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Law Professor Questions The Absurd Secrecy Around The TPP Agreement
from the why-is-this-acceptable? dept
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by law professor David Levine for his radio show/podcast, Hearsay Culture. The episode has aired on the radio, and I believe it will go up as a podcast soon as well. However, he's also written a fantastic article summarizing the absurdity of the secrecy around the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement:
This is a travesty. It's certainly not democracy. It's a joke carried out by a government department that appears to be out of control -- focused mainly on helping a few industry groups with little concern about the public, despite how widely they'll be impacted by such laws and rules.
Imagine being invited to formally offer input on a huge piece of legislation, a proposed international agreement that could cover everything from intellectual property rights on the Internet to access to medicine to investment rights in the agreement’s signatory countries. For 10 minutes, you’d be able to say whatever you’d like about the proposed law—good, bad, or indifferent—to everyone involved in the negotiations. But there’s a caveat: All of your questions, all of your input, on what may be the most controversial part of the package, would have to be based on a version of the proposed international agreement that was 16 months old. And in that 16-month period, there were eight rounds of negotiations that could have changed any and all of the text to which you had access, but no one could tell you if that version was still accurate.Levine is learning, first-hand, about "transparency" -- USTR style, where everything is kept secret, but you're cheerful about telling people who actually would like to help and could provide valuable feedback to come along... but then they're never allowed to actually see the document in question.
Would you still take the deal? This is not a hypothetical question; rather, this is the take-it-or-leave-it offer made to the public in May by the United States Trade Representative regarding the intellectual property rights chapter of the massively important but little-known Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP).
This is a travesty. It's certainly not democracy. It's a joke carried out by a government department that appears to be out of control -- focused mainly on helping a few industry groups with little concern about the public, despite how widely they'll be impacted by such laws and rules.
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Here's the dictionary's term of Treason...
Treason
trea·son
[tree-zuhn]
noun
1. the offense of acting to overthrow one's government or to harm or kill its sovereign.
2. a violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or to one's state.
3. the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.
Hmm... I DO believe that the USTR *IS* acting treasonous.
After all, they fit the 3rd definition perfectly.
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TECHNICALLY, they aren't in violation of allegiance to the U.S.
...
YET
I'd say it's close, but not quite there.
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Perhaps you should keep in mind that the USTR does not report to you. Since the charge was made in a legal context, perhaps you should consider how a legal dictionary defines it:
"treason
n. the crime of betraying one's country, defined in Article III, section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." Treason requires overt acts and includes the giving of government security secrets to other countries, even if friendly, when the information could harm American security. Treason can include revealing to an antagonistic country secrets such as the design of a bomber being built by a private company for the Defense Department. Treason may include "espionage" (spying for a foreign power or doing damage to the operation of the government and its agencies, particularly those involved in security) but is separate and worse than "sedition," which involves a conspiracy to upset the operation of the government."
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"3. the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery."
Do remember that the U.S. government is BUILT upon the trust and confidence of the CITIZENS.
So, by the DEFINITIONS of what the U.S. Government is SUPPOSED to be, the USTR has BETRAYED the citizens AND the government of the United States by allowing only a select few (something that the founding fathers hated and one of the reasons why the U.S. split from the U.K. back in 1776) to see what's going on, instead of the public at large.
So, by all accounts, the USTR *HAS* committed treason against the faith and trust of the citizens of the United States of America and SHOULD be tried for treason.
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Then the legal definition is meaningless because it's not enforced. Both parties in Congress have been guilty of this definition of "sedition" for years.
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Perhaps, but in the US, the dictionary definition of treason is not relevant.
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Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine. people throw around the word "treason" pretty easily, but they're usually using it wrong. In the US, treason is defined in the Constitution:
"Giving Aid and Comfort to enemies" also means something very specific, and more than just being supportive or nice to them.
In any case, the USTR has not committed treason as defined by the Constitution.
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This isn't a new phenomenon: People were already throwing the word “treason” around pretty easily... and had been throwing it around like that for a rather long time... in the late 1780s.
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seems to me it should read
'It's a joke carried out by a government that appears to be out of control'
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They are wrong.
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When was the last time somebody punched or just slapped a politician in the face?
Yeah, thought so.
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Who is in charge ?
Who sold me out ?
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