Just a reminder: the TPP, like most trade deals, is negotiated in secret, but ratified in public. The final version of the deal will be published in 30 days, and then Congress gets 90 days to consider before an up-or-down vote.
The 90-day thing is a result of Trade Promotion Authority granted by Congress to the administration. This is the "fast track" Congress voted to allow the President. It means the bill can't be filibustered.
"The fast track negotiating authority for trade agreements is the authority of the President of the United States to negotiate international agreements that Congress can approve or disapprove but cannot amend or filibuster."
It "was in effect from 1975 to 1994" "and from 2002 to 2007" "Although it expired for new agreements" "it continued to apply to agreements already under negotiation until they were eventually passed into law in 2011." "In June 2015, TPA passed Congress and was signed by the President."
It would be wonderful if Congress was not allowed to amend any bills. It seems to me that a major problem with our political system is adding pork to bills to either kill them or sneak in some unrelated legislation.
Pork barrel spending is only 1% of national spending. This amount of "waste"[0] is hardly a large problem. It also serves a valuable purpose, it gets congressman to vote against their own interests to ensure a functional democracy. Pork barrel spending was used to pass both the Civil Rights Act, and to stop the recent government shutdowns.
[0] - Most of pork barrel spending is not on bridges to no where but on research for diseases, local roads, police officers, VA benefits, emergency response to hurricane Sandy etc...
Happy to see someone who understands that pork barrel spending was THE currency Congressman had in order to secure votes needed for important bills. That is truly how compromise was achieved.
That seems silly to me. Is every bill supposed to be perfect the first time? Amendments exist so that people concerns with a bill can be addressed. Getting rid of them would simply prolong the process of passing laws.
"The Act was passed on the last day before Congress adjourned for the 2006 elections. According to Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), no one on the Senate-House Conference Committee had seen the final language of the bill before it was passed.[4][5] The Economist has written that these provisions were "hastily tacked onto the end of unrelated legislation"."
Edit to add: I agree that the ability to amend bills shouldn't be removed entirely, but it certainly needs an overhaul.
> Getting rid of them would simply prolong the process of passing laws.
Sounds good to me! If I ever run for office (ha!), I'd run on a platform of reducing the number of outstanding laws -- e.g. every new law passed requires two antiquated laws to be rescinded. Plus, as a side benefit, we could massively reduce the amount of quid pro quo pork added via amendments. Consider it the legal version of "My net programming contribution this week was -2000 lines of code." [1]
I often hear people say things like, "If Republicans and Democrats (or the house and senate) could work together, they'd get a lot more done.", and I think to myself, "Is a 'productive' congress one that passes thousands of pages of legislation?".
Bills are like diffs. They are not law, they merely make changes to the laws that exist. Some bills will add new files to the working repository, others will delete files. The diff isn't the code.
That's a deeply insightful observation about my analogy... thanks! </s>
The point was: Continuously bolting on new {law, code} tends to monotonically increase a system's complexity. Many people consider unnecessary complexity "bad." I'm one of those people.
Perhaps in the house, but in the senate they're often used as a political tool rather than to address legitimate concerns with a bill. It's a shady way of making laws.
Whether the ability to add amendments prolongs or delays the passing of laws, that's a tough one.
The rising popularity of anti-debt politics is having a huge impact on the amount of pork amendments that are introduced in Congress.
Meanwhile, amendments now serve the purpose of attaching valence issues (i.e. hyped up issues that turn voters into idiots) onto any significant piece of legislation. See Congress now -- having trouble deciding whether Planned Parenthood funding is worth shutting down the entire federal government.
But the solutin isn't getting rid of amendatory processes, because those processes aren't the root of any contemporary problem. Amendmory processes have been around since long before the US was even a country.
That wouldn't solve any core problem of governance: those bills are an artifact of members of Congress having constitutional power -- the right to vote against a bill. Given that they have that right, they also have the right to withhold it until they're bought off.
If your proposal became law, Congress would still do these compromises, they would just pass the provisions on a different bill -- say, "vote for my bill and I'll later vote for your pork project in the next appropriation". All that would change is the difficulty of coordinating it. The fundamental problem is still there.
I don't have a problem with amendments per se; but I do see a problem with tacking unpopular stuff onto an unrelated or must-pass bill. I wish there was some requirement that bills be cohesive.
Of course Congress should be allowed to amend bills. Since Congress writes most bills of course they can amend them, if not directly then indirectly by scrapping one bill and introducing another, almost identical bill with the amendments.
No amount of process-tweaking is going to make any difference if Americans keep electing stupid assholes to public office. Likewise, even a rather broken set of processes can be mitigated if they're administered by intelligent and reasonable people.
(Now, for my pet idea :)
What I would like to see, in addition to an electorate that doesn't make such terrible decisions, is a requirement that every bill have a falsifiable statement of purpose, along with clear and convincing reasoning why the proposed legislation might achieve that purpose. The purpose would always include some time limit. If the purpose of the bill is not achieved by the time the limit is up, then the bill is automatically repealed. If the courts (or some new institution analogous to the courts) determines the the reasoning is not clear, or the time limit is not reasonable (e.g. a million years to do X) then the bill is also repealed.
But even that's going to break down, if administered by idiots.
Only if you want the US president to have dictatorial powers.
Consider the erosion of congressional oversight of military actions over that last 100 years. Do you think we'd have troops in combat all over the globe right now if Congress had to vote on the actions taking place? What congressman would vote to put Americans in danger to "train" the Nigerian army?
"After dogged, diverse grassroots pressure delivered major blows to Fast Track, proponents used procedural gimmicks to pass Fast Track through Congress by a one-vote margin ... Fast Track has only been used 16 times in the history of our nation, often to enact the most controversial of "trade" pacts, such as NAFTA and the establishment of the WTO. Meanwhile, hundreds of less controversial U.S. trade agreements have been implemented without resort to Fast Track, showing that the extraordinary procedure is not needed to approve trade agreements."
"Undemocratic", meaning that a tiny minority of legislators can't filibuster the bill preventing the majority from passing it?
All fast-track really does is put a timeline to an up-or-down vote for the final treaty. People calling it "undemocratic" are really saying "it's too democratic".
The treaty power of the Constitution is quite clear requiring a supermajority of the Senate to ratify any negotiated treaty.
[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur...
Fast track is inherently undemocratic as it is negotiated in secret ("no advise and consent") and most likely unconstitutional, but conventional wisdom says it is death for any politician in the US to stand in the way of legislation that "creates jobs" or "protects children".
I'm sorry, but I don't know how to respond to this series of non-sequiturs. Trade promotion authority is an act of Congress; it is a privilege the legislature extended to the administration. It was not required to do so.
Congress cannot delegate its powers or constitutional requirements to the executive branch :)
But reading TPA, it carefully skirts this line.
The most questionable part is the no amendments part.
The constitution says:
"All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.
"
Note the "as on other bills" part, clearly implying they must be able to propose amendments on other bills, and not just bills for raising revenue.
Aren't there a bunch of old SCOTUS cases establishing that Congress can in fact delegate, and that the Senate process doesn't have to be followed when the administration is acting merely as a negotiating agent for Congress?
As you can probably tell, I did some quick Google research, and the constitutionality of TPA doesn't see to be a particularly contentious issue, despite being discussed frequently. Got a better source than any of mine? (I can only assume you do.)
It's definitely the case that congress can delegate implied powers to agencies, but generally not explicitly authorized powers that were granted to congress. Here, my one concern is the no amendments part, and nothing else. That is because the constitution prescribes something. and that can't be changed by bill, only by constitutional amendment.
The rest of the delegation, it depends on what exactly is delegated.
More easily, the House and Senate are able to promulgate their own rules. Since the rules of things like consideration limits and cloture are not enshrined in the Constitution, but rather in House and Senate rules, they are free to pass a law like TPA that sets special procedures.[1][2] I may have strayed from your point though.
" they are free to pass a law like TPA that sets special procedures."
Agreed.
However my point was: they can only do that to the degree that these procedures do not violate explicitly promulgated constitutional requirements.
Ie they cannot decide to give a senator two votes, or declare that votes are decided by something other than yeas and nays, etc.
This is because the constitution says that is what is supposed to happen, and you can't override those requirements.
The no amendments appears to possibly run afoul of that, if what i quoted from the constitution is read the way i read it :)
It looks like this actually came up during NAFTA. A lower federal court found the NAFTA ratification process constitutional, and the appeals court found the question was political and thus not justiciable.
> Congress cannot delegate its powers or constitutional requirements to the executive branch
The Constitution gives Congress explicit powers to set its own rules regarding procedure. Among these constitutionally allowed rules are "let's decide not to debate a particular bill the President gives to us". They still get to vote and all the other things the Constitution states; all that has changed is the procedure by which the bill is presented to a vote.
"Among these constitutionally allowed rules are "let's decide not to debate a particular bill the President gives to us"."
Please read exactly what i quoted, which literally includes a quote from the constitution, instead of building a completely different strawman and tearing it down.
I'm sorry you neither know how to respond nor understand the meaning of the term non-sequitur; a clear line exists between one comment and the terms found in the next.
You may find this article helpful or simply search for "Nondelegation doctrine" for more detailed analysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondelegation_doctrine The TPP far exceeds the setting of tariff rates and negotiation of agricultural imports and in fact borders in several areas on setting legislative policy imperially.
For those readers interested in what "fast-track" authority means from Congress' perspective [pdf] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43491.pdf is an excellent resource.
I think the article implied it well. A democratic process is visible to the people allowing input on or changes to their specifics via public pressure, action by lawmakers, etc. We can also counter it through court interpretations. Defeating a filibuster would be as simple as agreeing to a limit on speeches lol. That you or they are justifying skirting the whole process over just that while ignoring their conflicts of interest is funny.
In this situation, a Congress being paid off by big companies voted to let a number of those companies, the executive branch, and foreign countries come up with all the terms of an agreement that can essentially replace domestic laws. And then they will vote yes or no on it all at once, a situation that previously made things too big to fail (reject). This is quite unlike how our laws are meant to be formed. Further evidence is how elites and powerful companies that often act at odds with the majority here get to read & contribute to terms but majority that will be affected by them don't. They just have to accept whatever terms are dictated by one branch of government, some foreign ones, and private parties with a history of abusing consumers for profit. Sounds more fascist than democratic...
The bigger point was made by a commenter way down the page. The question was, "Does a treaty like this lock us into all kinds of rules from environment to I.P. that prevent future legislation from improving these?" We're currently facing battles against rich firms over copyright, patents (esp software and medicine), environmental abuses, shady practices in agriculture, and so on. Americans and legislators have a chance of dealing with this through our legal process. Can that happen after an elite-controlled treaty makes rules for all this that benefit them and the countries agree to them? Huge risk there that's hard to quantify.
It prevents elected representatives from making changes to an international treaty that most have not seen before the final version is handed to them. So yes, it's undemocratic. It was not crafted by (or arguably for) the people or by their elected representatives.
Let's not get into the details of how they could actually see it (sort of), but couldn't get a copy to review with experts, or with their constituents.
You think it's a bad thing that the Republican Congressperson from the 4th district of Alabama, which itself contains no major US city, is unable to tack additional requirements onto a trade bill that binds the citizens of Vietnam, Malaysia, and New Zealand?
If Robert Aderholt doesn't like the TPP, he's perfectly free to vote against it.
How were the WTO and WIPO able to conduct multilateral public discussions with many countries and stakeholders? Those agreements influenced trade in many countries, without mandating TPP-style secrecy during negotiations.
Excluding public stakeholders from the development of legislation will not make their issues disappear, it will only force those concerns into alternate vehicles of expression, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_of_the_governed
The Doha round was widely seen as a gridlocked failure, and the other large regional FTAs (NAFTA, for instance) aren't WTO agreements either, are they?
We're commenting here about the link posted upthread, not the whole concept of trade negotiations. The link claims that fast-track authority is "undemocratic".
Treaties are in effects laws with extraordinary scope compared to a typical law. They are sort of a middle ground between a law and constitutional amendment. Because of this, they are supposed to be hard to implement.
Look at the devastating impact that NAFTA had had on the nation. That sort of change should require a high threshold to pass.
Which are themselves another means that Congressional procedure creates for tiny minorities and influence groups to exert their will against the majority.
I don't think straight up-or-down votes are necessarily the best vector for public policy in all cases! I'm not saying that it was unreasonable to oppose fast-track. I'm saying that calling fast-track "undemocratic" is a bogus argument.
It's not bogus. Congress is largely in the pocket of corporations, but it's still a democratically elected representative body. None of the appointed treaty negotiators are democratically elected.
And those democratically elected legislators voted and agreed to take TPP as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, which they will again vote on in 90 days. I'm missing the failure of democracy here.
As idiotic as it would have been to allow the Congressman from the Arkansas 3rd, home to no major cities unless you consider the headquarters of Walmart a city, to directly alter trade law, Congress could have done that. They retained the authority to filibuster or amend the TPP enabling bill.
Thankfully, several months ago, they voted and agreed not to let that happen.
And they can vote and agree to change that agreement.
Congress changes laws all the time. That's their job.
"As idiotic as it would have been to allow the Congressman from the Arkansas 3rd, home to no major cities unless you consider the headquarters of Walmart a city, to directly alter trade law"
Are you seriously arguing that Walmart doesn't have an impact on trade? Or that international trade only affects "major cities"?
I assure you that you are wrong about both of those things.
"Thankfully, several months ago, they voted and agreed not to let that happen."
And tomorrow they might change their minds.
Where does this idea that a law can't ever be changed once it is passed come from?
If they would receive an annotated version with the annotations explaining the reasoning that led to each final decision then it might be possible to come up with an objective judgement. But if you have to reverse engineer the reasoning of several countries over several years about numerous topics in 90 days and from hundreds or thousands of pages in a language that hardly resembles your mother tongue...good luck with that.
For the new U.S. laws that will be created to implement TPP:
"Sec. 106(a)(1)(D)) Thirty days after the president submits to Congress a copy of the final legal text of the TPP, he may submit to Congress an implementing bill for the agreement, an explanation of how the implementing bill would change U.S. laws to conform to the terms of the agreement, a final statement of administrative action proposed to implement the agreement, reports on projected environmental and employment impacts, a plan for implementing and enforcing the agreement and other supporting information. (Sec. 106(a)(1)(E), Sec. 105(d)(1 and 2), and Sec. 105(e))"
Well, isn't that the entire problem at the US side? Your Congress has 60 days to read and understand several thousand of badly written legalese, and make a decision on it.
At any rate: every member of Congress has a staff with a million dollar annual payroll.
Are they going to carefully review the TPP for problems? Of course not. But the negotiation process has nothing to do with that. They'll vote for or against free trade as a valence issue and nothing more. What few surprises we'll get will be a pure result of election year posturing against Obama.
As for whether this is a problem, again, I think that boils down to a valence issue. Either you believe that free trade and trade rule harmonization led by the US is a good thing, or you (reasonably) do not. If you don't, then the process we have now is terrible, because that process creates the potential that trade deals will happen. Because of course, if Congress was looped in on TPP negotiation from the outset, with advise-and-consent on each successive draft, there could be no trade deal. This Congress couldn't work out an agreement to fund a pothole repair if the repair was close to a contested district.
Remember here we're talking about Congress deciding about laws for other countries, much more so than for their own.
I wish we wouldn't speak about such things in singular form, without qualifying what we mean specifically.
A normal trade agreement is something along the lines of "we promise to not tax import of European cars, if you promise to tax Asian lawn mowers", or "if you promise to allow antibiotics for farm animals", or something else a commissioner wants to see implemented.
Is this for or against free trade? It is part of a free trade deal so one could argue it is for, by definition. But that stance makes it very hard to discuss these things, especially in media sound bites. And that's exactly where we are today.
I think if it's one thing we've seen during the past ten years, it is that such negotiations needs to become more transparent. They have turned into political issues where's there is an opinion (which is a good thing!) many years before the facts are public.
Or, in other words, they'll vote the bill by its title, and won't ever care to know what is in it. (And that is the naive explanation, the cynical one is way worse.)
Do you really not think this is a problem? And how will society push Congress to represent its interests if nobody had time to read it either?
(And, no, that's not about the US Congress deciding about laws for other countries. Each country on the treaty must accept the bill independently. Each one of those countries has a process for it, that's usually at least as broken as the US one - it's just that I was commenting on the US process.)
I think enough congresscritters have been making noise about being upset they can only read it behind closed doors during the negotiation process that they will probably read it now that it is being published in full. Michael Capuano, the rep for East Cambridge/Somerville, MA sent out an update that was basically saying "letting us read it in a closet without taking notes is basically useless. I'm a tax lawyer, not an international trade expert, so without outside input, I can't decide anything meaningful about it.
EDIT: tptacek is right: it is important to be clear that it is becoming open.
I use it frequently. It's my preferred gender-neutral term for referring to members of Congress. I don't know it's true origin, but I picked it up from Dave Barry.
I wasn't aware it was anything other than a slightly-silly gender-neutral term for members of the House of Representatives. I suppose 'critters' could be pejorative but I'd not seen it used that way.
Just to be clear: people were able to "read it in a closet" while it was being negotiated, because Congress was not supposed to be in the loop for the negotiation. That is no longer the case; the treaty will now be published and downloadable on the Internet, and Congress will have months to read it, discuss it, and to decide whether to ratify it.
I am ambivalent about the TPP. I am ambivalent about free trade agreements. I am ambivalent about globalization. I generally believe, from the perspective of the US market, that every job that can cost-effectively be exported to Asia already has been. I don't think job exports are a good thing but also don't think TPP has much to do with it.
So having said all that: I'm not arguing in favor of the TPP. I'm simply pointing out that the most common criticism of the TPP --- that it's a "secret" deal --- is both inaccurate and not particularly significant.
> the most common criticism of the TPP --- that it's a "secret" deal --- is both inaccurate and not particularly significant.
I disagree. The scope of this deal, particularly the ISDS (which seems to have been amended due to widespread criticism), is incredibly broad. Undermining the basis of justice and democracy in secret negotiations without any feedback from the public is a terrible idea. If it was just about tariffs, sure, go ahead. But if business can get awarded massive damages in private courts because a democratic system decides not to tolerate their harmful practices anymore, well, that's unbelievably harmful to any semblance of justice and democracy. Stuff like that should never be negotiated in secret, but be subject to democratic checks and balances. The status of ISDS is to me still the primary factor in whether this deal will be acceptable or not. And as long as it's an inseparable part of the treaty, the treaty as a whole should fall if this part of it is considered unacceptable.
Businesses can obtain damages from governments, if those governments are found to have enabled trade policy that contravenes the treaty. Businesses cannot go to ISDS for damages from citizens or companies in those countries.
I don't know what one thing you don't like in the TPP has to do with the level of transparency involved in its ratification. If the ISDS process is a grievous flaw, rather than a mechanism that is similar to those used in many/most other trade treaties, surely it won't be ratified.
Either way, you'll soon have the full text of the treaty, months before it comes to a vote.
"Surely"? Only when there's sufficient protest against it.
The reason why the secrecy makes ISDS even worse is that it undermines democratic means of the people to improve their country. They might vote for a good law, but doing so might lead to steep damages paid to the companies whose behaviour made the new law necessary in the first place. It seriously undermines the country's sovereignty, and that's not something that should be bartered away in secret.
>I'm simply pointing out that the most common criticism of the TPP --- that it's a "secret" deal --- is both inaccurate and not particularly significant.
This is an important point. And furthermore, I'd even argue that it was necessary. The lack of transparency in the negotiations was to allow country's negotiators to be able to put their cards on their table without being immediately skewered out of context. For example, if Japan's negotiator proposed eliminating tarries on rice imports into her country as a carrot, the uproar back home would be enormous. But if it resulted in say, a removal on tariffs for exported Japanese cars, then the country could see it as a net win when the final agreement was put forth.
The secrecy was only there to let them barter freely before arriving at a conclusion. Otherwise, the negotiations would have gotten nowhere, and free trade would be nowhere.
I understand why it's kept secret during negotiation, but the terms of the secrecy kept representatives from copying out portions of the text for analysis during the negotiations. This is significant because the 90 day time line is insufficient to read and analyse such a large reaching trade agreement.
Then under the short time frame, the argument becomes 'we worked for years on this deal' don't vote no on any one point you disagree with because it's tied up in a big Gordian knot with a hundred other points. If software were written the way we negotiate trade deals, we'd fire the programmers.
All due respect but I call bullshit on the idea that months of time is insufficient for hundreds of Congresspeople to work with their million dollar staffs and the armies of lobbyists for business, labor, the environment, and tech policy that will also analyze the bill gratis.
I know they won't review the enabling bill carefully. But it's not because the bill isn't transparent. It's because reviewing the bill is work, and none of them are excited about spending their precious cycles on work rather than political status games.
If this bill had been public 9 months ago and voted on 9 months from now, the amount of scrutiny legislators would give it would be roughly equivalent.
So if I suggested that say there is a 100k line update scattered amid a 20M line in-production codebase and you have 90 days before that code goes live and cannot be changed and cannot be revoked. Would you feel that 90 days is sufficient? I wouldn't.
It's not just staff to read the text, it would be identifying and lining up experts with context in each area to weigh in. So far corporate lawyers have been embedded into the process but few representatives of the people. So I think we should approach this with deep caution.
Yes, I think a team as large as the one assembled to deal with the TPP could easily handle a 100kloc patchset for a 20MM line project. Teams much smaller than that handle gigantic patchsets all the time.
When code is irrevocable, the team sizes and/or time to handle the code should go way up. I suspect most of us have internalized a gut feel for estimates along the lines of the Linux kernel process or other equivalent commercial low-reliability software process, when with long lived legislation, we should take more cues along the lines of the Space Shuttle code development process (or perhaps I should liken it more towards approving and implementing a new crypto algorithm...) as more reasonable approaches.
You make it sound like the TPP is the only bill these congresspeople will have to digest in the next 2 to 3 months, but I suspect they'll have plenty of other policies vying for their attention.
Even if it was the only policy they need to get their head round, what's the rush? Is the world going to fall apart if it takes a year to debate? Isn't our understanding of the intricacies of the bill likely to improve over a longer debate?
Who cares if the congress people have enough time to read it all?
If I wouldn't have time to read it all, if it were all I did other than eat or sleep in the allotted time, then there is not enough time for it to be sufficiently considered, and should not be passed.
> I generally believe, from the perspective of the US market, that every job that can cost-effectively be exported to Asia already has been.
Do you mean "every TYPE of job" or every instance of job? Plenty of jobs have been exported, and plenty more will be, until the world is basically flat. As one example, right now, US doctors are still commonly reading and interpreting X-rays and CAT scans. This is being automated and also outsourced. In other words, this TYPE of job is already being done by doctors in China. But large portions of work remain here in the US. The export and automation of jobs will continue.
Maybe you're right by qualifying your comment with "cost effectively". Surely that's the case in an efficient market. But "cost effective" will change as technology and culture develops. As hospital administrators become less tech-phobic, more xray-techs will work from Shanghai.
> I don't think job exports are a good thing
Why not? It's the most efficient way of providing economic well-being to less developed countries, which means better food security for their people, better education, better healthcare, and more stable politics. You might say exporting jobs is the #1 best way the USA can deliver aid to foreign countries.
Just as the Affordable Care Act was nitpicked and scanned by all sorts of interest groups, I'm sure the TPP will as well.
And that's where we come in as well. We'll get to see the agreement, review it ourselves (with the help of interest groups we support) and contact our congressmen if we deem those things to be worth scuttling the deal over.
And before I'm accused of being too idealist, don't forget that The aforementioned health care act was passed, and net neutrality was preserved. In sufficient numbers, your representatives /do/ listen.
As one of those who read through "Affordable Care Act", I dearly wish someone had done some proof reading before voting on it. On a second note, I would hope that the treaty actually has all of the provisions in it, unlike the ACA which had a lot of "release regulations in X days" (which were not met) type language.
This is why I believe that representative democracy is a joke. It may achieve something, but certainly not the will of the people most of the time. Also it wastes a lot of resources on campaigns, and voting. Just one voting day is like 400 million hours of productivity lost. Shouldn't there be an app for that, at the very least? :) If it's secure enough for your bank, why not for your ballot?
Wait - what? So voting is a waste of time; instead we should vote all the time?
OTOH any popular TV show is a worse waste of time, given that its on weekly and not once a year. I think we can give representative democracy at least as much effort as one episode of Bachelor.
Random samples means pollsters will be bothering only a "few" people at a time for their opinion. A statistically significant sample. Instead of everyone turning out to vote for a guy or gal who will MAYBE represent them, policy will be informed by what a random sample of America thinks.
The idea that your vote counts, when Public Choice Theory says it's irrational to vote, ... and then that the representative will actually do what they ran on, which most of the time every representative would do roughly the same thing ... and that lobbyists have just as much as voice as huge blocs of Americans, which a recent Princeton study showed when it claims America is now an Oligarchy... all this shows that maybe the idea of representative democracy is a dangerous fiction.
Much danger there, sure. But representative cannot be doing much the same thing, or there would be no distinction of Democrat vs Republican? I see them doing very different things, all the time.
Myself, I favor a proxy system, where you can delegate your vote to anyone - your minister, your boss, your sister-in-law. They in turn can delegate their proxies to another. Up the graph somewhere (with loops dealt with somehow) are those with 100,000 or more proxies, who make the bar for voting on national issues directly. Stories have been written about it.
Easy fix 1 - Vote on the god damn weekend. I can't vote because my boss won't give me time off is the sort of shit that should have been on the scrap heap alongside slavery.
Less easy fix 2 - make voting compulsory, with a small fine, like $20/$40 for not showing up to vote. Remember I said showing up, not actually voting, since you can simply cast a blank ballot and then leave having done nothing just as if you didn't vote.
Both are terrible. Which weekend? Jews who can't vote on Saturday are screwed. Why not simply let people vote via an app? Better yet eliminate voting!!
>As for whether this is a problem, again, I think that boils down to a valence issue. Either you believe that free trade and trade rule harmonization led by the US is a good thing, or you (reasonably) do not.
Not really.
The TPP is largely a mechanism for stripping sovereignty from signatory countries and handing it to corporations. It does this by creating a mechanism whereby they can sue governments in secret courts for lost profits.
Sure, there are probably a few provisions in there about agricultural tariffs, but trade liberalization isn't really what it's about.
That is as accurate an assertion as saying that Obamacare enables death panels to ration health care.
A better way to describe the relevant clauses is that corporations can sue governments under an international tribunal system if governments are failing to uphold their commitments to an international law. It's basically the same sort of process that was used when, say, the US and Great Britain had a dispute about the boundary of Maine.
> "corporations can sue governments under an international tribunal system if governments are failing to uphold their commitments to an international law"
From an outsider's perspective, the international tribunal system is too susceptible to corruption. Three lawyers debating in secret, no public or government oversight of the proceedings, with a small pool of lawyers that are eligible to work in these tribunals. If I remember correctly, there are 15 lawyers that end up working on 75% of all international tribunals worth over $4 billion USD.
This talk lays out a number of the problems with the ISDS system, including the figures I've either remembered correctly or got wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fDCbf4O-0s . If anyone watches it and finds the point in the video where ISDS is discussed, please advise others where to find the relevant information.
>A better way to describe the relevant clauses is that corporations can sue governments under an international tribunal system if governments are failing to uphold their commitments to an international law
It's got jack shit to do with international law.
The wording in the agreement uses the term "indirect expropriation".
It's defined as "where an action or series of actions by a party (government) has an effect equivalent to direct expropriation without formal transfer of title or outright seizure".
i.e. lost profits caused by legislation. kinda like when Australia decided to put warning labels on cigarette packs.
Oh, and the supra-national court will be adjudicated by some corporate lawyers who can probably relied upon to interpret the wording of the above agreement in the "right" way.
In much the same way, USC Title 42 is a mechanism for stripping sovereignty from state governments and handing it to individuals and interest groups. It does this by creating a mechanism where (certain) groups get to sue the government for damages based on certain types discrimination.
Various state laws give up sovereignty and allow individuals and corporations to sue the state for negligent actions taken by state employees. The Tucker Act strips sovereignty and allows various contracts to be enforced against the government.
Governments sometimes give up sovereign immunity. It's actually a very important component of the rule of law, allowing the government to be bound by law in addition to the people.
Federal law is still subjected to democratic oversight. You vote in elections, don't you?
Stripping states of sovereignty and giving it to the federal government is still moving it from one democratically accountable government to another.
This is not quite the same thing as stripping the federal government of sovereignty and giving it to a secret court of supposedly (but not really) independent lawyers.
If you think that it was a great thing that Philip Morris was able to sue Australia or Uruguay for lost profits for putting warning labels on cigarette packets then I suppose you'd be in favor of the ISDS provisions in the TPP.
If, on the other hand, you think governments should legislate for the benefit of their citizens' health, then perhaps not so much.
Does it exclude the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries as well? Those are two of the big areas people are concerned about with the TPP/TTIP/TISA/CETA.
We're talking here about the dispute resolution process, which the commenter upthread is presumably commenting about because it was the topic of a Last Week With John Oliver episode a few months ago. The dispute resolution process excludes tobacco, according to the NYT.
Yes I know that's what is being discussed. However, even if the tobacco industry is exempt from this particular trade deal, it's important to consider which industries are not exempt.
BAT suing Australia over plain cigarette packaging wasn't a one off case of ISDS being used to sue a country. Another example would be Lone Pine Resources suing Canada $250 million (USD I believe) over Quebec trying to ban fracking.
In other words, whilst I'll be glad if the tobacco industry aren't able to use ISDS to sue a country, there are plenty of other industries that could cause problems with this clause.
How else is anyone supposed to litigate trade disputes?
The whole concept of a trade agreement is that countries agree to a series of regulations.
There is no such thing as "international law". It is entirely ad hoc. There is no court that has proper jurisdiction over international trade dispute.
Shouldn't it be immediately obvious why a company that ostensibly had mining rights in Canada can't expect a fair result to a dispute with Canada by suing in Canadian court?
> "How else is anyone supposed to litigate trade disputes?"
In a court system with public oversight, just like the rest of us.
> "Shouldn't it be immediately obvious why a company that ostensibly had mining rights in Canada can't expect a fair result to a dispute with Canada by suing in Canadian court?"
This is the reason why ISDS clauses came into being, to discourage governments from changing rules that may affect their profits, even if the choice was made democratically.
Whilst I understand why companies would want it, I see democratic decisions as having precedent over company profits. If there's a situation where one side has to lose out, then I'd want that to be the company rather than the people of a country.
It's a risk investing in infrastructure or products that can cause problems with public or environmental health. Why should the people of a country have to carry the can if a company chooses to make a risky investment?
Here's another example of a ISDS trade dispute, El Salvador being sued $301 million USD by OceanaGold, with El Salvador resisting the gold mining that OceanaGold want to carry out because of the risk of poisoning their water supply...
Are you implying that a contract, legally entered into by a democratically elected government, should be able to be rescinded without need for compensation whenever the government or electorate feels like it?
This is the type of thinking that leads to nationalization of property without compensation, such as that being done in Venezuela and that which is expressly prohibited by the US Constitution - and it's prohibited for good reason.
> "Are you implying that a contract, legally entered into by a democratically elected government, should be able to be rescinded without need for compensation whenever the government or electorate feels like it?"
In answer to your question, not on the whim of a government, but in the case of the electorate, yes, whenever they feel like it.
We're not talking about a life or death situation here, we're talking about a company's profits vs. the will of the people. The population of a country should have the final say in what they want to do with their country, if a government makes a bad decision on their behalf that benefits companies over people that's their mistake. It's up to companies to decide if they want to risk profiting from these deals.
Please stop demonizing companies and recognize that companies are made up of employees. This very well could be a life or death situation for a company's employee.
The will of the people is fickle and ruthless - that is the most pressing reason why the USA was cast as a republic rather than a democracy.
Where does the ultimate power of the electorate end? Does the will of the people override your ability to travel to another state for better work or pay because you're needed desperately at your current locale? Does the will of the people stop you from working in tech because we need more people swinging a hammer? Where is the line in the sand?
I know this comes off as a slippery slope argument and it is easy for people who agree with you to simply write these questions off because, gosh darnit, tobacco is bad and we've seen this with tobacco on an HBO show - but really, where is the line?
>"Please stop demonizing companies and recognize that companies are made up of employees. This very well could be a life or death situation for a company's employee."
I'm not demonising all companies, it's possible to run a company with an ethical focus, so it is possible to put people or the environment over pure profits. However, companies that would put pure profits over people will not get my sympathy.
As for life or death for a company's employees, that's one of the benefits of social security, you can remove undesirable economic activity without jeopardising the lives of the people linked to that economic activity. So basically in a well run country, it isn't really a matter of life and death to stop a company from trading in your country.
On the other hand, it can be a matter of life and death if profit is put over people. The El Salvador gold mining story I linked to is one example of that, I have plenty of other examples if you're interested.
>"Where does the ultimate power of the electorate end? Does the will of the people override your ability to travel to another state for better work or pay because you're needed desperately at your current locale?"
The rights of the majority vs. the rights of the minority is one of the classic debates around what is important in a democracy. There's a need for a balancing act between the two.
However, when it comes to the rights of the majority vs. the rights of a corporation to make money, the answer is much more clear cut. What we're talking about in this case is the laws we set to give the people the society they want, as well as (in our current society) the bounds that set what a company can and can't do. If a company relies on a certain law being the way it is to make money, and then the law changes, then the company either has to adapt or fold or convince people to change the law.
>Are you implying that a contract, legally entered into by a democratically elected government, should be able to be rescinded without need for compensation
Yes. The idea that contracts should be sacrosanct is bullshit.
>This is the type of thinking that leads to nationalization of property without compensation
Remember when they freed the slaves? Slaveholders wanted compensation too. They almost got it too.
>How else is anyone supposed to litigate trade disputes?
In the country's courts, much like any other commercial dispute.
>Shouldn't it be immediately obvious why a company that ostensibly had mining rights in Canada can't expect a fair result to a dispute with Canada by suing in Canadian court?
No. If you assume a fair, transparent legal system, which Canada more or less has then you should expect a fair result. The legal status of the mining rights can be agreed upon as part of the treaty, much as it is in any other trade treaty.
It ought to be immediately obvious that a secret court that supersedes national law overseen by corporate lawyers is not going to deliver a fair result.
States (and the federal government) are stripped of sovereignty which is given to unelected judges. Now, if you really want to appeal to democracy, then it's pretty tough to criticize democratic sovereigns delegating their authority to other parties.
Do you also consider the regulatory state (in which various unelected bureaucracies such as the EPA or SEC write regulations with minimal democratic oversight) to be a problem?
In any case, I do favor the rule of law, which includes allowing unsympathetic parties to have their day in court and to have those cases decided on the legal merits. I also have no particular affection towards democracy or national sovereignty (I use protection of individual rights as my normative basis, and favor sovereignty and democracy only insofar as they protect individual rights).
> Now, if you really want to appeal to democracy, then it's pretty tough to criticize democratic sovereigns delegating their authority to other parties.
The problem is that TPP is a one-way transfer of power -- the costs of (democratically choosing to) flaunt these courts would be overly onerous to citizens of many signatory states.
Because TPP is de facto irreversable, your argument here is structurally similar to the argument that dictators make when their transition to power happens via reforms approved by democractic mechanisms.
I.e., just because a democracy at one point approves of a reform, doesn't make that reform tautologically democractic at all future points in time.
TPP is not irreversible - it's just that by reversing it, consumers will again suffer the hardships associated to non-free trade, just as they currently suffer them now.
Lots of laws are "irreversible" in that regard. For example, Obamacare is irreversible because if we reverse it, the people currently receiving wealth transfers will suffer in the exact same way they suffered prior to Obamacare. Does this mean Obamacare is a "one-way transfer of power" and somehow anti-democratic?
I hypothesize that for many signatory nations, it is de facto irreversible.
> just as they currently suffer them now.
Obviously I don't have the text, but it would be surprising if TPP contained no punitive clauses for openly flaunting the agreement.
> Does this mean Obamacare is a "one-way transfer of power" and somehow anti-democratic?
No. The "transfer of power" bit is the part that TPP and AFA don't have in common.
It is the combination of a law that would be overly costly to change together with a transfer of sovereign power that makes TPP anti-democratic. Either one without the other is fine.
Obviously I don't have the text, but it would be surprising if TPP contained no punitive clauses for openly flaunting the agreement.
Punitive clauses are unenforceable insofar as they extend beyond "if you tariff us we'll tariff you back".
Obamacare transfers sovereign power to various unelected agencies (e.g. HHS) as well. I guess you now agree that Obamacare is an anti-democratic measure?
There is a world of difference between an elected representative giving up democratic oversight and an elected representative transferring democratic oversight.
IIRC one of the judges in the "supersedes-supreme-court-rulings" ISDS dispute resolution mechanism is actually appointed by the investor.
The point was that the governments do not have a choice about whether to agree to the ISDS proceedings if they sign trade agreements that contain ISDS.
And my point is that state governments don't have a choice about whether to agree to court proceedings over racial discrimination if they sign agreements accepting federal money.
I mean yes - this is pretty clear. If a government chooses to allow oversight by courts, they can't choose who sues them. Why single out laws about free trade, as opposed to laws relating to environmental protection or racial discrimination?
Environmental protection and race discrimination laws are designed to protect the health of the world and the dignity of the people that live upon it.
The main reason ISDS would be used is if a company's future profits are put in jeopardy. This is either going to be because a democratic decision or a non-democratic decision restricts these profits. In my opinion, democracy wins over profits, and if the decision is non-democratic it's probably made by dictatorship, which is unlikely to take any ISDS decision seriously anyway.
The main point though is this, the desire for corporate profits must not overrule the will of the people, and there's a strong possibility that trade agreements with ISDS will not meet this criteria (can see how it has been used already). ISDS has the power to negatively impact the quality of life in a country, and this is the main reason why ISDS is undesirable for the general population whereas environmental protection and racial discrimination laws are not.
tl;dr; It's not really about democracy at all, that's just a post-hoc justification for your anti-corporate agenda.
Incidentally, badly implemented environmental or discrimination laws can also negatively impact quality of life, just as badly implemented trade laws can. Why aren't you concerned that bad workers may file bogus discrimination lawsuits, just as tobacco companies file bad lawsuits. (See Ellen Pao as an example.)
But I guess that stuff doesn't count, because it doesn't inspire the same negative feelings in you that corporations do.
Not anti-corporate, but anti-corporate power grab. ISDS gives companies too much power, so I'm against it. Corporations should act in the best interest of the people, not the other way around.
How do you know what it is really about if it is still being negotiated behind closed doors?
Not trying to be snarky, just wondering if you could direct me to parts of the actual document that you are using to draw this conclusion because I would really like to read up on some of the provisions of the TPP.
The last leaked draft the EFF have on their site is from May 2014 (specifically the chapter covering intellectual property). Other bits and pieces have surfaced over the last two years as well, not all of them obtained legally, which is presumably why the EFF don't have them on their site. I do believe Cryptome has them, but I'm at work, I can't risk visiting Cryptome to get the links right now.
There are some important points to examine to make when it comes to trade rule harmonisation...
1. Are the agreements designed to reduce import tariffs, or are they designed to link up product standards and business practises?
2. Are the changes being driven by governments or by businesses?
If a trade agreement is just to reduce import tariffs between certain countries, then there's less of a problem.
The problem arises when free trade agreements are driven by by businesses and designed to link up product standards. I can't say much about the TPP, but if it's similar to the TTIP then the latter is what we appear to be getting.
Businesses generally want less red tape, not more. You could argue they'd push for higher standards to cut out competition that couldn't follow suit, but if that was the case they could already compete without the trade agreements.
It appears to me that the aim is to lower standards to open up new markets, and use the ISDS clause to discourage any strengthening of standards, but perhaps you have a different view on this?
Public Citizen says, "The Fast Track statute requires public posting of a text 30 days after the 90-day notice of intent to sign", which means Congress will have 60 days to review the final TPP text and 30 days to review the proposed U.S. legislation that could implement the TPP.
Are you trying to add any information here? I'm not necessarily in favor of the deal -- I will wait to see it and for interest groups to analyze it -- but you're just repeating talking points.
The "secret" thing isn't even going to be relevant in 30 days, and until then, nobody knows what it says about computers. The currently known details are all about things like sheep, cars, and pharmaceuticals.
That seems like a completely unfounded accusation. The Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement, which some consider to be the precedent for this agreement, was only 160 pages long and was quite readable. Here's the PDF of it:
Furthermore, every congressperson has a whole staff devoted to dissecting these things, and there are numerous activism groups who will be doing the same thing.
I wonder how many signatories will not even disclose it to their people. Given the track record of the US government to sign stuff before its read (we have to pass it...) and the gogogo of people who support that idea when they think they are getting something, I see no problem with Congress having so short a time dealing with it.
If anything, if benefits the US in that thousands of tariffs on US goods will be gone.
> Just a reminder: the TPP, like most trade deals, is negotiated in secret, but ratified in public. The final version of the deal will be published in 30 days, and then Congress gets 90 days to consider before an up-or-down vote.
It's a maximum of 90 days after the implementing bill is introduced in Congress. There's no deadline for that bill to be introduced, but the bill can't be introduced until at least 30 days after the final text is submitted.[1] from [2]
The comic is too detailed and too well written to summarize here. Go read it.
The TPP is basically why many companies gave up "policing" the Internet about 6-10 years ago. Many of the voracious file sharing lawsuits ($150,000 or $750 per download, which ever is greater) just stopped. They've been waiting for stronger legal teeth. Now they'll have the legal backing of governments to do private corporate takedowns. If we thought the MPAA/RIAA getting local police and federal officers to enforce their policies was bad, there's a lot worse ahead at a larger scale than most people can comprehend (required ISP logging/tracking/takedowns of every URL (retention time? forever), required in-line packet inspection (globally distributed GFW with local policies), etc).
Fighting this won't be silly little "sopa nope-a" web blackouts. It'll need full time DC congressional lobbying from our viewpoints. It can be done, but it would take a few million in funding to drive the point home and maybe a few more tens of millions in campaign donations to turn around the right wrong-thinking people.
You can look at it this way. When the WTO agreement was passed, opponents worried that it would lead to a massive transfer of manufacturing jobs to China, which could undercut the US with lower wages, laxer safety and environmental protection standard, etc.
Supporters claimed that it would benefit the average American, not just the wealthy, and that the spread of a market economy would bring democracy to China, which would then pass labor and environmental protection laws similar to our own.
What actually happened is that the WTO led to a massive transfer of manufacturing jobs to China, inequality in the US has increased, China has shown no interest in democracy, the working class there still enjoys low wages and poor working conditions, and they are now the largest polluter in the world.
On top of that, the US as a whole has been weakened, and the fact that we have thrown away any chance of conditioning access to markets on the implementation of air pollution regulations looks ever more regrettable given global warming.
I think it is reasonable to look at that and adjust your priors to trust TPP opponents more and TPP proponents less, even in the absence of any TPP-specific information.
Well, nobody knows the TPP yet. It's not public. The parts that have leaked are pretty bad. The comic mostly argues against a common hybrid republican/libertarian economic branding of "free trade." Free Trade branding ended up being a disguise for reducing labor costs by moving interchangeable capital to places where people work for (and live off of) $1/day instead of $800/day, but people never get the same freedom of movement rights as corporate capital. So, companies reduce costs, but people can't move to cheaper (or even better) places to improve their own costs.
As for arguing the comic is godawful, maybe de-escalate your rage meter for a while? It's just an informative comic posted to an online text forum run by a multi-billion dollar funding organization. It's all kinda meaningless overall.
It's the opposite of an informative comic. It is a comic designed to deceive readers based on an illusory claim of expertise (its author is not an economist, nor is he apparently familiar with the TPP) in order to push an agenda. It is upsetting to see it repeatedly posted to HN.
As far as I can tell, we aren't licensed and bonded economists either, so there's no ground to take down another not-an-economist (No True Economist?).
So Congress will publish the full "30 page document" on their website -- and citizens of each country have 90 days to harass their representatives if they disagree w/ the agreement? Sorry to be dense just trying to understand.
Canada will ratify it. The NDP has come out against it in the last few days but gave itself many escape clauses to support it (it was supporting it until it started tanking in the polls). Their only chance to come in power is through a coalition, and the other two parties support free trade.
There is an excellent LSE debate podcast on TTIP with the chair of the Uruguary round. I have posted it before, and I will dig out the link, (http://www.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2014/11/20141124t18... ) but listening to the folks who built the WTO and their views on the current rounds is salutary.
The gist of the podcast (from memory)
- Fair Trade is good for us all
- Global trade agreements benefit the poorest the best because if everyone is included, it's rare for the clauses to include "screw those guys over". Small poor countries usually get screwed over because all the effort goes into the big agreements between big trading partners (naturally). Global agreements usually get you the same good deal as Canada gets.
- we have mostly solved tariffs on traditional physical goods. The WTO has done a good job on this. It seems a bit self congratulatory.
- the TTP and TTIP (Pacific and Atlantic) are best we can do after WTO Doha talks basically collapsed. Global is better.
- In general negotiations proceed to move standards upwards - European Chicken farms are fine for me in the UK but apparently the US consumers think we grow our chickens in faeces. As such the standards negotiated usually end up being the higher of the two, not the lower.
- TTP and TTIP should never be negotiated in secret. Most of WTO was not and it is a political failure to do so. But the outcomes probably won't change much as frankly it's not that interesting to follow trade negotiations
The upshot is the old guard of WTO basically announcing that the politicians set the stall out badly and should reboot, but the general direction is positive, that there should be a general default to take the "highest quality" standard in any negotiation.
So please when seeing the phrase "negotiated in secret", see where it sits in the history of WTO negotiations, and pester congress not to kill it off for cheap political points but to pay more attention to their guidelines next time round - and damn well make sure the whole world is included, not half and half solutions.
At least the US has a chance to debate it in parliament. In New Zealand, our cabinet passes it and there is no debate. If there's one thing I don't like the sound of, it's the ISDS clauses..
That'a a big problem. It's a huge deal and Congress can either approve the whole thing or reject the whole thing. That puts a lot of pressure on the single representative.
It should be voted on in small pieces. The same should have happened with the ACA. There are lots of parts that could be enacted on their own.
The trickiness (and the whole reason fast track is a thing) is that Japan agreeing on A likely depends on the US agreeing on B (which depends on Vietnam agreeing on C)
It's hard to do compromise if the compromise itself isn't voted in. And when you're talking about 12 Nations...
OTOH breaking down legislation into smaller chunks to pass is definitely a good idea that isn't applied often enough (see immigration). Though that too can be tricky. For example you can't have the universal healthcare mandate without the preexisting condition refusal ban ( I have cancer and can't get health insurance , and now I'm being taxed??)
The 90-day thing is a result of Trade Promotion Authority granted by Congress to the administration. This is the "fast track" Congress voted to allow the President. It means the bill can't be filibustered.