The shifting rhetoric around the TPP over the years was interesting. First, liberals said it was just another trade deal, ho-hum, no need to look behind the curtain. Then the socialists said it was a giveaway to corporations and convinced everyone else they should oppose it. Liberals panicked, but then pretended to agree, or said it needs reworking. Now liberals are saying it was actually a plan to secure American hegemony in the Pacific and it’s a terrible thing it’s gone. Apparently restraining China is something Americans are supposed to care about. I mean, they live there, they may as well run the joint. Not very good messaging if you ask me. I think stories about how women working in sweatshops for pennies making clothes for Westerners is actually an improvement over their old, squalid lifestyle tugs at the heart strings a bit better.
I’m more partial to the ‘kill 10’s of thousands of political prisoners a year and then cut them up and use their organs for spare parts for their rich elite’ as a whole ‘heart strings’ pulling angle. Or how they have so ruined their environment that even the rich are worried about having filters for air and water and going outside thingy…and the less than rich are basically just fucked. Or…well, the list is too long. Lots of reasons to have one’s heart strings tugged wrt China.
Even if they don’t fill the void of the U.S. in the TPP, they’ll fill the void in a broader economic sense. Most countries would prefer the U.S. be the ones to be holding the reins, but it’s clear that Trump is taking the U.S. out of consideration. So then what?
Again, the point is not the TPP per se but rather the larger shift that’s happening. The TPP was designed to pivot the U.S. in Asia, against the threat of China. The U.S. has now backed out of the U.S.-China race. In a two country race where one country backs out, guess who wins?
Oh, I agree it was stupid for the US to back out of the TPP. Epically stupid, IMHO. I know that it was part of our pivot to Asia and that we have lost not only credibility but also a huge potential economic opportunity. I just am less sanguine that China is ready to or will step up to fill the void as there is a huge amount of distrust and angst over China’s trade and economic actions, as well as their naked territorial grab for the South and East China Sea adventure.
Ok, let’s take this apart. In 1989, Canada’s unemployment rate was 7.5%. In 2016, it was 7.0, which means your are technically correct. However, from 1990 to 1997, it was between 9.1 and 11.4%, so there was an increase. Cite here. (PDF)
I would also point out that annual growth in average personal income per capita was at 1.55 percent a year in the 1980s but slid to 0.63 percent a year between 1989 and 2005. The bottom 20 percent of families saw incomes fall by 7.6 percent during 1989 to 2004, while incomes of the top 20 percent rose 16.8 percent. The average Canadian wage increased eight percent between 1990 and 2000, while the top one percent of wage earners made 64 percent more.
This isn’t even looking at NAFTA chapter 11 disputes. The investor-state dispute settlement mechanism contained in NAFTA’s chapter 11 grants investors the right to sue foreign governments without first pursuing legal action in the country’s court systems, in order to protect foreign investors from discrimination. There were 12 cases brought against Canada from 1995 to 2005, while from 2006 - 2016 there have been 23. Canada has lost or settled six claims paying a total of $170 million in damages. The U.S.,meanwhile, has won 11 cases and has never lost a NAFTA investor-state case. Funny that.
About 63 per cent of the claims against Canada involved challenges to environmental protection or resource management programs that allegedly interfere with the profits of foreign investors. Our clean air and water are less important than foreign profits under NAFTA. For example, let’s look at MMT. There was a national ban on gasoline additive MMT, due to it being a suspected neurotoxin. Because of NAFTA, that ban was removed, and the government paid Ethyl Corp 13 million for the privilege of poisoning our citizens.
Still want to claim that NAFTA benefits all of Canada?
The benefits of Trade may be immense — although rather than wailing the demise of any treaty, things will just default to the regulations we have at the moment: it’s not as if nations are being forced back to barter — but it was the other stuff, purposed to benefit corporations and intellectual property that arouse more suspicions.
Personally I am utterly sick of commodities and firms dealing all being owned by one giant conglomeration. They can’t let any competitor survive, no matter how insignificant.
Like beer ? AB InBev has 200 competing beer brands for you.
Buy a bottle of water: over 70% of brands are part of Nestle. ‘Water is not a human right’ Nestle, no less.
Look for an internet hosting company in America, good luck finding one not owned by EIG.
All this stifles the normal course of companies growing, providing new stuffs, and offering meaningful choice
You keep harping on the fact that more people means more money and more jobs but that seems to ignore the absolute shit ton of poor people in this world.
Using your example of a small country of 15 million. Instead of dividing the country perfectly you divide the country into two groups, the richest 20% in the north and the poorest 80% in the south. The north also gets more land, natural resources, and a better infrastructure. Now say I barely made it into north but thank god I did. Because I barely made it in to the north I don’t own a company and am entirely beholden to the even richer citizens to keep my very good standard of living. The only added value I have above the people in the south at that point is that I am located in the north. So what’s in my best interest? It seems like I’m giving up the only thing I have going for me on the theory that a rising tide lifts all boats?
I’m about as big a free trade as there is, and agree with pretty much everything Rickjay has said. However, if I had to come up with an argument against the TPP and NAFTA, I wuld say that there are very good reasons to avoid huge, multilateral agreements in favor of bilateral agreements between nations. Multilateral agreements tend to be unstable compromises that wind up polluted with exceptions and compromises.
If all of Trump’s bombast around trade is an opening salvo to set conditions to negotiate bilateral treaties that eliminate even more trade protections, then great. But I see no evidence of that - the only ideology I have seen Trump consistently hold is his opposition to free trade. His picks for commerce and U.S. trade representative reinforce the notion that Trump really means to be a protectionist president. If that turns out to be the case, the economy will suffer for it and the poor will be hit hardest.
Trump may set a record for “Shortest time between Inauguration and Impeachment”.
He just removed the US from a major Asian Trading Bloc.
For a guy with Russian fingerprints all over him, he has certainly given all of Asian trade to China (which was not even in the TPP).
Neat trick, Bozo!
Because that’s normal, politician-level lies. Waiting for public opinion to shift on, say, gay marriage until it’s only a somewhat controversial view to have, not a career ending one.
I wish politicians didn’t have to…well, play politics, but there are reasons why they do. And thanks to a great deal of ignorance about trade and globalisation, being pro-TPP was up there with being atheist.
But Trump OTOH just makes up shit out of whole cloth e.g. “Thousands cheered as the WTC towers came down” “I can’t release my tax returns while under audit” “I have evidence that Obama’s birth certificate was a forgery” and obviously a fuckload more we could list. That’s a whole different class of untrustworthy.
I don’t dispute that many felt that way but I don’t think the assessment is correct.
Hilary wouldn’t have signed TPP if public opinion stayed where it was.
Meanwhile, as already alluded, Trump is the mother, father and holy shit of liars.
Perhaps, but why bother to vote for someone who will/may/“well it depends” carry out the opposite policy they promised and against the policy for which one votes for them ?
This isn’t necessarily about Hillary in the end, or Trump. One may as well stay at home if a candidate has no beliefs, and just takes the votes and runs. On any issue.
It’s not just the competition but the type of competition that has to be considered. I don’t think that a trade deal hurts American workers just because there’s more competition, but if you have a clearly developed industrialized country like the United States entering a free trade agreement with a much less developed country, there’s an incentive by the US companies to save money on labor costs by moving jobs overseas. And indeed that is what has happened. You can argue that free trade creates other opportunities, and indeed they do. The question is, for whom? And what happens to those individuals and families who are displaced by the realignment of labor? We’re not just talking about relocated jobs, either. The same effect can occur when American consumers decide they’re not going to pay an extra 50% (arbitrary number) for a Rubbermaid container made in the United States and opt for the one made abroad.
There’s nothing wrong with global free trade in principle but the American worker is vulnerable to displacement, and the larger problem is that for decades, executives lobbied Washington for moving jobs overseas AND at the same against a social safety net and infrastructure that would help individuals to adjust to economic shocks. Whether it’s wise or not, these are valid concerns that opponents of free trade have. It would have been best for everyone if Corporate America and Washington had had the foresight to avoid this wave of populist anger with thoughtful policies both within the language of the agreements and also with better social policies at home. Now we’re left with what will probably be a degree of protectionism not seen since the early 1930s, and in the end everyone loses.
Well I’d rather vote for a candidate that takes into account what people want, than one that ignores what everyone is saying (if such a politician has ever existed in a country that’s still a democracy).
Also conceding that hillary was pandering on one issue is not the same thing as saying she’s done that on every issue and so has no beliefs.
