NAFTA passed on Nov. 20, 1993, on the promise of jobs. Oddly enough . . .

[OrwellwasRight]

94. No, other parties want to have a say in the outcome of the deal.

Not all rules are equal in trade deal, just like not all rules are equal in health policy. The public should be allowed to help shape the rules that we will live under. That's why it is called a democracy.



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Five arguments against the self-defeating secrecy of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Alan Beattie | May 19 12:01 | 7 comments | Share
If you think that getting fast-track authority from Congress to negotiate trade agreements is hard, just wait for the deal that it is designed to pass.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between the US, Japan and 10 other economies in Asia and Latin America has run into a barrage of criticism. Some of it is probably justified; some of it is not. The problem is that we don’t really know.

The governments involved, and particularly the US administration, have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the negotiating texts secret. Even senators and congressmen are only allowed to look at them in a secure location without taking away notes.

Most of the Washington trade establishment seems to think this secrecy is justifiable, an attitude I find baffling. Here are various arguments I have heard against publishing the negotiating texts, and why I think are mistaken.



1. You shouldn’t show your hand in a negotiation with other countries.

This would be a valid objection to publishing individual countries’ internal negotiating strategies in great detail, but not to releasing the draft negotiating texts already shared between the different governments. There are no secrets from each other in there: check out the detailed statements of each country’s current stance in the intellectual property (IP) rights chapter obtained by Wikileaks. It’s the public that are being kept in the dark. Who, or what, has been harmed by that text being leaked? Have the IP talks collapsed because it was published? No.



2. You don’t let the public into other negotiations e.g. the nuclear deal with Iran.

Not at all analogous. Nuclear weapons negotiations involve national security secrets about technology and deployment that can never be revealed lest terrorists and rogue states get hold of them. Senator Barbara Boxer put it well: the TPP is a matter of commerce, not national security. Neither North Korea nor Isis is going to try to undermine the US by setting up a patent regime for pharmaceuticals copied and pasted from the TPP.



3. Interim texts aren’t published for other important negotiations.

Yes they are. Here is the draft text for this year’s climate change conference in Paris (and I submit the future of the planet is more important than the US getting a 0.4% increment to GDP after ten years). Here is a draft text for the Doha round: Doha had a whole bunch of problems and collapsed, but I never heard anyone claim excessive transparency was one of them. And here is a draft text proposed by the EU in the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations.

Source: http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2015/05/five-arguments-against-the-self-defeating-secrecy-of-the-trans-pacific-partnership/