The battle over the TPP, and fast-track authority to force Congress to vote on it without amendments, is far from over.
For those arguing that nothing nefarious is going on, and that it isn't really a "secret deal" because members of Congress can read it, hear what Barbara Boxer has to say:
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., today blasted the secrecy shrouding the ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.
“They said, well, it’s very transparent. Go down and look at it,” said Boxer on the floor of the Senate. “Let me tell you what you have to do to read this agreement. Follow this: you can only take a few of your staffers who happen to have a security clearance — because, God knows why, this is secure, this is classified. It has nothing to do with defense. It has nothing to do with going after ISIS.”
Boxer, who has served in the House and Senate for 33 years, then described the restrictions under which members of Congress can look at the current TPP text.
“The guard says, ‘you can’t take notes.’ I said, ‘I can’t take notes?’” Boxer recalled. “‘Well, you can take notes, but have to give them back to me, and I’ll put them in a file.’ So I said: ‘Wait a minute. I’m going to take notes and then you’re going to take my notes away from me and then you’re going to have them in a file, and you can read my notes? Not on your life.’”
Reading the deal, with only a limited selection of staffers on hand to help provide analysis as the deal is handed to you section by section, is not transparency. Having no ability to take any part of the language away with you in order to study it, analyze it, and consult on it with affected parties (i.e., workers, public interest groups, and other members of the public) is not transparency. It's a public relations fig leaf for non-transparency.
What do they so desperately want to hide from average people and their representatives?
Perhaps the answer can be found in the fact of who, on the other hand, DOES have unfettered access to this "classified" deal and the ability to scrutinize and sculpt it for their own benefit: corporations, lots and lots of corporations, and their organizations of high-powered lobbyists:
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.
Industry Trade Advisory Committees, or 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.” ...
[T]hey 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...
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.”
As Senator Boxer
says:
“Instead of standing in a corner, trying to figure out a way to bring a trade bill to the floor that doesn’t do anything for the middle class — that is held so secretively that you need to go down there and hand over your electronics and give up your right to take notes and bring them back to your office — they ought to come over here and figure out how to help the middle class,” Boxer said.
Great advice, but not the kind that a committee structure so heavily stacked in the interests of huge corporations and industry lobby groups is likely to listen to.