I think this Nature News and Comment article might be relevant to the generics discussion. Basically it would have the participants have IP laws closer to that of the US, therefore drugs would go off patent later, therefore they would have higher prices.
A fair complaint, me thinks. Dunno if the carrot (access to US markets) is worth it.
My understanding is that this sort of thing is typical of all of the trade agreements the US has been negotiating with various countries in recent years. In exchange for access to US markets they insist on stringent IP protections that are more advantageous for American corporations than the status quo.
The environmental criticism went like this: if a country tried to pass an environmental law that affected a foreign company, they'd have to compensate that company so that it was cost-neutral for them. It seemed pretty outrageous, if that's what it is.
We used to link this stuff to "removing trade barriers" to importing cigarettes.
The arbitration provisions of big trade agreements are potentially much worse than the awful IP provisions. I'm not knowledgeable at all about this kind of thing, but a friend of mine is, and man there is some fucked-up shit going on.
The secrecy of the negotiations should be the big tell, even for non-experts. Compare these trade negotiations to something like arms-control negotiations, where the parties are pretty public about what they want to be included in the final agreement. With these trade pacts, you get secrecy and evasion: "Oh, that provision isn't really a problem, although I can't really tell you why because technocracy. Next question!" The negotiations aren't in the interests of everyday citizens of the participating countries; they're much more like a meeting of the heads of mafia families than anything resembling a democratically legitimate process.
I agree with 7.2. As for 7.1, there's also plenty of fucked up shit involved when suing a sovereign in its own courts.
"Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, United States, Singapore and Vietnam"
Which of those is supposed to be a big producer of generic drugs, though? Or intellectual property not already covered by laws similar to the US? None that I can see, though I haven't followed it in any detail. Unless there are some evil clauses explicitly constraining import of generics from outside the block. No India here - generics. No Japan - agriculture. No Korea or China - solid state and manufacturing,
In fact the deal was probably only possible because there were already similar positions? Except US agribusiness is probably still coddled.
9: For generics, the potential members make up a lot of pharma consumers, and extending patent rights for drugs (longer terms, and more rights for new uses of existing drugs) it would limit the ability of their people to turn to generics.
there's also plenty of fucked up shit involved when suing a sovereign in its own courts.
No doubt.
The bigger issue with TPP and other trade pacts can be framed in terms of democracy. States are very hard to subject to democratic control, as the list "Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, United States, Singapore and Vietnam" demonstrates. But at least they're localized, and in some ways physically answerable to the people who live in them. So when states do things that make their citizens' lives miserable, the citizens have various partly/potentially effective ways of opposing what the state is doing. Even the most repressive state has a politics.
In recent decades, particularly since the 1970s, there's been a huge rise in something that is imperfectly described as multinational corporations or multinational capital. This network is increasingly powerful, increasingly able to operate outside of state control, and is much less susceptible than states are to any sort of democratic control. As it grows more powerful, the network regularly creates disasters in the lives of millions of people around the world.
The main purpose of agreements like TPP is to limit the mechanisms by which states can regulate and limit the multinational capital network. These agreements thus reduce the susceptibility of the network to state-mediated democratic control. The agreements typically also contain provisions that protect the network from non-state democratic power -- for example, TPP requires signatory states to provide police protection to the activities of foreign capital.
The predictable results of TPP and similar agreements are greater difficulties for democratic efforts to control global captital, greater impunity for global capital, and thus more and worse disasters in the lives of ordinary citizens.
I don't disagree with any of that.
there's also plenty of fucked up shit involved when suing a sovereign in its own courts.
Maintaining the fucked-upness of that shit is what I'm in the office doing right now. I'm thinking of writing a memoir: "Sovereign Immune System: How Eleventh Amendment Jurisprudence Destroyed My Belief In The Legitimacy Of Our Legal System."
Then I remember I get writers block on the third sentence, and go back to work.
Very much the sort of thing the Founders had in mind when they put treaties out of reach of the House, I presume. And not in a good way.
11:Yeah.
Loomis at LGM covers the MNC atrocity beat regularly.
And of course the hot hotter hottest new book Making of Global Capitalism is about whether Empire is American Empire and how much or why that matters.
11: Well said. It's only business.
Well, 11, you know...
Sounds great, but the idea of developmental mercantilism was partly to keep the accumulation and capital local and locally controlled. Everybody knows about the incredibly complicated MNC chain that makes up an Ipod or Ipad, but does most of the surplus go to Apple? And Apple has whatever, $1.2 in "cash" but this isn't platinum bars in a warehouse.
I am not feeling all sorry for Toshiba and Samsung, but if they go market-controlled they will barely be making strategic decisions soon. Without gross accumulation, they will need int'l financing for future projects, and will need to make concessions to global finance. Japan has understood how this works since the Restoration.
Where is the capital, the accumulation? Who has it, who controls it, what is it used for?
$1.2 trillion or some number like that for Apple
The Panitch and Gindin attempts to show how it was done and how it works, but even I, even I have a rough time grasping the degree to which Empire is the American Empire.
And P & G may be saying (as I have said) we are only in the, Rome analogy, Late Republican Stage. You ain't seen nothing yet.