US Fails To Close TPP Deal As Wikileaks Exposes Discord

http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2013/12/10/us-fails-to-close-tpp-deal-as-wikileaks-exposes-discord/

by shill • 13 years ago

211 86 13 years ago

dil8• 13 years ago

Hard to believe that these talks are conducted in secret behind closed door. It is quite clear the some of the proposals are strictly designed to serve powerful interest groups. Great work by Wikileaks to put this in the public arena.

rayiner6• 13 years ago

The basic idea of diplomatic negotiations being secret is that it's not appropriate to publicize your strategy for defending Belgium in case the Germans roll through on the way to France.

Unfortunately, in this situation, diplomatic negotiations are being used to end-run around the domestic legislative process. This is the intrinsic downside of allowing diplomatic cooperation to extend beyond its traditional domain of war and peace.[1] In liberal democracies, the organs of foreign policy are designed to be opaque and non-responsive to the public. In the United States, this is by design--stemming from the framers' worry that a democracy wouldn't be able to speak with the required single voice when it came to issues of foreign policy. But the flexibility of the process militates towards keeping it restricted to a narrow domain.

[1] There is something fundamentally undemocratic about using the diplomatic process to normalize law between countries. Yes it makes business easier, but it undermines democratic control over law. The law of a country should be an expression of the will of its voters, and only its voters. Some egghead in the UK has no business weighing in on what America's laws should be, and vice versa.

Malstrond• 13 years ago

it's not appropriate to publicize your strategy for defending Belgium in case the Germans roll through on the way to France.

The strategy for defending Belgium in both world wars and the strategy for defending the average citizen against corporate interests seem to be the same in this case: Do nothing, leave them to the wolves.

blah32497• 13 years ago

Don't these kind of deals need congressional approval eventually? The idea of dealing behind the scene is that it allows you to talk more openly about what is and isn't on the table without having anything on the record.

Ex: Say they were negotiating with Israel. Publicly Israel has very uncompromising policies. But maybe in private, in return for some things they are willing to give up some of their demands. Maybe some of their concessions end up not in the deal, or the whole deal falls through. They don't want to have to then be "accountable" for the things they put on the table.

dllthomas• 13 years ago

"Some egghead in the UK has no business weighing in on what America's laws should be, and vice versa."

Well, except by honestly convincing American voters.

Silhouette2• 13 years ago

There is something fundamentally undemocratic about using the diplomatic process to normalize law between countries. Yes it makes business easier, but it undermines democratic control over law.

Easier than what, though? In the absence of international agreements, how do you improve the business climate at all, even in ways that are universally beneficial?

Your point about democracy is a fair one, but it's predicated on the idea that the only pools of people who matter are divided up into individual countries that vote for their own governments in isolation. If we're going to deal with global issues, whether it's trade or transportation or the Internet or chasing bad people across national borders, maybe it's time to consider whether there is a better way forward than trying to do everything legislative at a national level?

I'm not talking about some sort of global senate and worldwide voting here, but the idea that nations could send representatives to negotiate things according to their desires and everyone's voters then have to accept the results before their nation signs up to the finished agreement isn't absurd. It seems like a reasonable way of ensuring that only transparently reasonable, least-common-denominator style agreements get made within any given set of nations, and that might be a better policy than what happens today, where international agreements are frequently used as excuses to implement policy that wouldn't pass electoral muster back home.

rhizome3• 13 years ago

You can't have the voters knowing anything that would reliably give them a reason to ignore the marketing campaigns that constitute political campaigns. That is, it would help citizens exercise independent thought, which campaign managers, donors, and candidates themselves hate.

hoggle• 13 years ago

I can't express how grateful I am for each and every whistleblower. They often take tremendous risks and with their actions show us that we should act responsibly and humanely whenever we can ourselves.

oceanstone• 13 years ago

They make democracy possible, by informing the voters.

rtpg• 13 years ago

As much as I appreciate Wikileak's efforts to put this out in the open, I feel like this deal fell through over much more 'fundamental' issues than copyright, like food security and such.

codex2• 13 years ago

Are treaties normally negotiated in public? I don't recall Obama live tweeting any closed door talks with Putin--it's just not a good idea. You can't be frank when you have to worry about covering your ass to prevent attacks from every nutjob special interest group at home.

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

Big trade deals that affect how companies work - yes. Foreign policy and diplomacy - no.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

No. Every recent trade deal done by the US was initially negotiated in private. It is totally normal.

Initial negotiations are always private, even for domestic legislation. Just look at the $85 billion funding package that was just announced. Only two people--Patty Murray and Paul Ryan--worked on that, in private, before it was introduced to the rest of Congress.

People who are concerned about the substance of the TPP are campaigning against the very basics of the process itself. This is a bad tactic. Over time it will be very corrosive to the government's ability to do anything.

twobits2• 13 years ago

"Hard to believe that these talks are conducted in secret behind closed door"

"Hard to believe"? Maybe you should start believing "conspiracy theories" a bit more.

RexRollman• 13 years ago

What kills me is that they want copyrights to be extended again. Copyrights are already last too long as it is.

betterunix• 13 years ago

Their real goal is for copyrights to last forever, but this annoying thing called the constitution forbids that.

toki5• 13 years ago

Does it? Genuine question, as I'm not really educated on the US Constitution.

jonathanwallace• 13 years ago

Everyone knows coupling is bad. Why couple the laws of such disparate cultures into one big ball of mud?

rayiner6• 13 years ago

Because something something global citizenship something something.

It's out of date to believe in national borders, but fundamentally, jealously preserving national autonomy ensures that you aren't subject to laws formulated by people who don't think like you do or share your values.

contingencies2• 13 years ago

Nationalism is not great, but having nations is not the same as nationalism. Having nations or national-level entities of some kind equates to having some degree of heterogeneity in the world with regards to its governance. This is a good thing. My money is on a gradual shift toward much smaller entities taking on the effective present-era responsibilities of states... some of which will be geographically decentralized.

r00fus• 13 years ago

From an multinational corporation's point of view, there is no culture - that's for the ants/humans.

They're the ones pushing this through their interest groups and government cronies.

contingencies2• 13 years ago

This comment is spot on. And the corporations are run by people who do not play well with others, often heavily medicated, often with borderline psychotic obsessions for money or beating the competition. They actually believe that so-called economic growth is a good thing for the world.

gjm113• 13 years ago

Everyone knows coupling is bad.

No. Software developers know this. Engineers know this. Maybe some other people who build complex systems and suffer when their interconnections cause pain.

Lawyers, maybe not so much. Excessive coupling in a legal context just means that more money needs to be spent on lawyers, and there's no reason for them to be the same lawyers (or politicians) who put the excessive coupling there in the first place. The incentive to keep things modular just isn't there.

As for people who happen not to have jobs for which minimal coupling is visibly important at all -- that would be most people by a large margin, I think -- no, they don't know coupling is bad.

coldcode• 13 years ago

The more open the debate the less likely the US can dictate to the rest of the world.

rodgerd• 13 years ago

For the US, failure is a feature, not a bug.

The TPPA started as a deal between a variety of east Asian and Pacific nations in what the US regards as its back yard. The last thing the US wants is China becoming more cosy with US dependents such as New Zealand, Australia, or the Philippines. For the US, joining the deal, and then forcing it to either confirm to US wishes, or breaking it entirely are much, much better options than losing influence in the region.

rhizome3• 13 years ago

Cold War hardliner logic must be part of the canon by now.

marquis• 13 years ago

US dependents

Dependents? These countries have healthy trading with Asia and other parts of the world. From my perspective, given that China would eventually any trade hole left by the U.S., is that it comes down to cronyism.

nate_meurer3• 13 years ago

I didn't know that the one of the things we (the U.S.) are pushing for is patents on surgical procedures. The mind boggles. And then it fucking explodes.

girvo• 13 years ago

I begin to wonder whether the US isn't just trolling, to sink the treaty on purpose.

nate_meurer3• 13 years ago

That seems outlandish, but I honestly don't have a better explanation.

salient• 13 years ago

OH, no it's real. Remember US was the one that came up with SOPA and ACTA, too. It wasn't China. It was US, the land of the free. They wouldn't be "trolling" 3 times in a row. They're serious about this.

lostlogin• 13 years ago

The New Zealand government has an agency, Pharmac, that buys drugs for the country. This gives a fair bit of purchasing power. The TPP seeks to tame Pharmac, to drive prices up presumably. Prevention of generic drug purchasing etc. But there isn't any agreement to remove tariffs on things NZ makes. http://m.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&obj...

stevenrace• 13 years ago

Given the rise of 'robotic-assisted surgery', it shouldn't come as much of a surprise. It's difficult to decouple the medical procedure from the hardware/software involved: robotic arms, the code behind it, machine vision bits, etc.

While far from a medical technotopia, this seems less insidious that patents on DNA sequences or even pharama in my mind.

riskable2• 13 years ago

I fail to see how a "procedure" in any sense could be patentable subject matter. If you've developed a robotic arm that can perform a surgical procedure you get a patent on the arm itself; not the motions it makes or the software it runs. That is abstract and ridiculous.

nate_meurer3• 13 years ago

I appreciate your post. However it's not at all difficult to separate the procedure from the machine used to perform it, whatever it may be. The latter is already coverable by a utility patent on the physical tools. The former is simply a description of steps, and in the case of robotic surgeries it will invariably be software.

But we're not just talking about software here. The U.S. is trying to make medical procedures patentable in all but the most manual cases. In other words, only if a procedure can be done completely by hand is it exempt; the moment you use any sort of "medical device" in the surgery then the steps themselves become protected intellectual property, in addition to the utility patents on the devices themselves.

Source: http://keionline.org/node/1825

mschuster913• 13 years ago

"making surgical procedures patentable" - in what sick world do we live in?!

I give the United States a maximum of 10-15 years before it will collapse due to massive civic unrest. (Which will undoubtedly be handled the Chinese way, with all the military equipment the police gets these days)

eru3• 13 years ago

Do you want to bet? What odds do you offer?

mschuster913• 13 years ago

20 bucks on the 10-15 years 'till collapse - and a hundred bucks that the next major unrest will be handled the Chinese way.

drharris2• 13 years ago

Not going to happen. Our bipolar government means that at any given time, at least 45% of the nation tacitly approves of the way things are going, just given the political party in power. Of those that disapprove, most don't care all that much and only a very small percentage would actually be willing to fight for real freedom. Pit that number against the current military and police structure that exists basically to maintain its own power (hint: it is rare they actually protect and serve the American citizenry) at the discretion of Government, and what do you wind up with? Not any sort of real revolution. We're already screwed before it begins.

riskable2• 13 years ago

at least 45% of the nation tacitly approves of the way things are going

You are 100% wrong on that statement. Just a few hours ago this news story was published:

http://news.yahoo.com/ap-gfk-poll-low-approval-congress-obam...

Turns out that 90% of Americans disapprove of the way lawmakers are handling their jobs. 58% disapprove of the President.

My prediction is that civil unrest will build and eventually peak in 2026. Legalization of marijuana will result in police forces having a lot less to do which could lead to all kinds of tyranny. Especially when you consider all the fancy military equipment they've been stockpiling.

I wouldn't be surprised if they start bulldozing homes with MRAMs in order to "kill or capture" people who are suspected of copyright infringement.

bananacurve• 13 years ago

I give the United States a maximum of 10-15 years before it will collapse due to massive civic unrest

Have even been to the US? Or did you just see it on TV?

bosch• 13 years ago

This is worse than what the NSA is doing as this will have a direct impact on EVERYONE, not just electronic users. This will also affect the poor and underprivileged more proportionately as well. I wonder why news organizations are not getting more involved and publicizing how bad this treaty truly is. It's ridiculous that governments who say they promote democracy demand that treaty negotiations are completely secret.

ck2• 13 years ago

Just insanely greedy I guess.

drcube• 13 years ago

Isn't that the way it is in the US already? +95 years if it's a corporate owned work. They just want to extend that to the rest of the world now.

allochthon• 13 years ago

American, here. Thank God for Australia. Looks like they're pushing back on US legal nonsense. The primary function of the US legal system is to protect the interests of the powerful.

US Fails To Close TPP Deal As Wikileaks Exposes Discord

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