How Not To Build A 21st Century Trade Agreement: In Secret

from the government-failures dept

Wed, Jul 11th 2012 6:59am — Mike Masnick

The USTR continues to pitch the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement as a "21st Century" trade agreement. However, as the folks at EFF point out, the defining aspect of the 21st century is the fact that the internet has enabled unrivaled transparency. A trade agreement created in secret -- though with special access for special interests -- is not a 21st-century agreement at all. It's the opposite. It's a last-century viewpoint on how the world works.

We're still not convinced it’s an agreement adequate for 21^st century society--especially in an environment where the public, Congress, and civil rights organizations are denied access to the treaty’s official text, while corporate representatives have full access to it. In a world where you can access the complete state code of Utah in Github to engage citizens in legislative drafting, secrecy and backroom deals are not exactly a 21^st century way to build the 21^st century society.

It's still never been adequately explained why the USTR feels the need for such secrecy and backroom deals. At best, the answer has been "this is how we always negotiate trade agreements." That's not an answer, that's an excuse. If the USTR is serious about building a trade agreement for the 21st century, it would recognize that it needs to be open and transparent.

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Filed Under: tpp, transparency, ustr
Companies: eff

25 Comments

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arcan, 11 Jul 2012 @ 7:01am

hey i have been making that statement for years. both about acta and tpp. i should sue the eff for stealing that idea...
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2012 @ 7:11am

That's not an excuse, that just the process.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2012 @ 7:25am

Money = power in writing TPP, not actual expertise or real world experience or being hired/elected to represent the people.

But as ACTA showed, money can buy a treaty written however you want, but it can't buy the votes to ratify it.
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Seegras (profile), 11 Jul 2012 @ 7:54am

Of course its utter bogus. But they can't very well confess that they try to keep the public out of it because the USTR lets write its "trade agreements" by rent-seeking corporations.
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TtfnJohn (profile), 11 Jul 2012 @ 8:05am

Perhaps they want a 21st Century agreement but they also want to cling to 19th Century process to do it.

Of course everyone in every country affected by TPP will fall into line to support it, just like they did ACTA. See? It still works!
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2012 @ 8:14am

All trade agreements must be negotiated in front of Mike Masnick.

It's the law.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2012 @ 8:26am

yes, its a true falacy of todays people, I "have" to know everything that goes on and approve/disapprove of it, quite sad, its how nothing gets done, when everybody wants to have a say in it, and everyone wants it there way
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anon, 11 Jul 2012 @ 8:39am

LOl at anonymous coward
It is not everyone wanting to know how a trade agreement is processed, all people want to know is how a trade agreement will affect them before it is ratified and becomes law which they have to follow.

Maybe we should create it secret pass it in secret and ratify it in secret and then when it comes to being used in a court not be able to use it because it is a secret that not even the judge can be allowed to see.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2012 @ 8:53am

Re:
read more about USTR here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2043605

You seem to be pretty close to this rather interesting article on how USTR works.
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rubberpants, 11 Jul 2012 @ 9:00am

Re:
The actions of the government are supposed to reflect the will of the people, from whom they derive their authority. In a representative democracy, it's imperative that citizens know what's being done on their behalf so they can hold their representatives accountable.

Are you defending the selective secrecy under which "treaty" is being negotiated?
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rubberpants, 11 Jul 2012 @ 9:02am

Re:
All techdirt trolls must remain anonymous.

It's the law.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2012 @ 9:26am

Im starting to think, that they think, that they have something up their sleeves, why else continue the same way they have been, if they have'nt.

Either they've seen whats been happening to stuff like acta or they've put a transparancy block on themselves but in reverse, the numnuts'
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MrWilson, 11 Jul 2012 @ 9:42am

Re: LOl at anonymous coward
"how a trade agreement will affect them before it is ratified and becomes law which they have to follow."

This is the bullshit of it all.

That trade agreements that affect citizens as if these agreements were laws are able to get negotiated without public input, much less true representation, is just absurd. I don't get the impression that powers given to the executive branch to make trade agreements was intended to allow an alternative means of creating "laws." It seems like it was supposed to be that the president could say, "we're making a deal with the UK to send them our cotton and they send us the textiles in return," not, "we've made a deal with other countries in which all of our citizens will be bound by these restrictions to the benefit of these corporations who paid us off."
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2012 @ 11:28am

Oh, but it is 21st century
21st century BC to be exact.
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Brendan (profile), 11 Jul 2012 @ 11:50am

Re:
Then the process is wrong and must be changed. It is no longer acceptable to draft laws (the ultimate goal of these multilateral ?trade agreements") in secret.
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TaCktiX (profile), 11 Jul 2012 @ 12:49pm

Re: Re:
bob disagrees with you.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2012 @ 1:20pm

Re:
"its how nothing gets done"

and if the people collectively don't want anything done then a representative government should do nothing.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2012 @ 1:21pm

Re: Re:
and if it ain't broken then don't fix it. Why must something always be done?
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JMT (profile), 11 Jul 2012 @ 2:25pm

Re:
It's a matter of trust, or a lack thereof. If governments had a history of implementing trade agreements that genuinely benefited the public as a whole, as opposed to a few powerful trade lobbies, then we would trust them to negotiate deals without close scrutiny. But they don't, so we don't.
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Androgynous Cowherd, 11 Jul 2012 @ 3:03pm

Devil's advocate?
Maybe playing the devil's advocate a bit here, but I have a slight quibble with declaring in no uncertain terms that X is "the defining aspect of" the Yth century after only the first 1/8 of the Yth century has thus far elapsed.

If you'd declared that giant passenger liners on the high seas had been the defining century of the 20th century in July of 1912, for example, you'd have been wrong, and not just because the recent loss of the Titanic with half its hands would put a dent in that industry.

There's still a lot of time left in the 21st for something analogous to the passenger jet, two World Wars, rapid advances in medicine, or something to come along and completely change the picture. In 2100 the "defining characteristic of the 21st century" might be the first Mars colony, or the quest for biological immortality, or the invention of a way to back up and restore the human mind, or AI, or World War III, or first contact with ETI, or something -- or, perhaps most likely, there may be no single thing that stands out above all the others. Was there for the 20th, when all was said and done?
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jenningsthecat (profile), 11 Jul 2012 @ 9:09pm

TPP is much more than just a trade agreement
According to The Nation, under TPP "Countries would be obliged to conform all their domestic laws and regulations to the TPP�s rules�in effect, a corporate coup d��tat. The proposed pact would limit even how governments can spend their tax dollars."

( http://www.thenation.com/article/168627/nafta-steroids )

According to Michael Geist, "the TPP would require countries (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Japan - all current or potential TPP members) that meet the international copyright term standard of life of the author plus 50 years to add an additional 20 years to the term of protection."

( http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6226/125/ )

Also, see the PDF document comparing ACTA to TPP at

infojustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/summary-03262012.pdf

TPP is just a massively beefed-up, more dangerous, more restrictive, more insidious version of ACTA - the benign-sounding name is just a ploy to keep prying eyes looking in other directions while corporations again attempt to bypass those annoying citizens who actually demand a say in the laws that govern them. The public outcry against ACTA derailed its adoption by some countries - the grey eminences behind TPP don't want that to happen again.
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Chargone (profile), 13 Jul 2012 @ 6:26am

Re:
doesn't stop it screwing over the rest of us though.
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Chargone (profile), 13 Jul 2012 @ 6:31am

Re: Oh, but it is 21st century
nah, if it was, we could get our pointy sticks and go stab 'em repeatedly for this sort of thing and it would actually solve the problem. (pointy sticks includes anything up to and including proper spears and arrows, mind.)
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Chargone (profile), 13 Jul 2012 @ 6:32am

Re: Devil's advocate?
'the defining distinctive aspect of the 21st century so far that was not also present in the 20th' is a bit of a mouthful though.
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Innenausbau Hamburg, 18 Mar 2014 @ 8:01am

Secret
Nothing more nothing less.
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