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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

> To be fair, any FTA (including the TPP) will be made public for a minimum of 4 months before Congress can vote on it (although with TPA they won't be allowed to offer amendments to it).

So not only it completely defeats the point (if you can't make amendments) it gives a joke of a time in comparison with years of development of such agreements when all kind of nasty stuff can be sneaked it which can change local laws. In short - it's not a democratic process at all, it's a farce of institutionalized corruption.

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This has been pretty standard for decades. If amendments were allowed, other actors couldn't negotiate with the US in good faith since after an agreement was made and the text made public (and remember, they have their own public political considerations), the US Congress could move the bar. The President still has pressure to deliver a sound agreement though or Congress can simply reject it.

With regard to the timeline, it takes a lot longer to negotiate terms with multiple actors, where a single sentence or word could be debated for days and months, than it takes to read and understand the effects of the final text.

> This has been pretty standard for decades. If amendments were allowed, other actors couldn't negotiate with the US in good faith since after an agreement was made and the text made public (and remember, they have their own public political considerations)

It's easily fixable - make negotiations public to begin with. Doesn't WIPO follow such practice anyway? So, the only reason not to make it public is to hide something that public will not accept. It should be a simple rule - any negotiations which affect the legal system should be public. Period. And stuff like TPP clearly does affect laws.

Reasonable people can debate whether it's helpful or harmful to precede public ratification of a trade deal with secret negotiations, but I don't think reasonable people can argue that the only reason to do secret negotiations is to slip toxic provisions past a suspicious public.

Trade deals happen between whole countries, not individual businesses. Each company compromises many hundreds of businesses. In any trade deal, there will be winner companies and loser companies. The negotiators for each country need to strike terms so that the wins pay for the losses and then some. It's much harder to do that if all the big companies that stand to lose from a deal get a veto vote early in the process.

Whether it's the only reason to make it secret or not is not really the point. As long as secrecy allows circumventing the democratic process and create laws through a backdoor it shouldn't be allowed. If you paid attention, these agreements aren't about trade. They are about promoting interests of some businesses through legislative means. Companies can gain or lose, but so is the public. Therefore there is no reason to give companies some preferential treatment here.

Reasonable people also debate whether what's happening here "circumvents the democratic process", since the point of the secret negotiation is to generate a proposal that, in the US at least, requires Congressional authorization.

Personally: I think the reason people resort to "undemocratic" and "backdoor" rhetoric is because they realize that once the treaty is put to a "it's this treaty or no treaty" vote, it will inevitably pass. The people who want a more "open" process really want more hooks earlier in the process to hold the whole treaty hostage to their interests. They can do that early in the process because the stakes are very low ("accede to our demands or the negotiation will be delayed"). They can't do that once the treaty is finalized ("accede to our demands or there will be no free trade agreement").

That's not a value judgement. Many of those interests are extremely worthy. But they should be argued on their merits, and not through a misleading appeal to democratic process. Democratic process sometimes seems like what many of TPP's opponents seem to be afraid of. (ducking)

(I have no idea if I personally support TPP. I'm a LeVeyan liberal Democrat; "Do What's Best For The Public School System Shalt Be The Whole Of The Law".)

>I think the reason people resort to "undemocratic" and "backdoor" rhetoric is because they realize that once the treaty is put to a "it's this treaty or no treaty" vote, it will inevitably pass.

That's exactly what undemocratic means here. I.e. democratic process reduced to rubberstamping farce.

> The people who want a more "open" process really want more hooks earlier in the process to hold the whole treaty hostage to their interests.

People want laws to have democratic oversight instead of rubberstamping of shady deals. Saying that there is some formal approval is completely irrelevant when you admit that it can't change anything.

> That's not a value judgement. Many of those interests are extremely worthy. But they should be argued on their merits

That would be an argument of democracy vs plutocracy.

You're using emotional words like "rubber-stamping" and "farcical" to describe the same phenomenon I just did. You're confirming my comment: the appeal to "rubber-stamping" is really just the concession that, put to a Congressional vote, people who oppose some provisions of the TPP would still rather have a flawed TPP than no TPP.

One way you can see that's the case: the same rubber-stamping Congress would have been rubber-stamping away had the negotiations been completely open.

> You're using emotional words like "rubber-stamping"

I'm just rephrasing what you said yourself:

> they realize that once the treaty is put to a "it's this treaty or no treaty" vote, it will inevitably pass.

That's rubberstamping. If you don't like the term, call it a fake democratic process.

> One way you can see that's the case: the same rubber-stamping Congress would have been rubber-stamping away had the negotiations been completely open.

No, because the amount of public input is significant here. Reducing it is exactly the goal of backroom deals.

It's explained here pretty well: http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/

Despite the domain name, that comic was not written by an economist; it's a political polemic that repeatedly argues that any argument by an economist must be suspicious (which apart from being false is also incredibly lazy, since there are plenty of economists to source for arguments against TPP).

It's also hard to comprehend:

* It has an extended segment about the trade deficit between the US and China and its impact on the valuation of the Yuan, despite the fact that China is not a party to the TPP.

* It argues that TPP will enable the US to outsource jobs to Asia, but the US already can outsource jobs to Asia, and for the most part has outsourced every job that's economical to outsource.

* Something about how the finance industry is a sentient evil robot, and now, to understand how that applies to the TPP, let's replace the robot with a country... let's say China.

If this is where you're getting your information on TPP, it's no wonder you're emotional about it. Try Dean Baker at CEPR. Don't worry: he also fiercely opposes TPP.

That's not really the reason TPP upsets me (I brought the comic for his illustrations for the lack of democratic process).

No one argues that TPP contains SOPA like censorship proposals (those were already leaked). And despite claims that agreements like TPP can't change laws, there is concrete evidence to the contrary. That's how garbage like DMCA-1201 was introduced.

Can you cite sources for that claim?

Nobody disagrees that TPP will motivate changes to IP laws in other countries besides the US, as that is the intent of the IP provisions in TPP.

Even the EFF seems to acknowledge that TPP's effects are not on US law, but rather export US law elsewhere.

> Can you cite sources for that claim?

Here is a recent example: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150611/15533031317/house...

It doesn't really matter whether US or other countries only are affected. Stuff like corporate sovereignty circumvents local legal system by design which is a pretty crooked concept no matter what country it is in.

This is an article about a different trade agreement.

Nobody is arguing that trade agreements never force the US to change their laws. That would be a silly argument! (Are the US's laws just "always right"?) And, indeed, as I've said repeatedly, a big part of the point of the TPP is to get other countries to harmonize their IP laws with those of the US --- so certainly nobody has argued that the TPP doesn't change laws in other countries.

But you just made a direct appeal to the idea that the TPP would change US law, and backed it up using a section of the DMCA is an example.

Can you find a source specifying how the TPP would change US law?

> This is an article about a different trade agreement.

It's about a trade agreement which demonstrates that trade agreements can change laws even against obvious reasons not to. Q.E.D. Now check bad aspects of TPP which go beyond current law, and you can reasonably assume that local laws can change to match that as well. I already brought you DMCA-1201 as another example.

And you can assume that it would be much harder to fix what's already bad in the law, because of such agreement even if it doesn't change that. I.e. it just preserves that bad. For example TPP requires certain copyright length. It means that current reforms in US in that aspect (shortening of the copyright) could be easily stalled with an argument "but international trade agreement obligations!".

So, any claims that such trade agreements have no effect on the law is simply a lie.

You are very emphatically rebutting an argument that nobody made!

The bottom line, TPP can change it in US, it can change it in other participating countries. And undemocratically with that.

It's easy to win arguments when you move the goalposts around. Nobody argued that it was impossible for a trade agreement like TPP to influence US laws. They argue that TPP itself doesn't.

> They argue that TPP itself doesn't.

So who cares if it doesn't de jure, if it has a very major potential to do it de facto. It's all about the risk and impact, not about what it formally declares.

It's like saying, hey, we have a label that it's safe. Don't mind if it actually injures anyone.

No, I wasn't making a "de facto" vs "de jure" argument. I was saying that it does not appear that there is any provision of the TPP that will change US laws. As I've said repeatedly in this thread: the point of the IPR provisions in TPP are to export US law to other countries. The TPP does not appear to involve us importing anyone else's law.

It's perfectly reasonable to be opposed to exporting our laws to other countries. But that's not what you said: you said you were concerned that the TPP will change US law, which is why you cited that weird Techdirt article, why you brought up the DMCA, and why you're trying to distinguish between "de facto" and "de jure" changes.

> I was saying that it does not appear that there is any provision of the TPP that will change US laws.

Aren't there SOPA like provisions in TPP? SOPA was rejected in US. Now if TPP is passed, its supporters can backport SOPA in US law claiming it's an "international obligation" and the law "has to be harmonized". Why is it unlikely? That's exactly what happened with DMCA in the past. It was imported after being initially rejected, under pretense that it's an "international obligation".

No, as far as we know, it does not. That's confusion that FFTF caused when it wrote an advocacy piece based on a 2-year-old version of TPP that is no longer current and is not supported by the recent "leaked" version of TPP.

> 2-year-old version of TPP that is no longer current.

But since it's secret, you can't claim it changed either. So leaked version is a good base for sinking the whole thing into oblivion. And it only highlights the point that it's necessary for such things to be transparent to begin with. Next time they'll keep it open if they don't want opposition based on invalid assumptions.

You've misread me again. The recent leaked version does not contain SOPA-like provisions. There is no evidence that TPP is SOPA-like, and there is strong evidence to the contrary.

Do we get those leaks on the constant basis? How can you guarantee anything in it next day after the leak? That just highlights what I said above. You can't trust such agreement to be for the benefit of the public, because they already contained something obviously against it. So it has to be completely dropped until there can be trust, which is only possible with transparent negotiations.

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