Leaked TPP Texts Reveal a Bonanza of Special Rights for Corporations

Leaked texts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Free Trade Agreement continue to reveal a bonanza of special rights for big corporations.

Most recently, on August 4, 2015, Knowledge Ecology International published updated leaks of part of the TPP’s intellectual property chapter. According to KEI Director James Love, the proposals contained in the leak would “harm consumers and in some cases block innovation. In countless ways, the Obama Administration has sought to expand and extend drug monopolies and raise drug prices. The astonishing collection of proposals pandering to big drug companies make more difficult the task of ensuring access to drugs for the treatment of cancer and other diseases and conditions.”

On July 29, 2015, WikiLeaks published a memo on obligations regarding State Owned Enterprises in the TPP.

Before that, on June 10, 2015, WikiLeaks published an updated version of the TPP’s healthcare annex.  The headline in the Sydney Morning Herald read, “Medicines to cost more and healthcare will suffer.”

Earlier still, WikiLeaks published an updated version of the TPP’s so-called investment chapter on March 25, 2015.

“This is really troubling,” Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was quoted as saying about the investment text in the New York Times. “It seems to indicate that savvy, deep-pocketed foreign conglomerates could challenge a broad range of laws we pass at every level of government, such as made-in-America laws or anti-tobacco laws. I think people on both sides of the aisle will have trouble with this.”

Speaking of the TPP’s leaked intellectual property chapter on October 16, 2014, Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program, said, “The leak shows our government demanding rules that would lead to preventable suffering and death in Pacific Rim countries, while eliminating opportunities to ease financial hardship on American families and our health programs at home.”

Environmental groups slammed leaked text of the TPP’s draft environment chapter, published by Wikileaks on January 15, 2014, saying it is completely inadequate to protecting the planet’s oceans, forests or wildlife.

“If the environment chapter is finalized as written in this leaked document, President Obama’s environmental trade record would be worse that George W. Bush’s,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club.

“Environmental protections are only as effective as their enforcement provisions, and a trade agreement with week enforcement language will do little or nothing to protect our communities and wildlife,” said Peter Lehner, executive director of the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

In December 2013, HuffingtonPost published leaked documents revealing that the United States was bullying other nations into accepting some of the worst expansions of corporate power proposed in any international agreement.  A heavily-redacted memo summarizing countries’ negotiating positions on a variety of TPP chapters heading into the December 7-to-10, 2013 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) ministerial in Singapore showed that the U.S. was behind pushes for new powers for corporations in the investment chapter, financial services chapter, intellectual property chapter and others.

An earlier “cheat sheet”-style chart from prior to the November 2013 Salt Lake City Round of negotiations contained additional information about countries’ positions.

Leaked text of the TPP investment, intellectual property, regulatory coherence and drug formularies chapters, as well as annexes to the Technical Barriers to Trade chapter, first published by Citizens Trade Campaign in 2011 and 2012, had already revealed the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) pushing for a bevy of special rights for transnational corporations that would come at the expense of environmental protection, consumer safety and access to medicine.

An updated copy of the Intellectual Property chapter published by Wikileaks in November 2013 further helped to shine a light on this secretive pact.

Draft texts are said to exist for some 29 separate TPP chapters, but despite more than five years of steady negotiations, none have ever been officially released for public scrutiny.

“Americans deserve the right to know what U.S. negotiators are proposing in our names,” said Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of Citizens Trade Campaign.  “In the absence of transparency on the part of our government, we have a responsibility to share what information we receive about the TPP with the public.”