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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has highlighted two amendments to Fast Track (a bill which would authorize the President to enter into binding trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, without Congressional oversight). Senator Elizabeth Warren and 14 other senators are backing an amendment that would eliminate "Fast Track" for any trade bill containing an investor-state dispute settlement clause. That would include the TPP as well as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (between the U.S. and European Union).
A second amendment, from Sens. Blumenthal, Brown, Baldwin, and Udall, addresses the lack of transparency of the agreement, and would require "all formal proposals advanced by the United States in negotiations for a trade agreement" to be published on the Web within five days of those proposals being shared with other parties to the negotiations. This would bring the United States up to the same level as the European Commission, which has already begun publishing its own TTIP position papers and text proposals to the public.
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has said that the White House will veto TPP if a bipartisan currency manipulation measure he called a "poison pill" is passed:
"If a trade agreement is required to come back with a currency discipline that is enforceable through trade mechanisms, I don't think there is another country in the world that would agree to that," Mr. Lew said at a Bretton Woods Committee conference in Washington. "It's a poison pill in terms of getting agreement on TPP."
The Brookings Institution has an article about the TPP's effect on "biosimilar" regulations in the U.S. and other TPP partner nations. "Biologic drugs" are expensive therapies derived from biological sources. They include vaccines, anti-toxins, proteins, and monoclonal antibodies. The high costs have encouraged the development of biosimilars, follow-on versions of an original biologic. Some estimates predict that "competition from biosimilars could reduce US spending on biologics by $44 to $66 billion over the next ten years".
Current Food and Drug Administration regulations grant biologic drugs 12 years of "data exclusivity" following approval, during which the FDA "may not approve a biosimilar application that relies on the data submitted as part of the original biologic application". Without the ability to reuse original clinical trial data, biosimilars face the same high costs of biologic drugs. Opponents to the long exclusivity period argue that restrictions on biosimilar competition keep drug prices high. The TPP would require member states to match the U.S.'s data exclusivity period, and make it harder to change:
For the 11 countries besides the U.S. that are involved in the TPP, current data exclusivity protections range from zero (Brunei) to eight years (Japan). Under the Obama Administration's current proposal, participating countries would increase those periods to match the US standard of 12 years. Curiously, this proposal directly contradicts the administration's ongoing domestic efforts to lower the period of data exclusivity. Since the ACA passed, the Obama administration has repeatedly proposed reducing it to seven, arguing that this would save Medicare $4.4 billion over the next decade. Some have noted that, once the 12-year period is enshrined in the TPP, it will become significantly more difficult to change it through the US legislative process. Furthermore, imposing US standards on the 11 member countries would inevitably restrict competition at the global level, and many patient advocacy and international humanitarian organizations have argued that doing so would undermine the efforts of US global health initiatives like the Vaccine Alliance and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which rely on price competition to manage program costs.
TPP: Wikipedia and Google News.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @03:36AM
Always join hands to oppose these broad trade agreements. So we had Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan joining Ralph Nader and Ross Perot to oppose NAFTA, and now we have Elizabeth Warren and Rand Paul opposing TPP.
Trade between nations is, in general, a good thing that increases prosperity for citizens of both or all countries.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @03:54AM
But this isn't just about trade between nations. This is about increasing the power of corporations in very draconian ways. We don't need more draconian copyright enforcement, or a corporation's 'expected profits' becoming something like a natural right to the extent that they can sue sovereign governments (in a corporate trial) over regulations that prevent them from doing harmful things that could save the corporation a bit of money.
Opposing garbage like this is just par for the course for anyone who cares about freedom. And the fact that it is so secret is damning all by itself; that is simply unacceptable for any country that claims to be democratic. The citizens need to get their input in.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @04:11AM
So it's fine if hundreds of outfits in China counterfeit Western physical and digital goods? Take our creativity and pawn it off as their own? What do you think America's competitive advantage is, anyway? It sure the heck isn't the ability to manufacture stuff that everybody knows how to make at the lowest cost.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:01AM
China will keep doing that with or without a treaty. The only effect the treaty will have is elevating the likes of the MPAA to defacto government agencies even more so than they are now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @10:32AM
You do realise China is specifically excluded in this trade agreement...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by K_benzoate on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:19AM
I don't accept "intellectual property" as a legitimate concept. And the targets will not be the Chinese counterfeiters because they are forever beyond our reach, it will be (comparatively) wealthy US citizens engaging in copyright infringement. This is a power grab by the domestic enforcement arm of the copyright cartels to knock "offending" US citizens off the net and shake them down for a few thousand dollars each if they ever want to reconnect to the Internet. It's also a Trojan Horse to smuggle this system into the rest of the world.
I say no to that. Fuck your "competitive advantage".
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @10:34AM
The targets cant possibly be Chinese.
They are not party to the treaty.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by rts008 on Thursday May 21 2015, @01:42PM
Yes, it is fine. It was also to be expected.(and was by some who protested this business tactic)
Should have thought about that before outsourcing everything that was not in the 'Imaginary Property egg-basket' to cheap-labor countries in the pursuit of avoiding EPA regulations, instant gratification, and next-quarter profits.
That's obvious: our military and political pawns, driven by the military industrial complex that owns them.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @03:17PM
The ends don't justify the means. Accepting draconian laws or trade agreements to supposedly better enforce copyrights and patents is absurd. Freedom must prevail.
But this won't do anything to fix the little 'problem' you mention, anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @04:32AM
And to think they gave your President a Nobel Peace Prize.
Sounds like this is just a way to make more countries pissed off as Lawyers get to grease their pockets further into the global realm.
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday May 21 2015, @04:01AM
Except TTP is not about trade, it's about capital and, more specifically:
Some may forget that the capital is a mean to society, not an end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @09:15AM
It's not about free trade stupid. It's about increasing the power of monopolies and corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership_Intellectual_Property_Provisions [wikipedia.org]
You should be concerned when "free trade" laws can trump whatever other laws governments make, undermining national sovereignty: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kill-the-dispute-settlement-language-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership/2015/02/25/ec7705a2-bd1e-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9_story.html [washingtonpost.com]
Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators
If that seems shocking, buckle your seat belt. ISDS could lead to gigantic fines, but it wouldn’t employ independent judges. Instead, highly paid corporate lawyers would go back and forth between representing corporations one day and sitting in judgment the next.
Just because propagandists say it's about free trade does not make it so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2015, @07:54PM
Yes, I can see you bought into the comparative advantage theory of David Ricardo from the introductory Econ class you must've taken. In practice these trade agreements are used to disenfranchise workers in the wealthier country (who are often poor despite the fact that they live in a wealthy country) and the benefits to workers in the poorer country are funneled directly into the pockets of the ruling class. If there's a net benefit to these agreements, you won't be seeing any of it in your own pockets, unless you happen to be among the 1/10th of a percent of the wealthy. They're the ones pushing hard for this stuff and it's easy to see why when you look at the particulars of it.