Summary: international trade deals involve a lot of tradeoffs in various sectors of a country: e.g. throwing textiles under the bus in order to get some advantages in automotive. If the initial negotiation of the treaty was open, special interest groups would make massive amounts of noise and no country would be able to come to agreement. Once the treaty is done being written, then countries can debate it internally, in its entirety. There will still be lots of noise but at least there is a complete treaty to argue over.
But that argument stops working once certain industry groups do get access to the negotiations, which I thought was the case here.
Also, this agreement goes way beyond a simple trade deal; parts on this undermine the very basis of our democracy and justice system. I don't see how any democratic country can possibly agree to this.
Not only our democracy and justice system, but the systems of the other signatory countries as well. For many of them, the TPP will result in loss of relative sovereignty to the American multi-national corporations that are privy to the details of the deal-- Novartis being the biggest pusher in the pharma aspects of the deal as they relate to copyright.
It's kind of a shame that an otherwise-useful treaty that could lead to great cooperation and improved trade between important markets is so marred by these unconscionable IP terms. Reminds me of a similar treaty in Europe a couple years ago that got struck down in its entirety due to its ridiculous IP terms. I forget the name.
Secret, but not secret. Secret from the less powerful industries, small and medium businesses, not remotely secret from the more powerful ones. Secret from Non-US industry, not secret from those industries that own congress. Nobody believes hollywood had no idea this was being negotiated as a straight land grab on their behalf. So we all think it's corrupt, nice isn't it?
Let's just call it what it actually is rather than this lip-service bullshit to a reason that is clearly not being honoured. I'm extremely in favour of free trade deals, but you can ruin anything with corruption and that's what is happening here.
Take down your tariffs and subsidies and your country gets richer regardless of treaty. No really. Do a whole corrupt thing like this and everyone gets poorer. Except perhaps the mega-wealthy trying to avoid competition for their businesses and those in their lobby. The thing is the mega-wealthy don't want to be richer, they have far more than they or 4 generations of their family can possibly spend. They want power, they don't want upstart entrepreneurs getting rich. They want their relative wealth to the average to be as high as possible. It's sick, sad and twisted. Fortunately we have the Republicans to stand up for what's right with respect to classical liberalism.
>Nobody believes hollywood had no idea this was being negotiated as a straight land grab on their behalf.
Absolutely. For one, hollywood, RIAA etc representatives were involved in the discussions as "experts" in the first place. Plus their lobbies set the agendas for what the government is gonna ask for etc.
>There will still be lots of noise but at least there is a complete treaty to argue over
So now we have to protest against whole document and WE AS PUBLIC, we citizens cannot negotiate paragraphs of the act because it's tightly coupled and one change will affect another paragraph. Now it all goes in or nothing.
You (media) can't dissect any new thing that gets added. Explain why it's bad, etc.. Now you have a huge dump of new information and everyone gets overwhelmed.
Summary: international trade deals involve a lot of tradeoffs in various sectors of a country: e.g. throwing textiles under the bus in order to get some advantages in automotive. If the initial negotiation of the treaty was open, special interest groups would make massive amounts of noise and no country would be able to come to agreement. Once the treaty is done being written, then countries can debate it internally, in its entirety. There will still be lots of noise but at least there is a complete treaty to argue over.
See also: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/26/417851577/episo...