With the TPP and the TTIP gone, what threat to liberty comes next?

Civil Liberties: Asia Nikkei has just reported that the Trump administration has formally withdrawn from the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a protectionist agreement masquerading as a free trade agreement. This also indicates certain termination of the corresponding TTIP agreement. Before the champagne pops open, though, it’s important to realize that something else will happen instead, and we don’t know what: these policies go back a full four decades.

Since the late 1970s, the United States has projected industrial dominance across the world by tying aggressive trade negotiations to its foreign policy. This was a bold and unusually aggressive move in the 1970s which was recommended by the ACTN, the Advisory Committee on Trade Negotiations, a committee which was headed by Edmund Pratt Jr – the head of Pfizer – and which reported straight to President Carter.

The background to this tectonic shift in the late 1970s was basically Toyota. When the geopolitical strategists in the United States observed that the American public actually preferred Japanese cars over the freedom-loving (and gas-loving, and spare-parts-loving) cars of ole American Detroit, it was written on the wall that the United States could no longer compete on industrial production alone. Putting America first, a number of committees tried putting in place international agreements that would ensure America’s status as king of the hill even in the face of superior industry elsewhere – essentially a very advanced form of rent-seeking.

The American negotiators first went to the United States WIPO with this proposal, where they were rather unceremoniously kicked out on the street, the United Nations seeing the proposal for the rent-seeking that it was. Instead, they needed to hijack another forum and convert it to what they wanted, and there were many to choose from. The choice fell on the GATT forum, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades.

Through a series of sessions where countries were played against each other, GATT was slowly converted into something called “GATT-plus” at the time, where a new global trade agreement would honor protectionist monopolies of the United States – particularly Hollywood’s distribution monopolies in the form of aggressive copyrights and the pharma industry’s monopolies on manufacturing drugs – in exchange for being able to trade at all. This way, it didn’t matter if Japan had better cars, or indeed, better everything. The world would pay rent in any case. (Of course, such a scheme only works while the US has a majority of the internationally recognized exclusive rights, but in the 1970s, China was nowhere near overtaking the US in quantity of patents and other monopolies).

Once finished, this new agreement was named TRIPS – and a new body was created to oversee it and supersede GATT. This new body was named the WTO, the World Trade Organization.

With the Internet entering the stage, the copyrights in this agreement started to collide with basic liberty – specifically, privacy. Where our parents had had the right to send an anonymous letter containing anything they wanted without it being opened in transit, powerful forces in the copyright industry wanted to curtail this liberty for our digital children, on the simple basis that “they can’t make money if anybody can send anything to anybody else anonymously”.

Not that it should matter; tomorrow’s civil liberties should never have to take a back seats to preserving yesterday’s business models.

Quite notably, even when these agreements were sold with the argument that they don’t change existing laws or only cause minor changes, it’s important to understand that the agreements also lock out the possibility of future reform. Their entire purpose is basically to tie the hands of legislators.

In order to understand just how critical enforcement of the copyright monopoly is to the United States geopolitical dominance, we can look at what happened when Russia applied for entry into the WTO. The point of controversy was a site named allofmp3.com, a site which sold mp3 files at far below record-level rates, and did so completely legally under Russian law as it was classified as a radio station, albeit a digital one.

The United States demanded it closed. That was the only notable American demand for Russia’s accession.

So let’s back up