(This post is from our new blog: Unofficial
Sources.)
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.
Industry Trade Advisory Committees, or ITACs, are cousins
to Federal
Advisory Committees like the National Petroleum Council that I
wrote about recently.
However, ITACs are functionally exempt
from many of the transparency rules
that generally govern Federal Advisory Committees,
and their communications are largely shielded from FOIA in order to
protect “third party commercial and/or financial information from
disclosure.” And even if for some reason they wanted to tell someone
what they’re doing, members must sign non-disclosure agreements so they
can’t “compromise” government negotiating goals. Finally, they also
escape requirements to balance their industry members
with representatives from public interest groups.
The result is that the Energy and Energy Services committee includes
the National Mining Association and America’s Natural Gas Alliance but only one
representative from a company dedicated to less-polluting wind and solar
energy.
The Information and Communications Technologies, Services, and
Electronic Commerce committee
includes representatives from Verizon and AT&T Services Inc. (a subsidiary
of AT&T), which domestically are still
pushing hard against new net neutrality rules that stop internet providers
from creating more expensive online fast-lanes.
And the Intellectual Property Rights committee includes
the Recording Industry Association of America, the Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America, Apple, Johnson and Johnson and Yahoo, rather than
groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which shares the industry’s
expertise in intellectual property policy but has an agenda less
aligned with business.
Maira Sutton, a global policy analyst with the EFF, points to the
Recording Industry Association of America as an organization that has been
“very much in favor of copyright term extensions and limiting fair use.” The
pact could make it difficult for countries to shorten copyright terms that
currently extend long past an author’s life, or for artists to repurpose
copyrighted material to make art or music. Apple, Sutton notes, is notorious
for creating technology that comes riddled with restrictions on what users and
programmers can do with them, a practice that could be bolstered in the TPP.
There does exist a Trade
and Environment Policy Advisory Committee and a Labor
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.
“It’s hard to have influence if you have 20 people from the industry and
one from civil society. There’d have to be a pretty serious effort to achieve
more balance,” says Karen Hansen-Kuhn, director of international strategies for
the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minneapolis-based
organization that is concerned
about food safety and farming-related provisions of the agreement. (I
worked as an intern at the IATP in 2011).
“The best outcome would be if Congress were to put in place a new
system. So [in future negotiations], when negotiating objectives are laid out,
at a certain point Congress would weigh in on whether those objectives
have been met,” Hansen-Kuhn says. “If fast track is rejected I think it opens
the possibility of doing things differently.”
UPDATE: Today’s procedural vote failed. The Senate tally
fell eight votes short of the 60 needed to allow debate to begin on fast-track
legislation.
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