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Emails Show How Industry Lobbyists Basically Wrote The Trans-Pacific Partnership
An anonymous reader writes: This Techdirt story shows how industry lobbyists influenced the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, to the point that one even openly celebrates that the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) version copied his own text word for word. The email exchange between Jim DeLisi, from Fanwood Chemical, to Barbara Weisel, a USTR official reads: "Hi Barbara – John sent through a link to the P4 agreement. I have taken a quick look at the rules of origin. Someone owes USTR a royalty payment – these are our rules. They will need some tweaking but will likely not need major surgery. This is a very pleasant surprise. I will study more closely over the weekend."
to know how this thing will operate. Whether there needs to be an agreement, and what needs to be in it, must be decided by some folks who have some decent idea of how these relationships operate.
The unfortunate part is that no one involved is doing anything to establish their credibility with regard to my interests. The people involved are plenty smart, but most of their words and actions seem to indicate that they have little to no consideration of my interests.
Are my interests more important than yours? Of course not. Neither are yours more important than mine. And most importantly, neither are the authors' more important than ours, collectively.
It would be nice to see some attention paid to that fact.
Both are ways, for large corporations, to "externalize risks to policitcs, and internalize profits". The wording is not mine. Karl Marx already observed this practice.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The economists love to say that trade is great for everyone. But they assume that all parties have an equal amount of advantages and disadvantages. There is this illusion of comparative advantage. But at least with the US we are making trade deals for the sole purpose of businesses lowering their costs to boost profits and make their shareholders richer and their CEOs even richer; while we little people lose opportunities and jobs and stagnant wages. This country's structural unemployment and underemployment is indicative of this.
Protectionism? Absolutely not!
What we need is a business environment like Germany's where government, business and labor all work together for society's overall prosperity. In the US, labor needs much more power (unions) and business needs to be taken down a few notches. I think we need to move towards a German economic model - stop the corporatism in the US.
This is one of the few instances where "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" actually applies. If the TPP is so great, why all the secrecy? If you've got to hide the details of a bill or treaty to get it passed, then maybe there's something wrong with your bill/treaty that means it shouldn't be passed!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
To be fair, I suspect much of this is the general dumbing down of our leaders combined with the increasingly technical World they are asked to govern.
The Congressman need not understand (or employ someone who understands) with all those helpful lobbyists at their beck and call.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Sorry, but you seem to be confusing a corrupt oligarchy for a nanny state.
And that's pretty much bullshit.
This is governments becoming beholden to corporations, and selling the farm for some magic beans.
This isn't a nanny state, this is a wholesale co-opting of government for corporate interests.
This has NOTHING at all to do with socialism, and everything to do with corporate welfare and stacking the deck for them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A law so secret that you can't even view it unless you're a congressperson, and even then you have to go to a locked room without recording equipment.
But how could that be suspicious at all?
And now we find out it's written and conceived by multinational corporations.
And we all know how benevolent and caring *they* are.
More seriously, anyone who votes for this has been bribed or blackmailed. It's an obvious takeover of nation-states by a globe spanning elite corporate-state.
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