TransPacific Partnership trade pact: Halt U.S. law/issue penalties 4 noncompliance

[newworldafro]

Check this video.......I guarantee you won't hear this on MSM...

TPP secrets: Obama covertly granting more power to multinational corporations — RT

TPP secrets: Obama covertly granting more power to multinational corporations

Published: 13 June, 2012, 20:20
Edited: 14 June, 2012, 01:15

Despite the White House’s efforts to keep a proposed free trade agreement concealed from the public — and even Congress — an excerpt from the TPP leaked Wednesday reveals that President Obama is prepared to bow to multinational corporations.

The United States has been engaged in discussion with eight Pacific nations to come to agreement on the terms of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade contract that would allow for a more open system of exchange between the US and less developed nations. Critics have been concerned, however, over how provisions of the project could drive up the price of medications and other goods across the world. The White House’s reluctance to provide details to even leading lawmakers responsible for America’s trade plans has caused a rift within the president’s own political party as his administration remains adamant about protecting the items being heard.

A section of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership was leaked to the Web early Wednesday, and its contents suggest that US President Barack Obama was perhaps not so genuine with promises made while campaigning in 2008 and even offers some insight into why his administration has been eerily secretive about the TPP.

Details about negotiations determined during meetings between White House officials and leaders from the eight Pacific nations involved in the TPP have been so hidden from the public that even some members of the US Congress have called on the president to come forth with information. In a leak published this week by the advocacy website Public Citizen, though, it’s made clear that the Obama administration has every intention of backpedaling on previous promises that could largely impact regulations that will directly affect the safety and financial security of millions of Americans and international citizens.

According to the leaked excerpt, the Obama administration has been considering TPP provisions that would allow foreign corporations operating within the United States to appeal regulations on the environment and banking that would be forced on American-owned businesses with no chance of reprieve. While the United States could be sanctioned for failing to impose regulations on American-run businesses, multinational corporations are practically encouraged to do as much because the TPP outlines a clear avenue to file an appeal. If one of the eight Pacific nations chooses to do as much, their plea would be heard by an international tribunal that could overrule US law.

Such key components of the leaked TPP document conflict directly with campaign promises harped by then-candidate President Obama while vying for the White House. Huffington Post reports that during the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama was clear in emphasizing, "We will not negotiate bilateral trade agreements that stop the government from protecting the environment, food safety or the health of its citizens; give greater rights to foreign investors than to US investors; require the privatization of our vital public services; or prevent developing country governments from adopting humanitarian licensing policies to improve access to life-saving medications.”

On the contrary, President Obama is reportedly not so concerned today. Condemning the president over how the TPP could alter intellectual property standards are many critics who fear that the agreement would lead to the monopolization of life-saving drugs and thus propel the prices to an unaffordable amount.

"Bush was better than Obama on this," Judit Rius of Doctors Without Borders Access to Medicines Campaign tells HuffPo. "It's pathetic, but it is what it is. The world's upside-down."

Last month, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) introduced legislation that specifically targets the Obama administration by demanding that the White House open up on details about the proposed TPP. Despite serving as chair of the United States Senate Finance Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness, Sen. Wyden has been largely left uninformed about the details of the TPP all while the White House has opened up to the multinational corporations expected to profit through the proposal.
“The majority of Congress is being kept in the dark as to the substance of the TPP negotiations, while representatives of U.S. corporations – like Halliburton, Chevron, PHRMA, Comcast, and the Motion Picture Association of America – are being consulted and made privy to details of the agreement,” said Wyden. The senator’s legislation would require the United States Trade Representative office “to provide documents related to trade negotiations to members of Congress and their staff upon request.”

So no congressional person has knowledge of what is occurring here, but several multinational heads are in attendance. Plus, the video said the entire document is being written so that the entire agreement can be hidden from public view 4 years after its completed............. ............. .......... .....

 

[newworldafro]

Check these videos......and the one above......they can explain better than I can, pretty basic though...

 

[newworldafro]

Secret TPP Deal Would Void Democracy | Labor Notes

Secret TPP Deal Would Void Democracy

.July 08, 2013 / Jane Slaughter

Many people know NAFTA has cost U.S. workers 700,000 jobs. But how many know another effect was to drive Mexican small farmers out of business? In the brave new world of free trade, Costco makes tortilla chips and salsa in the U.S. and trucks them to its stores in Mexico. Congress will soon debate whether to “fast-track” a trade deal that would make job-killers like NAFTA look puny. The Trans-Pacific Partnership would give corporations the right to sue national governments if they passed any law, regulation, or court ruling interfering with a corporation’s “expected future profits.” They could also sue over local or state laws they didn’t like. The TPP would cover 40 percent of the world’s economy. Existing laws and regulations on food safety, environmental protection, drug prices, local contracting, and internet freedom would all be up for challenge. And the decision-makers on such suits would not be local judges and juries; they’d be affiliated with the World Bank, an institution dedicated to corporate interests.

CAN IT BE STOPPED?

Citizen groups believe they can stop the TPP if there is enough outcry. They point to previous victories over the WTO (World Trade Organization) and FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas).

Most unions, however, have been slow to get on board—even though the TPP would jeopardize, according to the AFL-CIO, millions of jobs. The Teamsters and Communications Workers have been the most active. Greg Junemann, president of the Professional and Technical Engineers, says unions have given up, certain that “what Obama wants to do, they [Congress] are going to do.” Junemann, with other union heads, sits on a labor advisory committee (LAC) on trade—which, he said, has been completely ignored. In a June 6 letter, LAC chair Thomas Buffenbarger of the Machinists sharply criticized the administration for “restrictions on information that is shared with LAC members,” “unwillingness to share bracketed text or tabled positions from our negotiating partners,” and “refusal to include labor representatives on Industry Trade Advisory Committees.”

FAST TRACK

Over the opposition of many unions, President Obama signed corporate-friendly trade agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia in fall 2011. He singled out the TPP as a priority in this year’s State of the Union speech and wants Congress to give him “fast-track” authority. Veterans of the fight against Bill Clinton’s NAFTA will remember fast track—Congress gives away its ability to amend an international agreement, in favor of a simple up-or-down vote. Each house may debate the bill for no more than 20 hours. Fast track is likely to come up in late summer or early fall. But most Democrats in the House are opposed to fast track and the TPP, says Arthur Stamoulis of the Citizens Trade Campaign, and many Republicans will also vote against it (some because they want to deny Obama any appearance of success). Junemann counters that, in the end, doing what big business wants will weigh more with Republicans than hurting Obama. In any case, “there is no way they can get TPP through without fast track,” Stamoulis said. “When we defeated the FTAA [in the early 2000s], the first step was cross-border people’s movements dragging the proposal out of the shadows, shining a light on it, and introducing accountability and scrutiny to the negotiations.” Light and scrutiny have both been sorely lacking thus far, but leaks about TPP’s contents are alarming.

LOCAL LAWS TRUMPED

Corporations could sue governments over laws not to their liking. They are already doing so under existing “trade” agreements, but TPP would vastly expand the number of corporations and countries involved. For example, Australia passed a law requiring plain packaging for cigarettes (no Joe Camel). U.S.-based Philip Morris is in court over predicted lost sales. After the Fukushima disaster, Germany enacted a moratorium on nuclear power; a Swedish energy company is now suing the German government. Bechtel sued Bolivia for undoing the privatization of its water supply. Corporations have already collected $365 million by suing governments, usually in developing countries, under existing treaties, and $13 billion more is pending in suits under NAFTA and the Central America (CAFTA) and Peru FTAs. Most suits thus far are over environmental issues. But in June 2012, the French firm Veolia sued the Egyptian government for raising the minimum wage. Under TPP, the corporation would sue the federal government, whether the case pertained to a federal, state, or local law or court decision. If the tribunal awarded damages to the corporation, the federal government would pay. So if the government doesn’t want more suits, it has to change its laws (or pressure the local government to do so). Under NAFTA, the U.S. chemical company Ethyl Corp. sued Canada because it had banned the use of a gasoline additive called MMT, as a public health measure. Canada backed down, allowed MMT, and paid Ethyl $13 million. TPP would give international firms equal access to federal government contracts. TPP would include aggressive intellectual property rules to protect Big Pharma’s patents and restrict access to generic medicines. The consequences for those unable to afford HIV drugs, for example, especially in poor countries, would include hundreds of thousands of deaths. The U.S. Department of Energy has the authority to regulate exports of natural gas—but not to countries that have free trade agreements with the U.S. TPP would mean stepped-up natural gas exports, without review, to Japan, the world’s largest importer of natural gas, and therefore increased to find that gas. And presumably, when U.S. states, counties, and cities ban fracking, energy companies from any interested country could try to get those bans overturned. (Domestic oil and gas companies are already suing over local fracking bans, such as in Longmont, Colorado, and Dryden, New York.)

JOBS GONE

These new rights for corporations are horrifying, but the most widespread effect of TPP would be job loss. The minimum wage in Vietnam, for example, is $2.23 a day, so labor-intensive industries are already eager to move there. The TPP would accelerate that process: It would remove U.S. tariffs on goods produced in Vietnam and any other TPP country. Manufacturers in capital-intensive industries (heavy machinery factories, paper mills, semiconductors), who might be reluctant to risk investment, would be protected against the threat of other countries’ passing new environmental or regulatory costs. TPP’s protections against loss of “intellectual property” would reassure investors about building in Vietnam, where the majority of college grads are in math and science. Such concerns are currently a major disincentive for IT or research work in Vietnam, as its intellectual property practices are far looser than those in the U.S. Through arm-twisting and over the objections of the unions who’d worked to get him elected, Bill Clinton pushed through NAFTA in 1993. But by the early 2000s, “free trade” had a track record. The Free Trade Area of the Americas would have extended NAFTA to 31 more countries in the hemisphere. Some Latin American countries, notably Brazil, said no. Big protests were held in Quebec City in 2001 and in Miami in 2003, and the FTAA died. To stop fast track and the TPP, Citizens Trade Campaign suggests three actions: Contact your Congressperson and urge a “no” vote. Spread the word widely about the TPP, through all channels. And if TPP negotiations are held in North America, mobilize to greet the bargainers—à la Seattle 1999.

What Is the TPP?

It might as well stand for “Take Power from the People,” a Detroit postal worker said. The Trans-Pacific Partnership has been under hush-hush negotiations since 2008. It includes the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and, soon, Japan. A “docking mechanism” would allow other countries, including China, to join over time. The contents have not been made public, but are known to the 600 “corporate advisors” helping write it, such as Chevron, Halliburton, Walmart, Ford, GE, AT&T, Cargill, Pfizer, and the Semiconductor Industry Association. Some information has come to light through leaks. Like most trade agreements, the TPP is mostly not about trade but about giving corporations more rights to interfere with local laws. TPP tribunals staffed by corporate lawyers, outside the control of any government, would rule whether a country’s taxpayers must pay monetary damages to wronged corporations. Negotiations begin in July on a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement between the U.S. and the European Union. Stopping TPP would help derail it, too.

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread957788/pg1

 

[newworldafro]

Update

1)

2)

Secret Globalist Treaty Threatens Internet Freedom
http://www.prisonplanet.com/secret-globalist-treaty-threatens-internet-freedom.html

Kurt Nimmo
November 13, 2013

Wikileaks has released a 95 page, 30,000 word document spelling out details on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The secret globalist agreement will have a significant effect on a wide range of issues including internet freedom, medicine, patents, and civil liberties. The cabal will meet in Salt Lake, Utah, between November 19 and 24.
The draft text for the TPP Intellectual Property Rights Chapter spells out provisions for implementing a transnational “enforcement regime” designed to supplant national laws and sovereignty with a globalist construct. The TPP is by far the largest and most oppressive economic treaty devised thus far. It will have an impact on a staggering 40 percent of worldwide GDP. The TPP is the forerunner to the equally secret US-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TPP). Both treaties combined will cover 60 percent of world GDP and exclude China.
Enforcement will be accomplished by “supranational litigation tribunals to which sovereign national courts are expected to defer.” According to the document, the globalist courts can conduct hearings with secret evidence.
In addition, aspects of the treaty resemble SOPA and ACTA treaties with draconian surveillance mechanisms. In early 2013, thousands of websites “went black” to show solidarity in opposition to SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, legislation that seriously threatened the functionality of the internet. “SOPA was an attempt to put the power of information back in the hands of an elite few who are rapidly losing the ability to control what the masses are reading, hearing and seeing,” Mac Slavo wrote in January, 2012.
“Since the beginning of the TPP negotiations, the process of drafting and negotiating the treaty’s chapters has been shrouded in an unprecedented level of secrecy,” Wikileaks notes in a statement on the release of the TPP draft. “Access to drafts of the TPP chapters is shielded from the general public. Members of the US Congress are only able to view selected portions of treaty-related documents in highly restrictive conditions and under strict supervision. It has been previously revealed that only three individuals in each TPP nation have access to the full text of the agreement, while 600 ’trade advisers’ – lobbyists guarding the interests of large US corporations such as Chevron, Halliburton, Monsanto and Walmart – are granted privileged access to crucial sections of the treaty text.”
Obama is poised to fast-track the secret agreement. “The US administration is aggressively pushing the TPP through the US legislative process on the sly,” said Wikileaks editor Julian Assange.
“If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs,” Assange added.

3) Secret TPP treaty: Advanced Intellectual Property chapter for all 12 nations with negotiating positions
WikiLeaks release: November 13, 2013
https://wikileaks.org/tpp/static/pdf/Wikileaks-secret-TPP-treaty-IP-chapter.pdf

 

[newworldafro]

http://www.blacklistednews.com/Go_t...in_the_Secret_TPP_Deal/41820/0/38/38/Y/M.html

Go to Prison for Sharing Files? That’s What Hollywood Wants in the Secret TPP Deal
Published: February 13, 2015

The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States’ excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will be harder to shorten them in the future. It contains extremeDRM anti-circumvention provisions that will make it a crime to tinker with, hack, re-sell, preserve, and otherwise control any number of digital files and devices that you own. The TPP will encourage ISPs to monitor and police their users, likely leading to more censorship measures such as the blockage and filtering of content online in the name of copyright enforcement. And in the most recent leak of the TPP’s Intellectual Property chapter, we found an even more alarming provision on trade secrets that could be used to crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers who report on corporate wrongdoing.
Here, we’d like to explore yet another set of rules in TPP that will chill users’ rights. Those are the criminal enforcement provisions, which based upon the latest leak from May 2014 is still a contested and unresolved issue. It’s about whether users could be jailed or hit with debilitating fines over allegations of copyright infringement.

Dangerously Low Threshold of Criminality

The US is pushing for a dangerously broad definition of a criminal violation of copyright, where even noncommercial activities could get people convicted of a crime. The leak also shows that Canada has opposed this definition. Canada supports language in which criminal remedies would only apply to cases where someone infringed explicitly for commercial purposes.
This distinction is crucial. Commercial infringement, where an infringer sells unauthorized copies of content for financial gain, is and should be a crime. But that’s not what the US is pushing for—it’s trying to get language passed in TPP that would make a criminal out of anyone who simply shares or otherwise makes available copyrighted works on a “commercial scale.”
As anyone who has ever had a meme go viral knows, it is very easy to distribute content on a commercial scale online, even without it being a money-making operation. That means fans who distribute subtitles to foreign movies or anime, or archivists and librarians who preserve and upload old books, videos, games, or music, could go to jail or face huge fines for their work. Someone who makes a remix film and puts it online could be under threat. Such a broad definition is ripe for abuse, and we’ve seen such abuse happen many times before.
Fair use, and other copyright exceptions and limitations frameworks like fair dealing, have been under constant attack by rightsholder groups who try to undermine and chip away at our rights as users to do things with copyrighted content. Given this reality, these criminal enforcement rules could go further to intimidate and discourage users from exercising their rights to use and share content for purposes such as parody, education, and access for the disabled.

Penalties That Must be “Sufficiently High”

The penalties themselves could be enough to intimidate and punish users in a way that is grossly disproportionate to the crime. Based upon the leak, which showed no opposition in key sections, it seems TPP negotiators have already agreed to more vague provisions that would oblige countries to enact prison sentences and monetary fines that are “sufficiently high” to deter people from infringing again. Here is the text:
penalties that include sentences of imprisonment as well as monetary fines sufficiently high to provide a deterrent to future acts of infringement, consistently with the level of penalties applied for crimes of a corresponding gravity;
Already in many countries, criminal punishments for copyright grossly outweigh penalties for acts that are comparatively more harmful to others. So the question as to what crimes copyright infringement corresponds to in “gravity” is obscure. What’s more alarming is that countries without existing criminal penalties or whose penalties are not “sufficiently high” to satisfy the US government, may be forced to enact harsher rules. The US Trade Representative (USTR) could use the certification process, at the behest of rightsholder groups, to arm-twist nations into passing more severe penalties, even after the TPP is signed and ratified. The USTR has had a long history of pressuring other nations into enacting extreme IP policies, so it would not be out of the realm of possibility.

Property Seizure and Asset Forfeiture

The TPP’s copyright provisions even require countries to enable judges to unilaterally order the seizure, destruction, or forfeiture of anything that can be “traceable to infringing activity”, has been used in the “creation of pirated copyright goods”, or is “documentary evidence relevant to the alleged offense”. Under such obligations, law enforcement could become ever more empowered to seize laptops, servers, or even domain names.
Domain name seizure in the name of copyright enforcement is not new to us in the US, nor to people running websites from abroad. But these provisions open the door to the passage of ever more oppressive measures to enable governments to get an order from a judge to seize websites and devices. The provision also says that the government can act even without a formal complaint from the copyright holder. So in places where the government chooses to use the force of copyright to censor its critics, this could be even more disastrous.

Criminalization of Getting Around DRM

We’ve continued to raise this issue, but it’s always worth mentioning—the TPP exports the United States’ criminal laws on digital rights management, or DRM. The TPP could lead to policies where users will be charged with crimes for circumventing, or sharing knowledge or tools on how to circumvent DRM for financial gain as long as they have “reasonable ground to know” that it’s illegal to do so. Chile, however, opposes this vague language because it could lead to criminal penalties for innocent users.
The most recent leak of the Intellectual Property chapter revealed new exceptions that would let public interest organizations—such as libraries and educational institutions—get around DRM to access copyrighted content for uses protected by fair use or fair dealing, or content that may simply be in the public domain. But even if it’s legal, it would be difficult for them to get around DRM since they may not be equipped with the knowledge to do it on their own. If someone else tries to do a public service for them by creating these tools for legally-protected purposes, they could still be put in jail or face huge fines.

Conclusion

Like the various other digital copyright enforcement provisions in TPP, the criminal enforcement language loosely reflects the United States’ DMCA but is abstracted enough that the US can pressure other nations to enact rules that are much worse for users. It’s therefore far from comforting when the White House claims that the TPP’s copyright rules would not “change US law”—we’re still exporting bad rules to other nations, while binding ourselves to obligations that may prevent US lawmakers from reforming it for the better. These rules were passed in the US through cycles of corrupt policy laundering. Now, the TPP is the latest step in this trend of increasingly draconian copyright rules passing through opaque, corporate-captured processes.
These excessive criminal copyright rules are what we get when Big Content has access to powerful, secretive rule-making institutions. We get rules that would send users to prison, force them to pay debilitating fines, or have their property seized or destroyed in the name of copyright enforcement. This is yet another reason why we need to stop the TPP—to put an end to this seemingly endless progression towards ever more chilling copyright restrictions and enforcement.

If you’re in the US, please call on your representatives to oppose Fast Track for TPP and other undemocratic trade deals with harmful digital policies.