Corporate-Backed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Shrouded in Secrecy

A good read about the TPP. Heard of it yet? It could destroy jobs, force more deregulation, send more "Buy America" purchases overseas. What? Yes!! Read on . . .

Corporate-Backed Trans-Pacific Partnership Shrouded in Secrecy
Tuesday, 19 March 2013 09:15 By Sam Knight, Truthout | News Analysis

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a multilateral trade deal currently being hammered out by the United States and ten other countries, could end up affecting every human being and dollar of wealth on the planet. The extent to which it will is clear to no one, apart from negotiators. But the deal, in its current form, has been in the works since 2010, involves Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam, and is open to all 21 countries in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) region. US Trade Representative (USTR) Ron Kirk, who just left his post in early March, and other top negotiators have said that they would welcome China, and recent reports in the Japanese and Australian media indicate that Japan is set to join. Thus, even the most minor of edits to the draft text could end up making or breaking people from Brisbane to Bangor. But legislators around the world are being kept in the dark about what they're voting on until the deal is hammered out; it's expected to be completed this year. When it's finished, if the experience of Congress here is any indication, legislators will be feeling extraordinary pressure from corporate lobbyists and their heads of state to accept the deal without a fuss.

The smoke-filled room itself is no secret. Kirk and his counterparts have said that talks must be kept confidential, in Kirk's words, "to enable negotiators for various governments to share information and have frank conversations that result in progress toward concluding a trade agreement."

But other officials, including American legislators and their staffers, sing a different tune. They decry the opacity as a way to ram the deal through Congress.

"When challenged about the conflict with the Obama administration's touted commitment to transparency," TPP critic and Public Citizen trade lawyer Lori Wallach wrote in The Nation last year, "Trade Representative Kirk noted that after the release of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) text in 2001, that deal could not be completed. In other words, the official in charge of the TPP says the only way to complete the deal is to keep it secret from the people who would have to live with the results."

Read more here:

http://truth-out.org/news/item/15142-corporate-backed-trans-pacific-partnership-shrouded-in-secrecy