” became the moniker in International Organization-speak for a post-war U.S. economic strategy that aimed to centralize free-market development and trade among cooperating countries and their territories. The Economic Cooperation Act harmonized branches of the State Department, the various bureaus within the Departments of Labor, Commerce, and Agriculture, the Treasury, the Washington Import-Export Bank, and created an entirely new international union called the International Confederation of Free-Trade Unions. The stated purpose of harmonizing these departments were to conform to changes motivated by the creation of the United Nations while protecting commercial interests. In terms of development and aid, this meant rebuilding Europe’s infrastructure with a sizable quota of U.S. labor, while providing participating countries with development funds for small and medium-sized businesses. This aid was provided in exchange for cooperating with a list of fundamental reforms in currency, trade, shipping and banking rules. Additionally, these reforms also included more open access to the commodity resources of the economic cooperation’s old territories (most of which were listed as non-self-governing territories in accordance with Chapter 11 of the UN Charter).

By 1951, the ECA was renamed the Mutual Security Act, which continued to provide the framework for US military involvement over the role of “promoting the foreign policy of the United States by authorizing military, economic and technical assistance to friendly countries, to strengthen the mutual security and individual and collective defenses of the free world, to develop their resources in the interest of their security and independence and the national interest of the United States and to facilitate the effective participation of those countries in the United Nations system for collective security.”

Russia, after rejecting economic cooperation in 1948, joined APEC in 1998, seven years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

THE TPP IS A STRATEGIC AGREEMENT

The TPP is a strategic agreement between the United States, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Canada, Australia, NZ, and Japan. There is no Soviet threat, and no Russian participation in the TPP. Also missing from the TPP is China, the second largest economy in the world, and it’s absence reflects the TPP’s move away from its originally designed FTAAP. For the US, China’s rise is perceived as a threat to its global economic hegemony, and unless the US is able to contain China’s economy, the TPP serves as a kind of China containment strategy.

Despite rising tensions over disputed maritime boundaries in what is conventionally considered the South China Sea, the catalyst for this threat over Chinese military aggression is, rather, the Chinese investment process. China’s system of State-owned investment (SOI) has won them favor in the Africa, Middle East, Pacific, Caribbean, and Central/South America regions, in many of the same resource-rich countries that the U.S. and its allies struggled to control during the post-war years.

Currently, neither the US nor the EU have the regulatory means or authority to stop competing Chinese investment protocols, however, the new EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) may try to develop new investment and trade rules allowing for a greater capacity to compete with China over the investment of the commodity resources in developing countries.

BRICS

BRICS One of the result’s of China’s economic success in negotiating regional and global trade is that China has the economic clout to partner with other ex-colonial or non-ECA partners, Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa to potentially give rise to a new currency reserve based on what Goldman Sachs termed BRICS.

A reserve currency stabilizes currencies in participating markets and provides greater access for trade. Without a stabilizing currency, trade in the global market would be extremely slow and cumbersome, particularly since every currency and commodity trade has to be valued against the perpetual fluctuations of a basket of unstable markets.

The standard economic indicator that is used to measure the strength of our national economies for trade is GDP, a national accounting system that was defined by the U.S. in 1953 and has been revised via the UN System of National Accounts in 1993 and in 2008. How we account for GDP is the index through which we measure national economies and the value of our currencies in trade.

(For those who seek clarity over the accounting framework, this may be a good time to address an article that I posted on the UN SNA and the 2008 accounting revisions, including the way the accounting of military systems were revised, as it is well-referenced with a lot of primary documents.)

The rise of the BRICS as a competing reserve currency is technically what the IMF calls, Special Drawing Rights (SDR) and the role of a BRICS SDR would be to stabilize fluctuating currencies among the emerging or developing trade partners. From the perspective of the dominant US and the EU economies, the rise of BRICS is both in direct competition and symbiotic to the reserve currency held by the US Treasury, which not coincidentally, was also a process that resulted from the Economic Cooperation Act.

What the move towards BRICS means for developing economies is that it is a viable alternative to the World Bank, the Asia Development Bank, and other global financial institutions that demand structured repayment of their loans and investments for the development of infrastructure services facilitating, for example, resource acquisition and extraction industries. As is evident, the turnaround time for the development of infrastructure projects don’t often fall into the time frame or profit margins demanded by investment banks, and China and the state-owned investment banks are able to restructure debt payments in a way that doesn’t criminalize governments and peoples, as it did with Greece, which perhaps coincidentally, was the first country to receive post-war security and development assistance. The 1947 “Bill to provide assistance to Greece and Turkey Act,” was the direct precursor to the establishment of the 1948 Economic Cooperation Act.

In July of 2012, the World Bank launched a program to raise $400 billion dollars to finance development needs through a global tax reform. Primarily targeting the top transnational corporations, it appears that this global tax reform is being harmonized in coordination with a wide range of global governance reforms and new international programs that reaches towards meeting the 2015 UN Millennium Development Goals, addressing economic and environmental reform, poverty reduction and other development needs. If there is an agenda to harmonize these global governance reforms, then arguably, the rush to conclude the TPP/TTIP at its present timetable seeks to use the combined economic weight of the U.S. cooperation as leverage to assert its influence and role in reforming global markets.

To be clear, I don’t want to suggest that these global governance reforms are directed towards containing China or BRICS, but I do think that the interests of the large transnationals and extractive industries are lobbying for governments to ensure that any new revision to global governance is designed to meet the demands of industries.

As recently as last September for example, the final declaration from the G20 summit reaffirmed their support for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a tax and trade initiative comprised of the industrial mining and mineral sector.

SHIPPING LANES F1.large

Although many rightfully take issue with calling China a containment strategy in the way we might talk about containing North Korea, I’d suggest that what we are actually seeing is more of a containerment strategy. For one thing, as long as China’s relationships with their trade partners remain productive, China is beyond being contained and any attempt at containing China would likely be seen as a deluded conceit.

There are, however, other strategies that could be employed that can impede China’s transport of materials, resources and manufactured goods, and one of those is controlling the shipping lanes. As long as the US maintains the transpacific partnerships, the US will continue patrolling and assisting to militarize the shipping lanes. As the image to the left shows, China’s container traffic (in yellow) measures 5000+ transits a year exceeding 10,000 gross tonnage per ship, or 13+ transits a day.

As BRICS economies become the favored trade partner with many of the developing resource-rich countries, and with China being the manufacturing powerhouse that it is, how does the US and EU maintain their influence when their investment procedures have become outmoded? BRICS has a procedural, if not fraternal advantage over the US/EU, and the rise of the BRICS economies will likely attract further partnerships among the developing countries.

Revisiting the old colonial power’s administrative strategy which has been employed for centuries, the U.S. appears to be further militarizing the shipping lanes in accordance with today’s customary international maritime law. Of course innocent passage through territorial seas is a right of nations, however, there are a wide range of U.S. laws and new treaty obligations pertaining to fisheries, wildlife, customs, immigration, environmental protection, marine safety that are enforced by regional or national agencies and could be used to involve the Department of Defense, not to mention the transport of illegal substances and weapons, which would directly involve the military.

In preparation for the writing of this article, I read through the Annotated Supplement to the Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations, Oceans Law and Policy to get a sense of the procedures with which ships could be detained in the territorial waters of cooperating countries. Without overreaching, the U.S could– within the reach of international law– control the passage of ships through territorial waters while employing a program of peaceful transit passage. This is equivalent to putting up stoplights on freeways or highways and allowing the police to randomly search your vehicle.

A July 2013 incident that underscores the control that is manifest within the right of innocent passage, is that a ship delivering sugar from Cuba to North Korea was stopped at the Panama Canal for suspicion of drugs. Authorities found undeclared weapons hidden in the cargo and the ship was detained for inspection. In a statement from Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, officials said the vessel was carrying “240 metric tons of obsolete defensive weapons… all of it manufactured in the mid-20th century — to be repaired and returned to Cuba.”

What was strange was that the timing of this seizure occurred just days after Nicaragua announced that it had signed that investment deal by a Chinese billionaire, to build a Nicaraguan canal that would essentially open the Asia-Pacific with the Caribbean and its Atlantic-American trade partners, via Nicaragua’s maritime boundaries and outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. military. It has been put forward by some reports that the Chinese government is behind this investment deal.

DIRE STRAITS

Regional free-trade agreements and other bilateral trade agreements are pathways through which we could impose our strategic economic influence and destabilization policies, encouraging public consent of US maritime security in the region.

Resources If we map out China’s main transport route for importing resources from Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and the Pacific, and we impose the militarized areas of multi-laterel or bilateral FTA or Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) countries, the first thing that we notice is that these are mostly militarized choke points that have become unstable since the signing of these agreements.

• The Strait of Malacca which is part of Malaysia/Singapore and the access route for China to the Middle East and Africa already had a strong presence via COMLOG WESTPAC; and was established at the Port of Singapore Authority after it relocated from Subic Bay, Philippines, when the base was closed in 1992.

• The Spratly Islands are 45 islands occupied by military forces of China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei. Besides China, all of the countries with a claim in the Spratly Islands are TPP countries, or have, in the case of the Philippines a TIFA with the U.S. Despite these overlapping territorial claims, the Association of Southeast Asian Countries (ASEAN) have been at the forefront negotiating a resolve over these long-held historical disputes.

ASEAN is also a regional forum of which the U.S. attends but is not a member and China and ASEAN members have begun negotiations over what can be seen as a competing trade alignment to the TPP, the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Whichever agreement concludes first will establish the rules of trade in the region, and just as China will be free to join the TPP if it adopts and conforms to US-led rules, the U.S. too will be free to join the expanded ASEAN+, if the RCEP should conclude first. Neither China nor the US will be excluded from the TPP or the RCEP once concluded. At the moment, I’d argue, the race is over investment and trade rules.

Military Bases • Jeju, aka “Peace Island” is a pristine island belonging to South Korea and is at the nose of the Korea strait leading from the South China Sea to the East Sea or the Sea of Japan. The militarization of Jeju by the ROK in 2011 has been controversial because it is a multiple UNESCO World Heritage Site, a major tourist attraction and has been a symbol of Peace following the slaughter of up to 80,000 civilians by ROK troops during a democratic uprising in 1948. It should not be thought of as merely coincidence that the militarization of Jeju was announced after the KORUS FTA was signed in 2007, and just after the conclusion of new agreements in 2010.

On March 26, 2010, forty-six South Korean sailors were killed in an explosion that sank the Cheonan, a South Korean Pohang-class corvette of the Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN). An international team of investigators, which excluded both China and Russia, concluded that the fragments of the torpedo which was said to have sank the Cheonan was North Korean. At the time of this sinking, the US and the ROKN were in the midst of one of the largest and longest running wargames, Key Resolve-Foal Eagle. The controversy over who sank the Cheonan has not been resolved, particularly since accusations of a North Korean sub infiltrating South Korean waters during these war games and escaping have been largely dismissed by critics and independent observers. However, the effect of this tragedy was enough for President Lee to stir Koreans into supporting further militarization.

How Jeju conforms to the China “containerment” theory, is that commodity resources are also being shipped from Vladivostok, and a new port on the North Korean side of the Tumen river where China, Russia and North Korea share borders. China and Russia have just signed leases allowing them access to the new North Korean harbor which is said to be a very deep and fast port, and unlike Vladivostok, it is open year round and not susceptible to closures because of ice.

Disputed Islands• The Senkaku/Daioyu Island dispute. In Sept. 2012, the Japanese government reached an agreement with the family that owns three of the five islands in the disputed Senkaku/Daioyu chain to purchase the territory for Japan. The Senkaku islands, between Okinawa and Taiwan, also lie along the shipping lanes near China’s manufacturing corridor along the East China Sea. When China protested, Prime Minister Noda hinted at using Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to “defend” Senkaku if China responded militarily. According to a recent Japan Times article, the Japanese government consulted with the State Department prior to the purchase, and the U.S. State Department had given “very strong advice not to go in this direction.”

Following this action, nationalist protests erupted in both Japan and China. Discussions about expanding the role of Japan’s SDF, including the redrafting of Article 9, which prohibits Japan from possessing military power were held, and as of October 3, 2013, Japan and the U.S. concluded a joint statement implementing military cooperation meeting Japan’s regional military objectives.

From a July 2012 article in Asia Security Watch, “Japan’s Regional Security Environment and Possibilities for Conflict:”

“Indeed there are signs of a strategy being implemented. While Noda is unlikely to decisively agree to Japan’s joining TPP negotiations, he will continue to fly the TPP flag”… “and the LDP have identified in their policy statements a desire to change Japan’s disposition towards defense and collective self-defense in particular, the dubious mechanism of “constitutional reinterpretation” to Article 9. Noda has in the last week identified discussion on the interpretation of collective self-defense as something he wants to push forward in the current parliamentary session, particularly as it pertains to defense of US ships on the high seas and Japan’s use of its BMD system to defend the US from ballistic missile attack. Finally, Noda has also pushed forward on the previously identified proposal of ‘nationalizing’ the Senkaku Islands… “

Japan had been teetering on the TPP fence, since the U.S. announced it was joining talks. Japan’s powerful agriculture lobby was adamantly opposed to Japan joining the TPP, understanding that any agreement would threaten government protections of rice and small family rice farmers, the backbone of Japanese agriculture. However, the TPP had very wide support among the business and commerce, manufacturing and automobile sectors and this was reflected by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party win of both the Upper and Lower house of the Japanese Diet.

Despite the shroud of secrecy that continues to enfold TPP negotiations, when it came to Japan, every nuance had been magnified. For many following the TPP as closely as we’ve been able to over the last few years, the question of whether Japan would join or not would unfold how the TPP would conclude, if at all.

Because of the size and influence of the Japanese economy, some thought that Japan joining would end up stalling the negotiations, others thought Japan joining would ensure quick conclusion, either way, it was anticipated that with Japan’s entry, new concessions and demands would have to be met, and this would include US-Japan Defense Cooperation.

When the Oct. 3rd high-level US-Japan Security Consultative Committee met in Tokyo, new bilateral planning over the sharing of defense technology and facilities were established, strengthening Japan’s SDF, integrating Japan in “multilateral cooperation” in trade, maritime security, disaster relief and trilateral cooperation between Australia and the ROK, and realigning U.S. forces in Japan.

In a private meeting with Ho-Fung Hung a Chinese political economist and featured speaker at the Feb. 2011, USC “State of the Chinese Economy” conference about China’s relationship to the TPP, Hung expressed, “at this time, China did not take an official position because it was waiting to see what Japan does, whether or not Japan signs on to the TPP or not.”

Two years later, Hung’s analysis appears to have rung true. On March 16th, 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, formally announce that Japan would join the TPP. What followed is that in May, two months later, China’s alternative to the TPP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) held it’s first meeting in Brunei with ASEAN+6 members (which include Australia, Japan, South Korea, India and New Zealand). In June, Hong Kong billionaire, Wang Jing, signed the inter-oceanic Nicaragua canal investment deal with Nicaragua president Daniel Ortega to develop a $40 billion project in the U.S. hemisphere. And on July 23rd, Japan officially became the 12th member of the TPP.

Now I don’t want to over-determine the narrative of these events, because history never really unfolds this neatly. I do however, want to assert that Japan has been a lynchpin to US-China relations and much of what happens now between the US and China across the Asia-Pacific region will result from Japan having joined the TPP. If the dots were not already connected, this US-Japan security alliance was predicated on Japan joining the TPP (or vice-versa).

This is the TPP

So as part of the justification for this Pacific Pivot, could it be that the US has been quietly emboldening our Trans Pacific Partners and other FTA or TIFA allies into manufacturing tensions? In looking at the timeline of events, it would be difficult to disassociate the U.S. backed militarization of the Pacific Pivot from being distinctly separate from the policy of economic cooperation.

These manufactured events, as Noam Chomsky describes in Manufacturing Consent, are “related to the understanding that indoctrination is the essence of propaganda. In a “democratic” society indoctrination occurs when the techniques of control of a propaganda model are imposed — which means imposing Necessary Illusions.” In this case the necessary illusion is economic cooperation.

We cannot, should not separate the TPP from its military component. It’s disingenuous to call for an end to these free-trade agreements without simultaneously calling for an end to militarization.

Arnie Saiki, Coordinator Moana Nui

related thread:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37414&p=527040&hilit=Japan#p526938

[parel]

TPPA: Leaked IP text -US Congress revolts against Fast Track

Thursday, 14 November 2013, 9:02 am
Press Release: Professor Jane Kelsey
14 November 2013

For immediate release

Doubly whammy hits TPPA: Leaked IP text & US Congress revolts against Fast Track

‘Two king hits in one day for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is a bad omen for chief negotiators and hundreds of officials as they head into a crunch meeting in Salt Lake City next week’, according to Auckland University Professor Jane Kelsey, who monitors the negotiations.

Yet another leaked text of the intellectual property chapter was posted on Wikileaks today, dating from the end of the Brunei round in August. It includes the positions of all 12 countries and reveals a massive gulf between US demands and a bloc of other countries, including New Zealand. The US still has place-savers for several highly controversial further demands, notably on biologic products, which involve genes and living cells.

Analyses of the text are available from KeiOnline and Public Citizen Access to Medicines.

‘As we have consistently said, the obsessive secrecy surrounding these negotiations makes leaks inevitable. It is in the national interest, and the interests of democracy, for the parties to release the draft texts of all the chapters now to allow informed analysis, democratic input and assessment of the risks’, said Professor Kelsey.

In a second, stunning blow to the TPPA negotiations, 151 of the 201 Democrat members of the US House of Representatives today released a letter to the President that formally declared their opposition to giving him “fast track authority’. Others may follow.

The letter states ‘we will oppose “Fast Track” Trade Promotion Authority or any other mechanism delegating Congress’ constitutional authority over trade policy that continues to exclude us from having a meaningful role in the formative states of trade agreements and throughout negotiating and approval processes.’

Fast track, otherwise known as Trade Promotion Authority, would require Congress to accept the final TPPA deal or reject it, in toto, and not to cherry pick the parts they want and block what they do not like. No major deal has gone through Congress in recent decades without fast track.

The Democrats’ pledge means Obama would have to rely on Republicans, with whom he has been consistently at war over, most recently on the debt ceiling. Earlier this week 22 Republicans signed a similar pledge.

According to the New York Times yesterday, “Other members have signaled their opposition independently, meaning that roughly 40 percent to 50 percent of House members have signaled, sight unseen, that they do not support the regional trade pact.”

The TPPA parties want to conclude a deal by the end of 2013. Even if Congress was willing, there is no chance of fast track being approved this year. The House of Representatives has only 15 sitting days left for 2013 before they go on a month-long New Year break.

‘In a sane world, this declaration from members of Congress would see the chief negotiators abandon their planned summit in Salt Lake City next week’, said Professor Kelsey.

‘Their goal is to prepare the platform for Trade Ministers to engage in serious horse-trading in Singapore from 7-9 December’.

But Professor Kelsey warns that ‘without fast track, Obama can’t deliver on any political trade-offs. For New Zealand, and other governments, to proceed in that context is playing Russian roulette with our futures’.

Background

The attached memorandum provides further information.

The largest margin by which any recent US President got fast track through the House was 27 votes. One passed by two votes and one failed. Opposition spanned party lines.

President Obama first said he wanted Congress to give him Fast Track during State of the Nation address in February 2013. Eight months later he still has not introduced a bill.

A bipartisan team of four senior members from the Finance and Ways and Means committees have been working on the draft bill for months, but have not yet agreed.

The toxic battle over the debt ceiling in October will resume in February 2014.

The Tea Party has already launched its anti-fast track campaign, and opposes the Trade Adjustment Assistance programme that provides extended unemployment benefits and job retraining to US workers who lose their jobs to trade.

There is a backlash among members of Congress against unprecedented limits on their access to the negotiating process and draft text (although they still have more access than any New Zealand MPs have.)

Members of the House of Representatives are elected every two years. Their priorities, often linked to campaign funds, range across dairy, tobacco, pharmaceutical monopolies, mining, environment, offshoring of jobs, food safety, and re-regulating the finance industry. All are key areas in the TPPA negotiations.

[seemslikeadream]

thank YOU parel

The New York Times endorsed a secretive trade agreement that the public can’t read
BY ANDREA PETERSON
November 8 at 5:05 pm


The Obama administration is secretly negotiating a treaty that could have significant effects on domestic law. Officially, it's a "free trade" treaty among Pacific rim countries, but a section of the draft agreement leaked in 2011 suggested that it will require signers, including the United States, to make significant changes to copyright law and enforcement measures.
Strangely, the administration seems to be encouraging the public to have a debate on the treaty before they know what's in it. The Office of the United States Trade Representative has solicited comments about the treaty on its Web site, but there is no particularly detailed information about the content of the agreement, or a draft of the current version of the proposal.
Now, as Maira Sutton at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes, the New York Times editorial board has endorsed the TPP. While the editorial acknowledges that some are "worried about provisions on intellectual property that could restrict the availability of generic medicines and grant longer copyright protections to big media companies," it nevertheless argues that a "good deal" would "not only help individual countries but set an example for global trade talks."
But as Sutton points out, it seems strange for the Times to be opining on a treaty the public hasn't gotten to see yet. If the Times has gotten a leaked copy of the report, it should publish it so the public can make up its own mind. If it hasn't seen the treaty, perhaps it should reserve judgment until it's learned what's actually in it.