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I think people are conflating two propositions here. The first is "treaties should be negotiated in secrecy." The second is "Congress should be limited to an up-or-down vote." The second doesn't necessarily follow from the first. Most every treaty the US has ever negotiated has been negotiated in secrecy, and then given to the Senate for approval. There was no "fast-track authority" in those cases - the Senate had the opportunity to debate and discuss the implications, and decide whether or not to approve the agreement. They could freely choose to weigh the costs and benefits of approving the agreement, versus the costs and benefits of demanding new terms and risking a collapse of negotiations. That wouldn't be present under fast-track. The point of fast-track is to constrain the Senate's authority (and ultimately the authority of the people they represent). The other thing here is that the current secrecy is unusual in how much it shuts out members of Congress. They can't have drafts of the agreement to take home and think over; they can't have their staff read it and explain all the highly technical details about IP law or whatever. So there's an unusual limit on how much influence our representatives can exert during those initial negotiations. In the past, members of Congress have been actively involved in negotiating treaties (for the UN Charter, half the US delegation were Congressmen or Senators; 26 Senators were in Geneva for the SALT II talks), or they've been consulted by the President earlier in the process (Washington and Jackson both asked the Senate for suggestions about the possible terms of Indian treaties; Polk asked the Senate's opinion of his negotiating position on the Canada-US border dispute). Members of Congress should be involved in treaty negotiations. They can represent the interests of the people. They can craft a deal that won't need fast-track authority to pass, because the Senate will have already worked its desired changes into the final draft. And they can do both these things in secrecy, and not scotch the deal by making it public before it's ready. But still the bill is effectively secret even for them. I ask why that is. Why does this need to be secret even from the vast majority of Congress, and then left for them to take or leave without any input? And based on what we've seen so far, I'm pretty sure that the answer is, because it's a terrible deal that hurts the interests of normal people in order to advance the interests of MNCs.
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Jun 14, 2015 04:05
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computer parts posted:The purpose of fast-track from all reports I've seen is for the benefit of other governments, since the US has a precedent of establishing treaties and then not ratifying them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles posted:At first a "Council of Ten" comprising two delegates each from Britain, France, the United States, Italy and Japan met officially to decide the peace terms. It became the "Big Four" when Japan dropped out and the top person from each of the other four nations met in 145 closed sessions to make all the major decisions to be ratified by the entire assembly. Apart from Italian issues, the main conditions were determined at personal meetings among the leaders of the "Big Three" nations: British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and American President Woodrow Wilson. Here we have a treaty that was negotiated in secret, and presented to the Senate as a fait accompli. It was unable to pass in its original form, and because of that was defeated. If Wilson had been willing to allow amendments, the treaty could have passed. If he had included representatives of the Lodge bloc in the negotiations in the first place, they could have kept the negotiations secret while getting a deal they could support. But Wilson refused to do either of these things. Instead he insisted on strict secrecy in the negotiating process, and then an up-or-down vote on his preferred draft. In conclusion, I quite agree with your post, and the Treaty of Versailles is an apt comparison! fake edit: To extend the analogy further, the Treaty of Versailles was also substantively terrible. Although I will concede that the TPP is unlikely to produce another Hitler, so it's got that going for it.
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Jun 14, 2015 04:40
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computer parts posted:Of course you're assuming the other countries would pass whatever the US would pass. Ponsonby Britt posted:There was no "fast-track authority" in those cases - the Senate had the opportunity to debate and discuss the implications, and decide whether or not to approve the agreement. They could freely choose to weigh the costs and benefits of approving the agreement, versus the costs and benefits of demanding new terms and risking a collapse of negotiations. That wouldn't be present under fast-track. The point of fast-track is to constrain the Senate's authority (and ultimately the authority of the people they represent). In fact I am not assuming that. I'm assuming that the Senate can draw on lots of experts and make an informed cost-benefit analysis weighing the risk of no agreement against the effects of the draft that the administration ultimately negotiates and the potential benefits of changing it. Is this the best argument the pro-TPP side can make? A failure to engage with the other side's arguments, or even to bother to read them? If the deal and the process behind it are so great, then you should have actual responses to my arguments that should easily prove me wrong. Unless your arguments also need to be secret for some reason?
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Jun 14, 2015 06:56
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Fojar38 posted:The best argument for the TPP is that China needs to be contained and TPP is part of such. The containment argument never made much sense to me. The idea as I understand it is that an FTA that excludes China would divert the members' trade away from China and toward each other - strengthening all the other parties while weakening China. But of the twelve countries negotiating the TPP, seven of them already have free trade agreements with China, an eighth has been negotiated but not come into force yet, and a ninth is being negotiated right now. So if those nine countries see benefits, then some of those will spill over into China. And many of the TPP parties already have free trade agreements and other diplomatic ties with each other - is another FTA going to have that much effect on US trade with Canada and Mexico? Or bring us diplomatically closer to Japan or Australia? I also worry about what happens if the TPP does have a large containing effect. Okay, so a few million textile workers are unemployed, because their factory moved down to Vietnam to take advantage of the TPP. Is that going to make the Chinese government humbly back down, and ask to be allowed into the TPP? Or is it going to make them double down on nationalism in order to placate those angry jobless people, and ramp up drilling in the Spratlys to to try and replace the lost tax revenue?
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Jun 14, 2015 07:59
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Fojar38 posted:A) The Chinese economy is already doubling down on nationalism because their economy is starting to show signs of being hosed. This idea that China will become more assertive unless they're accommodated is false, they've become progressively more assertive over the past decade despite being accommodated constantly. The idea that the TPP would somehow cause the Chinese to retaliate and therefore we shouldn't pass it is not only immoral (an authoritarian country should not be dictating US trade policy) but also false, because they're already "retaliating." If the TPP is effective at diverting trade from China to the US, that would reduce their ability to use trade measures against TPP member neighbors. I agree with that part of your argument. But it also reduces the cost to China of using those measures. They won't be losing as much money, so they'll screw with trade more frequently. And China has other levers of influencing their neighbors. If the TPP diverts trade away, then they'll have less to lose and so they'll be more likely to engage in diplomatic or military ways of poking their neighbors. I also agree with you that China is already being assertive in the status quo, but that doesn't mean they won't become more assertive if they're contained. (Note the 'if' there - I think it's highly possible that the TPP will indirectly benefit China. If Chile makes more money because the TPP lets it sell copper to Malaysia, and then turns around and uses that money to buy textiles from its bilateral FTA partner China, then China is helped by TPP, and not contained.) I guess to rephrase my earlier post: if the TPP does what you say, and makes it impossible for China to use trade to bully its neighbors, how do you think China is going to react to that? By admitting that they should stop bullying, and bandwagoning with the US and the TPP? Or by doubling down on the assertiveness and finding their own partners to balance against the US? Ponsonby Britt fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jun 14, 2015 |
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Jun 14, 2015 19:12
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Here's a question for the TPP defenders in the thread: What's your response to this critique? Doctors Without Borders is calling the TPP "the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines in developing countries." That seems pretty damning. In particular, what is your defense of the provisions they single out on page 3? "Medecins sans Frontieres (pdf) posted:Data exclusivity grants a distinct monopoly status to medicines, even when patents no longer apply or exist, giving companies a new way to keep prices high for longer and This is particularly bothersome for me, based on my own personal experience. I have moderately severe ulcerative colitis, a condition which causes constant, bloody diarrhea if untreated. Luckily, I was able to get onto a biologic which has largely reduced these symptoms. Unluckily, it took me about a year to do so - a year of arguing with my insurance company, jumping through hoops to convince them that other drugs were ineffective, and getting charity assistance to defray the drug's costs. Biologics are extremely expensive - the initial price I was quoted was $11,000 a month. I'm not a drug expert. I don't know whether biologics are so expensive in the US because the drug companies are using their patent to gouge consumers, or because they're simply expensive to produce. (Or both.) But it seems clear that something is broken about US drug law when the prices are so high, and it's so difficult for someone like me (and I have insurance) to get biologics covered. Either the patent system is allowing bad faith gouging, or it's failing to promote good faith competition to lower prices to an affordable level. And this is the system that the TPP would extend to other countries? Ulcerative colitis isn't a fatal disease, but it's extremely unpleasant and disruptive of normal life activities. And we want to make it harder to treat in other countries? We want to charge $11,000 a month to some factory worker in Malaysia who gets paid $110 a month? Who does this provision help besides pharmaceutical companies?
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Jun 14, 2015 20:34
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