10 ms·

TPP was a communications and messaging failure on parts of governments. Other than being a sprawling agreement touching on multiple unrelated topics largely dev

by niftich 10y ago

TPP was a communications and messaging failure on parts of governments. Other than being a sprawling agreement touching on multiple unrelated topics largely developed in secret, the US government in particular did little to convincingly persuade the populace about TPP's advantages. The anti-globalization folks predictably seized on those aspects while a different debate about the expansion of copyrights (i.e. the harmonization of copyright protections with those of the US) was raging in the tech sphere. A gulf began to widen between the administration and those opposing TPP, and quality independent analysis was much more difficult to come by than fearmongering. A few corporations spoke out in favor of TPP [1], but given their vested interest, they made a poor case of swaying average people. Meanwhile, even mainstream news coverage of TPP tended negative. Hillary Clinton notably had modify her messaging on TPP [2] to be seen as a viable candidate, despite endorsing it before. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11893512#11894446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11893512#11894446 [2] http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-called-trans-pacific-partnership-the-gold-standard/ http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-called-trans-pacific-p...

mtgx 10y ago
The fact that mostly corporations were invited to the negotiations and not the civil society probably didn't help that whole "communication issue" either.
- Natsu 10y ago
  Yeah, I think it's a bit more than a communications issue when they secretly negotiated a treaty that planned to take away the rights of everyone online to give a few media giants even more control over what people can say online. The EFF has a long list of reasons to oppose it here: https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp
  - dba7dba 10y ago
    EFF and Trump admin on same page on something? What is going on?
    - veidr 10y ago
      Even a non-literate white nationalist clock is right twice a day.
    - kobeya 10y ago
      Your preconceptions are collapsing.
    - colordrops 10y ago
      You are only now just seeing that Trump agreeing with something doesn't make it bad by default? It's not Good vs Evil here. Reality is more nuanced. Glen Greenwald, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange also espouse certain views that match those of Trump, even though they all despise the man. It's not like Trump just went down a check list and picked the "evil" option for every issue. And the left, such as Hillary, didn't go down the list and choose the "good" option for every issue. Both sides have issues for which they have horrible self-serving stances that the other side opposes, and thus you will find people you look up to often agreeing with your "enemy".
    - dba7dba 10y ago
      No one can detect a joke when it involves Trump...
    - ddw 10y ago
      Well I'm pretty sure that they are against it for different reasons. Government surveillance is something that a paranoid, insecure person like Trump is going to love.
      - candiodari 10y ago
        Sadly that seems to be a very bipartisan attitude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_mass_surveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_mass_surveilla... Actually, one might have some (small) hope that Trump is actually libertarian enough to tone the surveillance state down. Not hoping for much though.
  - 3131s 10y ago
    > I think it's a bit more than a communications issue when they secretly negotiated a treaty Sure, but at least they made this cartoon to help the plebs see the light: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtNfLixcJO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtNfLixcJO4
  - niftich 10y ago
    You're not wrong, but you're proving my point. I've said before [1] that "TPP [is] the largest cross-national, non-military cooperation pact of our time. It's a huge power play with serious geopolitical consequences", a perspective that likely echoes that of US allies [2] and yet the conversation in the tech sphere focused solely on IP. This is a good fight -- one I applaud and support the EFF for pursuing relentlessly -- but this is just one issue in a gigantic compromise legislation that has to attain broad legislative support inside the US [3][4] as well as support from the other signatories, of which there are many. It was in fact a failure of messaging to not get out ahead of, or in response to these vocal oppositions, as the public's ire was allowed to foment. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11893512#11894446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11893512#11894446 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/world/asia/trans-pacific-partnership-china-australia.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/world/asia/trans-pacific-... [3] http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/trade-trans-pacific-partnership-214807 http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/trade-trans-pacific-pa... [4] http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/293344-mcconnell-tpp-not-coming-up-this-year http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/293344-mcconnel...
    - Ericson2314 10y ago
      My understanding is that the other countries were not pushing to adopt our IP policies (though Japan did), so construing that point as compromise is a bit disingenuous. I think that, with the exception of environmental policy on the part of the poorer counties, I'd prefer the other countries' notiations. (Other than IP I have no evidence though, as others have said it's hard to come by.)
    - Natsu 10y ago
      I do not see it as a communication problem because there's nothing they could tell me that would make me support those IP provisions.
    - goodplay 10y ago
      Then they shouldn't have grouped the orthogonal issues together in an all-or-nothing affair.
  - chiaro 10y ago
    The EFF was actually invited to negotiate the treaty too, but they refused, opting to instead throw stones from the dark.
- ajross 10y ago
  Do you have an example of a trade agreement that wasn't negotiated "in secret" and which involved "civil society". Treaties, free trade treaties foremost among them, are almost never public before the final text is available, because if they were they'd never get that far. Too many interests. Look, it's a free trade agreement. It says, basically, "no tariffs at all for trade between the signatories". Except of course that every signatory has a list of a thousand "but..." clauses to protect whatever proprietary interests have their ear. So the end results is a big mess of exceptions and clarifications, which is why everyone hates it. There is literally something in there in there that everyone will hate! By design! I mean, look: it's hardly the most important bill of the decade, and I'm not crying that it failed. But to pretend that this was some collusion of the global illuminati to stick it to the hippies, or white nationalists, or whoever you happen to identify with is just insane. It's a ?!@#!$ trade treaty, for god's sake.
  - digler999 10y ago
    > It's a ?!@#!$ trade treaty, for god's sake. its ramifications would have affected billions of people just as if it were a new civil and criminal law, that's what was so scary about it. Citizens aren't bound to obey international treaties. That's why we have governments.
  - gech 10y ago
    Oh i guess no big deal then, can't criticize something that wasn't even made available, for god's sake. Insane
  - Gargoyle 10y ago
    The fact that it's always been done that way is not a sufficient excuse.
  - jordanb 10y ago
    The fact that most trade agreements are negotiated in secret by special interests doesn't make it right. The TPP was full of provisions that would have made profits higher for corporations and very little that would genuinely protect workers and the environment. This is understandable given that most the voices in the room were representing corporations.
wfo 10y ago
Nothing you said I disagree with yet your tone suggests TPP is by assumption a good thing simply marketed wrong; yet you've not made a single argument for why it is good. It's not just the US government that did little to convincingly persuade the populace about TPP's advantages; nobody convincingly persuaded anyone about its advantages except for the tiny group of elites who negotiated and structured the deal in their own favor. I'm willing to hear an argument for why TPP would be good for working people in the US. I've never heard anything even close to that. I've heard plenty of hard evidence that it's horrible for working people (and people in general) in the US, while being great for large corporate interests. Sometimes unpopular things are unpopular because they are bad, it's not always a communication problem.
- oculusthrift 10y ago
  Not everything is done for blue collar rust belt people. TPP is about the US as a whole. Instead of us setting the terms of trade in the Asian Pacific, we will have China and Russia cut their own deals and cut America and its allies out. Entitled white heroin users in the Rust Belt would rather help themselves with protectionist policies to give them no skill jobs instead of help the rest of the country and the world.
  - captainlego 10y ago
    Or, you know, they could develop trade deal without all the secrecy and bullshit? When the government has been lying to you for years about domestic spying, among other things, how do you expect them to follow you blindly on another deal made in the dark? This country is going to go into chaos in the next ~10-25 years as more and more jobs are automated, unemployment skyrockets, and people refuse to give free money to all the "entitled white heroin users in the Rust Belt." Notwithstanding the effects of global warming ramping up. Except because of the elitism we get to start this period with Donald Trump at the helm instead of someone at least half sane.
    - chiaro 10y ago
      Trade deals are developed in secret for the same reason that all legislation is (before being presented for a democratic vote). The negotiation process is hamstrung by too many interests, with domestic lobbies preventing anything from being discussed at all. This is a point of interest in game theory. Paper here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706785 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706785
okreallywtf 10y ago
I had a hard time with a lot of the anti-tpp sentiment coming from the left because I felt like Obama did make a good case for it (to me) in some of the interviews I heard [1]. I'll be honest in saying I never took a lot of time to dig into the guts of the thing and really vet out the criticisms of it, but at the highest level (which is what the president usually speaks to), it seemed sound. [1] http://www.marketplace.org/2015/10/06/economy/president-obama-talks-trade/full-interview-president-obama-defends-tpp http://www.marketplace.org/2015/10/06/economy/president-obam...
- oculusthrift 10y ago
  there is no argument against it that stands on logical legs. The arguments either just talk about boogie men like corporations, globalism, and the "establishment" or somehow gets mixed with fear of Mexicans/Muslims/Chinese taking jobs.
  - themusicgod1 10y ago
    This is untrue. It encodes the US's broken anti-circumvention law on the global stage, which restricts our ability to freely trade with eachother. There are gains from trade and the TPP should not be used to stop them.
    - oculusthrift 10y ago
      I didn't hear that argument from either the left (bernie - corporations) or right (rust belt voters who barely understand email). only some small online subset of tech savvy users.
  - arca_vorago 10y ago
    I assure you, globalism is much more than just a talking point "boogie man", and there is plenty of very valid discussion to be had on the matter in that aspect, seing as according to the supreme law of the land in the US, the Constitution, treaties and agreements entered carry the full weight of federal law. Not a superficial point at all. Which is also why most of us paying attention realized the passing of fast-track was such a large blow to the control mechanisms for such treaties. Whatever your viewpoint on the TPP itself, to negate criticism of it as lacking any "logical legs" is intellectually dishonest at best.
jeffdavis 10y ago
When people feel left out of a process that has a big impact on their lives, it's fair to say "no". You can say that this deal is what's best for them. But whatever harm killing this deal may have done is much less than the harm from letting the elites decide what's best for them without the courtesy of even an explanation. I think there were a lot of people that voted for Trump simply because the elites told everyone that they had to vote for Clinton. It's a way to remind the government that the people are in charge.
hackerboos 10y ago
I'm ok with trade deals. I'm not ok with private companies suing sovereign nations for compensation. [0] I'm not ok with secret tribunals that make those decisions. [1] I'm not ok with governments not making provisions for the workers that lost their jobs because Vietnamese shrimp flooded their country's market. [2] [0] https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/kill-the-dispute-settlement-language-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership/2015/02/25/ec7705a2-bd1e-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9_story.html?client=safariI https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/o... [1] http://billmoyers.com/story/shadow-courts-secret-tribunals-trade/ http://billmoyers.com/story/shadow-courts-secret-tribunals-t... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-08/more-shoes-and-shrimp-less-china-reliance-for-vietnam-in-tpp https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-08/more-shoe...
- valas 10y ago
  Many are upset about proposed dispute resolution regime ('suing'), but is it much different from how WTO works? AFAIK in WTO countries sue other countries on behalf of their corporations [0]. BTW, your first citation is an opinion piece by Elizabeth Warren who is far from impartial in this debate. [0] https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_by_country_e.htm https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_by_countr...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - chiaro 10y ago
    The WTO would function as the court of appeal for decisions made under the TPP's ISDS provisions. It would also be the body permitting sanctions (i.e. a return to pre-TPP tariff levels on trade with the offending country) in the event of non-cooperation.
  - nicoburns 10y ago
    Possibly not that different, but I (and I think a lot of other people) aren't very happy with those rules either. And TPP undeniably expands the scope / makes it more likely these kind of judgements would be made.
jlarocco 10y ago
I'm gonna call bullshit on this. It's unfortunate people are trying to spin this as negative because Trump is the one pulling out of it, but the TPP was never a good idea, and never good for anybody except big corporations. The EFF has an entire page on why the TPP was bad. The secrecy was only one part of it. https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp Some HN headlines related to TPP: "The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared" "TPP Text Confirms Massive Loss to Canadian Public Domain" "UN Experts Say TPP and Fast Track Threaten Human Rights" "TPP could thwart computer security research and tinkering" I'm going to stop there because people can search the history for themselves. Hate on Trump all you want, but he did the right thing here.
- chiaro 10y ago
  I was actually against the TPP back when all the rumours were spinning around before the text was released. When the full text actually came out, in an old-fashioned sense of obligation I read the whole thing. Then I did it again. Very few fears I had held were grounded. To my surprise though, the narrative didn't change at all. What was actually contained in the agreement was irrelevant. People were afraid of sovereignty, environmental and worker protections and more before the text was released, and they were after. Here's a couple of common criticisms that will easily identify a commenter as having not read the agreement: "the TPP (or ISDS) allows companies to sue countries for lost profits" (they don't) "this is a power grab by pharmaceutical companies" (Pharma was second after Tobacco at being upset with the deal) "it undermines Net Neutrality" (there are specific points allowing net neutrality regulation, NN was an Obama policy plank FFS) "TPP worsens environmental or labor conditions" (it actually provides minimum standards that will improve these in developing countries specifically around overfishing, trade of endangered animals, and minimum wage. It's why the deal was endorsed by the WWF)
  - tmsbrg 10y ago
    You have to be weary too of the exact meanings, not just how it reads. I remember reading an article from the EFF on the IP provisions which quoted a lot from the then-leaked information. The quotes all sounded quite fair and reasonable if you read them. Things like "countries should attempt to ensure proper protections of the public domain" (don't remember actual quotes, but that was the tone). But the problem was, as the EFF then pointed out, all of the provisions about protecting the people against corporations where just non-binding advice like that, while most of the provisions about protecting corporations from the people were strong and binding. So even if it seems like a reasonable text, if you look at it in a very critical lawyerish way, it could actually be very different. Then again maybe you did read it that way and still found it not that bad. I admit I didn't read it myself, but then again I'm from Europe so it's not my agreement to check. Still I have some faith in the EFF and other organisations which did read it and found it a dangerous agreement. And I really think it's a good thing that it's now harder to negotiate trade agreements in secret. It doesn't matter what the traditional way to negotiate these was, they have a big impact on the countries that implement them, and people deserve more than just a (representative) YES/NO to a huge number of potentially life-changing provisions at once.

by niftich 10y ago

mtgx 10y ago

The fact that mostly corporations were invited to the negotiations and not the civil society probably didn't help that whole "communication issue" either.

Natsu 10y ago
Yeah, I think it's a bit more than a communications issue when they secretly negotiated a treaty that planned to take away the rights of everyone online to give a few media giants even more control over what people can say online. The EFF has a long list of reasons to oppose it here: https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp
- dba7dba 10y ago
  EFF and Trump admin on same page on something? What is going on?
  - veidr 10y ago
    Even a non-literate white nationalist clock is right twice a day.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    Your preconceptions are collapsing.
  - colordrops 10y ago
    You are only now just seeing that Trump agreeing with something doesn't make it bad by default? It's not Good vs Evil here. Reality is more nuanced. Glen Greenwald, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange also espouse certain views that match those of Trump, even though they all despise the man. It's not like Trump just went down a check list and picked the "evil" option for every issue. And the left, such as Hillary, didn't go down the list and choose the "good" option for every issue. Both sides have issues for which they have horrible self-serving stances that the other side opposes, and thus you will find people you look up to often agreeing with your "enemy".
  - dba7dba 10y ago
    No one can detect a joke when it involves Trump...
  - ddw 10y ago
    Well I'm pretty sure that they are against it for different reasons. Government surveillance is something that a paranoid, insecure person like Trump is going to love.
    - candiodari 10y ago
      Sadly that seems to be a very bipartisan attitude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_mass_surveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_mass_surveilla... Actually, one might have some (small) hope that Trump is actually libertarian enough to tone the surveillance state down. Not hoping for much though.
- 3131s 10y ago
  > I think it's a bit more than a communications issue when they secretly negotiated a treaty Sure, but at least they made this cartoon to help the plebs see the light: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtNfLixcJO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtNfLixcJO4
- niftich 10y ago
  You're not wrong, but you're proving my point. I've said before [1] that "TPP [is] the largest cross-national, non-military cooperation pact of our time. It's a huge power play with serious geopolitical consequences", a perspective that likely echoes that of US allies [2] and yet the conversation in the tech sphere focused solely on IP. This is a good fight -- one I applaud and support the EFF for pursuing relentlessly -- but this is just one issue in a gigantic compromise legislation that has to attain broad legislative support inside the US [3][4] as well as support from the other signatories, of which there are many. It was in fact a failure of messaging to not get out ahead of, or in response to these vocal oppositions, as the public's ire was allowed to foment. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11893512#11894446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11893512#11894446 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/world/asia/trans-pacific-partnership-china-australia.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/world/asia/trans-pacific-... [3] http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/trade-trans-pacific-partnership-214807 http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/trade-trans-pacific-pa... [4] http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/293344-mcconnell-tpp-not-coming-up-this-year http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/293344-mcconnel...
  - Ericson2314 10y ago
    My understanding is that the other countries were not pushing to adopt our IP policies (though Japan did), so construing that point as compromise is a bit disingenuous. I think that, with the exception of environmental policy on the part of the poorer counties, I'd prefer the other countries' notiations. (Other than IP I have no evidence though, as others have said it's hard to come by.)
  - Natsu 10y ago
    I do not see it as a communication problem because there's nothing they could tell me that would make me support those IP provisions.
  - goodplay 10y ago
    Then they shouldn't have grouped the orthogonal issues together in an all-or-nothing affair.
- chiaro 10y ago
  The EFF was actually invited to negotiate the treaty too, but they refused, opting to instead throw stones from the dark.
ajross 10y ago
Do you have an example of a trade agreement that wasn't negotiated "in secret" and which involved "civil society". Treaties, free trade treaties foremost among them, are almost never public before the final text is available, because if they were they'd never get that far. Too many interests. Look, it's a free trade agreement. It says, basically, "no tariffs at all for trade between the signatories". Except of course that every signatory has a list of a thousand "but..." clauses to protect whatever proprietary interests have their ear. So the end results is a big mess of exceptions and clarifications, which is why everyone hates it. There is literally something in there in there that everyone will hate! By design! I mean, look: it's hardly the most important bill of the decade, and I'm not crying that it failed. But to pretend that this was some collusion of the global illuminati to stick it to the hippies, or white nationalists, or whoever you happen to identify with is just insane. It's a ?!@#!$ trade treaty, for god's sake.
- digler999 10y ago
  > It's a ?!@#!$ trade treaty, for god's sake. its ramifications would have affected billions of people just as if it were a new civil and criminal law, that's what was so scary about it. Citizens aren't bound to obey international treaties. That's why we have governments.
- gech 10y ago
  Oh i guess no big deal then, can't criticize something that wasn't even made available, for god's sake. Insane
- Gargoyle 10y ago
  The fact that it's always been done that way is not a sufficient excuse.
- jordanb 10y ago
  The fact that most trade agreements are negotiated in secret by special interests doesn't make it right. The TPP was full of provisions that would have made profits higher for corporations and very little that would genuinely protect workers and the environment. This is understandable given that most the voices in the room were representing corporations.

wfo 10y ago

Nothing you said I disagree with yet your tone suggests TPP is by assumption a good thing simply marketed wrong; yet you've not made a single argument for why it is good. It's not just the US government that did little to convincingly persuade the populace about TPP's advantages; nobody convincingly persuaded anyone about its advantages except for the tiny group of elites who negotiated and structured the deal in their own favor. I'm willing to hear an argument for why TPP would be good for working people in the US. I've never heard anything even close to that. I've heard plenty of hard evidence that it's horrible for working people (and people in general) in the US, while being great for large corporate interests. Sometimes unpopular things are unpopular because they are bad, it's not always a communication problem.

oculusthrift 10y ago
Not everything is done for blue collar rust belt people. TPP is about the US as a whole. Instead of us setting the terms of trade in the Asian Pacific, we will have China and Russia cut their own deals and cut America and its allies out. Entitled white heroin users in the Rust Belt would rather help themselves with protectionist policies to give them no skill jobs instead of help the rest of the country and the world.
- captainlego 10y ago
  Or, you know, they could develop trade deal without all the secrecy and bullshit? When the government has been lying to you for years about domestic spying, among other things, how do you expect them to follow you blindly on another deal made in the dark? This country is going to go into chaos in the next ~10-25 years as more and more jobs are automated, unemployment skyrockets, and people refuse to give free money to all the "entitled white heroin users in the Rust Belt." Notwithstanding the effects of global warming ramping up. Except because of the elitism we get to start this period with Donald Trump at the helm instead of someone at least half sane.
  - chiaro 10y ago
    Trade deals are developed in secret for the same reason that all legislation is (before being presented for a democratic vote). The negotiation process is hamstrung by too many interests, with domestic lobbies preventing anything from being discussed at all. This is a point of interest in game theory. Paper here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706785 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706785

okreallywtf 10y ago

I had a hard time with a lot of the anti-tpp sentiment coming from the left because I felt like Obama did make a good case for it (to me) in some of the interviews I heard [1]. I'll be honest in saying I never took a lot of time to dig into the guts of the thing and really vet out the criticisms of it, but at the highest level (which is what the president usually speaks to), it seemed sound. [1] http://www.marketplace.org/2015/10/06/economy/president-obama-talks-trade/full-interview-president-obama-defends-tpp http://www.marketplace.org/2015/10/06/economy/president-obam...

oculusthrift 10y ago
there is no argument against it that stands on logical legs. The arguments either just talk about boogie men like corporations, globalism, and the "establishment" or somehow gets mixed with fear of Mexicans/Muslims/Chinese taking jobs.
- themusicgod1 10y ago
  This is untrue. It encodes the US's broken anti-circumvention law on the global stage, which restricts our ability to freely trade with eachother. There are gains from trade and the TPP should not be used to stop them.
  - oculusthrift 10y ago
    I didn't hear that argument from either the left (bernie - corporations) or right (rust belt voters who barely understand email). only some small online subset of tech savvy users.
- arca_vorago 10y ago
  I assure you, globalism is much more than just a talking point "boogie man", and there is plenty of very valid discussion to be had on the matter in that aspect, seing as according to the supreme law of the land in the US, the Constitution, treaties and agreements entered carry the full weight of federal law. Not a superficial point at all. Which is also why most of us paying attention realized the passing of fast-track was such a large blow to the control mechanisms for such treaties. Whatever your viewpoint on the TPP itself, to negate criticism of it as lacking any "logical legs" is intellectually dishonest at best.

jeffdavis 10y ago

When people feel left out of a process that has a big impact on their lives, it's fair to say "no". You can say that this deal is what's best for them. But whatever harm killing this deal may have done is much less than the harm from letting the elites decide what's best for them without the courtesy of even an explanation. I think there were a lot of people that voted for Trump simply because the elites told everyone that they had to vote for Clinton. It's a way to remind the government that the people are in charge.

hackerboos 10y ago

I'm ok with trade deals. I'm not ok with private companies suing sovereign nations for compensation. [0] I'm not ok with secret tribunals that make those decisions. [1] I'm not ok with governments not making provisions for the workers that lost their jobs because Vietnamese shrimp flooded their country's market. [2] [0] https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/kill-the-dispute-settlement-language-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership/2015/02/25/ec7705a2-bd1e-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9_story.html?client=safariI https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/o... [1] http://billmoyers.com/story/shadow-courts-secret-tribunals-trade/ http://billmoyers.com/story/shadow-courts-secret-tribunals-t... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-08/more-shoes-and-shrimp-less-china-reliance-for-vietnam-in-tpp https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-08/more-shoe...

valas 10y ago
Many are upset about proposed dispute resolution regime ('suing'), but is it much different from how WTO works? AFAIK in WTO countries sue other countries on behalf of their corporations [0]. BTW, your first citation is an opinion piece by Elizabeth Warren who is far from impartial in this debate. [0] https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_by_country_e.htm https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_by_countr...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- chiaro 10y ago
  The WTO would function as the court of appeal for decisions made under the TPP's ISDS provisions. It would also be the body permitting sanctions (i.e. a return to pre-TPP tariff levels on trade with the offending country) in the event of non-cooperation.
- nicoburns 10y ago
  Possibly not that different, but I (and I think a lot of other people) aren't very happy with those rules either. And TPP undeniably expands the scope / makes it more likely these kind of judgements would be made.

jlarocco 10y ago

I'm gonna call bullshit on this. It's unfortunate people are trying to spin this as negative because Trump is the one pulling out of it, but the TPP was never a good idea, and never good for anybody except big corporations. The EFF has an entire page on why the TPP was bad. The secrecy was only one part of it. https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp Some HN headlines related to TPP: "The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared" "TPP Text Confirms Massive Loss to Canadian Public Domain" "UN Experts Say TPP and Fast Track Threaten Human Rights" "TPP could thwart computer security research and tinkering" I'm going to stop there because people can search the history for themselves. Hate on Trump all you want, but he did the right thing here.

chiaro 10y ago
I was actually against the TPP back when all the rumours were spinning around before the text was released. When the full text actually came out, in an old-fashioned sense of obligation I read the whole thing. Then I did it again. Very few fears I had held were grounded. To my surprise though, the narrative didn't change at all. What was actually contained in the agreement was irrelevant. People were afraid of sovereignty, environmental and worker protections and more before the text was released, and they were after. Here's a couple of common criticisms that will easily identify a commenter as having not read the agreement: "the TPP (or ISDS) allows companies to sue countries for lost profits" (they don't) "this is a power grab by pharmaceutical companies" (Pharma was second after Tobacco at being upset with the deal) "it undermines Net Neutrality" (there are specific points allowing net neutrality regulation, NN was an Obama policy plank FFS) "TPP worsens environmental or labor conditions" (it actually provides minimum standards that will improve these in developing countries specifically around overfishing, trade of endangered animals, and minimum wage. It's why the deal was endorsed by the WWF)
- tmsbrg 10y ago
  You have to be weary too of the exact meanings, not just how it reads. I remember reading an article from the EFF on the IP provisions which quoted a lot from the then-leaked information. The quotes all sounded quite fair and reasonable if you read them. Things like "countries should attempt to ensure proper protections of the public domain" (don't remember actual quotes, but that was the tone). But the problem was, as the EFF then pointed out, all of the provisions about protecting the people against corporations where just non-binding advice like that, while most of the provisions about protecting corporations from the people were strong and binding. So even if it seems like a reasonable text, if you look at it in a very critical lawyerish way, it could actually be very different. Then again maybe you did read it that way and still found it not that bad. I admit I didn't read it myself, but then again I'm from Europe so it's not my agreement to check. Still I have some faith in the EFF and other organisations which did read it and found it a dangerous agreement. And I really think it's a good thing that it's now harder to negotiate trade agreements in secret. It doesn't matter what the traditional way to negotiate these was, they have a big impact on the countries that implement them, and people deserve more than just a (representative) YES/NO to a huge number of potentially life-changing provisions at once.