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WikiLeaks Publishes Secret TPP Docs; “Fast Track” Paving Way for “Global Corporate Governance”

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Bloomberg is reporting now: “Fast-Track Trade Vote in House Set for Friday, Lawmaker Says.”

WikiLeaks just published the Healthcare Annex to the secret draft “Transparency” Chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, along with each country’s negotiating position. The Healthcare Annex seeks to regulate state schemes for medicines and medical devices. States WikiLeaks: “It forces healthcare authorities to give big pharmaceutical companies more information about national decisions on public access to medicine, and grants corporations greater powers to challenge decisions they perceive as harmful to their interests.”

KEVIN ZEESE, kbzeese at gmail.com, @kbzeese
Zeese is an activist with PopularResistance.org and FlushtheTPP.org who has written and spoken extensively about so-called “trade” agreements and “Fast Track.” He is helping to lead protests outside the Capitol. Zeese notes that Fast Track authority would extend presidential powers for six years — extending to the next president — and include not just the TPP, but also the Trade in Services Agreement, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Said Zeese: “All three of these really are pushing toward a whole type of new, global corporate governance, where nation-states are weakened, where democracy is weakened, where the people’s voice is even made more quiet, and corporations gain greater and greater power.” Today’s publication from WikiLeaks is the latest of several such leaks. Zeese assessed the agreements and what the documents from WikiLeaks tell us about them in this recent segment from The Real News: “What the TiSA Leaked Documents Reveal About Negotiations.”

PETER MAYBARDUK, pmaybarduk at citizen.org, via Angela Bradbery, abradbery at citizen.org, @maybarduk
Director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program, Maybarduk said today: “This leak reveals that the Obama administration, acting at the behest of pharmaceutical companies, has subjected Medicare to a series of procedural rules, negotiated in secret, that would limit Congress’ ability to enact policy reforms that would reduce prescription drug costs for Americans — and might even open to challenge aspects of our health care system today.” The group just released “MEMO: Three Burning Questions about the Leaked TPP Transparency Annex and Its Implications for U.S. Health Care” [PDF]. Maybarduk was quoted in the New York Times piece this morning: “U.S. Shifts Stance on Drug Pricing in Pacific Trade Pact Talks, Document Reveals.”

JAMES LOVE, james.love at keionline.org, @jamie_love
Director of Knowledge Ecology International, Love just wrote the piece “TPP, designed to make medicine more expensive, reforms more difficult.” He said today: “Not only does USTR [United States Trade Representative] want to expand and extend intellectual property rights on medicines, they also want to undermine the ability of governments to negotiate reasonable reimbursements, and give drug companies the ability to sue governments who don’t pay top dollar.”

WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange said in a statement today: “It is a mistake to think of the TPP as a single treaty. In reality there are three conjoined mega-agreements, the TiSA, the TPP and the TTIP, all of which strategically assemble into a grand unified treaty, partitioning the world into the west versus the rest. This ‘Great Treaty’ is described by the Pentagon as the economic core to the U.S. military’s ‘Asia Pivot.’ The architects are aiming no lower than the arc of history. The Great Treaty is taking shape in complete secrecy, because along with its undebated geostrategic ambitions it locks into place an aggressive new form of transnational corporatism for which there is little public support.”