Look who's not invited

US President Barack Obama obviously hates WikiLeaks already and must be fuming at last week's leak of the draft of the chapter on intellectual property of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, which is a cornerstone of his foreign policy.

But the hundreds of millions of people directly affected and the several billion indirectly involved should be grateful and must now hope that the leak will deal a death blow to this dangerously secretive way of negotiating international trade deals. At the very least, the revelation should ensure Obama does not get fast-track authority to push the deal through Congress before the end of the year.

The TPP has long been controversial because critics complain the exclusion of China from the talks now involving 12 Pacific Rim countries is part of an attempt by America to maintain its hegemony.

But even staunch supporters of free trade - who point out that a genuinely free-trade agreement should be a win-win situation for all players - are unhappy with fundamental aspects of this deal, some of which the WikiLeaks documents reveal. Among the complaints are:

• The TPP has a basic political intent because it excludes China;
• It is undemocratic because there has been insufficient public discussion or debate about proposals and arguments going on behind closed doors;
• It is not basically a trade agreement because of the 29 chapters that have been admitted to be part of the negotiations, only five deal directly with trade - the other 25 are concerned with food and environmental standards, intellectual property rights and other issues;
• The TPP as constituted plays into the hands of big US firms, especially pharmaceutical companies and Disney, which are the major beneficiaries and have been allowed to shape the negotiations even as politicians and the public have been excluded.

Some of the most strident opponents of the deal, including Yves Smith, founder of the blog Naked Capitalism, claim that if the TPP goes through, it could kill people in order to enrich big US pharmaceutical companies. "The intent is to strengthen America's aggressive patent regime and require foreign countries to comply with it," Smith wrote.

The US Food and Drug Administration is generally sympathetic to Big Pharma and will allow a minor change to an existing drug - for example, an extended-release version of a pill that needs to be taken only once a day - to get a new patent.