9 ms·

US Fails To Close TPP Deal As Wikileaks Exposes Discord

211 points by shill 13y ago

jonathanwallace 13y ago
Everyone knows coupling is bad. Why couple the laws of such disparate cultures into one big ball of mud?
- rayiner 13y ago
  Because something something global citizenship something something. It's out of date to believe in national borders, but fundamentally, jealously preserving national autonomy ensures that you aren't subject to laws formulated by people who don't think like you do or share your values.
  - contingencies 13y ago
    Nationalism is not great, but having nations is not the same as nationalism. Having nations or national-level entities of some kind equates to having some degree of heterogeneity in the world with regards to its governance. This is a good thing. My money is on a gradual shift toward much smaller entities taking on the effective present-era responsibilities of states... some of which will be geographically decentralized.
    - thaumasiotes 13y ago
      Nations didn't emerge from a state of a unified all-world government. They emerged from a state of disunity. They cause more homogeneity, not less. Every additional level of government brings additional regularity; that is its purpose.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      Having nations is not the same thing as nationalism, but nationalism is what perpetuated nations as independent entities. Once people stop believing that their nation and culture is unique and worth preserving, they stop fighting for independence.
- r00fus 13y ago
  From an multinational corporation's point of view, there is no culture - that's for the ants/humans. They're the ones pushing this through their interest groups and government cronies.
  - contingencies 13y ago
    This comment is spot on. And the corporations are run by people who do not play well with others, often heavily medicated, often with borderline psychotic obsessions for money or beating the competition. They actually believe that so-called economic growth is a good thing for the world.
- gjm11 13y ago
  > Everyone knows coupling is bad. No. Software developers know this. Engineers know this. Maybe some other people who build complex systems and suffer when their interconnections cause pain. Lawyers, maybe not so much. Excessive coupling in a legal context just means that more money needs to be spent on lawyers, and there's no reason for them to be the same lawyers (or politicians) who put the excessive coupling there in the first place. The incentive to keep things modular just isn't there. As for people who happen not to have jobs for which minimal coupling is visibly important at all -- that would be most people by a large margin, I think -- no, they don't know coupling is bad.
dil8 13y ago
Hard to believe that these talks are conducted in secret behind closed door. It is quite clear the some of the proposals are strictly designed to serve powerful interest groups. Great work by Wikileaks to put this in the public arena.
- rayiner 13y ago
  The basic idea of diplomatic negotiations being secret is that it's not appropriate to publicize your strategy for defending Belgium in case the Germans roll through on the way to France. Unfortunately, in this situation, diplomatic negotiations are being used to end-run around the domestic legislative process. This is the intrinsic downside of allowing diplomatic cooperation to extend beyond its traditional domain of war and peace.[1] In liberal democracies, the organs of foreign policy are designed to be opaque and non-responsive to the public. In the United States, this is by design--stemming from the framers' worry that a democracy wouldn't be able to speak with the required single voice when it came to issues of foreign policy. But the flexibility of the process militates towards keeping it restricted to a narrow domain. [1] There is something fundamentally undemocratic about using the diplomatic process to normalize law between countries. Yes it makes business easier, but it undermines democratic control over law. The law of a country should be an expression of the will of its voters, and only its voters. Some egghead in the UK has no business weighing in on what America's laws should be, and vice versa.
  - Malstrond 13y ago
    >it's not appropriate to publicize your strategy for defending Belgium in case the Germans roll through on the way to France. The strategy for defending Belgium in both world wars and the strategy for defending the average citizen against corporate interests seem to be the same in this case: Do nothing, leave them to the wolves.
  - blah32497 13y ago
    Don't these kind of deals need congressional approval eventually? The idea of dealing behind the scene is that it allows you to talk more openly about what is and isn't on the table without having anything on the record. Ex: Say they were negotiating with Israel. Publicly Israel has very uncompromising policies. But maybe in private, in return for some things they are willing to give up some of their demands. Maybe some of their concessions end up not in the deal, or the whole deal falls through. They don't want to have to then be "accountable" for the things they put on the table.
RexRollman 13y ago
What kills me is that they want copyrights to be extended again. Copyrights are already last too long as it is.
- betterunix 13y ago
  Their real goal is for copyrights to last forever, but this annoying thing called the constitution forbids that.
  - toki5 13y ago
    Does it? Genuine question, as I'm not really educated on the US Constitution.
    - hamiltonkibbe 13y ago
      Yes, it grants congress the power to grant copyright protections for a "limited time." Although a limited time could conceivably be "any finite period of time," a set of which "1 million years" is a member, if one chose to interpret it that way. EDIT: I hope no one ever interprets it that way.
      - rhizome 13y ago
        It has and will continue to be interpreted that way until a stronger defense against it is conceived.
      - andrewfong 13y ago
        1 million years would be pushing it, but there isn't a clear boundary. Eldred v. Ashcroft is the most authoritative case in U.S. law on this but it doesn't reach a clear conclusion. [1] What's more interesting is the dissent in that case. According to Justice Breyer, the current copyright term is valued at 99.8% of a perpetual copyright (presumably because the present value of the future becomes increasingly discounted over time). Unfortunately, the rest of the court didn't go along with this as it would have implied throwing out plenty of prior copyright extensions as well. [1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/01-618.ZO.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/01-618.ZO.html
coldcode 13y ago
The more open the debate the less likely the US can dictate to the rest of the world.
rodgerd 13y ago
For the US, failure is a feature, not a bug. The TPPA started as a deal between a variety of east Asian and Pacific nations in what the US regards as its back yard. The last thing the US wants is China becoming more cosy with US dependents such as New Zealand, Australia, or the Philippines. For the US, joining the deal, and then forcing it to either confirm to US wishes, or breaking it entirely are much, much better options than losing influence in the region.
- rhizome 13y ago
  Cold War hardliner logic must be part of the canon by now.
- marquis 13y ago
  >US dependents Dependents? These countries have healthy trading with Asia and other parts of the world. From my perspective, given that China would eventually any trade hole left by the U.S., is that it comes down to cronyism.
nate_meurer 13y ago
I didn't know that the one of the things we (the U.S.) are pushing for is patents on surgical procedures. The mind boggles. And then it fucking explodes.
- girvo 13y ago
  I begin to wonder whether the US isn't just trolling, to sink the treaty on purpose.
  - nate_meurer 13y ago
    That seems outlandish, but I honestly don't have a better explanation.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - salient 13y ago
    OH, no it's real. Remember US was the one that came up with SOPA and ACTA, too. It wasn't China. It was US, the land of the free. They wouldn't be "trolling" 3 times in a row. They're serious about this.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  The New Zealand government has an agency, Pharmac, that buys drugs for the country. This gives a fair bit of purchasing power. The TPP seeks to tame Pharmac, to drive prices up presumably. Prevention of generic drug purchasing etc. But there isn't any agreement to remove tariffs on things NZ makes. http://m.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10850106 http://m.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&obj...
- stevenrace 13y ago
  Given the rise of 'robotic-assisted surgery', it shouldn't come as much of a surprise. It's difficult to decouple the medical procedure from the hardware/software involved: robotic arms, the code behind it, machine vision bits, etc. While far from a medical technotopia, this seems less insidious that patents on DNA sequences or even pharama in my mind.
mschuster91 13y ago
"making surgical procedures patentable" - in what sick world do we live in?! I give the United States a maximum of 10-15 years before it will collapse due to massive civic unrest. (Which will undoubtedly be handled the Chinese way, with all the military equipment the police gets these days)
- eru 13y ago
  Do you want to bet? What odds do you offer?
  - mschuster91 13y ago
    20 bucks on the 10-15 years 'till collapse - and a hundred bucks that the next major unrest will be handled the Chinese way.
    - eru 13y ago
      Can we denote in Swiss Franks (at the current exchange rate)?
      - mschuster91 13y ago
        For sure.
        eru 13y ago
        Good. What odds do you offer?
- drharris 13y ago
  Not going to happen. Our bipolar government means that at any given time, at least 45% of the nation tacitly approves of the way things are going, just given the political party in power. Of those that disapprove, most don't care all that much and only a very small percentage would actually be willing to fight for real freedom. Pit that number against the current military and police structure that exists basically to maintain its own power (hint: it is rare they actually protect and serve the American citizenry) at the discretion of Government, and what do you wind up with? Not any sort of real revolution. We're already screwed before it begins.
bosch 13y ago
This is worse than what the NSA is doing as this will have a direct impact on EVERYONE, not just electronic users. This will also affect the poor and underprivileged more proportionately as well. I wonder why news organizations are not getting more involved and publicizing how bad this treaty truly is. It's ridiculous that governments who say they promote democracy demand that treaty negotiations are completely secret.
ck2 13y ago
Copyright for life + 70 years? Are they insane? Just insanely greedy I guess.
- drcube 13y ago
  Isn't that the way it is in the US already? +95 years if it's a corporate owned work. They just want to extend that to the rest of the world now.
allochthon 13y ago
American, here. Thank God for Australia. Looks like they're pushing back on US legal nonsense. The primary function of the US legal system is to protect the interests of the powerful.

211 points by shill 13y ago

jonathanwallace 13y ago

Everyone knows coupling is bad. Why couple the laws of such disparate cultures into one big ball of mud?

rayiner 13y ago
Because something something global citizenship something something. It's out of date to believe in national borders, but fundamentally, jealously preserving national autonomy ensures that you aren't subject to laws formulated by people who don't think like you do or share your values.
- contingencies 13y ago
  Nationalism is not great, but having nations is not the same as nationalism. Having nations or national-level entities of some kind equates to having some degree of heterogeneity in the world with regards to its governance. This is a good thing. My money is on a gradual shift toward much smaller entities taking on the effective present-era responsibilities of states... some of which will be geographically decentralized.
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    Nations didn't emerge from a state of a unified all-world government. They emerged from a state of disunity. They cause more homogeneity, not less. Every additional level of government brings additional regularity; that is its purpose.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Having nations is not the same thing as nationalism, but nationalism is what perpetuated nations as independent entities. Once people stop believing that their nation and culture is unique and worth preserving, they stop fighting for independence.
r00fus 13y ago
From an multinational corporation's point of view, there is no culture - that's for the ants/humans. They're the ones pushing this through their interest groups and government cronies.
- contingencies 13y ago
  This comment is spot on. And the corporations are run by people who do not play well with others, often heavily medicated, often with borderline psychotic obsessions for money or beating the competition. They actually believe that so-called economic growth is a good thing for the world.
gjm11 13y ago
> Everyone knows coupling is bad. No. Software developers know this. Engineers know this. Maybe some other people who build complex systems and suffer when their interconnections cause pain. Lawyers, maybe not so much. Excessive coupling in a legal context just means that more money needs to be spent on lawyers, and there's no reason for them to be the same lawyers (or politicians) who put the excessive coupling there in the first place. The incentive to keep things modular just isn't there. As for people who happen not to have jobs for which minimal coupling is visibly important at all -- that would be most people by a large margin, I think -- no, they don't know coupling is bad.

dil8 13y ago

Hard to believe that these talks are conducted in secret behind closed door. It is quite clear the some of the proposals are strictly designed to serve powerful interest groups. Great work by Wikileaks to put this in the public arena.

rayiner 13y ago
The basic idea of diplomatic negotiations being secret is that it's not appropriate to publicize your strategy for defending Belgium in case the Germans roll through on the way to France. Unfortunately, in this situation, diplomatic negotiations are being used to end-run around the domestic legislative process. This is the intrinsic downside of allowing diplomatic cooperation to extend beyond its traditional domain of war and peace.[1] In liberal democracies, the organs of foreign policy are designed to be opaque and non-responsive to the public. In the United States, this is by design--stemming from the framers' worry that a democracy wouldn't be able to speak with the required single voice when it came to issues of foreign policy. But the flexibility of the process militates towards keeping it restricted to a narrow domain. [1] There is something fundamentally undemocratic about using the diplomatic process to normalize law between countries. Yes it makes business easier, but it undermines democratic control over law. The law of a country should be an expression of the will of its voters, and only its voters. Some egghead in the UK has no business weighing in on what America's laws should be, and vice versa.
- Malstrond 13y ago
  >it's not appropriate to publicize your strategy for defending Belgium in case the Germans roll through on the way to France. The strategy for defending Belgium in both world wars and the strategy for defending the average citizen against corporate interests seem to be the same in this case: Do nothing, leave them to the wolves.
- blah32497 13y ago
  Don't these kind of deals need congressional approval eventually? The idea of dealing behind the scene is that it allows you to talk more openly about what is and isn't on the table without having anything on the record. Ex: Say they were negotiating with Israel. Publicly Israel has very uncompromising policies. But maybe in private, in return for some things they are willing to give up some of their demands. Maybe some of their concessions end up not in the deal, or the whole deal falls through. They don't want to have to then be "accountable" for the things they put on the table.

RexRollman 13y ago

What kills me is that they want copyrights to be extended again. Copyrights are already last too long as it is.

betterunix 13y ago
Their real goal is for copyrights to last forever, but this annoying thing called the constitution forbids that.
- toki5 13y ago
  Does it? Genuine question, as I'm not really educated on the US Constitution.
  - hamiltonkibbe 13y ago
    Yes, it grants congress the power to grant copyright protections for a "limited time." Although a limited time could conceivably be "any finite period of time," a set of which "1 million years" is a member, if one chose to interpret it that way. EDIT: I hope no one ever interprets it that way.
    - rhizome 13y ago
      It has and will continue to be interpreted that way until a stronger defense against it is conceived.
    - andrewfong 13y ago
      1 million years would be pushing it, but there isn't a clear boundary. Eldred v. Ashcroft is the most authoritative case in U.S. law on this but it doesn't reach a clear conclusion. [1] What's more interesting is the dissent in that case. According to Justice Breyer, the current copyright term is valued at 99.8% of a perpetual copyright (presumably because the present value of the future becomes increasingly discounted over time). Unfortunately, the rest of the court didn't go along with this as it would have implied throwing out plenty of prior copyright extensions as well. [1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/01-618.ZO.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/01-618.ZO.html

coldcode 13y ago

The more open the debate the less likely the US can dictate to the rest of the world.

rodgerd 13y ago

For the US, failure is a feature, not a bug. The TPPA started as a deal between a variety of east Asian and Pacific nations in what the US regards as its back yard. The last thing the US wants is China becoming more cosy with US dependents such as New Zealand, Australia, or the Philippines. For the US, joining the deal, and then forcing it to either confirm to US wishes, or breaking it entirely are much, much better options than losing influence in the region.

rhizome 13y ago
Cold War hardliner logic must be part of the canon by now.
marquis 13y ago
>US dependents Dependents? These countries have healthy trading with Asia and other parts of the world. From my perspective, given that China would eventually any trade hole left by the U.S., is that it comes down to cronyism.

nate_meurer 13y ago

I didn't know that the one of the things we (the U.S.) are pushing for is patents on surgical procedures. The mind boggles. And then it fucking explodes.

girvo 13y ago
I begin to wonder whether the US isn't just trolling, to sink the treaty on purpose.
- nate_meurer 13y ago
  That seems outlandish, but I honestly don't have a better explanation.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- salient 13y ago
  OH, no it's real. Remember US was the one that came up with SOPA and ACTA, too. It wasn't China. It was US, the land of the free. They wouldn't be "trolling" 3 times in a row. They're serious about this.
lostlogin 13y ago
The New Zealand government has an agency, Pharmac, that buys drugs for the country. This gives a fair bit of purchasing power. The TPP seeks to tame Pharmac, to drive prices up presumably. Prevention of generic drug purchasing etc. But there isn't any agreement to remove tariffs on things NZ makes. http://m.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10850106 http://m.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&obj...
stevenrace 13y ago
Given the rise of 'robotic-assisted surgery', it shouldn't come as much of a surprise. It's difficult to decouple the medical procedure from the hardware/software involved: robotic arms, the code behind it, machine vision bits, etc. While far from a medical technotopia, this seems less insidious that patents on DNA sequences or even pharama in my mind.

mschuster91 13y ago

"making surgical procedures patentable" - in what sick world do we live in?! I give the United States a maximum of 10-15 years before it will collapse due to massive civic unrest. (Which will undoubtedly be handled the Chinese way, with all the military equipment the police gets these days)

eru 13y ago
Do you want to bet? What odds do you offer?
- mschuster91 13y ago
  20 bucks on the 10-15 years 'till collapse - and a hundred bucks that the next major unrest will be handled the Chinese way.
  - eru 13y ago
    Can we denote in Swiss Franks (at the current exchange rate)?
    - mschuster91 13y ago
      For sure.
      - eru 13y ago
        Good. What odds do you offer?
drharris 13y ago
Not going to happen. Our bipolar government means that at any given time, at least 45% of the nation tacitly approves of the way things are going, just given the political party in power. Of those that disapprove, most don't care all that much and only a very small percentage would actually be willing to fight for real freedom. Pit that number against the current military and police structure that exists basically to maintain its own power (hint: it is rare they actually protect and serve the American citizenry) at the discretion of Government, and what do you wind up with? Not any sort of real revolution. We're already screwed before it begins.

bosch 13y ago

This is worse than what the NSA is doing as this will have a direct impact on EVERYONE, not just electronic users. This will also affect the poor and underprivileged more proportionately as well. I wonder why news organizations are not getting more involved and publicizing how bad this treaty truly is. It's ridiculous that governments who say they promote democracy demand that treaty negotiations are completely secret.

ck2 13y ago

drcube 13y ago
Isn't that the way it is in the US already? +95 years if it's a corporate owned work. They just want to extend that to the rest of the world now.

allochthon 13y ago

American, here. Thank God for Australia. Looks like they're pushing back on US legal nonsense. The primary function of the US legal system is to protect the interests of the powerful.