Thursday, May 14, 2015

Did You Know Details of the Proposed New Trans-Pacific Trade Deal are Kept in a Secret Room (and You Can't See It)?

The hallway to the protected room, where the  proposed TPP agreement is kept, but the public can't see it.


Breitbart reports:
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)—an opponent of the secretive Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) that would fast-track the Pacific Rim trade deal Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)—went inside the secret room inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday morning to read the TPP text and told Breitbart News exclusively afterwards that he believes President Barack Obama should make it public now.

The deal’s text is kept in a room behind double doors that each have signs: “No Public Or Media Beyond This Point.”

“It’s done like you’re going in to read a classified briefing though it’s not actually ‘classified.’ It’s called ‘confidential,’” Paul said in an interview with Breitbart News outside the room after reading it. Paul and his legal staff spent about 45 minutes in the room reading the deal’s text.

“I think the staff signed an agreement [which didn’t include a non-disclosure]—they signed in, it’s  a normal procedure,” he explained. “But I wasn’t required to sign in.”

When asked for some of the details that are inside the TPP agreement, Paul said he’s not allowed to tell us that. But he did say the secret trade deal that his Kentucky colleague, Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)54%
, wants to rush through the Senate is about 800 pages long. He added he plans to seek additional information from the U.S. Trade Representative’s office—including a briefing from them—and suspects that the text he read isn’t even the final version of the deal.

“I think I am not supposed to reveal the details of it, but I can tell you it was about 800 pages long,” Paul said.

NOTE: An 800 page document is not about free trade. A free trade agreement would read something like this:

We have agreed to allow free trade between our countries.   

What is going on behind closed doors is the expansion of crony capitalism---which had nothing to do with free trade or free markets.

  -RW

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