“Worse than any­thing we could’ve imagined.”

"If U.S. Congress signs this agreement despite its blatant corruption, they'll be signing a death warrant for the open Internet and putting the future of free speech in peril." —Evan Greer, Fight for the Future

“An act of cli­mate denial.”

“Give­away to big agribusiness.”

“A death war­rant for the open Internet.”

“Worst night­mare.”

“A dis­as­ter.”

As expert analy­sis of the long-shroud­ed, new­ly pub­li­cized TransPa­cif­ic Part­ner­ship (TPP) final text con­tin­ued to roll out on Thurs­day, con­sen­sus formed around one fun­da­men­tal assess­ment of the 12-nation pact: It’s worse than we thought.

“From leaks, we knew quite a bit about the agree­ment, but in chap­ter after chap­ter the final text is worse than we expect­ed, with the demands of the 500 offi­cial U.S. trade advis­ers rep­re­sent­ing cor­po­rate inter­ests sat­is­fied to the detri­ment of the pub­lic inter­est,” said Lori Wal­lach, direc­tor of Pub­lic Cit­i­zen’s Glob­al Trade Watch.

In fact, Pub­lic Cit­i­zen charged, the TPP rolls back past pub­lic inter­est reforms to the U.S. trade mod­el while expand­ing prob­lem­at­ic pro­vi­sions demand­ed by the hun­dreds of offi­cial U.S. cor­po­rate trade advis­ers who had a hand in the nego­ti­a­tions while cit­i­zens were left in the dark.

On issues rang­ing from cli­mate change to food safe­ty, from open Inter­net to access to med­i­cines, the TPP ​“is a dis­as­ter,” declared Nick Dear­den of Glob­al Jus­tice Now.

“Now that we’ve seen the full text, it turns out the job-killing TPP is worse than any­thing we could’ve imag­ined,” added Charles Cham­ber­lain, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Democ­ra­cy for Amer­i­ca. ​“This agree­ment would push down wages, flood our nation with unsafe import­ed food, raise the price of life-sav­ing med­i­cine, all the while trad­ing with coun­tries where gays and sin­gle moth­ers can be stoned to death.”

‘ Act of cli­mate denial’

Major cli­mate action groups, includ­ing 350​.org and the Sier­ra Club, were quick to point out that the text was notable as much for what it did­n’t say as what for what it did. ​“The TPP is an act of cli­mate denial,” said 350 pol­i­cy direc­tor Jason Kowal­s­ki on Thurs­day. ​“While the text is full of hand­outs to the fos­sil fuel indus­try, it doesn’t men­tion the words cli­mate change once.”

What it does do, how­ev­er, is give ​“fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies the extra­or­di­nary abil­i­ty to sue local gov­ern­ments that try and keep fos­sil fuels in the ground,” Kowal­s­ki con­tin­ued. ​“If a province puts a mora­to­ri­um on frack­ing, cor­po­ra­tions can sue; if a com­mu­ni­ty tries to stop a coal mine, cor­po­ra­tions can over­rule them. In short, these rules under­mine coun­tries’ abil­i­ty to do what sci­en­tists say is the sin­gle most impor­tant thing we can do to com­bat the cli­mate cri­sis: keep fos­sil fuels in the ground.”

Fur­ther­more, Friends of the Earth (FOE) said in its response to the final text, the agree­ment ​“is designed to pro­tect ​‘free trade’ in dirty ener­gy prod­ucts such as tar sands oil, coal from the Pow­der Riv­er Basin, and liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas shipped out of West Coast ports.” The result, FOE warned, will be ​“more cli­mate change from car­bon emis­sions across the Pacific.”

“Pres­i­dent Oba­ma has sold the Amer­i­can peo­ple a false bill of goods,” said FOE pres­i­dent Erich Pica. ​“The TransPa­cif­ic Part­ner­ship fails Pres­i­dent Oba­ma’s pledge to make the TPP an envi­ron­men­tal­ly sound trade agreement.”

Inter­na­tion­al observers were no less crit­i­cal. Matthew Rim­mer, a pro­fes­sor of intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty and inno­va­tion law at Aus­trali­a’s Queens­land Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy and trade pol­i­cy expert, told Fair­fax Media it looks like U.S. trade offi­cials have been ​“green­wash­ing” the agreement.

“The envi­ron­ment chap­ter con­firms some of the worst night­mares of envi­ron­men­tal groups and cli­mate activists,” Rim­mer told the news out­let. ​“The agree­ment has poor cov­er­age of envi­ron­men­tal issues, and weak enforce­ment mech­a­nisms. There is only lim­it­ed cov­er­age of bio­di­ver­si­ty, con­ser­va­tion, marine cap­ture fish­eries, and trade in envi­ron­men­tal services.”

‘ Attack sen­si­ble food safe­ty rules’

With its pro­vi­sions that tie the hands of food inspec­tors at inter­na­tion­al bor­ders and give more pow­er to biotech­nol­o­gy firms, ​“the TPP is a give­away to big agribusi­ness and food com­pa­nies,” said Wenon­ah Hauter, Food & Water Watch exec­u­tive direc­tor. Such cor­po­rate enti­ties, she said, want to use trade deals like the TPP ​“to attack sen­si­ble food safe­ty rules, weak­en the inspec­tion of import­ed food, and block efforts to strength­en U.S. food safe­ty standards.”

Last month, the Cen­ter for Food Safe­ty out­lined the top five rea­sons ​“eaters should be wor­ried about Oba­ma’s new trade deal.” At the top of the list was the TPP’s abil­i­ty to under­mine efforts to label GMO foods. ​“More broad­ly,” the Cen­ter wrote in Octo­ber, ​“any U.S. food safe­ty rules on label­ing, pes­ti­cides, or addi­tives that [are] high­er than inter­na­tion­al stan­dards could be sub­ject to chal­lenge as ​‘ille­gal trade barriers’.”

Indeed, accord­ing to Food & Water Watch, the final text released Thurs­day indi­cates that under a TPP régime, ​“agribusi­ness and biotech seed com­pa­nies can now more eas­i­ly use trade rules to chal­lenge coun­tries that ban GMO imports, test for GMO con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, do not prompt­ly approve new GMO crops or even require GMO labeling.”

“The TPP food safe­ty and label­ing pro­vi­sions are worse than expect­ed and bad news for Amer­i­can con­sumers and farm­ers,” said Hauter. ​“Con­gress must reject this raw deal that hand­cuffs food safe­ty inspec­tors and expos­es every­one to a ris­ing tide of unsafe import­ed food.”

‘ Death war­rant for the open Internet’

“If U.S. Con­gress signs this agree­ment despite its bla­tant cor­rup­tion, they’ll be sign­ing a death war­rant for the open Inter­net and putting the future of free speech in per­il,” stat­ed Evan Greer, Fight for the Future (FFTF) cam­paign director.

Among the ​“sev­er­al sec­tions of grave con­cern” iden­ti­fied by FFTF are those cov­er­ing trade­marks, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal patents, copy­right pro­tec­tions, and ​“trade secrets.”

Sec­tion J, which address­es Inter­net Ser­vice Providers (ISPs) ​“is one of the worst sec­tions that impacts the open­ness of the Inter­net,” accord­ing to the dig­i­tal rights group, which explained further:

This sec­tion requires Inter­net Ser­vice Providers to play ​“copy­right cops” and assist in the enforce­ment of copy­right take­down requests – but it does not require coun­tries to have a sys­tem for counter-notices, so a U.S com­pa­ny could order a web­site to be tak­en down in anoth­er coun­try, and there would be no way for the per­son run­ning that web­site to refute their claims if, say, it was a polit­i­cal crit­i­cism web­site using copy­right­ed con­tent in a man­ner con­sis­tent with fair use. Sec­tion J makes it so ISPs are not liable for any wrong­do­ing when they take down con­tent — incen­tiviz­ing them to err on the side of copy­right hold­ers rather than on the side of free speech.

‘ Pub­lic review is needed’

Like-mind­ed groups in Cana­da, where new­ly elect­ed Prime Min­is­ter Justin Trudeau has been on the job for all of one day, are sound­ing sim­i­lar alarms.

Cit­ing con­cerns about how the deal would impact human rights, health, employ­ment, envi­ron­ment, and democ­ra­cy, the Coun­cil of Cana­di­ans on Thurs­day demand­ed a full pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion—includ­ing an inde­pen­dent human rights, eco­nom­ic, and envi­ron­men­tal review of the doc­u­ment — before Trudeau goes any fur­ther. The group expressed par­tic­u­lar con­cern over investor-state dis­pute set­tle­ment (ISDS) pro­vi­sions, which allow cor­po­ra­tions to sue states for lost prof­its, ask­ing that they be excised from the deal.

“Trudeau is under a lot of pres­sure to adopt this deal as soon as pos­si­ble, with calls already com­ing in from U.S. Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma and Japan­ese Pres­i­dent Shin­to Abe,” acknowl­edged the Coun­cil’s nation­al chair­per­son, Maude Bar­low. ​“But a thor­ough pub­lic review is need­ed before he can estab­lish whether the TPP is tru­ly in Canada’s interest.”

Or any­one else’s, for that matter.

This sto­ry was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on Com­mon Dreams. Reprint­ed under Cre­ative Com­mons 3.0.