

Extreme secrecy eroding support for Obama's trade pact - adventured
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/secrecy-eroding-support-for-trade-pact-critics-say-117581.html

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DigitalSea
One question I have had since I first heard about the TPP is: why the secrecy?
The TPP is meant to be a trade agreement for multiple nations, if the end goal
is to make it easy to do business with other countries, why are the details so
scarce, why is nobody allowed to know of its contents? We are talking about an
agreement a lot of members of congress do not know anything about, but
representatives from companies like General Electric do.

We should be legitimately scared of how the TPP is being handled, how its
terms are being negotiated and the stasian like control that Obama and the
administration seems to have over who can view the agreement in progress as
well as informing the public of its contents. The reason is obvious: if the
public were to know what the terms of the TPP were, they would be outraged
(and rightfully so). If a bill has the power to increase the cost of
medicines, enforce broken patent system protections, change copyright laws and
restrict your freedoms in the real world and online, don't the public have a
right to know?

How are those who are even given the opportunity to view the bill (in limited
circumstance) able to back the bill and make a decision on supporting it when
the government is not letting anyone take a copy back and closely inspect its
contents deeper? Could it be the Obama administration and the backers of the
bill do not want anyone to see what it truly contains? Limiting how people
view it and when is a great way to hide the corporately sponsored additions
that are littered throughout the bill.

What we have here is nothing more than a corporate power grab. You know
something is fundamentally broken when we have to rely on a site like
WikiLeak's to keep the public updated as to what changes have been made to a
monumentally massive trade agreement.

I hope this bill is killed or as a decent compromise, has the secrecy veil
lifted and the real negotiations can be done in public in a more democratic
and less North Korean style manner.

