TPP update

Popular Resistance - The Senate today is holding a key procedural vote that would allow the Trans-Pacific Partnership to be “fast-tracked.”

So who can read the text of the TPP? Not you, it’s classified. Even members of Congress can only look at it one section at a time in the Capitol’s basement, without most of their staff or the ability to keep notes.

But there’s an exception: if you’re part of one of 28 U.S. government-appointed trade advisory committees providing advice to the U.S. negotiators. The committees with the most access to what’s going on in the negotiations are 16 “Industry Trade Advisory Committees,” whose members include AT&T, General Electric, Apple, Dow Chemical, Nike, Walmart and the American Petroleum Institute.

The TPP is an international trade agreement currently being negotiated between the US and 11 other countries, including Japan, Australia, Chile, Singapore and Malaysia. Among other things, it could could strengthen copyright laws, limit efforts at food safety reform and allow domestic policies to be contested by corporations in an international court. Its impact is expected to be sweeping, yet venues for public input hardly exist...

There does exist a Trade and Environment Policy Advisory Committee and aLabor Advisory Committee, but their members are far outnumbered by those from industry. A Washington Post analysis from February 2014 noted, “Of the 566 committee members [in the 28 committees], 306 come from private industry and an additional 174 hail from trade associations. All told they represent 85% of the voices on the trade committees.”

Last year the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the part of the executive branch that runs trade negotiations, proposed creating a Public Interest Trade Advisory Committee, but civil society groups widely refused to participate in a process that would muzzle them from talking about what they saw in the trade agreement.