When the director of policy for Doctors Without Borders tells the public that "U.S. negotiators have basically functioned as drug lobbyists" and "We consider this the worst-ever agreement in terms of access to medicine", there's really little more that needs saying.
I love that the best defense unnamed "U.S. officials" can offer is that "major compromises" will likely still be made. In other words: yes we're acting as drug company lobbyists, but we expect some of these other countries to stand up for their citizens enough to get a few concessions.
U.S. negotiators have basically functioned as drug lobbyists
I made a similar comment a few days ago - what we need is a crowd-funded lobbying platform for everyday people. A kind of Kickstarter for law and policy.
If a few thousand or even tens of thousands of people chip in a few dollars to lobby for a change in policy, we can compete with corporations who have bought their way into power.
While we're complaining on the internet big business is using pocket change to get what they want. It needs to be as easy if not easier to pay a few bucks for your desired policy as it is to complain about it in an online forum.
And according to https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/ , to match the $3.24 Billion spent on lobbying in 2014 you'd have to get absolutely everyone in the US 18 or over to give you 13$ and a quarter just to match what corporations are spending.
It's not the least bit realistic, and if the pre-2008 growth rate in lobbying spend picks up again it'll just get more and more out of control.
What's really necessary to get this absolutely incredible amount of money out of politics. The two presidential candidates shouldn't have to spend over 30 billion dollars on an election. The amount of money in politics right now is just insane.
to match the $3.24 Billion spent on lobbying in 2014
Who says every dollar needs to be matched? If a corporation lobbies for rubber subsidies, no one will give a shit. If a corporation lobbies to make it a criminal offence to mention their brand online without a license, that crosses into free speech which might be worth a dollar or twenty to those who find that kind of thing important.
It's not the least bit realistic
You don't necessarily need to spend more than the corporations, you just need to make it lucrative to stand up for the good guy. If you can have $1m to be evil or $900k to be good, the $100k lost is more than made up for by the advocacy of those you served. It's free advertising.
Fund alternative media whose cost structure is much lower than TV networks, e.g. this TISA explainer video on banking, public services regulation and corporations, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wwkikCpQ6pk . The Young Turks is the top online news show on YouTube, I wish they had episode transcripts. There is a related PAC to reverse Citizens United, http://www.wolf-pac.com
PAC's and Super PAC's are often heavily funded by corporations.
And regular PAC's really cannot compete with the unlimited funding a Super PAC can levy (PAC's have strict limits on contributions to parties and candidates; $5,000 per candidate, $15,000 per party per year).
How is this any different from the panoply of public lobbying and advocacy organizations that exist today? The Chamber of Commerce pulls in $200 million per year. EDF pulls in $121M. Sierra $98M. CAP $40M. Cato $29M. The Family Research Council $13M. The EFF pulls in $10M.
Even the smallest of these are not small numbers. And, if you're interested in policy or political change, you've heard of all of them, and they all make it pretty damn easy to donate money[0]. It's just people don't care that much, and for the people who do care, there's often someone else on the opposite side of things who cares just as much.
It doesn't seem to me that a crowd-funded lobbying platform offers much. Maybe it makes it easier to start up an organization? Sure, I guess, but it doesn't give me any confidence that they'll use any funds I give in an effective way. At least major, well-known organizations have a brand to defend and have to be able to prove repeatable successes.
Going by this argument there's no point using Kickstarter because you could already fund projects without it. But what Kickstarter did was act as a hub for many different projects (EFF won't help much for anything pertaining to health care), a public tracker to monitor progress and outcome, a means of describing what the goals are and what different fund totals will help achieve, and a trusted method to transfer funds.
Within each Lobby Kickstarter you could outline which organizations would receive funds for specific goals, e.g. ACLU for particular civil liberties that are under attack, EFF to address dragnet surveillance etc. Yes you're adding a middleman but you have a one stop shop for initiatives that range far and wide. You could also keep score of which organizations have been successful so that you have an additional trust mechanism, much the way a company might keep track of its subcontractors when choosing who to use to get a job done.
I think a more practical idea is the notion of people running for office that vow to take a public vote for all their decisions through the internet (yes it could be done realistically with public/private key cryptography)
There's also the fact that the Executive branch (for current and all future Presidents) has just greatly expanded it's power, and snubbed out Congress' ability to stone-wall any trade deals they don't agree with (via amendments, etc...).
Obama likes to constantly state that he will act because Congress "refuses" to... which completely ignores the fact that Congress' "lack" of action is exactly what they are supposed to do when there is no agreement on an issue. Just because Congress doesn't execute the President's will doesn't mean Congress is wrong!
Now the Executive branch gets to unilaterally decide what trade agreements are good for the nation (and that usually means which big lobbying firm courted the Executive branch the best) -- that doesn't sound very democratic to me.
When the Congress hands the Executive fast-track authority for such dealings, it is quite disingenuous to point the finger at the Executive. The Executive branch is going to take and hold every single power the Congress grants it. The Congress is there to balance a runaway Executive.
Congress surrendered the authority. They are the ones to blame.
It seems that the TPP, TTIP and TiSA are not about the sort of “free trade” that would free local businesses to sell abroad. They are about freeing international corporations from the government regulation necessary to protect the economy, the people, and the environment. They are about preserving privatized monopolies and preventing competition from the public sector. And they are about moving litigation offshore into private arbitrary tribunals
What is going on was predicted by David Korten in his 1995 blockbuster, When Corporations Rule The World. Catherine Austin Fitts calls it a “corporate coup d’état.”
This corporate coup includes the privatization and offshoring of the judicial function [0] delegated to the US court system in the Constitution, through Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions that strengthen existing ISDS procedures.
As explained in The Economist [1], ISDS gives foreign firms a special right to apply to a secretive tribunal of highly paid corporate lawyers for compensation whenever the government passes a law to do things that hurt corporate profits — such things as discouraging smoking, protecting the environment or preventing a nuclear catastrophe.
Arbitrators are paid $600-700 an hour, giving them little incentive to dismiss cases. The secretive nature of the arbitration process and the lack of any requirement to consider precedent give wide scope for creative judgments – the sort of arbitrary edicts satirized by Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
To date, the highest ISDS award has been for $2.3 billion to Occidental Oil Company against the government of Ecuador over its termination of an oil-concession contract, although the termination was apparently legal. Under the TPP, however, even larger and more unpredictable judgments can be anticipated, since the sort of “investment” it protects includes not just “the commitment of capital or other resources” but “the expectation of gain or profit.” That means the rights of corporations extend not merely to their factories and other “capital” but to the profits they expect to receive. Just the threat of a massive damage award for impairing “expected corporate profits” could be enough to discourage prospective legislation by lawmakers.
I don't see why his affiliation with Doctors Without Borders carries argument-ending weight here. They do noble work, but their interest is the well-being of people outside the U.S. The best case scenario for them is U.S. companies doing all the expensive R&D, and their patients outside the U.S. getting the resulting drugs for free.
The USTR, in contrast, has the sole responsibility of maximizing the benefit to the U.S. It's in our interest if people outside the U.S. have to pay us a bunch of money to get the drugs we invent.
That is not to say that we shouldn't be giving free drugs to people who need it. But that's a policy decision decidedly outside the scope of the USTR. We have agencies like USAID whose job it is to handle humanitarian aid.
I live in New Zealand - we've chosen to have socialised medicine - we buy drugs in bulk, for the whole country - it gives the national drug buying agency lots of market power - it doesn't force drug companies to sell to us under cost - but it does pick and choose hich drugs it buys with its limited budget - if they want our business they have to compete with other companies in front of a knowledgable experienced buyer acting on our behalf.
No one here is getting drugs for free, just at reasonable prices that may not be available in the US
TPP as currently written will neuter this advantage costing us billions that will come out of my taxes
Same for us in Australia. Both Australia and New Zealand are getting the spiky end of the stick in regards to pharmaceuticals, we have a similar system of socialised medicine.
It's probably very similar for most industrialized countries to some extent. In Netherland (which probably has the most expensive health care in Europe), insurance companies negotiate about the prices, which means those companies decide which medicine is and isn't covered, and while they still have a reasonable amount of negotiating power, it's not as much as that of a more centralized approach. Still better than the US approach, but certainly the weakest of the EU.
Wel yeah... US govt has very large buying power to so by simple market economics, the US govt gets as good a deal as... oh wait. Shit. They made it illegal for themselves to negotiate. Oops.
Big fan of your comments usually, so it's disappointing to see such a specious argument. Not only is this a false dichotomy (free drugs vs getting paid fairly), it's dramatically removed from reality.
Currently, without the TPP, the large pharmaceutical companies make billions in profit every year even including the rampant "piracy" in countries like India and China.
Or, with the TPP, all of those generics go poof, billions lose legal access to modern drugs, and pharmaceutical companies increase profits by 30, maybe 40 percent?
Of course that slack will get taken up by USAID, like you said, which means that now American tax payers will be on the hook to provide medicine that is now more expensive because our own government made them so.
I'm using the limiting cases to illustrate the incentives of the parties, not as a characterization of the actual argument being made. My point is that Doctors without Borders and the USTR serve different constituencies with conflicting interests.
As for getting "paid fairly" I disagree with the general notion that companies that make unimportant things should get paid "what the market will bear" while companies that make important things should get "paid fairly." I think that creates perverse incentives.
"What the market will bear" is actually pretty low in this case (medicine for the people helped by Doctors without Borders). The whole point of patents is to artificially reduce supply to increase the price.
Your comment seems to conflate 'our', 'us' and 'we' with the drug companies themselves. There should be more to such negotiations than just whatever is in the (self)interest of US-based drug companies.
That all this seems to be happening behind closed doors doesn't inspire confidence.
Within limits, the interests of the drug companies coincide with those who want new and better drugs to treat various illnesses. Those against the drug companies are on the side of those who want lower prices for existing drugs.
If you think Big Pharma isn't struggling, you haven't payed close enough attention. There is a bit of a crisis in innovation that is commonly blamed on the low-hanging fruit being gone. To cope, almost all of the big US companies have cut their discovery and preclinical teams significantly. In their place companies are paying contract companies to do large chunks of the more monotonous chunks of research or buying assets that are already developed to clinical candidate from academia or small biotechs.
And yet they have enough money to get the influence to get the US government to strongarm other governments through treaties. That's not cheap.
I do hear what you say about the font drying up, but it's also no secret that medication is ridiculously expensive in the US. Big pharma is very wealthy, and very politically powerful, despite the low-hanging fruit being gone. The point I'm trying to make is that they don't need a treaty to protect them.
"I don't see why his affiliation with Doctors Without Borders carries argument-ending weight here. They do noble work, but their interest is the well-being of people outside the U.S."
That's quite an interesting interpretation of "without borders".
Maybe the best way to ensure access to medicine is by providing economic opportunities to the worlds most impoverished citizens. In other words, if the trade off is say a 10% increase in per capita GDP in exchange for less access to generics, maybe the former is better than the latter?
Those writing the TPP have no interest in passing any of the profits of these trade deals off to impoverished third world nations to enrich their societies.
If you want a mutually beneficial trade agreement, you don't need secret meetings or a rush to get it through congress.
The reason it is kept secret is presumably because the general public has difficulty seeing the ancillary benefits (reduction of trade barriers) and pays close attention to the obvious drawbacks (IP rights for "evil" corporations). This contention is fairly well supported by a cursory read through this or any other internet thread about a trade agreement.
Whether the good in the TPP outweighs the bad is an open question that I don't have an answer to. I am just trying to provide some counter arguments to an otherwise one-sided discussion on here.
That's an incredibly weak justification, and it comes off as patronizing. You're telling me that they have to hide when they do trade deals, because people might object to the concessions?
So you're going to commit is to something we didn't agree to? That's exactly why we need transparency.
And who decides who gets to make these deals? "Oh let us decide for you." No, you'll make a decision I don't want.
They must be some pretty weak and nuanced ancillary benefits if you're unable to explain them in such a way this "dumb" populace can understand the trade offs.
> Whether the good in the TPP outweighs the bad is an open question that I don't have an answer to. I am just trying to provide some counter arguments to an otherwise one-sided discussion on here.
Its not an open question, its a closed, hidden question we don't get access to, let alone any answers to.
This is a one-sided discussion because it is a one-sided situation.
> Economic modeling estimates that the benefits to the U.S. from the TPP will be $5 billion in 2015, rising to $14 billion in 2025
Yeah, its not worth it.
Btw US GDP is ~$16 trillion. This isn't going to move the meter at all. Its primarily about securing foreign IP rights for US companies, Obama's legacy, and strategic influence.
Perhaps, but there is no way that the TPP is going to produce at 10% increase in GDP per capita. I'm generally supportive of free trade agreements, but in the case of the TPP, all the low-hanging economic fruit has already been picked. There are no significant remaining trade barriers that can be removed to generate quick growth.
I love that the best defense unnamed "U.S. officials" can offer is that "major compromises" will likely still be made. In other words: yes we're acting as drug company lobbyists, but we expect some of these other countries to stand up for their citizens enough to get a few concessions.
Fantastic stuff. "Thanks Obama" (and Hillary)