WikiLeaks Unveils TPP Secret Documents

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed trade and investment agreement, that involves 12 nations from Asia Pacific led by the US. The member states are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. 

It’s been a controversial agreement that has raised various protests because of the secrecy of negotiations covering the agreement's expansive scope, and the attendant controversial clauses in drafts that  previously has been leaked to the public.

Austrian economist Dr. Richard Ebeling at the Epic Times clarified that this hasn’t been a free trade agreement: (bold mine)

What should be most clear is that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not a free trade agreement. Parts of it may, no doubt, lower some trade barriers, thus making easier the production, sale and purchase of a wider variety of imports and exports. However, TPP, like all other trade agreements in the post-World War II era is a managed trade agreement.

That is, governments of the respective participating nations negotiate on the terms, limits and particular conditions under which goods and services will be produced and then bought and sold in each other’s countries. The Japanese government, for instance, is determined to maintain a degree of trade protectionism for the benefit of Japan’s rice producers, who are fearful of open competition from their American rivals.

The U.S. government is under pressure from the American auto industry, for example, to continue limiting greater competition from the Japanese automobile industry. American labor unions want to restrict the importing of goods produced at lower labor costs abroad than U.S. manufactured goods, because American consumers might prefer to buy the lower priced foreign products and thus risking the loss of some of their union members’ jobs.

In short, the TPP is a trade agreement designed to promote the interests of politicians, cronies, and related politically connected vested interest groups on a regional scale. 

As a side note, the TPP could be seen as a part of the geopolitical strategy by the US government to 'rebalance' military and diplomatic relations toward Asia. Or this could be part of the Asian Pivot. The Asian Pivot, according to former US secretary of state, Mrs. Hillary Clinton consist of six courses of action: namely strengthening bilateral security alliances; deepening America's relationships with rising powers, including China; engaging with regional multilateral institutions; expanding trade and investment; forging a broad-based military presence; and advancing democracy and human rights. 

With the seeming growing rift between the US and China, TPP perhaps could now seen an instrument to compete or even limit China's sphere of influence.

Nonetheless, following a bounty recently setup by the anonymous organization WikiLeaks to publish secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources, the same group unveiled some of the shroud from negotiations

From the Guardian

WikiLeaks on Wednesday released 17 different documents related to the Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa), a controversial pact currently being hashed out between the US and 23 other countries – most of them in Europe and South America.

The document dump comes at a tense moment in the negotiations over a series of trade deals. President Barack Obama has clashed with his own party over the deals as critics have worried about the impact on jobs and civil liberties.

On Tuesday, WikiLeaks put a $100,000 bounty on documents relating to the alphabet soup of trade treaties currently being negotiated between the US and the rest of the world, particularly the controversial Trans-Pacific trade agreement (TPP). The offer, announced yesterday, has already raised more than $33,000.

Wednesday’s leak is the third time that WikLeaks has published sections from secret trade agreements. In January it leaked a chapter from the TPP related to the environment. In November 2013 it made public a draft of the agreement’s intellectual property chapter, containing proposals that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said would “trample over individual rights and free expression”. 

Among the text leaked on Wednesday are Tisa’s annex on telecommunications services, an amendment that would standardize regulation of telecoms across member countries, according to WikiLeaks. Other documents in the batch of files relate to e-commerce, transportation of living people and regulation of financial services corporations.

I guess the Wikileaks just unveiled part of the grand scheme to promote the globalization of cronyism.