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...
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.
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.
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.
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.