Apparently Obama is angry at progressives for attacking the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“What I am averse to is a bunch of ad hominem attacks and misinformation that stirs up the base but ultimately doesn’t serve them well. And I’m going to be pushing back very hard if I keep hearing that stuff,” Obama told a small group of reporters on the call.
Of all the criticisms, “The one that gets on my nerves the most is the notion that this is a secret deal,” he said. “Every single one of the critics saying this is a secret deal, or sent out e-mails to their fundraising base that they’re working to stop a secret deal, could walk over and see the text of the agreement.”
No: Every critic doesn’t have access. Only a partial version of the deal is available to the public, and only because it was leaked. The very idea that these deals should be done in secret is fundamentally anti-democratic. They do it because they know people would object if they knew what was in them.
In short, countries would have to abandon any efforts to learn from the mistakes of the US and its experience with the DMCA over the last 12 years, and adopt many of the most controversial aspects of US copyright law in their entirety. At the same time, the US IP chapter does not export the limitations and exceptions in the US copyright regime like fair use, which have enabled freedom of expression and technological innovation to flourish in the US. It includes only a placeholder for exceptions and limitations. This raises serious concerns about other countries’ sovereignty and the ability of national governments to set laws and policies to meet their domestic priorities.
Go read the rest if you want to be sick to your stomach.
The bill also includes takings tribunals, in which firms would be able to sue governments for violating the terms of the deal. (In the past, such tribunals have been used successfully to sue for such things as banning additives which cause cancer, since the lost sales are a loss for the company involved.)
Obama made his bones by completing the Wall Street bailout. Now, before he finishes his term, he wants to give the people who can make him filthy rich after he’s no longer President a big, fat, slobbery kiss that will make them billions. This may well be, to him, the most important thing he’s done in his entire presidency:
In a meeting with reporters in the US Capitol, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio said his caucus has been “talked to, approached, lobbied, and maybe cajoled by more cabinet members on this issue than any [other] issue since Barack Obama has been president. And that’s just sad.”
Brown continued: “I wish they had put the same effort into the minimum wage. I wish they had put the same effort into Medicare at [age] fifty-five. I wish they had put the same effort into some consumer strengthening on Dodd-Frank.”
Like all Presidents, even George W Bush, Obama has done both good and evil. But the TPP, from what we know, is almost entirely bad and no one should trust a deal like this that is largely secret.
As usual, the TPP is about constraining Democracy, not just internally, but by locking countries in to laws which they then can’t change without abrogating the trade deal.
I covered this in “Free Trade is Elites Betraying Their Own Population“. You should read it.
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