I can see how TPP (when we find out what precise it is) could be claimed to affect human rights. But "fast track" is a parliamentary technique used for other types of bills, such as the BRAC bills that are used to close U.S. military bases (domestically and overseas).
Ostensibly it puts the head of state in a power to negotiate with a guarantee that the legislative body won't modify the terms and conditions after the international negotiation is done. This offers a leveraging ability because the other negotiators know that the document won't be modified afterward.
There's nothing wrong intellectually with the problem/solution scenario presented and solved by such a mechanism - so long as you entrust the people negotiating to be representing your interests.
And therein lies the problem. Many American's haven't stated the words "This is not a representative government and has lost its authority" because that is directly seditious, but in practice their contextualized actions support this postulation.
The reason that the mechanism of fast track is not ok because people strongly distrust the government - in fact, that's a redeeming feature of some open democracies - it's why we have an election determined by a calendar, and not the whim of the ruling party.
The underpinnings of trust in what makes such a solution work is fundamentally incompatible with our structure and experience of government. We have strong evidence and are fully aware of what that will lead to.
And as more of the TPP is leaked, we see we are 100% right. That's why fast track is patently offensive - we know it's the 1% trying to be a stealthy ninja to screw over the 99% even more. Well, most of us do --- some of us are Lenin's useful idiots (usually about 28% believe in supply side neoliberalism in polls. Lucky for us, about 90% of those hate Obama)
This is why commercial news outlets report so little about it. A strategy of silence is the only chance they have.
They could try to stall two years and hope a republican or at least a white male is in the white house but I think there is cognizance that the timeline of net neutrality which led to an activist victory can't be repeated.
If you give the internet 2 more years to mobilize on this, TPP iz getting defeated. Chelsea Manning changed the rules of the game. People could relate to the wussy kid who shook the global military complex. Everything took off after that. Corporate power needs to be faster and quieter, the lion has awoken.
To force Congress into an up-or-down vote on the merits of the whole package instead of pointless thread-pulling that will cause an agreement to founder. There are 12 countries that are a party to the TPP. If we are to wait for 12 legislatures to debate and amend and re-amend then nothing will ever get done; there are times when a simple yes or no vote is more appropriate.
It's like people don't seem to understand the point of having an executive branch in the first place. This sort of thing is precisely why we have one, and why the Constitution specifically empowers the President to negotiate treaties 'with the advice and consent of the senate' - not with the endless amendments and horse-trading of Congress as a whole that bedevils a great deal of domestic legislation.
Same reason you'd use the similar rules for BRAC: By forcing politicians to take an up-or-down vote on measures of national importance you get the best chance at a vote on the merits of the bill in question, without parochial concerns creeping in.
You'd never expect members of Congress from Florida to vote in favor of a bill that takes away a military base at Jacksonville, for instance, no matter how much excess capacity is resident at the base. For instance Naval Station Mayport has not had a carrier homeported there for years ever since the USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) was decommissioned. So all of the infrastructure at the base dedicated to carrier-centric concerns could be shuttered and possibly save the taxpayers some money, but doing so would forestall the option of adding a carrier later, and would probably reduce the number of personnel assigned to the base.
Alternately you could assign a nuclear carrier to the base to make use of the infrastructure present, but you'd need to make further upgrades to handle nuclear carriers, and assigning a carrier to Mayport would necessarily mean removing it from Norfolk.
Guess which state's delegation has successfully prevented the use of funds to expand Mayport's carrier capabilities? Hint: They are north of North Carolina and south of Maryland.
Now a bill like a free trade bill is practically the definition of a bill easily tainted with parochial concerns. That's the reason there was a similar outcry over NAFTA while it was being drafted, when "experts" at the time were stridently predicting the impending implosion of the American economy, with wording that would have made Steinbeck sound like a happy-go-lucky author.
It's telling when the zeal over free trade turns even progressive icons like Bernie Sanders into racists that resort to turning Vietnamese (as one example) into a sub-class of humanity compared to Americans. It's also telling when the worst accusation that can be laid against the proposal to date is that "it's still being negotiated in secret!!!1", as if that wasn't also the method used to negotiate most major international agreements.
The final proposal may turn out to be bad, and in that case I'll be the first to recommend vetoing the proposal as a whole. But simplified trade authority approval procedures are precisely the right thing to do, as otherwise you end up with "ratification" bills that ratify something completely different than what had been agreed, usually with a Ted Stevens-style "Bridge to Nowhere" attached right on top.
Do things like BRAC also threaten human rights?