July 6, 2015 3:43PM

Oh, the Hyperbole!

By Simon Lester

I’m generally a fan of the efforts by WikiLeaks to publish secret government documents. There may be times where particular documents are too sensitive to put out there, but for the most part I think the government is being unnecessarily secretive.


However, in terms of commentary on the documents it publishes, WikiLeaks doesn’t always know what it is talking about. Here is what it said recently about a draft text of an international negotation on freeing up trade in services (the Trade in Services Agreement, or TiSA):

Today, 1500 CEST Wednesday, 1 July 2015, WikiLeaks releases a modern journalistic holy grail: the secret Core Text for the largest ‘trade deal’ in history, the TiSA (Trade In Services Agreement), whose 52 nations together comprise two‐​thirds of global GDP. The negotiating parties are the United States, the 28 members of the European Union and 23 other countries, including Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Taiwan and Israel.


…


While the proposed Trans‐​Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP) have become well known in recent months, the TiSA is the largest component of the United States’ strategic neoliberal ‘trade’ treaty triumvirate. Together, the three treaties form not only a new legal order shaped for transnational corporations, but a new economic “grand enclosure”, which excludes China and all other BRICS countries.

Wow, “a new legal order shaped for transnational corporations”! That sounds scary! We better avoid that!


It also sounds like a massive exaggeration of what’s in the legal text. WikiLeaks seems to be taking the view of one trade critic as fact. There are certainly arguments that, in their efforts to promote free international trade in services, the governments working on this treaty haven’t gotten the balance between economic efficiency and national autonomy exactly right. But I think the right approach for WikiLeaks, instead of assuming a massive corporate conspiracy, is to publish the documents it finds and then offer to host a discussion among various experts about what the text actually says and what its impact will be.