Last week in this space we printed an article that touched on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and how the terms of this far-reaching trade agreement were meant to be kept secret from the public until five years after the agreement had been signed or the agreement was abandoned by the 12 countries involved.

The likelihood that this agreement will come to pass has been heightened by the passing of the Trade Promotion Authority legislation (TPA) signed by President Barack Obama in June, which allows him to get an up-or-down vote on any international trade agreements, without allowing Congress to offer any amendments. The TPA legislation will last for six years, regardless of who replaces Obama after 2016.

Another trade agreement that falls under TPA is called the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) and, like TPP, has been negotiated entirely in secret and without participation of any negotiators representing the interests of consumers or the public. Like TPP before it, the terms of the agreement, being negotiated by 52 countries and multinational corporations since 2013, were supposed to remain hidden from the public for five years after it was adopted or abandoned. However, some of the agreement was leaked and published by WikiLeaks.

Most surprisingly—or perhaps not surprisingly at all to those who have been paying attention—is new rules called for in the international banking and financial industry in the TISA negotiations. Keep in mind that this is the industry that almost everyone agrees precipitated the global financial collapse in 2008. TISA would restrict regulatory policies intended to limit financial risk.

According to Ben Beachy, writing in Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, “TISA’s sweeping ‘market access’ rules conflict with commonsense financial regulations that apply equally to foreign and domestic firms. One rule would expose governments to legal challenges before extrajudicial tribunals for banning risky financial services or products, such as the complex derivatives that fueled the financial crisis. The same rule threatens proposals to limit the size of banks so that they do not become ‘too big to fail.’”

In a preliminary analysis of the leaked TISA financial services chapter, law professor Jane Kelsey, of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, wrote, “The secrecy of negotiating documents exceeds even the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and runs counter to moves in the World Trade Organization (WTO) towards greater openness.”

She also wrote, “The TISA is being promoted by the same governments that installed the failed model of financial de-regulation in the WTO and which have been blamed for helping to fuel the global financial crisis.” Further, she said, “TISA is designed for and in close consultation with the global finance industry, whose greed and recklessness has been blamed for successive crises and who continue to capture rulemaking in global institutions.”

The financial institutions involved in the TISA negotiations are also very concerned with transparency, meaning they want governments to be very transparent when creating rules or regulations that may impact their businesses. The agreement, however, does not call for greater transparency on how financial institutions operate or treat their customers and, given the recent history of the financial industry, that should be of paramount importance to all of the 52 countries involved in these negotiations.

In May, five of the largest and most powerful banks in the world pled guilty to manipulating the world’s foreign exchange market so they could profit. The banks, Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland acknowledged that the illegal activity ran from 2007 through 2013, and the companies agreed to pay fines totaling nearly $6 billion.

Now these very same banks, along with other financial institutions, want to re-write the international rules on finance, and keep the new rules secret from the consumers who use financial institutions for five years. Remarkably, everyone involved thinks this is a reasonable arrangement, including, apparently, President Barack Obama and the leaders of the 51 other countries who are all nominally democracies. At the conclusion of the Group of Seven (G7) meeting in Germany in June, the White House posted a statement from the leaders of the seven countries, which says, “We also welcome ongoing efforts to conclude ambitious and high-standard new bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) and look forward to swift progress in pluri-lateral negotiations, including the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA)....”

Congress gave away its right to propose changes to TPP, or TISA, or the third trade agreement currently being negotiated, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which involves the U.S. and the countries of the European Union. The fact that these treaties have been negotiated in secret and, if adopted, will remain secret, is a sufficient reason by itself for citizens of democracies to oppose them and pressure their legislators to vote all three down.