Despite assurances that he would not diminish the right of fair use in American copyright law, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk appears to be doing just that during secret negotiations being conducted on the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (also known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP).

According to language leaked to the Internet late last week, the legal definition of “fair use” is now fair game for the international cabal of TPP negotiators hammering out that trade scheme in secret.

The TPP is an international trade treaty currently being negotiated behind closed doors by nine (Mexico and Canada have been invited to join and would bring the total number of participants to 11) nations located along the Pacific Rim. The 14th round of talks is set for September 6-15 in Leesburg, Virginia.

As we have reported, among the many problems with shrouding the details of such a binding agreement behind a thick veil of secrecy is the fact that if the TPP is approved by the Senate it will become the law of the land and the laws of the United States will be subject to abrogation by an international body that is unelected and unanswerable to the people of the United States.

Furthermore, the text of the agreement reveals that USTR Kirk has agreed to place the approval of “domestic stakeholders” (read: large corporations) on a level with that of the Congress. It is precisely this exalting of big business that has troubled many of the people’s representatives in Congress.

For example, recently Zach Carter of the Huffington Post reported that Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs and Global Competitiveness, was stonewalled by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) when he attempted to see any of the draft documents related to the governance of the TPP.

In response to this rebuff, Wyden proposed a measure in the Senate that would force transparency on the process and that was enough to convince the USTR to grant the Senator a peek at the documents, though his staff was not permitted to peruse them.

Wyden spokeswoman Jennifer Hoelzer told HuffPost that such accommodations were “better than nothing” but not ideal in light of the well-known fact that on Capitol Hill the real work of drafting and evaluating legislation is performed by the representatives’ staff members who are often experts in particular areas of domestic and foreign policy.

“I would point out how insulting it is for them to argue that members of Congress are to personally go over to USTR to view the trade documents,” Hoelzer said. “An advisor at Halliburton or the MPAA is given a password that allows him or her to go on the USTR website and view the TPP agreement anytime he or she wants.”

That’s right. A duly elected senator of the United States has to beg and plead and threaten legislation in order to be able to gain access to the TPP trade agreement, but corporate interests are given a password by the USTR that grants them a priori access to those same documents.

August 28, 2012

Source: Economy in Crisis

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