Salt Lake Residents Resist the Trans-Pacific Partnership!

Salt Lake City, UT November 19, 2013

Delegations from twelve national governments are meeting this week at Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade agreement shrouded in secrecy designed to benefit multinational corporations. Activists and concerned citizens are planning actions throughout Salt Lake City to educate the public about the trade agreement and to protest the negotiations.

Citizens, journalists, activists and even members of Congress have been denied access to the agreement’s text, while representatives from multinational corporations have played a key role in the drafting process. This utter lack of transparency continues into the Salt Lake meetings, that were not disclosed to the public until very recently, and which journalists and community members will not be allowed to attend.

In spite of this short notice, the community has mobilized the TPP Welcoming Committee. On Tuesday at 10:30 a.m., these activists will hold an action at the Bureau of Land Management offices at 440 W. 200 S., to protest the selling off of our public lands to corporate interests. From there, they will march to a larger protest at Grand America Hotel, where organizers will speak out about the major problems of this trade pact and comment on actions that need to occur to halt this agreement which, if passed, will have pervasive negative effects on citizens of all signatory countries. On Tuesday night at 6 p.m., the TPP Welcoming Committee will hold a teach-in at the Utah Pride Center, 255 E. 400 S., to explain the impact the treaty will have on medical access, internet freedom, climate justice, labor rights and many other important issues. This will be followed by a creative nighttime light action at 8 p.m. outside Grand America Hotel, pulling the TPP out of the shadows and into public scrutiny.

Organizations like WikiLeaks have been able to obtain and release to the public only a small portion of the provisions of this secret agreement. They have exposed that the agreement expands copyright and patent monopolies, with alarming consequences. It enables pharmaceutical companies, for example, to use patents to substantially increase the costs of many drugs and therefore deprive people around the world of lifesaving medicine. The current draft of the agreement contains many of the same copyright provisions and controversial internet censorship powers previously contained in the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, overwhelmingly opposed by the U.S. populace.

In addition, the TPP would create international tribunals in which corporations could sue governments to overturn sovereign laws and extract vital resources from taxpayers and communities. These courts, completely outside U.S. jurisdiction, would expand corporate power while undermining national sovereignty and local control.

The TPP and the secretive negotiations undermine free speech, further entrench corporate rule, deny people around the world lifesaving medicines and erode national sovereignty.The agreement is yet another example of the corrupting influence of money in our political process. Accordingly, those involved in the negotiations will face significant opposition and dissent from the TPP Welcoming Committee and other concerned citizens.

The TPP Welcoming Committee is a coalition of individuals and organizations including Backbone Campaign, Sole de Utah, Utah Tar Sands Resistance, the Justice Party, Center for a Stateless Society, Popular Resistance, Occupy.com, Washington Fair Trade Coalition, HESA-Heterodox Economics Student Association at the University of Utah, and March Against Monsanto.

The leaked provisions were covered in a segment on the November 14 episode of Democracy Now. It’s no surprise that Amy Goodman and Lori Wallach take a jaundiced view of the treaty. Unfortunately, it’s also no surprise that TPP’s chief defender signed on from a “free market” think tank. The Cato Institute’s Bill Watson holds that “when we see some of these reports about the intellectual property chapter, we need to remember that the free trade agreements are about fundamentally something very different:

“They are about free trade. And the value of free trade … is really incontrovertible. The United States has been lowering its barriers for 50 years to engage in the global economy in a way that increases growth economically, that improves the quality of life of people in the United States. We still have a number of protectionist measures in the United States that an agreement like the TPP will address.”

The beauty of bilateral “free trade” agreements like TPP, Watson continues, is that it’s hard to eliminate these protectionist measures within Congress because the “special interests” that benefit from them have so much political clout.

Wallach immediately responded, quite rightly, that “the TPP has very little to do with free trade;” its expanded IP regime, she said, “is protectionism.”

The interesting thing is that Watson didn’t disagree: He actually called TPP’s IP provisions an undesirable “aspecial-interest free-for-all, a grab bag, that U.S. companies are pushing to get what they want in these agreements,” that doesn’t belong in the treaty.

Nevertheless, he says, TPP should be approved, despite the fact that it raises IP trade barriers — because it “lowers trade barriers.” And the U.S. Trade Representative’s negotiation process is a good thing, despite the fact that it’s not only written in secret but damn near dictated to the USTR’s stenographer by industry lobbyists, because it supposedly eliminates the influence of those “special interests” in Congress.

So what Watson’s saying — if we interpret charitably and look for any coherent message at all — is that tariffs are the only trade barriers that really matter. The IP provisions are kinda sorta bad and violate free trade principles, maybe, but aren’t a big deal compared to all those “real” trade barriers like tariffs that are being lowered.

Nonsense. Patents and copyrights do exactly the same thing tariffs do: They confer a monopoly on the right to sell a particular good in a particular market.

The neoliberal move to lower tariff barriers at national borders is really just the reverse of lemon socialism. Instead of the capitalist state taking over a necessary function on behalf of big business because corporations no longer find it profitable to operate on their own nickel, the capitalist state is ceasing to perform a function that no longer serves the interests of big business. A hundred years ago, the dominant American manufacturing firms supported tariff protectionism because it was in their economic interest. U.S. Steel wanted the U.S. government to restrict imports of foreign steel,  protecting its steel monopoly in the domestic market. Today, tariffs no longer serve transnational corporations with production facilities all over the world. They actually impede the transfer of goods between national subsidiaries of corporations, raising the cost of importing goods outsourced on contract to Third World sweatshops.

“Intellectual property,” on the other hand, is a form of protectionism even more important to American global corporations today than tariffs were to U.S. manufacturers a century ago. “Intellectual property” is every bit as much a form of protectionism as the tariff — it’s simply enforced at the corporate boundary, instead of the national boundary. In fact, IP is central to transnational corporate capitalism as we know it. It’s structurally vital to the system.

So it’s just the opposite of what Watson says. TPP is actually a massive net increase in protectionism in trade barriers. It drastically increases the most economically significant form of protectionism that the dominant corporate interests’ business model most heavily relies on, while partially phasing out an obsolete form of protectionism the special interests just don’t much care about any more.

TPP is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of the 21st Century.

Em seu discurso acerca do Estado da União de 2013 o Presidente dos Estados Unidos Barack Obama afirma que os Estados Unidos ajudarão a acabar com a pobreza extrema “mediante protegerem as crianças do mundo de mortes evitáveis, e materializarem a promessa de uma geração sem AIDS, coisas que estão ao nosso alcance.” Soa bonito, não é? Infelizmente, o presidente contradisse diretamente essas metas de seu discurso ao empenhar-se para a Parceria TransPacífico (TPP).

A TPP é sistematicamente apresentada como acordo de  “livre comércio,” mas há um tipo de barreira comercial que ela se propõe fortalecer: “Propriedade intelectual.” Patentes e outras formas de “propriedade intelectual” restringem o comércio mediante concederem o monopólio de uma ideia ou do fabrico de um produto. A “propriedade intelectual” torna ilegal usar a própria propriedade pessoal para fabricar um produto e vendê-lo no mercado uma vez o estado tenha definido a própria ideia desse produto como “propriedade” de outrem.

A “propriedade intelectual” prejudica os consumidores porque faz os preços subirem. Para alguns bens ela representa simplesmente custo econômico. Quando porém se trata de medicamentos, os aumentos de preços associados a patentes farmacêuticas custam vidas. Como diz Judit Rius Sanjuan, da Médicos Sem Fronteiras, “Políticas que restringem a competição frustram nossa capacidade de melhorar a vida de milhões de pessoas por meio de tratamentos acessíveis salvadores de vidas.”  Ou, nas palavras  do integrante de alto nível do Centro por uma Sociedade sem Estado Charles Johnson, “Patentes matam pessoas.”

E não apenas algumas poucas pessoas. Fogo no Sangue, documentário exibido pela primeira vez este ano no Sundance Film Festival, revela como as patentes têm matado milhões de pessoas. Como explica Amy Goodman, “grandes empresas farmacêuticas, incluindo Pfizer e GlaxoSmithKline, bem como os Estados Unidos, impediram que milhões de pessoas do mundo em desenvolvimento recebessem medicamentos genéricos contra AIDS a preços acessíveis. Em decorrência, milhões de pessoas morreram.”

A Parceria TransPacífico expandiria esses já letais monopólios de patentes, restringindo ainda mais o acesso a medicamentos salvadores de vidas. Tido von Schoen-Angerer, da Médicos Sem Fronteiras, escreveuem 2011 que ”documentos vazados revelam diversos objetivos dos Estados Unidos: tornar impossível questionar uma patente antes de ela ser concedida; rebaixar o nível necessário a obtenção de patente (de tal modo que mesmo drogas que sejam meramente novas formas de medicamentos existentes, e não representem avanço terapêutico, possam ser protegidas por meio de monopólio); e pressionar no sentido de novas formas de fazer cumprir propriedade intelectual que deem às autoridades alfandegárias poderes excessivos para apreenderem medicamentos genéricos suspeitos de violar a propriedade intelectual – IP.”  Cada uma dessas disposições contaria com a força do governo a impedir acesso de pessoas pobres ao medicamento.

É claro que robustecer monopólios de patente contradiz as metas declaradas de Obama de “proteger as crianças do mundo de mortes evitáveis” e “materializar a promessa de uma geração sem AIDS.” Essa contradição entre a TPP e o compromisso declarado do governo dos Estados Unidos com a saúde pública já vem sendo tornada visível há algum tempo. Já em 2011 Sophie DeLaunay, diretora executiva da Médicos Sem Fronteiras, disse que a TPP criaria “contradição fundamental entre a política de comércio dos Estados Unidos e os compromissos dos Estados Unidos com a saúde internacional.”

Contradições como essa não são nada de novo para o estado. Embora os políticos prometam repetidamente proteger a saúde pública, de há muito eles usam poder coercitivo para aumentar os custos médicos, sacrificando a saúde pública em benefício de lucros privados. O estado de há muito justifica seu poder com a linguagem do “bem público,” ao mesmo tempo em que brande esse poder para proteger o privilégio.

Se realmente nos importamos com ”proteger as crianças do mundo de mortes evitáveis” e “materializar a promessa de uma geração sem AIDS,” temos de pôr fim a esse conluio assassino entre o estado e o poder corporativo. Temos de esmagar o estado e suas contradições letais.

Artigo original afixado por Nathan Goodman em 17 de fevereiro de 2013.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

The TPP is typically presented as a “free trade” agreement, but there’s one type of trade barrier it proposes to strengthen: “Intellectual property.” Patents and other forms of “intellectual property” restrict trade by granting monopolies on the sharing of an idea or the manufacture of a product. “Intellectual property” makes it illegal to use your own personal property to manufacture a product and sell it on the market once the state has defined the very idea of that product as someone else’s “property.”

“Intellectual property” harms consumers by raising prices. For some goods this is just an economic cost. But when it comes to medicine, the price increases associated with pharmaceutical patents cost lives. As Judit Rius Sanjuan of Doctors Without Borders says, “Policies that restrict competition thwart our ability to improve the lives of millions with affordable, lifesaving treatments.”  Or, as Center for a Stateless Society senior fellow Charles Johnson puts it, “Patents kill people.”

And not just a few people. Fire in the Blood, a documentary that premiered this year at the Sundance Film Festival, reveals how patents have killed millions. As Amy Goodman explains, “major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, as well as the United States, prevented tens of millions of people in the developing world from receiving affordable generic AIDS drugs. Millions died as a result.”

The Trans-Pacific Partnership would expand these already deadly patent monopolies, further restricting access to lifesaving medicines. Tido von Schoen-Angerer of Doctors Without Borders wrote in 2011 that “leaked papers reveal a number of U.S. objectives: to make it impossible to challenge a patent before it is granted; to lower the bar required to get a patent (so that even drugs that are merely new forms of existing medicines, and don’t show a therapeutic improvement, can be protected by monopolies); and to push for new forms of intellectual property enforcement that give customs officials excessive powers to impound generic medicines suspected of breaching IP.”  Each of these provisions would use government force to prevent poor people from accessing medicine.

It’s clear that entrenching patent monopolies contradicts Obama’s stated goals of “saving the world’s children from preventable deaths” and “realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation.” This contradiction between the TPP and the U.S. government’s stated commitment to public health has been apparent for a while. Back in 2011, Doctors Without Borders executive director Sophie DeLaunay said that the TPP would create “a fundamental contradiction between U.S. trade policy and U.S. commitments to global health.”

Contradictions like this are nothing new for the state. While politicians repeatedly promise to protect public health, they have long used coercive power to raise medical costs, sacrificing public health for private profits. The state has long  justified its power with the language of “the public good,” all while wielding that power to protect privilege.

If we really care about “saving the world’s children from preventable deaths” and “realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation,” we must end this murderous collusion between state and corporate power. We must smash the state and its deadly contradictions.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Contradições Letais: Privilégios de Patente versus “Salvar Vidas”.