Comment by erhardm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erhardm | Hacker News Reader

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"... Upon the insistence of the US, the documents are not transmitted any more as electronic or even printed documents.[5] They are only made available [to authorised readers] in secure rooms at the European Commission HQ in Brussels, in a number of US embassies,[5] and at the offices of member states' trade ministries.[61] In all these secured rooms phones or other types of scanning device are forbidden.[5] Blank sheets of paper, marked with the reader's names, are provided on which visitors can jot down their notes.[61]..."[0]

How can my representative be really productive in analyzing such a deal? Why all the barriers to understand the document?

I didn't find out the time it's supposedly be public for debate, but if you're doing a deal for the people, you want people to negotiate, not just accept the deal as it is, which, as history taught us, it will be a really tight timeframe for debate and it's approved few days before a major holiday when people are distracted.

Our representatives must have our [all citizens] best interest at heart. I don't see how this is in our best interest.

And I didn't event talked about the deal itself, only the procedure which seems flawed.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Invest...

> I didn't find out the time it's supposedly be public for debate, but if you're doing a deal for the people, you want people to negotiate, not just accept the deal as it is, which, as history taught us, it will be a really tight timeframe for debate and it's approved few days before a major holiday when people are distracted.

CETA was public for more than two years before it went for signing. Naturally nobody cared until the last 6 months.

That would be because your representative is not a negotiator. They get to approve or reject the deal once it is done, but "people" do not get involved in the negotiation because "people" have a lot of parochial interests and are, as history has taught us, quite ignorant. Sorry if this bothers you, but it is how trade deals have always been done and is how they will always be conducted going forward.

But the flip side is surely that the chance that the whole deal is overthrown by the time legislators finally get to see it becomes a lot bigger.

I think they will not be done this way going forward, because these deals took ten years of negotations, and now they fail. It doesn't work anymore.

There is always the possibility of a deal not getting approved, but no trade deal would ever be negotiated in public. The problem with such public negotiation is that instead of a single deal where a country can decide to sacrifice industry X in favor of industry Y you get astroturfing and publicity campaigns from both industry X and industry Y seeking to gain favor in the negotiations. A pre-negotiated package may be a bitter pill to swallow for some, but the alternatives are non-starters; no one is going to bother to negotiate a deal with another country that tries this sort of public horse-trading so asking for the deal to be done in public is no different than simply asking for no deal in the first place.

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