Item — HN Reader

For some interesting insight into why trade agreements are negotiated in secret, listen to this planet money episode: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/26/417851577/episo....

Part of the problem of any trade deal is that you'll end up pissing off one group at home to make another one more happy. Trade negotiators argue they need to have the deals be negotiated in secret or special interest groups will cause too much noise and trade deals will never get done.

4 comments

Have you looked at who is going to benefit from the TPP?

The legislators are forcing this pact specifically because it promotes certain interests of various corporations. The group that will end up getting pissed off is the public at large when their quality of living is reduced. Novartis et al will get their rapacious drug profiteering enforced onto countries that currently aren't under their dominion, and the people who live in those countries will suffer through high prices for medicine because their politicians got a fat kickback.

Special interest groups are driving this entire partnership from start to finish.

This is true of legislation in general. Any significant bill brought to the floor of a legislature for a vote has already been negotiated by the bill sponsors and leadership, and usually they even have a good idea of how many votes it's going to get.

It's true of business deals too. Typically the managers will negotiate the deal in private, and then present it their board and/or shareholders to be ratified.

It's just really hard to make significant decisions in a large group of people. Anyone who has been in a huge meeting, or on a big committee, will understand that.

Yes -- the problem with negotiating the trade deal in public is the people you intend to screw over have time to use the democratic process to stop it before you can put it into law.

No, the problem is that you end up handcuffed by various interests in the process of negotiating.

If you try to give up one thing (e.g. free trade) in exchange for another (anti-counterfeiting provisions) and you get jumped on as soon as you suggest the first you never get a chance to broach the second.

Maybe the solution is to have a mandatory waiting period after the full text is released. 90 days before any votes can take place, something like that. Gives people time to go through and actually evaluate the proposal as a whole.

That's not how this works. The TPP is public before it is implemented, it is secret before it is finalized. If a country has the democratic means to stop it, it can do so after it is finalized but before it is implemented. I'm not saying that I like the TPP as a whole or that some countries aren't getting screwed over, but the negotiation process would be fucktarded if it was public all the way through.

Countries aren't getting screwed over, citizens are, certain industries or interests in each country are. These trade deals throw certain sectors of the country under the bus in favor of other sectors as they must.

And the ability to rubber stamp a 6,000 page monolithic treaty which has already been agreed to is a complete joke. It's about as democratic as a parent asking a child, "would you like to go to boarding school or boot camp?" The democracy happened during the negotiations and amendments -- at that point the needs of each constituent were considered, included or excluded, compromised. Unfortunately the citizens of these countries or their elected representatives or anyone willing to represent their interests weren't invited to that party.

The negotiation would be harder, sure if it were public but that's because making an agreement that is fair is a lot harder than asking corporate lobbyists to narrate a wishlist and typing it up. All they had to do was reconcile the many, many different wishlists (still very hard), not put forth an agreement that actual citizens would approve of (much harder but what they should actually be doing).

Maybe we should democratically vote for representatives that keep their policies secret until we've voted for them.

Yes, sometimes secret negotiations are needed to get things done. Look at the recent budget deal in the US Congress. [1] The media and the public had no idea what was going on behind the scenes when Boehner announced his resignation. If Obama or key Republicans had talked about the negotiations, no deal could have been made.

[1] http://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/9619214/budget-deal-congress

That already happens. Bills are written in mostly private negotiations between legislators. They are made public before they get voted on. They can amend the bills in Congress because amendments are voted by the same people who will approve or reject. If legislators in America, Canada, Japan, Vietnam all offere amendments, it's essentially going back to the drawing board of international negotiations.

So candidates are absolutely free (and do) keep their proposals secret until they are finalized and ready to present. The problem with the TPP is fast trackign it through. Candidates don't present all their ideas 12 hours before a vote, they do it months in advance and people have time to analyze and debate the merits.

don't we just call that "breaking promises" now?