The TPP makes me crazy, as I'm a big fan of trade for basically the same reason I'm a big fan of transparency: I think things generally go better when we have a lot of well-informed individuals thinking and making choices.
I've been strongly in favor of pretty much every trade deal to come along. But here my feeling is more "fuck that" as I have zero faith that the secretive TPP process would produce anything I can trust.
The TPP is an anti-free trade deal. It's mostly about strengthening intellectual property and giving multinationals their own special courts so that they can sue governments for lost profits if they implement environment/labor legislation.
How do you know this? I follow economics blogs and the general reaction concerning TPP is that the secrecy hype is overblown and that it's largely just a mundane trade agreement with a few nasty provisions like the copyright stuff, but the good parts outweigh the bad.
I'd be hard-pressed to argue with their opinion without actually reading the agreement, not to mention the years of education and exposure to global geopolitics I'd need to actually understand what the provisions being argued over mean and why they exist.
Geopolitics is nuclear science that everyone seems to think is a bikeshed.
Mostly Marginal Revolution and whatever he links to. He's got a way of making economics accessible that I've yet to really see elsewhere.
I wasn't being literal. It's not very complicated, and you can understand it, but there's a lot of hidden context involved and the consequences of ignorance in that space are immense.
And that's the rub, right? You agree with most prior free trade deals because you're privy to the information needed to form an opinion about them. You and I may disagree, but we have access to the facts in order to have informed debate.
Keeping things secret can only be done because access to those facts would be almost universally distasteful to everyone - so let's not tell anyone.
(It's easy to then make a jump to human rights, as violations of those are almost always secret.)
Those other trade deals were negotiated in secret before being presented to Congress for a vote, or to the public if it was a simple bilateral agreement without treaty powers.
Do we negotiate nuclear policy iwth Iran on live TV with a big audience in the room? Of course not. Do we negotiate clogal warming agreements in public? No. The whole point of international negotiation is to sit down and be able to work out your differences in a de-politicized manner and then submit an agreement to legislatures for approval.
I swear, I've never seen so much paranoid bullshit as I have about his TPP thing. This is diplomacy, not fucking reality TV.
Nuclear agreements that deal with nations' rights to defend themselves on a level that could wipe out all life on Earth is so far and away different from trying to secretly enshrine universally disliked copyright laws for monetary protectionism, that it's mind-numbing that you would leave a comment with such snark while lacking any ability to differentiate between the topic we're dealing with and nuclear proliferation.
The TPP is aggressively trying to enshrine SOPA-esque laws on the international level - laws that have repeatedly been defeated by almost universal public outcry. The fact that they're reintroduced in secrecy, as a method to circumvent the will of nations of people is where the hate for the TPP comes from.
Then if such provisions make it through to the final version, encourage your representative to vote against it. I refuse to get caught up in this fake issue of diplomats negotiating things in secret - as far as I'm concerned that's a distinct positive, as i minimizes the opportunity for politicians to engage in unproductive grandstanding.
Do you have any evidence that, say, NAFTA was secret before the vote? I don't recall any of that from the time. I also don't recall this level of secrecy around climate negotiations.
I've been strongly in favor of pretty much every trade deal to come along. But here my feeling is more "fuck that" as I have zero faith that the secretive TPP process would produce anything I can trust.