The Saudi Cables and the TPP Healthcare Annex

Two new troves of documents published by Wikileaks: the Saudi Cables, of which a portion were released yesterday (evidently the most damning are to appear any moment now...), and the TPP Healthcare Annex (to the “transparency” chapter), which was released last week.

The Saudi Cables:

Today, Friday 19th June at 1pm GMT, WikiLeaks began publishing The Saudi Cables: more than half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry that contain secret communications from various Saudi Embassies around the world. The publication includes “Top Secret” reports from other Saudi State institutions, including the Ministry of Interior and the Kingdom’s General Intelligence Services. The massive cache of data also contains a large number of email communications between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and foreign entities. The Saudi Cables are being published in tranches of tens of thousands of documents at a time over the coming weeks. Today WikiLeaks is releasing around 70,000 documents from the trove as the first tranche.

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The Saudi Cables provide key insights into the Kingdom’s operations and how it has managed its alliances and consolidated its position as a regional Middle East superpower, including through bribing and co-opting key individuals and institutions. The cables also illustrate the highly centralised bureaucratic structure of the Kingdom, where even the most minute issues are addressed by the most senior officials.

[Source]

As’ad AbuKhalil has a post today about the Saudi regime’s comical – well, they would be comical were the regime not in the habit of imprisoning, torturing, and beheading noncompliant “citizens” – warnings:

This is hilarious. The Saudi foreign ministry issued this directive to its citizens: It reads: ‘Dear Aware Citizen: Avoid entering any site for the purpose of obtaining leaked documents or information that may be untrue, for harming the security of the homeland’. Kid you not. The second one reads: ‘Dear Aware Citizen: Don’t publish any documents that may be untrue which could aid the enemies of the homeland in attaining their goals’. Kid you not.

The TPP Healthcare Annex:

Today, Wednesday 10 June 2015, WikiLeaks publishes the Healthcare Annex to the secret draft “Transparency” Chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), along with each country's negotiating position. The Healthcare Annex seeks to regulate state schemes for medicines and medical devices. 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.

Expert policy analysis, published by WikiLeaks today, shows that the Annex appears to be designed to cripple New Zealand's strong public healthcare programme and to inhibit the adoption of similar programmes in developing countries. The Annex will also tie the hands of the US Congress in its ability to pursue reforms of the Medicare programme.

The draft is restricted from release for four years after the passage of the TPP into law.

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Few people, even within the negotiating countries' governments, have access to the full text of the draft agreement and the public, who it will affect most, have none at all. Hundreds of large corporations, however, have been given access to portions of the text, generating a powerful lobby to effect changes on behalf of these groups.

[Source]

Historical quotes of the day

“It’s a Washington…where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none of our environment or our workers who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear, workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years.

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You know, in the years after her husband signed NAFTA, Senator Clinton would go around talking about how great it was and how many benefits it would bring. Now that she’s running for President, she says we need a time-out on trade. No one knows when this time-out will end. Maybe after the election…. ”

– Obama on the campaign trail speaking in Janesville, Wisconsin, February 2008 [Source]*

“[Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee] was frank in saying that the primary campaign has been necessarily domestically focused, particularly in the Midwest, and that much of the rhetoric that may be perceived to be protectionist is more reflective of political maneuvering than policy.

…Noting anxiety among many US domestic audiences about the US economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign. …[H]e cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”

– Joseph De Mora, Canadian political and economic affairs consular officer, “REPORT ON US ELECTIONS – CHCGO MEETING WITH OBAMA ADVISOR AUSTAN GOOLSBEE” [Source]

“I would immediately call the president of Mexico, the president of Canada to try to amend NAFTA because I think that we can get labor agreements in that agreement right now. And it should reflect the basic principle that our trade agreements should not just be good for Wall Street, it should also be good for Main Street.”

“We should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced.”

- Obama on his supposed plan as president to prioritize renegotiating NAFTA [Source] [Source]

“At a time when the economy has been shrinking drastically and trade has been shrinking around the world...we probably want to make the economy more stabilized in the coming months before we have a long discussion around further trade negotiations.”

- Obama explaining to reporters why he won’t be moving to renegotiate NAFTA, August, 2009 [Source]

“[M]ake no mistake, this administration is committed to pursuing expanded trade and new trade agreements. It is absolutely essential to our economic future.”

- “REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON FINANCIAL RESCUE AND REFORM,” Obama speaking to representatives of the “financial industry,” Federal Hall, New York City, September 14, 2009 [Source]

Obama’s learned an important lesson: dispensing with even the pretense of democracy and cutting the public out of the process – except as passive recipients of placating paternalism – is much more efficient.

* (Some of these remarks are discussed in Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (2010). The first quotation is presented in historical context in a recent post by John Nichols at The Nation - “Why So Many Democrats Rejected Obama’s Lobbying on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal.”)

Historical quote of the day

“The PSYOP [Psychological Operations] aspect of the PRC [Population and Resources Control] program tries to make the imposition of control more palatable to the people by relating the necessity of controls to their safety and well-being.”

- US Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004)

Good piece by Paul Street on “Washington’s Continuing Murderous Middle East Myopia”

“No Wise Men Here: Gabriel Kolko and Washington’s Continuing Murderous Middle East Myopia”:

…The U.S. imperial establishment might still rule, but it does not do so through superior intelligence, vision, principles, planning, and strategy. As Kolko suggested in his synthesis Main Currents in American History (1976), it reigns instead thanks to deep structural fragmentation, powerlessness, cruelty, misery, and chaos in the imperial “homeland” and across the world system. It rules over and through disorder, drift, violence, division, and sheer inherited technological, institutional, and territorial advantage at home and abroad. The moment when underlying political-economic and other structural and conjunctural shifts and events will unseat the great post-WWII “rogue superpower” once and for all from its deadly global position cannot be precisely determined of course. There have long been signs that the death spiral of U.S. hegemony is underway; how long the process will take and whether humanity can survive it in decent shape are open questions….

Read the whole thing here.

Quote of the day

“Again and again, proponents of free trade agreements claim that this time, a new trade agreement has strong and meaningful protections; again and again, those protections prove unable to stop the worst abuses. Lack of enforcement by both Democratic and Republican presidents and other flaws with the treaties have allowed countries with weaker laws and standards and widespread labor and environment abuses to undermine treaty provisions, leaving U.S. workers and other interested parties with no recourse.”

- “Broken Promises: Decades of Failure to Enforce Labor Standards in Free Trade Agreements,” report by Elizabeth Warren’s staff

The real intent: Stiglitz on the TPP

“The Secret Corporate Takeover”:

…The real intent of these provisions is to impede health, environmental, safety, and, yes, even financial regulations meant to protect America’s own economy and citizens. Companies can sue governments for full compensation for any reduction in their future expected profits resulting from regulatory changes.

This is not just a theoretical possibility. Philip Morris is suing Uruguay and Australia for requiring warning labels on cigarettes. Admittedly, both countries went a little further than the US, mandating the inclusion of graphic images showing the consequences of cigarette smoking.

The labeling is working. It is discouraging smoking. So now Philip Morris is demanding to be compensated for lost profits.

In the future, if we discover that some other product causes health problems (think of asbestos), rather than facing lawsuits for the costs imposed on us, the manufacturer could sue governments for restraining them from killing more people. The same thing could happen if our governments impose more stringent regulations to protect us from the impact of greenhouse-gas emissions.

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Rules and regulations determine the kind of economy and society in which people live. They affect relative bargaining power, with important implications for inequality, a growing problem around the world. The question is whether we should allow rich corporations to use provisions hidden in so-called trade agreements to dictate how we will live in the twenty-first century. I hope citizens in the US, Europe, and the Pacific answer with a resounding no.