 Today we're going to talk about a giant trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. While most Americans probably haven't even heard of the TPP, it could affect everything from internet freedom to access to medicine to how many stormtroopers are going to come crashing through your window if the recording industry finds out that you're violating a copyright. And while trade agreements used to deal mostly with abstract concepts like trade, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is an entirely different animal. For example, the United States is using the TPP negotiations to push for patent standards that would make it easier for drug companies to maintain their monopolies on new drugs. Which is awesome if you're a pharmaceutical company that's tired of competing with cheaper generics, but not so awesome if you're an organization like Doctors Without Borders and depend on that competition from generics so you can stop more people from dying horribly. Then there's the horrific prospect of investor-state dispute settlements. Can we get like a spooky sound effect here? Imagine that there's a company based in another TPP country, like, I don't know, Brunei. But that company still does some business in the United States. Now imagine that the United States passes a new safety regulation. That means that company from Brunei has to bring its U.S. operations into compliance, which might mean they have to dip into their profits a little. But under the investor-state system, foreign corporations, like our friends in Brunei, could bypass the legal system, go directly to a trade tribunal and demand compensation for the profits they lost directly from the American taxpayers. So yeah, that might sound like the craziest thing in the entire universe, but it's already happening under other trade agreements. Like under the North American Free Trade Agreement, American pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly is currently suing Canada to the tune of $500 million, because the Canadian government decided not to extend two of their drug patents. And what makes this so extraordinary is that Eli Lilly's complaint doesn't even have anything to do with Canadian law. Instead, it's making the case that since it's a U.S. company, it should be treated by the same standards as it would in the United States. So for the folks keeping score at home, that's a corporation suing an entire country, because that country's right to govern itself is starting to interfere with that corporation's profits. And if you're having a hard time remembering where President Obama made our rousing call to give corporations a power that used to be reserved for, like, other countries, that's because candidate Obama and the Democratic Party promised to oppose this kind of thing in their 2008 party platform. But given the positions the Obama administration's trade negotiators have been taking, I think it's pretty safe to say that they've changed their minds on this one. Even though there's an entire subplot we could do on the host of threats to internet freedom, privacy, and innovation that come with the TPP, I'd like to take a moment to just talk about why this is even happening, because I haven't even got to the kicker yet, which is that this entire negotiation process was supposed to be completely secret. The only way the public knows about any of the things we've talked about is because they were leaked to the press by whistleblowers, and the Obama administration's trade negotiators won't show the rest of the draft to anyone. Anyone. Except for hundreds of corporate advisors and lobbyists. Of course. And while you're obviously going to want to get some input from businesses, a trade deal this huge would affect the lives of billions of people, and they might not want the same things as that handful of insiders who have been given extra special access. According to a spokesman for an understandably furious Senator Ron Wyden, even the few members of Congress who have been given access to the trade documents have to personally go to the trade representative's offices to see them, while the corporate advisors all got passwords that let them view an online version whenever they want. While defending the need for secrecy in an interview with Reuters, a U.S. trade representative named Ron Kirk cited the example of the failed free trade area of the Americas, which collapsed after negotiators released the draft text. And this is where the flaws in the logic start to show, because if the argument is that being transparent with the public results in widespread opposition and undermines the United States' negotiating position, you'd think the solution would be to just come up with a trade agreement that the public would actually support in the first place. Instead, U.S. negotiators are trying to conceal as much of the negotiation process as possible. It probably doesn't help that the office of the U.S. trade representative is full of people who used to work for pharmaceutical companies in the entertainment industry, and had it actually stayed a secret, a behind-the-scenes trade deal would have given President Obama a nice way to quietly reverse his positions on controversial issues like intellectual property rights and investor state settlements, and do it all without enraging the public. But that still leaves us with the question of why President Obama is reversing those positions to begin with. And I'm sure this is a huge surprise coming from the guy who works at an anti-corruption nonprofit, but it could have something to do with the fact that the same special interest that got a sweet advance copy of the TPP and helped shape it into a corporate wish list also happened to be major political donors. Because while President Obama doesn't have to worry about raising money for another campaign, the next Democrat who runs for president, and the members of Congress from both parties who will eventually have to approve the TPP do. As much as politicians love to talk tough about standing up to those evil special interests, they all know that nine times out of ten, the candidate who raises the most money wins. And since 63.5% of that money comes from 0.4% of the population, there isn't a terribly powerful incentive for most politicians to give a damn what the people who aren't in that 0.4% think. So, should we fight to stop the TPP? Absolutely yes, and we'll link you some tools to take action at the end of this video. But unless we get at the root cause, unless we force the money out of our system and criminalize the casual corruption that's come to define an entire generation of politicians, we'll be back here in the same place a month from now fighting the same fight to stop the same kind of innovation crushing anti-competitive policies over and over and over again. The reason politicians keep getting away with this sort of thing is because they don't see any consequences for their actions. They're assuming that they can get away with pushing through as much lobbyist approved policy as it takes to keep the reelection war chest full as long as they crowbar middle class and jobs into enough talking points. And I know all of that sounds very discouraging, but it really shouldn't. As far as generation defining political battles go, we actually don't have it so bad. We're not talking about ending apartheid or overthrowing a dictator here. We just have to throw any politicians who won't make real anti-corruption reform a priority out on their collective ass. And the first step towards making that happen is establishing that getting money out of politics isn't some fringe issue. That takes a permanent anti-corruption movement. And as it just so happens, that's what we're building right here. I'm Monsour for Represent Us, and I'll see you next time.