So at this point, he's beholden not to the common voters, but to the wealthy who also helped him get into office (and who, unlike the common voters, he can still benefit from in the years to come)
This isn't specific to Obama, but is the game of a career in politics.
Why can't such agreements be made mandatory public? All these backroom discussions of far reaching proposals like Internet censorship are simply disgusting.
To be fair, any FTA (including the TPP) will be made public for a minimum of 4 months before Congress can vote on it (although with TPA they won't be allowed to offer amendments to it).
In reality, almost all legislation is written behind closed doors today (a public Git-for-Law would be a wonderful project), and is then sponsored by a member of Congress and goes (usually) to Committee.
Non-trade agreements with foreign powers are also negotiated "behind closed doors", because the negotiations themselves tend to be quite sensitive, and the negotiating positions of each country are also considered highly sensitive.
The real issue is probably that the Trade Advisory Committees are not required by law to be balanced between corporate interests and public advocacy groups (there are multiple representatives from such groups, although it's not currently well balanced).
The procedure section shows Congress to have the ability to pass it to committees for at most 45 days and then they have at most 15 days after that to vote on it.
That seems to imply that it would be public for a maximum of 2 months, but I don't know much about this area.
That article describes previous grants of trade promotion authority, while this grant of authority, by all reports, will require more stringent and lengthier consultation and public notice requirements.
It's not spelled out in any sentence where you'll see "must be public for 4 months" in a single line, and I can see how that wording is confusing, however, the basic timeline is:
# Executive Actions - Negotiation
1. 90 day notification to begin negotiations
2. Negotiations begin
3. Negotiations conclude
4. 180 day notification prior to signing agreement
5. 90 day notification of intention to sign agreement
6. 60 days prior to signing, release of agreement text (first 2 months)
7. 30 days after notification of intention to sign, submission of Advisory Committee Reports
8. Agreement signed (not law yet)
# Reporting and Mock Markup
9. 60 days after agreement is signed, list of required changes in law due
10. 105 days after agreement is signed, USITC report due
11. Mock markups (no time schedule)
12. 30 days prior to implementing legislation, final text submitted (3rd month)
# Congressional Consideration and Implementation
13. Implementing bill introduced in House and Senate (no timeline)
14. Within 45 days, House Ways and Means must report bill
15. Within 15 days, House must vote on bill
16. Within 15 days, Senate Finance Committee must report bill
17. Within 15 days, Senate must vote on bill
18. Bill signed into public law (no timeline)
19. President implements bill by proclamation (no deadline)
So the Bill can spend a MAXIMUM of 90 days in the House and Senate; however, prior to even getting there, the text of the bill must have been public for a MINIMUM of 90 days (which is like 4-5 months in Congress time).
So even at hyper speed, the text would be public for 3 months, and in reality at least 4 months. More likely, the text will be public for 6-8 months before it is passed.
> To be fair, any FTA (including the TPP) will be made public for a minimum of 4 months before Congress can vote on it (although with TPA they won't be allowed to offer amendments to it).
So not only it completely defeats the point (if you can't make amendments) it gives a joke of a time in comparison with years of development of such agreements when all kind of nasty stuff can be sneaked it which can change local laws. In short - it's not a democratic process at all, it's a farce of institutionalized corruption.
This has been pretty standard for decades. If amendments were allowed, other actors couldn't negotiate with the US in good faith since after an agreement was made and the text made public (and remember, they have their own public political considerations), the US Congress could move the bar. The President still has pressure to deliver a sound agreement though or Congress can simply reject it.
With regard to the timeline, it takes a lot longer to negotiate terms with multiple actors, where a single sentence or word could be debated for days and months, than it takes to read and understand the effects of the final text.
> This has been pretty standard for decades. If amendments were allowed, other actors couldn't negotiate with the US in good faith since after an agreement was made and the text made public (and remember, they have their own public political considerations)
It's easily fixable - make negotiations public to begin with. Doesn't WIPO follow such practice anyway? So, the only reason not to make it public is to hide something that public will not accept. It should be a simple rule - any negotiations which affect the legal system should be public. Period. And stuff like TPP clearly does affect laws.
Reasonable people can debate whether it's helpful or harmful to precede public ratification of a trade deal with secret negotiations, but I don't think reasonable people can argue that the only reason to do secret negotiations is to slip toxic provisions past a suspicious public.
Trade deals happen between whole countries, not individual businesses. Each company compromises many hundreds of businesses. In any trade deal, there will be winner companies and loser companies. The negotiators for each country need to strike terms so that the wins pay for the losses and then some. It's much harder to do that if all the big companies that stand to lose from a deal get a veto vote early in the process.
Whether it's the only reason to make it secret or not is not really the point. As long as secrecy allows circumventing the democratic process and create laws through a backdoor it shouldn't be allowed. If you paid attention, these agreements aren't about trade. They are about promoting interests of some businesses through legislative means. Companies can gain or lose, but so is the public. Therefore there is no reason to give companies some preferential treatment here.
Reasonable people also debate whether what's happening here "circumvents the democratic process", since the point of the secret negotiation is to generate a proposal that, in the US at least, requires Congressional authorization.
Personally: I think the reason people resort to "undemocratic" and "backdoor" rhetoric is because they realize that once the treaty is put to a "it's this treaty or no treaty" vote, it will inevitably pass. The people who want a more "open" process really want more hooks earlier in the process to hold the whole treaty hostage to their interests. They can do that early in the process because the stakes are very low ("accede to our demands or the negotiation will be delayed"). They can't do that once the treaty is finalized ("accede to our demands or there will be no free trade agreement").
That's not a value judgement. Many of those interests are extremely worthy. But they should be argued on their merits, and not through a misleading appeal to democratic process. Democratic process sometimes seems like what many of TPP's opponents seem to be afraid of. (ducking)
(I have no idea if I personally support TPP. I'm a LeVeyan liberal Democrat; "Do What's Best For The Public School System Shalt Be The Whole Of The Law".)
>I think the reason people resort to "undemocratic" and "backdoor" rhetoric is because they realize that once the treaty is put to a "it's this treaty or no treaty" vote, it will inevitably pass.
That's exactly what undemocratic means here. I.e. democratic process reduced to rubberstamping farce.
> The people who want a more "open" process really want more hooks earlier in the process to hold the whole treaty hostage to their interests.
People want laws to have democratic oversight instead of rubberstamping of shady deals. Saying that there is some formal approval is completely irrelevant when you admit that it can't change anything.
> That's not a value judgement. Many of those interests are extremely worthy. But they should be argued on their merits
That would be an argument of democracy vs plutocracy.
You're using emotional words like "rubber-stamping" and "farcical" to describe the same phenomenon I just did. You're confirming my comment: the appeal to "rubber-stamping" is really just the concession that, put to a Congressional vote, people who oppose some provisions of the TPP would still rather have a flawed TPP than no TPP.
One way you can see that's the case: the same rubber-stamping Congress would have been rubber-stamping away had the negotiations been completely open.
> You're using emotional words like "rubber-stamping"
I'm just rephrasing what you said yourself:
> they realize that once the treaty is put to a "it's this treaty or no treaty" vote, it will inevitably pass.
That's rubberstamping. If you don't like the term, call it a fake democratic process.
> One way you can see that's the case: the same rubber-stamping Congress would have been rubber-stamping away had the negotiations been completely open.
No, because the amount of public input is significant here. Reducing it is exactly the goal of backroom deals.
Despite the domain name, that comic was not written by an economist; it's a political polemic that repeatedly argues that any argument by an economist must be suspicious (which apart from being false is also incredibly lazy, since there are plenty of economists to source for arguments against TPP).
It's also hard to comprehend:
* It has an extended segment about the trade deficit between the US and China and its impact on the valuation of the Yuan, despite the fact that China is not a party to the TPP.
* It argues that TPP will enable the US to outsource jobs to Asia, but the US already can outsource jobs to Asia, and for the most part has outsourced every job that's economical to outsource.
* Something about how the finance industry is a sentient evil robot, and now, to understand how that applies to the TPP, let's replace the robot with a country... let's say China.
If this is where you're getting your information on TPP, it's no wonder you're emotional about it. Try Dean Baker at CEPR. Don't worry: he also fiercely opposes TPP.
That's not really the reason TPP upsets me (I brought the comic for his illustrations for the lack of democratic process).
No one argues that TPP contains SOPA like censorship proposals (those were already leaked). And despite claims that agreements like TPP can't change laws, there is concrete evidence to the contrary. That's how garbage like DMCA-1201 was introduced.
It doesn't really matter whether US or other countries only are affected. Stuff like corporate sovereignty circumvents local legal system by design which is a pretty crooked concept no matter what country it is in.
This is an article about a different trade agreement.
Nobody is arguing that trade agreements never force the US to change their laws. That would be a silly argument! (Are the US's laws just "always right"?) And, indeed, as I've said repeatedly, a big part of the point of the TPP is to get other countries to harmonize their IP laws with those of the US --- so certainly nobody has argued that the TPP doesn't change laws in other countries.
But you just made a direct appeal to the idea that the TPP would change US law, and backed it up using a section of the DMCA is an example.
Can you find a source specifying how the TPP would change US law?
> This is an article about a different trade agreement.
It's about a trade agreement which demonstrates that trade agreements can change laws even against obvious reasons not to. Q.E.D. Now check bad aspects of TPP which go beyond current law, and you can reasonably assume that local laws can change to match that as well. I already brought you DMCA-1201 as another example.
And you can assume that it would be much harder to fix what's already bad in the law, because of such agreement even if it doesn't change that. I.e. it just preserves that bad. For example TPP requires certain copyright length. It means that current reforms in US in that aspect (shortening of the copyright) could be easily stalled with an argument "but international trade agreement obligations!".
So, any claims that such trade agreements have no effect on the law is simply a lie.
It's easy to win arguments when you move the goalposts around. Nobody argued that it was impossible for a trade agreement like TPP to influence US laws. They argue that TPP itself doesn't.
So who cares if it doesn't de jure, if it has a very major potential to do it de facto. It's all about the risk and impact, not about what it formally declares.
It's like saying, hey, we have a label that it's safe. Don't mind if it actually injures anyone.
No, I wasn't making a "de facto" vs "de jure" argument. I was saying that it does not appear that there is any provision of the TPP that will change US laws. As I've said repeatedly in this thread: the point of the IPR provisions in TPP are to export US law to other countries. The TPP does not appear to involve us importing anyone else's law.
It's perfectly reasonable to be opposed to exporting our laws to other countries. But that's not what you said: you said you were concerned that the TPP will change US law, which is why you cited that weird Techdirt article, why you brought up the DMCA, and why you're trying to distinguish between "de facto" and "de jure" changes.
> I was saying that it does not appear that there is any provision of the TPP that will change US laws.
Aren't there SOPA like provisions in TPP? SOPA was rejected in US. Now if TPP is passed, its supporters can backport SOPA in US law claiming it's an "international obligation" and the law "has to be harmonized". Why is it unlikely? That's exactly what happened with DMCA in the past. It was imported after being initially rejected, under pretense that it's an "international obligation".
No, as far as we know, it does not. That's confusion that FFTF caused when it wrote an advocacy piece based on a 2-year-old version of TPP that is no longer current and is not supported by the recent "leaked" version of TPP.
> 2-year-old version of TPP that is no longer current.
But since it's secret, you can't claim it changed either. So leaked version is a good base for sinking the whole thing into oblivion. And it only highlights the point that it's necessary for such things to be transparent to begin with. Next time they'll keep it open if they don't want opposition based on invalid assumptions.
You've misread me again. The recent leaked version does not contain SOPA-like provisions. There is no evidence that TPP is SOPA-like, and there is strong evidence to the contrary.
Do we get those leaks on the constant basis? How can you guarantee anything in it next day after the leak? That just highlights what I said above. You can't trust such agreement to be for the benefit of the public, because they already contained something obviously against it. So it has to be completely dropped until there can be trust, which is only possible with transparent negotiations.
TPP, Trans-Atlantic and TiSA are the trifecta and the BRICS are excluded out of these for a good reason. Even though there are firm Geo-Strategic grounds for these agreements, they are most likely not in the side of the Worker and likely cement the power of Elite in US and partner countries.
That's generally a true statement about anything that could foreseeably be good for the US economy. What's good for the economy is good for investors, and, apart from (vast numbers of) state employees with defined benefit pension plans managed by huge investment firms, investors aren't workers.
Can anyone summarize why this is so bad for everyone except the super rich? I understand how manufacturing will be hurt and it sounds like agriculture comes out to be mostly a wash. But it sounds like the US services industries will be helped by the agreement.
There are two specific issues that come up regularly, and two background issues with the whole concept of free trade agreements.
Specific issue #1: the TPP, like a bunch of other trade agreements, includes semi-binding arbitration. Enact a system of regulated free trade and you generate disputes. But there's no meaningful international legal system (a "world trade court" that can resolve those disputes. Trade dispute resolution is therefore extrajudicial. (TPP's arbitration is "semi-binding" in that TPP arbitrators have authority only to impose fines; they can't change our laws).
Specific issue #2: a key goal of TPP is to harmonize worldwide IP laws with those of the US. But much of the world has lax IP laws compared to the US, specifically for drugs. Dean Baker at CEPR --- a credible and fiercely liberal economist --- believes drug regulation will increase prices in the US (by how much, I haven't really seen estimates). Pretty much everyone believes that if TPP is actually enforced for pharma, it will increase drug prices in the rest of the world, and also squeeze out companies that have carved niches for themselves by arbitraging the different patent regimes to manufacture drugs that are still on-patent in the US.
Background issue #1: modern free trade agreements always involve IP regulations, and IP is a valence issue on Internet forums: most vocal Internet commenters ambiently oppose all IP regulation. TPP doesn't significantly alter IP law in the US, but it does further ratify that law, taking us steps away from reforming them. If you think IP reform was in the cards, you don't like TPP.
Background issue #2: the US economy is, by design, owned by large companies; those companies are in turn mostly owned by large investment firms. A plurality of the stakeholders in those firms are "wealthy elites" (not scare quoting). Free trade agreements that the US supports are designed to juice the economy, and thus improve outcomes for big companies. "Wealthy elites" have far more direct exposure to investment upside than "workers". So there's a natural concern about conflict-of-interest: TPP will benefit the wealthy more than it will the working class.
There are reasonable rebuttals to all these points, but you asked for the liberal brief against TPP, and I think that's a solid summary of it.
Thank you. So it doesn't sound like there is much that specifically hurts middle class to lower upper class Americans, it's just that it contributes to continued power & wealth accumulation in the upper upper class, the prevention of which could be seen as a reasonable goal in its own right.
If you asked a manufacturing worker in Youngstown, OH what they thought of the TPP, their answer would immediately be "it's just a way to help rich people export our jobs to Asia".
On the other hand, it might be reasonable to assume that the barriers to that were already so low that jobs that can be exported to Asia already have been.
It's hard to employ smuggling as a protest against a free trade deal, since the point of a free trade deal is to reduce the set of goods that need to be smuggled. And the fines in the TPP are settled between governments, not between aggrieved governments and individual foreign citizens.
From leaks it suggests it involves companies suing governments for cash settlement.
Also, you are rather naive if you think 'free trade' means free trade, it will be nothing of the sort, it will raise barriers and make many goods and services more expensive.
This is neither responsive to my comment (which points out that TPP fines are settled between governments, and not to people who can "ignore" fines; somehow, this has become an argument against my comment?) nor falsifiable.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadhttp://www.businessinsider.com/obama-i-know-cause-i-won-both...
So at this point, he's beholden not to the common voters, but to the wealthy who also helped him get into office (and who, unlike the common voters, he can still benefit from in the years to come)
This isn't specific to Obama, but is the game of a career in politics.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandO...
In reality, almost all legislation is written behind closed doors today (a public Git-for-Law would be a wonderful project), and is then sponsored by a member of Congress and goes (usually) to Committee.
Non-trade agreements with foreign powers are also negotiated "behind closed doors", because the negotiations themselves tend to be quite sensitive, and the negotiating positions of each country are also considered highly sensitive.
The real issue is probably that the Trade Advisory Committees are not required by law to be balanced between corporate interests and public advocacy groups (there are multiple representatives from such groups, although it's not currently well balanced).
The procedure section shows Congress to have the ability to pass it to committees for at most 45 days and then they have at most 15 days after that to vote on it.
That seems to imply that it would be public for a maximum of 2 months, but I don't know much about this area.
Edit: Sec. 6 contains the public notice requirements: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/995...
# Executive Actions - Negotiation 1. 90 day notification to begin negotiations 2. Negotiations begin 3. Negotiations conclude 4. 180 day notification prior to signing agreement 5. 90 day notification of intention to sign agreement 6. 60 days prior to signing, release of agreement text (first 2 months) 7. 30 days after notification of intention to sign, submission of Advisory Committee Reports 8. Agreement signed (not law yet)
# Reporting and Mock Markup 9. 60 days after agreement is signed, list of required changes in law due 10. 105 days after agreement is signed, USITC report due 11. Mock markups (no time schedule) 12. 30 days prior to implementing legislation, final text submitted (3rd month)
# Congressional Consideration and Implementation 13. Implementing bill introduced in House and Senate (no timeline) 14. Within 45 days, House Ways and Means must report bill 15. Within 15 days, House must vote on bill 16. Within 15 days, Senate Finance Committee must report bill 17. Within 15 days, Senate must vote on bill 18. Bill signed into public law (no timeline) 19. President implements bill by proclamation (no deadline)
So the Bill can spend a MAXIMUM of 90 days in the House and Senate; however, prior to even getting there, the text of the bill must have been public for a MINIMUM of 90 days (which is like 4-5 months in Congress time).
So even at hyper speed, the text would be public for 3 months, and in reality at least 4 months. More likely, the text will be public for 6-8 months before it is passed.
Source: Congressional Research Service (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33743.pdf)
So not only it completely defeats the point (if you can't make amendments) it gives a joke of a time in comparison with years of development of such agreements when all kind of nasty stuff can be sneaked it which can change local laws. In short - it's not a democratic process at all, it's a farce of institutionalized corruption.
With regard to the timeline, it takes a lot longer to negotiate terms with multiple actors, where a single sentence or word could be debated for days and months, than it takes to read and understand the effects of the final text.
It's easily fixable - make negotiations public to begin with. Doesn't WIPO follow such practice anyway? So, the only reason not to make it public is to hide something that public will not accept. It should be a simple rule - any negotiations which affect the legal system should be public. Period. And stuff like TPP clearly does affect laws.
Trade deals happen between whole countries, not individual businesses. Each company compromises many hundreds of businesses. In any trade deal, there will be winner companies and loser companies. The negotiators for each country need to strike terms so that the wins pay for the losses and then some. It's much harder to do that if all the big companies that stand to lose from a deal get a veto vote early in the process.
Personally: I think the reason people resort to "undemocratic" and "backdoor" rhetoric is because they realize that once the treaty is put to a "it's this treaty or no treaty" vote, it will inevitably pass. The people who want a more "open" process really want more hooks earlier in the process to hold the whole treaty hostage to their interests. They can do that early in the process because the stakes are very low ("accede to our demands or the negotiation will be delayed"). They can't do that once the treaty is finalized ("accede to our demands or there will be no free trade agreement").
That's not a value judgement. Many of those interests are extremely worthy. But they should be argued on their merits, and not through a misleading appeal to democratic process. Democratic process sometimes seems like what many of TPP's opponents seem to be afraid of. (ducking)
(I have no idea if I personally support TPP. I'm a LeVeyan liberal Democrat; "Do What's Best For The Public School System Shalt Be The Whole Of The Law".)
That's exactly what undemocratic means here. I.e. democratic process reduced to rubberstamping farce.
> The people who want a more "open" process really want more hooks earlier in the process to hold the whole treaty hostage to their interests.
People want laws to have democratic oversight instead of rubberstamping of shady deals. Saying that there is some formal approval is completely irrelevant when you admit that it can't change anything.
> That's not a value judgement. Many of those interests are extremely worthy. But they should be argued on their merits
That would be an argument of democracy vs plutocracy.
One way you can see that's the case: the same rubber-stamping Congress would have been rubber-stamping away had the negotiations been completely open.
I'm just rephrasing what you said yourself:
> they realize that once the treaty is put to a "it's this treaty or no treaty" vote, it will inevitably pass.
That's rubberstamping. If you don't like the term, call it a fake democratic process.
> One way you can see that's the case: the same rubber-stamping Congress would have been rubber-stamping away had the negotiations been completely open.
No, because the amount of public input is significant here. Reducing it is exactly the goal of backroom deals.
It's explained here pretty well: http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/
It's also hard to comprehend:
* It has an extended segment about the trade deficit between the US and China and its impact on the valuation of the Yuan, despite the fact that China is not a party to the TPP.
* It argues that TPP will enable the US to outsource jobs to Asia, but the US already can outsource jobs to Asia, and for the most part has outsourced every job that's economical to outsource.
* Something about how the finance industry is a sentient evil robot, and now, to understand how that applies to the TPP, let's replace the robot with a country... let's say China.
If this is where you're getting your information on TPP, it's no wonder you're emotional about it. Try Dean Baker at CEPR. Don't worry: he also fiercely opposes TPP.
No one argues that TPP contains SOPA like censorship proposals (those were already leaked). And despite claims that agreements like TPP can't change laws, there is concrete evidence to the contrary. That's how garbage like DMCA-1201 was introduced.
Nobody disagrees that TPP will motivate changes to IP laws in other countries besides the US, as that is the intent of the IP provisions in TPP.
Even the EFF seems to acknowledge that TPP's effects are not on US law, but rather export US law elsewhere.
Here is a recent example: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150611/15533031317/house...
It doesn't really matter whether US or other countries only are affected. Stuff like corporate sovereignty circumvents local legal system by design which is a pretty crooked concept no matter what country it is in.
Nobody is arguing that trade agreements never force the US to change their laws. That would be a silly argument! (Are the US's laws just "always right"?) And, indeed, as I've said repeatedly, a big part of the point of the TPP is to get other countries to harmonize their IP laws with those of the US --- so certainly nobody has argued that the TPP doesn't change laws in other countries.
But you just made a direct appeal to the idea that the TPP would change US law, and backed it up using a section of the DMCA is an example.
Can you find a source specifying how the TPP would change US law?
It's about a trade agreement which demonstrates that trade agreements can change laws even against obvious reasons not to. Q.E.D. Now check bad aspects of TPP which go beyond current law, and you can reasonably assume that local laws can change to match that as well. I already brought you DMCA-1201 as another example.
And you can assume that it would be much harder to fix what's already bad in the law, because of such agreement even if it doesn't change that. I.e. it just preserves that bad. For example TPP requires certain copyright length. It means that current reforms in US in that aspect (shortening of the copyright) could be easily stalled with an argument "but international trade agreement obligations!".
So, any claims that such trade agreements have no effect on the law is simply a lie.
So who cares if it doesn't de jure, if it has a very major potential to do it de facto. It's all about the risk and impact, not about what it formally declares.
It's like saying, hey, we have a label that it's safe. Don't mind if it actually injures anyone.
It's perfectly reasonable to be opposed to exporting our laws to other countries. But that's not what you said: you said you were concerned that the TPP will change US law, which is why you cited that weird Techdirt article, why you brought up the DMCA, and why you're trying to distinguish between "de facto" and "de jure" changes.
Aren't there SOPA like provisions in TPP? SOPA was rejected in US. Now if TPP is passed, its supporters can backport SOPA in US law claiming it's an "international obligation" and the law "has to be harmonized". Why is it unlikely? That's exactly what happened with DMCA in the past. It was imported after being initially rejected, under pretense that it's an "international obligation".
But since it's secret, you can't claim it changed either. So leaked version is a good base for sinking the whole thing into oblivion. And it only highlights the point that it's necessary for such things to be transparent to begin with. Next time they'll keep it open if they don't want opposition based on invalid assumptions.
Is it too late to make a 'hope & change' joke without sounding cliché?
Specific issue #1: the TPP, like a bunch of other trade agreements, includes semi-binding arbitration. Enact a system of regulated free trade and you generate disputes. But there's no meaningful international legal system (a "world trade court" that can resolve those disputes. Trade dispute resolution is therefore extrajudicial. (TPP's arbitration is "semi-binding" in that TPP arbitrators have authority only to impose fines; they can't change our laws).
Specific issue #2: a key goal of TPP is to harmonize worldwide IP laws with those of the US. But much of the world has lax IP laws compared to the US, specifically for drugs. Dean Baker at CEPR --- a credible and fiercely liberal economist --- believes drug regulation will increase prices in the US (by how much, I haven't really seen estimates). Pretty much everyone believes that if TPP is actually enforced for pharma, it will increase drug prices in the rest of the world, and also squeeze out companies that have carved niches for themselves by arbitraging the different patent regimes to manufacture drugs that are still on-patent in the US.
Background issue #1: modern free trade agreements always involve IP regulations, and IP is a valence issue on Internet forums: most vocal Internet commenters ambiently oppose all IP regulation. TPP doesn't significantly alter IP law in the US, but it does further ratify that law, taking us steps away from reforming them. If you think IP reform was in the cards, you don't like TPP.
Background issue #2: the US economy is, by design, owned by large companies; those companies are in turn mostly owned by large investment firms. A plurality of the stakeholders in those firms are "wealthy elites" (not scare quoting). Free trade agreements that the US supports are designed to juice the economy, and thus improve outcomes for big companies. "Wealthy elites" have far more direct exposure to investment upside than "workers". So there's a natural concern about conflict-of-interest: TPP will benefit the wealthy more than it will the working class.
There are reasonable rebuttals to all these points, but you asked for the liberal brief against TPP, and I think that's a solid summary of it.
On the other hand, it might be reasonable to assume that the barriers to that were already so low that jobs that can be exported to Asia already have been.
The legal process no longer concerns itself with the average citizen, why then does the average citizen show concern over the law?
From leaks it suggests it involves companies suing governments for cash settlement.
Also, you are rather naive if you think 'free trade' means free trade, it will be nothing of the sort, it will raise barriers and make many goods and services more expensive.
How do you know TPP fines are settled between governments? TPP is still ongoing, and is secret. How can I be more clear?
As for your opinion about free trade, it hardly deserves a response, please consult a dictionary because you are not using the word correctly.