TPP Negotiators Hit With Protests, Media Doesn't Cover








In spite of the lack of American media coverage of this tremendously important agreement representatives of labor, environmental, family farm, consumer, Internet freedom, public health, faith, human rights and community organizations held a rally Monday outside the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. These organizations represent "stakeholders" from all countries that are denied a seat at the TPP negotiating table....At the rally George Kohl, senior director of Communications Workers of America, said "We believe in trade. We are fighting against old trade policy that literally guarantees corporate profits at the expense of working families in all nations. In the weeks ahead, we will mobilize like never before against Fast Track authorizing legislation and the TPP, and for 21st century trade that gives workers' rights, environmental issues and other concerns the same standing as corporate profits."

The negotiations are secret and the kids of people at that DC rally are not represented at the bargaining table. But corporate representatives have access to drafts of the treaty, and the negotiators typically come from and expect to go to lucrative corporate positions after the treaty is finalized -- assuming they "play ball." ... While we do not know exactly what is being negotiated, we do know from leaks -- and previous "NAFTA-style" trade agreements -- tell us what to expect. Much of TPP is about "investor protections" and not trade at all. These provisions allow corporations to sue governments for doing things that infringe on profits -- like laws and regulations protecting the environment, worker safety, consumers and the health of citizens. For example, under similar agreements already in effect tobacco companies are suing governments to block anti-smoking efforts that protect the health of citizens!

Members of Congress are very concerned about the transparency of the TPP negotiating process. On a call Monday Representatives Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Louise Slaughter (D-NY), Tim Ryan (D-OH), Keith Ellison (D-MN) and (rock star) Dan Kildee (D-MI) expressed their concerns about the secrecy of TPP as well as the failure to address currency manipulation in the agreement. Senator Elizabeth Warren put her finger on the secrecy problem, saying, "Why are the trade talks secret? You'll love this answer. Boy, the things you learn on Capitol Hill. I actually have had supporters of the deal say to me, 'They have to be secret, because if the American people knew what was actually in them, they would be opposed.'


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/09/1350478/-TPP-Negotiators-Hit-With-Protests-Media-Doesn-t-Cover

A corporatocracy


Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's superb research and activist group, Global Trade Watch, correctly calls the Trans-Pacific Partnership "a corporate coup d'etat." Indeed, nations that join must conform their laws and rules to TPP's strictures, effectively supplanting US sovereignty and cancelling our people's right to be self-governing. Worse, it creates virtually permanent corporate rule over us--there's no expiration date on the agreement, and no provision in it can be altered unless all countries agree. Thus, even if Americans voted in an election to make changes, any other TPP country could overrule us by not agreeing.


Well, you might think, we'll still have our courts to redress corporate misuse of TPP's provisions. Uh... no........ One of the deal's chapters creates a monstrous monkey wrench called the "Investor-State Dispute Resolution" system. In this private, supra-legal "court," corporations are empowered to sue TPP governments over environmental, health, consumer, zoning, or any other public policies that the corporations claim are either undermining their TPP "rights" or diminishing--get this--their "expected future profits." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This elevates thousands of private, profit-seeking entities to the legal status of sovereign nations. Under the investor-state system, a smaller version of which was included in NAFTA and other free-trade schemes, the deck is stacked for corporate interests. Cases are decided behind closed doors by three-person international tribunals of private attorneys who often have a glaring corporate bias. The same lawyers who represent corporations in these cases routinely switch over in other cases to serve as "judges." Holy revolving door!


These "tribunalists" are not accountable to any electorate, and their decisions are final--there's no appeal to a real court. If a corporation wins a case, taxpayers of the government being sued lose, for they must pony up cash to compensate the corporation for its "loss" of profit. . . . . . . . . . . . . At present, even before the elephantine TPP is imposed on us, corporations are demanding a total of nearly $14 billion just in cases brought under free trade arrangements that include the US. Among the current corporate giants suing governments in investor-state tribunals are (1) Philip Morris (Altria), attacking Australia's and Uruguay's cigarette labeling policies; (2) Chevron, trying to avoid its liability for the gross toxic contamination of people and nature in the Ecuadorian Amazon; (3) Eli Lilly, demanding that Canada rewrite its patent law to give its drugs extended monopoly protection; and (4) several European investment firms, assaulting Egypt's minimum wage law. . . .



http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/3402

As Bitter as Ever
The ‘Medicine’ of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
by Pete Dolack

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is as dangerous as ever. Denying access to medicines, increased surveillance of Internet usage and mandatory patents at the behest of multi-national corporations are some of the corporate goodies stashed in the TPP’s intellectual property chapter, revealed by WikiLeaks this month. Journalism could even be criminalized. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The more we know about the TPP, the worse it gets, which is why the governments of the 12 countries involved, led by the Obama administration, continue to negotiate in unprecedented secrecy. The latest text of the TPP’s intellectual property chapter shows very little change from an earlier draft also published by WikiLeaks. In a press release accompanying this month’s publication of the revised text,



WikiLeaks says: “There are significant industry-favouring additions within the areas of pharmaceuticals and patents. These additions are likely to affect access to important medicines such as cancer drugs and will also weaken the requirements needed to patent genes in plants, which will impact small farmers and boost the dominance of large agricultural corporations like Monsanto.” . . . . . . . An analysis by Public Citizen explains: “A rule [would] require the patenting of plant-related inventions, such as the genes inserted into genetically modified plants, putting farmers in developing countries at the mercy of the agriculture industry, including seed manufacturers such as Monsanto, and threatening food security in these countries more broadly.”



Monsanto, already attempting to gain a stranglehold over the world’s food supply, is hardly in need of yet more favorable treatment. Proprietary seeds and genetically modified organisms are Monsanto’s routes to control what you eat and what farmers grow. Once under contract, farmers are required to buy new genetically engineered seeds from the company every year and the Monsanto herbicide to which the seed has been engineered to be resistant. . . . . Stealth ‘fast-track’ process needed to sneak TPP through Congress: Concomitant to the secrecy shrouding the TPP is the stealth needed to pass the “free trade” treaty. The Obama administration is seeking to be given “fast-track” authority by Congress. Under the fast-track process, Congress cedes its right to make any changes, limits its time to debate, and must schedule a straight yes-or-no vote (no amendments allowed) in a short period of time. Some of the worst “free trade” deals have been approved in this manner, and the importance of fast-track is shown in that the last U.S. trade pact approved, with South Korea, was approved in 2007 — literally one minute before fast-track authority expired!



http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/24/the-medicine-of-the-trans-pacific-partnership/

How the Trans-Pacific Partnership Would Undermine Internet Freedom


Remember SOPA - the "copyright" legislation before Congress last year that public outcry stopped cold? Well, the same corporations behind SOPA have pushed to insert its most pernicious provisions into TPP. Says who? The organizations that stopped SOPA like the Electronic Freedom Foundation and the ACLU.

Under this TPP proposal, Internet Service Providers could be required to "police" user activity (i.e. police YOU), take down internet content, and cut people off from internet access for common user-generated content.

Violations could be as simple as the creation of a YouTube video with clips from other videos, even if for personal or educational purposes....Mandatory fines would be imposed for individuals' non-commercial copies of copyrighted material. So, downloading some music could be treated the same as large-scale, for-profit copyright violations.

Innovation would be stifled as the creation and sharing of user-generated content would face new barriers, and as monopoly copyrights would be extended. The TPP proposes to impose copyright protections for a minimum of 120 years for corporate-created content... Breaking digital locks for legit purposes, such as using Linux, could subject users to mandatory fines. Blind and deaf people also would be harmed by this overreach, as digital locks can block access to audio-supported content and closed captioning.



http://www.exposethetpp.org/TPPImpacts_InternetFreedom.html

Article One, section 8, clause 8:

"The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_patent_law

EFF: All Nations Lose with TPP's Expansion of Copyright Terms

....corporate works that were not published within 25 years of its creation, are protected the term of protection is 120 years from the date of the creation.This provision expands the terms of the controversial US Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (or the “Mickey Mouse Act” as it was called due to Disney’s heavy lobbying) to countries of the Pacific region. New Zealand, a party to the TPP negotiations, currently has a copyright term of the author’s life and an additional 50 years for literary works. Another TPP member, Malaysia, has a copyright term of life plus 50 years for “literary, musical or artistic work.” Canada, which is just entering negotiations, has an even shorter term of just 50 years for fixed sound recordings. Pursuant to the current TPP terms [pdf], all of these countries would be required to extend their terms and grant companies lengthy exclusive rights to works for no empirical reason.

The common justification for granting restrictive monopoly rights in copyright law is to provide an “incentive” for people to generate material that can be enjoyed by the public. But economists and law scholars who have studied this rationale have found that “the optimal length of copyright is at most seven years.” . . . Long copyright terms are a poor recipe for compensating creators, who generally receive low royalties from their works.5 And yet, the strong copyright lobby prevents any recommendation to reduce the presently excessive terms, attacking any attempt to speak for the public domain or for users rights and dazzles politicians with nonsensical “copyright math”.


https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/08/all-nations-lose-tpps-expansion-copyright-terms

Fortunately, and bringing me to the second and more important reason the TPP undermines popular sovereignty, the investment chapter for the TPP was leaked, and the excellent Public Citizen[2] published it (link to the PDF). Their summary in relevant part describes the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions:

These provisions are so extreme that many people unfamiliar with them tend to dismiss description of them or their implications…

Procedural rights that are not available to domestic investors to sue governments outside of national court systems, unconstrained by the rights and obligations of countries’ constitutions, laws and domestic court procedures (Section B). There is simply no reason for foreign investors to pursue claims against a nation outside of that nation’s judicial system, unless it is in an attempt to obtain greater rights than those provided under national law. Moreover, many of the TPP partners have strong domestic legal systems . For example, TPP partners New Zealand, Australia and Singapore are all ranked by the World Bank as performing at least as well as the United States with regard to control of corruption and adherence to rule of law. Yet in a manner that would enrage right and left alike, the private “investor-state” enforcement system included in the leaked TPP text would empower foreign investors and corporations to skirt domestic courts and laws and sue governments in foreign tribunals. There, they can demand cash compensation from domestic treasuries over domestic policies that they claim undermine their new investor rights and expected future profits. This establishes an alarming two-track system of justice that privileges foreign corporations in myriad ways relative to governments or domestic businesses. It also exposes signatory countries to vast liabilities, as foreign firms use foreign tribunals to raid public treasuries.

So that explains the “new kind of” “regulatory structure,” the “binding international governance system” a lot better than I can. Because this new “governance system” is literally, and not metaphorically, revolutionary[3], I took a look at the actual text of the Investment Chapter, made some screen shots, and added some (really sloppy) yellow magic marker highlighting. I should say that I am by no stretch of the imagination a subject matter expert in the language of international trade treaties, though I do know a “shall” when I see it; my purpose in highlighting the text is simply to show passages that the cynical would characterize as “weasel wording,” or subject to “lawyerly parsing,” or containing, in the vulgate, “loopholes that you could drive a truck through.” Also, you may wish to contrast the majesty of the language of the U.S. Constitution with the fluorescent-lit, Orwellian bureaucratese of the Investment Chapter. Also too, you’ve really got to read this stuff to believe it.


http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/the-tpp-if-passed-spells-the-end-of-popular-sovereignty-for-the-united-states.html

Seven Reasons Police Brutality Is Systemic, Not Anecdotal





...the plural of anecdote is not data, and the media is inevitably drawn toward tales of conflict. Despite the increasing frequency with which we hear of misbehaving cops, many Americans maintain a default respect for the man in uniform. As an NYPD assistant chief put it, “We don’t want a few bad apples or a few rogue cops damaging” the police’s good name.

This is an attractive proposal, certainly, but unfortunately it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Here are seven reasons why police misconduct is a systemic problem, not “a few bad apples”:

1. Many departments don’t provide adequate training in nonviolent solutions.

This is particularly obvious when it comes to dealing with family pets. “Police kill family dog” is practically its own subgenre of police brutality reports, and most of these cases—like the story of the Minnesota children who were made to sit, handcuffed, next to their dead and bleeding pet—are all too preventable. Some police departments have begun to train their officers to deal more appropriately with pets, but Thomas Aveni of the Police Policy Studies Council, a police consulting firm, says it’s still extremely rare. In the absence of this training, police are less likely to view violence as a last resort.

2. . . .


http://www.theamericanconservative.com/seven-reasons-police-brutality-is-systematic-not-anecdotal/

Two Seconds









"....Watch the video. Again, there is no audio, but how on earth can anybody order someone to raise his hands three times in two seconds? That’s how long it took from the time the police car stopped until Rice was lying on the ground, mortally wounded.

What you see is not always what you get, so we need to wait for the investigation. But this looks very, very bad for the Cleveland police. From the look of things on this video, that kid barely had time to react to the sudden appearance of a police car before he was on the ground with one or more bullets inside of him....

....there is virtually no time at all between the police car stopping and the officer shooting Tamir Rice. It’s hard to see what Rice was doing with his hands when the car stopped; maybe the police feared that he was about to shoot them. Still … two seconds? Really? This looks very, very wrong to me. In fact, this looks outrageous. I don’t blame people one bit for protesting this.

The cop’s last name is Loehmann. A pretty safe bet he’s white."




http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/two-seconds-tamir-rice/