Everything & More You Always Wanted to Know About the TPPA!

Kia ora!

Are you asking yourself “Is it worth continuing to protest the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA or the Yes You Will China Club)?” Well, if “it’s a maybe” and you’re also a Kiwi then this is your lucky last day to make a submission. This submission is mostly a post of New Zealanders, by New Zealanders, for New Zealanders. We take our country seriously. Yeah you do! Though I should warn you that this issue often causes us to emote using strong language and other methods like #Dildogate Not Safe For Work (NSFW!)

Protest has a long and forgotten history online in Aotearoa. From White Women’s Lib. to Trans-Pacific Nuclear Tests we have enjoyed a tense media history with Uncle Sam (US). This has lead our government to become infatuated with multinational corporate investors for at least 30 years, as symbolised recently at our annual Treaty of Waitangi commemorations (see above). Our politicians have been very coy about this engagement, as they didn’t want us Kiwis to get too excited or start thinking of previous historic elopements, not before we were all of sudden hitched to the secretive TPPA. This is literally why we started protesting way too early in the morning. Aw, we didn’t even know (see below).

But now we do know what we are talking about. Yeah right! With a bit of luck somehow the secret negotiating documents that will be used to interpret the text of this prenuptial agreement will be leaked on the internet, then hopefully made into a Wellywood movie sometime in the next six years. Meanwhile for the next two years following the February 4th signing we will just have to be content watching re-releases or pirate remixes of previous activism titles until the deal is either fully ratified or ‘catified’.

I am pleased to now finally be ready to sit down behind a desk and make a submission to a New Zealand Select Committee on the TPPA. Like many thousands of Kiwis I have requested vehemently for one way or another to have my voice heard. Today, even knowing that the text has finally been released (see above) and independent peer-peer-reviewed analysis is available[1], it’s not easy for anyone like myself living by their wits on the streets of the internet to answer for themselves “What is the TPPA?” (see below).

To motivate myself to become informed enough to make an on the fly submission in person, I spend ninety seconds or less on average previewing each video I find, mostly of White Trans-Pacfic People talking about things related to the TPPA. Searching by keyword and selecting by algorithm from the YouTube network, I keep backup copies of the one’s I really like, to manipulate more thoroughly through intellectual disobedience. Just in case we sooner or later, blindly and lazily, let our politicians agree to trade away our non-tariff barriers of fair use and restrict our private intellectual property access rights through Technological Protection Measures (TPM), maybe (see below).

Ka pai!

No, unsurprisingly I have rediscovered that to #InformTheProtestors everyday of what they should be talking about and shouting WE NEED FREEDOM TO KEEP SHARING INFORMATION AND TO KEEP EXPRESSING OURSELVES OPENLY, especially over the internet! Here collective thoughts can become community actions in a…

We must move catlike within the Public Domain arena through an socially active Medium which allows us to easily use a “Some Rights Reserved” Creative Commons copyright license, thus harnessing the power of our personal knowledge and data — based in the United States of America (US). Since, that is where the National Security Agency (NSA) heads efforts to infringe the World’s Human Rights, by keeping a datable, legally protected copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex[3]. Though any free trade agreement (FTA) would involve giving up something through negotiations in return for something else, it should still be unsettling to you to think I should be in favour of every trade deal simply because trade = good. Our government is just ideologically bent on searching out how everything relates to the price of milk.

I’ve heard the explanation of comparative advantage before (see above), but though it was colourful it wasn’t put in context online in Aotearoa. Thus for the things we find addictive or chilling, like “internet safe Hollywood movies”, we need to be able to produce things that other Trans-Pacific Consumers source protein and lactose from, like “calf friendly Fonterra milk”.

Because each country produces things at different frequencies (see above), to most Trans-Pacific Peoples it sounds sensible to agree to trade with other Trans-Pacific Nations on a level playing field (through the TPPA).

So our goods overall will theoretically remain cheaper than in the US and wages higher than Vietnam while we continue to do business as usual (see below). Therefore we should sit down on the couch and absorb more copyrighted intellectual property at least until either the globe warms by two degrees or…

However when tariffs were lowered, as in past agreements like our FTA with China (NZ-China FTA, the first free trade agreement that China has signed with any developed country), many “skilled Chinese workers” had to stop the trade they were apprenticing for and study something else, like international law, maybe. And there are still resource management problems damaging NZ Inc.’s ability to exploit our rivers for tourism and fishing. These are reasons to write a submission on the TPPA even if you are just a rent-a-clown protester who opposes every trade deal roadshow. I’m not sure at the last election if I voted but we’ll get to that next time[5].

I understand that it would be better to write, rewrite and edit my own submission even though there are alternative methods (see above). I’ve tried to focus on the interrelated issues of “The undermining of our democracy (ie. secret tribunals, secret negotiations)”, “Internet protections and privacy” and “The cost to consumers for copyright extensions”. I love feeling that I am free to trade copies of anything across the internet that is fair use, and weigh in with my own submissions if I ever feel they are ready ‘togo’, potentially at only a marginal cost to my remaining submission time. But the real advantage of the internet is that it costs virtually nothing to produce copies of imaginary goods (only it is guaranteed to take a while for things to work out profitably, maybe). While we are free to share what we think best in an instant, we can then afford to spend more time on other important TPPA stuff. Following on from my InformTheProtestors effort[6], Robbie Nicol is still waiting patiently behind a desk… (see below).

Treaties (or trade deals that weren’t specifically about reducing tariffs if you will) like the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), obviously would have been more effective if there were meaningful consequences for countries like Canada breaking the deal. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has the supra-national power to enforce trade agreements because countries ratified the Marrakesh Agreement. Joining the TPPA may similarly have serious consequences unlike volunteering for the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

This is largely why the European Union (EU) is developing an alternative to the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) supra-national justice system in the TPPA (see above). If something isn’t in the TPPA, like the words “Climate Change” or the “Spirit of Democracy” for instance, it is effectively incompatible with other treaties in which that something is included. How much can be negotiated into a trade deal is comparable to how much can be put on a beast of burden before it spasms wildly. Reflecting how long and how loudly one protests abusive demands. Be they of; the presently US based multinational corporate investors; past supra-national-powers like the European Economic Community (EEC, repackaged as the EU on the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon;) or future superpowers like China (negotiating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which is viewed as an alternative to the TPPA[7]).

E noho rā.