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[–] oedipusaurus_rex ago 

Trade deals aren't necessarily bad, but from where I'm standing, this one is.

What's going on geo-politically is that the US and Europe are all on the same page. We follow the same laws that were put into place when the US was a manufacturing powerhouse, so we were able to negotiate trade laws that benefited the US. Since Nafta went through our manufacturing was outsourced to other countries. We got really cheap goods out of this deal, but the manufacturing sector was decimated. If you didn't work in manufacturing then this was a good thing. If you did then this was a bad thing. Also it was kinda bad because we sold off one of our bargaining chips for cheaper prices on goods.

So right now China and SE Asia are huge manufacturing hubs. The US doesn't have much going on in that area of the world, and it's coming up in a big way, and they have no obligation to follow the same trade laws as the rest of the world. The TPP was negotiated to implement trade laws that benefit US interest in that part of the world. Since we don't have a major stake in manufacturing anymore we have to give China something to make it worth their time. As it turns out most of our good paying service sector jobs can be outsourced. Things like nursing, customer service, they can be done over telephone and internet. China wanted to take over the US service sector as payment for following western trade laws.

If you or your family work in jobs in the service industry then the TPP is not in your best interest. If you own a company that does international trade in SE Asia then the TPP is a great thing.

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[–] l23r ago 

TPP is dead. Hardly anyone knows about the RCEP and the people who support it want to keep it that way, which is why they keep the focus on the TPP.

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[–] dontforgetaboutevil ago  (edited ago)

Because all of the international trade pacts that have been made in my lifetime have resulted in a net loss of US jobs. This has shrunk our whole economy and made everything harder for US citizens. No matter how well off you are some element of your interest has been damaged by these pacts.

I don't exactly know why they always turn out so awful. Mostly it seems that the elements of the free market are removed by flooding the market with cheap shoddy products. This causes decent products which are more expensive to eventually get priced out of the market. Or quality manufacturers lower the quality of their own products to compete.

Essentially a market functions at it's lowest common denominator in all situations. Maybe in a true free market that wouldn't happen but I've never heard of one of those anywhere. Maybe somebody has one running on another planet but it's sure as fuck never existed on earth.

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[–] pushthis ago  (edited ago)

edit- the TPP is global business of the current time, or it was until being canceled. it is similar in past efforts to fortify global business that which has not the global interest of billions in mind.

because technology facillitates innovation and innovation facilitates ease in local production but global business works against this and in doing so, supresses what technology runofthemill people have available to themselves. So one sees, global business is not superior. like a carrot far from a bunny, global business theme has become. before global facilitated luxuries across the globe being delivered to consumerslocal but nowdays the only luxuries existing across the world in this Information Age is cheap labor by oppressive regimes and the likes for the taking

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[–] murraryrothbard 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago  (edited ago)

Some would say crony trade is better than no trade. That is the main non-hysterical argument I have heard against trump pulling out of TPP. From my view crony trade is bad and I have to think trump as a businessman knows zero trade is not the goal. We'll see what he does. Someone has to put their foot down on the crony trade deals we can't just keep approving them because "it's better than nothing".

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[–] 7744797? 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

It's like NAFTA but bigger.

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[–] badkangaroo 0 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago 

The TPP also includes a Trade Tribunal

Of many things TPP allows "to exempt foreign corporations from our laws and regulations, placing the resolution of any disputes as to the applicability of those matters to foreign business in the hands of an international arbitration tribunal overseen by the Secretary General of the United Nations." [http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/11736-tpp-secret-trade-agreement-puts-international-tribunal-above-us-law]

Why is the tribunal bad?

"These pacts also empower foreign investors to bypass domestic courts and sue governments for cash damages in international tribunals." [http://www.citizen.org/documents/tpp-investment-fixes.pdf]

The tribunals operate above our domestic courts and have very little oversight unless you trust the UN. Then they force the government to pay for lost profit. I'm assuming that the payment would come out of our treasury.

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[–] rwbj 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

This is one of the biggest deals. These are known as ISDS clauses, or investor-state-dispute-settlement. As an example of these there was Phillip Morris vs Uruguay. Phillip Morris is headquartered in Switzerland who has a similar treaty with Uruguay. After Uruguay passed some basic public health smoking legislation (limiting advertisement, packaging standards, no smoking in public places, etc) Phillip Morris was able to sue the country.

These courts literally entitle corporations to profit. If a nation decides to do something that could interfere with that profit they can sue the state. If the state loses, not only is the corporation allowed to overturn their law - but the state must also compensate the corporation for lost profits with taxpayer money. In this specific case Phillip Morris, after dragging it through the tribunal for 6 years (and the country was spending one can only imagine how much taxpayer money defending themselves), ultimately lost - but the fact this was even possible is ridiculous.

These already exist, to some degree, with things like NAFTA but the TPP was going to greatly expand the scope and scale of these. They effectively write corporate pandering into law.

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[–] badkangaroo 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

These courts literally entitle corporations to profit.

Sounds like some crazy talk doesn't it? If this kept on going, then the corporations would quite literally begin to run the courts/government. Imagine facebook/Zuckerberg getting this power.

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[–] Ciscogeek 0 points 16 points (+16|-0) ago  (edited ago)

From a good reddit post on /r/canada

This is not my comment but someone from /r/worldnews and I wanted to show just how big of a bullet Canadian workers coast to coast dodged thanks to Trump (as unpopular as he is) when our PM who is suppose to champion for middle class was trying to push travesty of a free trade agreement:

"I spent a lot of time writing this, and it doesn't appear to be showing up in the comments. I'll try one more time as a top level comment - What the TPP actually does and why:

I did a couple hours of research a few months ago. The best I could come up with from neutral sources was what I put below. Read all of the bullet points though, because I didn't neatly separate this list into pros and cons (if you even can).

  • It is an absurdly complicated subject, so take everything with a grain of salt.

  • It would be like NAFTA was for mexico <--> US / Canada, but with a few major differences.

  • The first major difference, is that instead of targeting trade with Mexico, the point was to target trade with south east asia.

  • The second major difference was that NAFTA targeted manufacturing jobs (in return for cheaper goods). TPP targeted service level jobs, and was very explicit in which industries for which countries.

  • For example, for the United States, jobs in nursing and retail work were specifically targeted and expected to be strongly adversely affected, in return for significantly expanded asian market penetration for things like American automotive exports and pharmaceuticals.

  • How could something like nursing be exported? Well, that actually gets to the heart of the matter. For the United States, the point of the TPP (and its sister acts) was to greatly, greatly strengthen and enforce IP law for south east asia, to match already existing IP and trade law in the US and Europe.

  • So whereas right now your bank probably hires American programmers, instead of programmers from Cambodia, for purely safety and enforcement reasons, that would change tomorrow. And with the TPP, if you are a programmer, this would adversely affect you. But nursing was specifically targeted, as bringing SE asia more in line with HIPAA guarantees would make it legally feasible to outsource more hospital overhead offshore.

  • This all means you could expect major offshoring of what are right now considered reputable and secure jobs in America, and for the act to be quite transformative for the economy. In short, if your job isn't tied to the USA, and is easy to offshore, but hasn't been for logistic, legal or economic reasons, the TPP almost certainly changed the math involved with that equation (though of course it will be different for every job / industry).

Okay, so if America is trading away good jobs in entire industries, what does it get in return?

  • Right now, if you are a large business that wants to get into Asian markets, you have two problems. 1) If you open in China, there's a good chance your designs will be eventually be stolen and given to a Chinese company, which the Chinese government will then later support at your expense. And 2) The rest of SE asia has similar problems to varying degrees, and they all trade with China.

  • Additionally, right now Europe's economy is looking dead for the foreseeable future. And since America isn't spending money jumpstarting our own economy, we're not likely to grow at a large rate any time soon either.

  • But asian economies are booming. And as they do so, they are trading with each other, and making trade deals with each other that don't include us. And that's a major disadvantage for America and Europe.

  • So the purpose of the TPP, from a western viewpoint, is to get SE asia into the same economic and legal framework as the western world, and open their markets to western companies.

  • The second purpose of the TPP, is to get China to play ball too. Right now, if we tell China to open their markets, and enforce western IP law, they'll laugh in our face (and do so). We don't have the bartering chips for that deal. But if the rest of SE asia is already doing so with the West, and builds their economies around such laws, then 15-20 years from now, it won't just be Europe / USA telling China to open their markets and enforce international IP law, it will be the vast majority of China's trading partners. In short, it would be an economic coup d'etat for western powers, that would bring a lot of money to large western companies and give Washington much more power in Asia. If you are a citizen of the west, this is almost certainly a good thing.

  • So Obama and Clinton's bet, is that if we don't make a deal like the TPP, then Chinese (and by extension SE asian) companies are going to spring up as international competitors to American firms anyway. And that increased competition represents lost profits that could otherwise have been made by western companies trading in China. So by trading those jobs to outsourcing now, the US would be in a much more dominant position later, and it is worth the trade.

Okay, is that line of thinking valid?

Yes and No.

  • If you are a CEO, or a powerful washington person. Then yes, unequivocally. The TPP means continued western and American worldwide economic hegemony and should be strongly fought for. EU / USA firms cannot do business in China. That's a major economic disadvantage for any western firm playing on that level.

  • For people who's jobs are not offshored, then yes, this is probably a good plan. Just like NAFTA resulted in cheaper goods, TPP should result in cheaper services across the board.

  • But if your job can be offshored (and the list of offshorable jobs the TPP will make cost effective to offshore is large), then it is more complicated.

  • If the USA had a real economic safety net, and put forward programs towards retraining and revitalizing areas specifically hit by offshoring and globalization, then you could vote for the TPP confidently. This, for example is how the scandanavian countries handled integration into the EU, and overall there are very few cases of real economic hardship as the result of that integration. Overall, it was a success story.

  • But after NAFTA, the USA implemented no such programs, whatsoever. Economists at the time, believed them to be unnecessary. The thinking was, that if free trade agreements resulted in more trade, which resulted in more jobs, then people who lost their jobs to outsourcing should have no difficulty finding new jobs in a free market.

  • The reality was that outsourcing resulted in chain effects whereby entire regions of the country lost all their good jobs, and the good jobs that remained moved to other US locations. Combined with the fact that many people woke up one day to find that their entire career was no longer employable in their home country, meant that they simply could not find new work. Add in again Greenspan's attempts to 'lower worker mobility to increase American labor competitiveness', and the end result is that today, in 2017, many families that lost their jobs due to nafta STILL are not employed.

So at the end of the day, you have to make a call. Do you think that America will be like Scandanavia, and reinvest a portion of the profits reaped by greater access to Asian markets on economic growth, unemployment benefits, worker retraining and government programs? Or do you think that America will call those things socialism, ignore the problem, and allow large companies to reap the economic rewards unmolested?

Personally, I fall into the second category, so I am very, very happy to see the TPP fail. I think that given the second viewpoint, outsourcing service level jobs, in THIS economy, would be a death sentence for many, many people. But that said, if you think that the first option is a possibility, then the TPP should be strongly supported. And really, in an ideal world, if we could trust that America would take care of the people who would be harmed by the outsourcing, then we would want the TPP to pass, because increased trade and American competitiveness in the future is something that should be encouraged and worked towards."

Edit 1: Someone found the author, its /u/ep1032, thank you for your insightful post.

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[–] Dalai_Llama 0 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago 

A very interesting read. However, I would point out that even though this assessment is made:

This, for example is how the scandanavian countries handled integration into the EU, and overall there are very few cases of real economic hardship as the result of that integration. Overall, it was a success story.

Once the economic integration is achieved, the political integration will begin.

I don't believe the political integration of the Scandanavian countries is going as smoothly as expected.

Once the integration of Western and Asian economies is complete, the political integration will begin. If it was so upsetting to consider the possibility of the Russians interfering in US elections, I don't see how this could be justified.

Ultimately, this path would lead to the dissolution of US soverignty. And I believe there are many nefarious actors who see this as the ultimate prize.

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