Full Text of Trans-Pacific Partnership Released (Officially, This Time) (mfat.govt.nz)

EmagGeek writes: The full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, has been officially released, and is available for the public to see. According to CNN, The TPP is a 12-nation deal that touches on 40% of the global economy. The provisions of the deal would knock down tariffs and import quotas, making it cheaper to import and export, and open new Asia-Pacific markets. Negotiations have been going on for years, led by the United States and Japan — with China conspicuously absent from the list of signees.

Comments

This is fantastic.

[gavron]

I once went on a date where the girl said "I am going to set everything up. It will be a surprise. You'll like it! Don't try to guess what's going to happen!"

It was a great time!

The TTP is almost like that. We don't know what's coming until it does; we all get fucked; big pharma and big media have a great time.

E

Re:This is fantastic.

[Pseudonymous Powers]

we all get fucked; big pharma and big media have a great time.

So the TPP is all about movies, drugs, and sex that one partner enjoys way more than the other? Say, that really does sound like a date!

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

we all get fucked; big pharma and big media have a great time

Pretty much this.

This agreement is mostly about giving corporations a wish list of things which in general won't benefit citizens.

Because America are so fucking beholden to corporate interests they're pretty much fucking over the world to benefit multinational corporations. Stupid shit like being able to sue governments if they don't like how a law impacts them.

Thanks, assholes, for letting your corrupt politicians on the payroll of corporations to fuck up the world. We really fucking appreciate it.

This is pretty much the nail in the coffin for societies which are rules by governments instead of corporations.

Fucking stupid fucking American bullshit fucking libertarian fantasy economics in which we all get fucked for corporations is magically going to improve our fucking lives.

Fuck you America, fuck you.

Re:This is fantastic.

[truck_soccer]

You're welcome? It's not like we (citizens) have any say in what our government does. That's the greatest illusion in history. Federal elections are decided by who has the most money from "Special interests". Local and state government elections are all about who you know (read: money changing hands) And we all hoot and rave about how democracy is great and we're free. We are free to do as THEY say. We have the right to get our property taken by them, we have the right to expect no real privacy, we have the right to expect freedom of speech unless it involves unpopular opinion. When someone uses the old "if you don't like the laws you should vote someone else in" all I can do is shake my head and sigh. If we're going to have any impact on our governance in the future, there needs to be a purge of all the currently held seats in the judiciary, executive, and legislative branches on state and federal levels. Our entire system has been infiltrated and poisoned by greed.

Re:This is fantastic.

[gstoddart]

So the TPP is all about movies, drugs, and sex that one partner enjoys way more than the other?

Sure, if you mean using date rape drugs and filming it ... because that's pretty much what this stupid deal is doing to us.

It's a grab bag of stuff from the wishlist of multinational corporations, pushed through by people who are more beholden to corporate profits than their own citizens, and largely written by the industries it benefits.

Mark my words, this really is just more "race to the bottom" crap, and won't benefit citizens.

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever I read about TPP and it's cousins my mind drifts to this joke:

A bear goes to the drug store:
"50 condoms please"
Two rabbits behind him start laughing their asses off.
The bear scowls at them and says "Make that 52"

Re:This is fantastic.

[Sir_Eptishous]

He's dead Jim.

Re:This is fantastic.

[Zak3056]

You're welcome? It's not like we (citizens) have any say in what our government does. That's the greatest illusion in history. Federal elections are decided by who has the most money from "Special interests".

The older I get, the more I reject that notion. Sure, the media is manipulating you and election season is a three ring circus, and yes, there is undoubtedly election fraud that nudges things a bit, but in the end, the people still vote, and the people elect the government they deserve. Everyone pretty much agrees with YOUR statement, "special interests blah blah blah" but upwards of 90% of you (at least the ones that vote) KEEP VOTING FOR THE SAME PEOPLE! What the fuck do you expect is going to happen?

Douglas Adams summed the situation up really well in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish:

“On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”

“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”

“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”

“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”

“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”

Re:This is fantastic.

[thegarbz]

I once went on a date where the girl said "I am going to set everything up. ...

It was a great time!

we all get fucked;

Sounds like quite an evening.

big pharma

Sounds like an evening that would be hard to remember.

and big media have a great time.

And now it sounds like an evening that you'd rather forget. Pornhub link?

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Voting is theater, and only serves to make people feel warm and fuzzy for "participating" in our "democracy"

Re: This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

My vote is decided by the electorate, not by which lever I push; pretending the system still works is only contributing to the status quo of declining rights, freedoms, incomes, and health.

Re:This is fantastic.

[zlives]

i think the real culprit is the concept of winning.
no one wants to vote for a candidate that will lose. Bernie is a perfect example for the dems, most dems like him but think he will lose so they will vote for Hank so Hank can then beat Bubba and then they can say yayyyy we won.

Re:This is fantastic.

[Archangel Michael]

Here's the difference between a hot girl and Big Pharma,Media, Corporations et al ...

TPP is like being promised the hot girl, and getting fucked in your virgin ass by a bunch of well hung dudes.

Re:This is fantastic.

[TiggertheMad]

The older I get, the more I reject that notion. Sure, the media is manipulating you and election season is a three ring circus, and yes, there is undoubtedly election fraud that nudges things a bit, but in the end, the people still vote, and the people elect the government they deserve. Everyone pretty much agrees with YOUR statement, "special interests blah blah blah" but upwards of 90% of you (at least the ones that vote) KEEP VOTING FOR THE SAME PEOPLE! What the fuck do you expect is going to happen?

Douglas Adams summed the situation up really well in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish:

That is a lovely and relevant quote by DA. You are correct that at the end of the day, the people are still ultimately in charge of things. The fundamental flaw with representative democracy is the idea that the average person is qualified or will spend the needed time to make an educated decision about their leaders. They keep voting for the same people that they think are going to represent their interests, because it is really hard to 'hire' someone represent them, and most people don't want to take the time to do it properly.

We clearly need to be more careful about which lizards we vote for (irony fully intended)

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

... upwards of 90% of you (at least the ones that vote) KEEP VOTING FOR THE SAME PEOPLE!

Looking at it another way, the people who draw the district lines can predict which way people will typically vote with a >90% success rate.

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who do you propose they vote for if not the same people because they are the only ones on the ballot. Primaries aren't legally binding election processes. Parties can do whatever they want without input from members, including appointing candidates. So primaries turnout doesn't matter. Write ins and absentee votes don't get counted until after the election results are announced and even then only if it seems close. What about jarrymandering? Think my vote from Utah for bernie sanders will ever get past my local polling offices dumpster?

I can produce a mountain of empirical evidence that our votes do not matter. Can you provide any proof to the contrary?

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a grab bag of stuff from the wishlist of multinational corporations, pushed through by people who are more beholden to corporate profits than their own citizens, and largely written by the industries it benefits.

But I am sure the corporations are just reading it for the first time along with the rest of us... ;)

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case, the older you get, the more wrong you are.

Studies like that one have conclusively demonstrated that it doesn't matter which congresscritter gets voted in...those with money make the decisions, and that's it. The whole political process of campaigning, voting, etc....is just a circus.

Yes, there is a degree to which this is the voter's fault. If we would just vote for people who don't have these disgusting alliances, things would be better. You fail to realize: people who don't have these alliances never have a chance of winning. The reasons are many: most such people don't seek power in the first place, those that do are honest and hence are at an immediate disadvantage against their dishonest competitors, and if any manage to win anyway they quickly fall to temptation once they start to see the dollars and to think of themselves as potentates.

Facing reality is not pessimism, even if the reality faced is unpleasant.

Re:This is fantastic.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

What you call "race to the bottom" is capitalism causing the skyrocketting wealth and health of over 3 billion Asians, as happened in the West over a hundred years ago, and hence the average health and wealth of the combined de facto common market of 6 billion continues to increase at an excellent clip.

And to call it stagnation in the West is an exaggeration as well, given you have technological wonders for purchase that didn't exist when this process got under way 20 years ago, and you are better off (phones, medicine, and so on.)

And technological advancement should accelerate given those 3 billion generate still more wealth to be used as investment, including R&D.

Some aspects of the TPP may be bad, but opening up further trade is not one of them.

Re:This is fantastic.

[tnk1]

The major problem is that when I go to vote, I have a few choices on the ballot. Some I think suck less than others, but no way to vote for the sort of person I'd like to be in office.

Yes, I can write-in sometimes, but that is almost literally pissing into the wind. If there are other candidates from independent parties, they tend to be bugshit insane in some way.

We vote for the same people because they're the same people on the ballot. Even with a largish primary field like the Republicans have, there's really no good choice, only a decision of which one isn't as bad as the others. When your population is 300+ million people, even 15 candidates is not really all that much for a national race.

So, no, the answer is not voting for different people. At least, that's not the first step that has to happen. The first step is harder... building a party from the local levels upward which can get elected and has a base where it can get funded and get on a state and national ballot. For that, you need to do the work that the other parties have been working on for the last 100+ years.

Re:This is fantastic.

[johnlcallaway]

The problem with the US elections has nothing to do with money (at least not directly) or whether people are capable of deciding who to vote for.

I'll prove it with this statement ... why don't you run for office???

I'll wait while you form a response ....

I'll bet the reasons fell into either it doesn't interest you, you can't afford to take the time off, you don't want the public scrutiny, you don't think you could get elected, you are too busy, or a ton of other reasons.

Which is why we basically have dedicated politicians, only someone who really wants to be a politician wants to run for office. And they usually have some sort of dedicated income so they don't worry about having a job if they lose. Or in 4 years when they get kicked out.

I've talked with a few people who have run for local political positions, and most have said they would never do it again because of the experience. My wife discourages me from public office whenever I bring it up because she was involved in local elections when she was young.

We get the politicians we get because no one else wants the job.

On a side note, I always find it funny that people complain about money in politics, and how they want to get rid of it. But what they really mean is they want to get rid of all the money from groups they don't approve of. They don't want the Koch brothers to have any say, but they don't mind if the Sierra Club or Everytown does. They complain about how money influences politics. But can't answer the question about why, if it influences it so much, doesn't the NRA give a lot of money to anti-gun politicians in order to sway their opinions??

Maybe it's the actions of the politicians that attract the money, not the money changing the actions of the politicians. Doesn't it make more sense for organizations to give money to the politicians they want to get elected rather than give money to those that disagree with them?? In other words, just because ice cream sales go up in the summer and it's hot in the summer doesn't mean that ice cream makes it hot out. Just because the NRA gives money to a politician that votes against gun control doesn't mean that the money caused him to vote that way. After all, Bloomberg has pretty big pockets too.

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a grab bag of stuff from the wishlist of multinational corporations, pushed through by people who are more beholden to corporate profits than their own citizens, and largely written by the industries it benefits.

Mark my words...

Mark your words? Fucking please.

That first sentence of yours did it's best to describe global politics for the last 100 fucking years.

Yeah, I'll mark your words alright. They should be labeled SOS, a.k.a. Same Old Shit.

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

The money-in-politics issue is misunderstood because most people don't know what money actually is. I shall clarify:

Money is an abstract representation of how much influence one has over other people. This becomes clear when you realize that any time you want anyone to do anything for you, you pay them. Money is how you make people grow your food for you, sew you clothes for you, etc.

Politics is the enterprise of exercising influence over other people.

The two are essentially linked. You can no more take money out of politics than you can take medicine out of health care.

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

"but in the end, the people still vote, and the people elect the government they deserve"

Problem, science says the human brain is bad at reasoning or reality, aka your statement suggest people have freedom rather than being forced to perceive the world and behave according to their biochemistry.

Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought, see the science:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

... more "race to the bottom" crap, and won't benefit citizens.

In my weekly perusal of a(n) (online) bookstore I discovered 'Hollowed out' (David Madland), which explains how the collapse of the American middle class is turning the USA into a third-world country. The interesting part: We should all be surprised that 30 years of trickle-down economics hasn't worked. Are politicians really surprised that giving money to rich people didn't didn't make anyone else rich, or were they just grabbing money for themselves? I've noticed the American glorification of wealth and greed but even the simplest analogy reveals the flaw of reaganomics: Let's give rich teenagers a car because, eventually, the poor teenagers will get a car. This shows what reaganomics really is: Welfare for the over-indulgent that pretends to help everyone.

Re:This is fantastic.

[KGIII]

Yes, but the naysayers, like the one you replied to, don't have enough. They are entitled to more, for less, and with greater ease. They do, indeed, feel this way and then have the temerity to cite greed, ego, and others as being both to blame and morally reprehensible. Things are not exactly how they want them so they're qualified to opine and are important enough to restructure society to fit their desires. But no, it's the other side that is greedy, self-centered, and manipulative.

Re:This is fantastic.

[KGIII]

I'll prove it with this statement ... why don't you run for office???

I am. I'm running for State Senate in 2016.

Re:This is fantastic.

[KGIII]

I have been, effectively, throwing my vote away for about 40 years. I vote for a third party candidate or write one in, almost without exception. Good God, half the people I vote for would be horrific if they were elected! I vote third party, not because I want them to win. I vote because I know that there's someone compiling statistics and that if enough of us do it then they'll eventually notice and pander to those of us who want more than two choices. Hell, I've voted for Nader!

Re:This is fantastic.

[KGIII]

A bear and a rabbit are in the woods, behind a tree, taking a shit. The bear turns to the rabbit and says, "You know. I have this problem, shit really sticks to my fur. It makes it tough to clean up afterwards."

The rabbit replies, "Well, I'm glad. I don't have that problem. Shit doesn't stick to my fur."

To which the bear responds, "Good."

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

I visited Washington D.C. for the first time as a teenager. I was struck by how small it was in comparison to the land mass I had once flown over to visit the west coast. I experienced a moment of clarity where I realized just how fragile our government really is. If the majority of this country's citizens descended upon that place demanding their government change course, our government would have no choice. Fortunately, voting is easier.

Re:This is fantastic.

[sjames]

The money/time/job thing is huge. The basic income would help that one a lot.

Re:This is fantastic.

[Kjella]

Regarding the "wrong lizard", I have been following the attempt to found a small party and for every person who had sane ideas that could become a mainstream party more than 1% of the population could vote for there were quite a few who were either utter extremists, conspiracy nuts or in other ways so far off the political map you couldn't find them. The most annoying ones though were the ones who wanted our party to champion their cause, because none of the traditional parties would pick it up even though it's at best tangential or at worse divisive with the core voters. There were so many trying to derail the politics that it got flipped around, because they didn't get their pet issue in they'd refuse everyone else's pet issue so it ended up with having absolutely no official policy on so many key issues. I did vote for them, but realized they couldn't get anywhere on that platform and there was no real path to change so instead I went back to voting for one of the bigger parties. There's a lot of loons at the fringes.

Re:This is fantastic.

[dave420]

Capitalism was only successful once reined in by regulations. Capitalism without regulations truly is a race to the bottom, as we saw in the industrial revolution, before regulation had a chance to ensure the capitalist operators ceased using human labour as a consumable.

Re:This is fantastic.

[wyHunter]

Hello, it's the corporate owned American government that is doing this. Most of us ordinary people are as screwed as non Americans - or even more so.

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahaha dave420 enjoys the fine flavor of eating his words http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Re:This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got to be kidding me. I think that dave420 has a strange secret desire to be bitch slapped periodically by apk. I really do. He keeps doing it!

Re: This is fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Piss off, APK. Your personal vendettas are not only demeaning but are making this site much harder to read when your repeated 5000 word spam posts get in the way of the actual discussion.

Poor New Zealand

[cdrudge]

Poor New Zealand, currently under cyberattack. Downloaded the first 1.6MB of the zip files fine, struggled for the next .4MB, and then proceeded to terminate the connection.

I wonder if that attack was part of the TPP deal.

Re:Poor New Zealand

[jandrese]

It's the internet, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Here is a mirror if you're having trouble. I can re-compress it if necessary to get around content aware filtering.

Re:Poor New Zealand

[Anonymous Coward]

tpp and cisa hand in hand

Re: Poor New Zealand

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you can't put the genie back in the bottle but *THEY* will... Just wait and see. It's going to be a very different internet in some years, subverted from the infrastructure up, centralized and monitored. You will be able to vote for your favourite reality show... And that will be about the only choice left to you.

Re:Poor New Zealand

[master5o1]

That's just our Internet down here. Too many sheep blocking the road when you're late for church. It's very frustrating at times.

First post, substantive

[john.r.strohm]

There is something fundamentally wrong when the "most open administration in history" has to let New Zealand publish the document, rather than posting it themselves.

There is something fundamentally suspicious when there is no all-up posting made. You have to download a rather large number of chunks to get the whole thing.

Why do I get the feeling that someone is STILL trying to hide something?

Re:First post, substantive

[cdrudge]

There is something fundamentally suspicious when there is no all-up posting made. You have to download a rather large number of chunks to get the whole thing.

Or you could just download the zip file of all the chapters that is at the bottom of the page.

Re:First post, substantive

[Crowd Computing]

Or you can focus on the file containing the topic likely to be of most interest to Slashdot readers: intellectual property. A quick search through the chapter turned up the following section on the public domain:

Article 18.15: Public Domain
1. The Parties recognise the importance of a rich and accessible public domain.
2. The Parties also acknowledge the importance of informational materials, such as publicly accessible databases of registered intellectual property rights that assist in the identification of subject matter that has fallen into the public domain.

The agreement merely asks countries to "recognise" [sic] and "acknowledge" the importance of the public domain. This contrasts with the provisions on copyright and patents, which demand compliance in many instances, including the following example on "Criminal Procedures and Penalties" (Art. 18.77):

Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied at least in cases of wilful trademark counterfeiting or copyright or related rights piracy on a commercial scale.

The definition of "commercial scale" is particularly troubling: "significant acts, not carried out for commercial advantage or financial gain, that have a substantial prejudicial impact on the interests of the copyright or related rights holder in relation to the marketplace."

Re:First post, substantive

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the zip file that says "Zip file of all 30 Chapters (excluding Annexes) [ZIP, 3.15MB]"?

What part of "excluding Annexes" did you not understand???

Re:First post, substantive

[bigpat]

The agreement merely asks countries to "recognise" [sic] and "acknowledge" the importance of the public domain. This contrasts with the provisions on copyright and patents, which demand compliance in many instances, including the following example on "Criminal Procedures and Penalties" (Art. 18.77):

That hits the nail on the head... All the parts that screw people over are iron clad, specified to the extreme while all the consumer, labor, environmental protections are all fluffy piles of bull shit wrapped in language you could drive a truck full of slaves through to their coal fired baby seal killing factory.

Re:First post, substantive

[John.Banister]

It's just that they want you to download it on an international connection.

Re:First post, substantive

[phil.swansborough]

Wish I had mod points for this: "wrapped in language you could drive a truck full of slaves through to their coal fired baby seal killing factory."

Re:First post, substantive

[wyHunter]

Because you're listening to the newspeak of the marxists.

ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone shed some light on this warning from Eric Raymond about social justice honeytraps at tech conferences?

Is there any basis to these allegations?

Is it true that Linus himself has been targeted by these groups?

What the hell is going on here, and why isn't this front-page news on Slashdot?

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any basis to these allegations?

A history of events of false accusations of rape that go without any penalty to the accuser is basis enough to assume that someone will try to use that precedent for purposes that you likely disagree with.

Is it true that Linus himself has been targeted by these groups?

Probably, many people with some degree of fame have been targeted in rape accusations. Often for the money, sometimes for political purposes, sometimes simply to destroy something that a man built and leads.

What the hell is going on here, and why isn't this front-page news on Slashdot?

Slashdot is part of the problem. If you don't believe me, just check back in tomorrow for "Social Justice Friday." If my prediction of man-hating stories is found false this week, I will be amazed but will enjoy the relative peace.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Slashdot gets to the news 1-2 days late. There's no conspiracy. Chill. It'll get there.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believed that until a Slashdot admin deleted a fairly well-written summary I wrote about the debunking of the UN "cyber violence" report while giving sjw fluff pieces a pass. There is bias and it is administrative.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[GameboyRMH]

Just a bunch of paranoid misogynist nutjobbery. At least that's how I'll treat it until there's some evidence.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Opportunist]

Because we're all fed up with SJW bullshit?

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[painandgreed]

Because we're all fed up with SJW bullshit?

Damned Straight! We want more social injustice!

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Opportunist]

Yeah, because we have to have one of them. Either we get social equality whining or social injustice. Shooting or hanging.

How about I choose "neither"?

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone shed some light on this warning from Eric Raymond about social justice honeytraps at tech conferences [ibiblio.org]?

No, because it appears to be all in his head.

Is there any basis to these allegations?

No.

Is it true that Linus himself has been targeted by these groups?

No.

What the hell is going on here, and why isn't this front-page news on Slashdot?

Because the only place that picked this up and thought it was true was fucking Breitbart. There are no sources, and there's no interest in blatantly false stories.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was with him until he says "(Don't like that, ladies? Tough. You were just fine with collective guilt when the shoe was on the other foot. Enjoy your turn!)".

Thankyou Eric Raymond for making it clear you are a complete and utter ass. Fuck you, you toxic son of a bitch.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Pseudonym]

What the hell is going on here, and why isn't this front-page news on Slashdot?

There are three parts to the question.

"What the hell is going on here [...]": ESR passed on an unsubstantiated rumour. He does that. Eventually there may be some substance to it, but there isn't now.

"[...] why isn't this front-page news [...]": Not everything that ESR says is news. Now if it had been expressed as a Linus rant, El Reg would have picked it up pretty quickly...

"[... ] on Slashdot?": Because you didn't submit it.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no unpleasant observations. Only unpleasant people.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[tsm_sf]

Are you kidding? This is strictly female misogynists vs male misogynists. It's great! The only downside is the inevitable collateral damage when some well-meaning person fails to recognize that they're about to hug a genuine tar baby and picks a side.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] a fairly well-written summary I wrote [...]

Well, that's an unbiassed assessment if I ever heard one.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Anonymous Coward]

It made Breitbart Tech, so that's pretty good evidence that it's bullshit.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like ESR and his mum.

Re:ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs?

[btsfh]

I believed that until a Slashdot admin deleted a fairly well-written summary I wrote about the debunking of the UN "cyber violence" report while giving sjw fluff pieces a pass. There is bias and it is administrative.

The problem wasn't the debunking of the report, it was the well-written summary. We can't have those showing up on slashdot

looking up un(ac)countable on alphabet.com

[Anonymous Coward]

only one version of the truth? usually a short story with spiritual connotations,, ask ed snowden your questions continues here on /.ed

Media or journal recommendations?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm too lazy and not knowledgeable enough about these things... Can someone tell me a media outlet likely to provide a helpful, unbiased summary of this?

Re:Media or journal recommendations?

[Anonymous Coward]

FoxNEWS, CNN, MSNBC, all stellar news outlets with impeccable editorial records.

Re:Media or journal recommendations?

[KGIII]

Wait for Aljazeera to pop something up. They'll have bias but it will be obvious and the reporting will be accurate where something like this is concerned. Don't rely on a single news source. The EFF might pop up some review at some point, it too will have biases. The truth will lie somewhere between and probably closer to the Aljazeera side.

/. Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

We call this the Slashdot Effect.

It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

Do you want to outlaw something traded under this agreement in your own country?
Nope! Your government will be tried in an international court!

Want to legalize something not legal in this agreement or buy it from a supplier not under the agreement while one who is under it sells it at a higher price?
Nope! Your government will be tried in an international court!

Trade is only the excuse for this agreement. Just like the patriot act and affordable care act specifics are so vague it to allow any interpretation desired by those who head up the agreement. It's also structures in such a way that nations not complying with changes afterward will be punished. This is not an "agreement" as it's called, it's a treaty. Notice corporation wrote most of it.

This is the official handing over of the government to corporations. It's been happening in practice, but that pesky constitution and balance of powers occasionally gets in the way. This is the bypass for it.

If you DON'T bully your representatives, beg, plead and even threaten them to keep this from passing we're all going to be part of the "expanded EU".

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you DON'T bully your representatives, beg, plead and even threaten them to keep this from passing we're all going to be part of the "expanded EU".

And if you DO bully your representatives, beg, plead and even threaten them to keep this from passing...... It is going to pass anyway.

So, why bother?

Sorry to be so pessimistic. Or was that realistic?

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

The US government will be "tried in an international court" about as soon as they show up. If they show up, it will be with guns drawn.

Other governments will do the same.

That provision has no teeth. Or bullets.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

As long as the people at the top aren't the same people funded by people like George Soros who want it in place. Right now the top executive positions in the U.S. government and those in the Republicrat party (as in the single party establishment masquerading as separate parties) want it. We will have to put people in power to replace them who have the backbone to stand up to it.

There's a sever lack of backbone in most who get elected, then the ones who have it get chased out of office.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Darkinspiration]

No, the US will enforce the international tribunal with sanctions and gun. And will never show up when they are accused.

Other country's will be forced to follow the US will,,,,,

Just like the with NAFTA

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Halo1]

Do you want to outlaw something traded under this agreement in your own country?
Nope! Your government will be tried in an international court!

It's not even a court. It's an ad-hoc panel that consists of private lawyers. Worse: very expensive lawyers that spend most of their time representing parties in front of similar panels. They can even rule over complaints filed by parties that they have previously represented.

I would strongly recommend to read the analysis of ISDS by the European Economic and Social Committee, as it appears in CETA (a TPP-style agreement between the EU and Canada that is now also in the ratification phase). It contains a lot of interesting information and citations of other documents.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

Any non-US nation that tries to dodge international court with an US corporation will be prevented from doing so by the most advanced military the world has ever seen.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[DarkOx]

Which is why I really really think we need to elect an isolationist president. The only way to save America from these type of shenanigans is to spark an all out trade war. No it won't be good for the economy but freedom is more important than that.

Some how we need to get someone in office who will say "fuck the treaty" and then when 'they' go after us with the WTO or international courts that same person will say, 'oh yea this is a sovereign nation of which I am the elected leader and I don't recognize your authority to do anything; fuck off'

Re: It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Go threaten your representatives. You will be arrested. Pester them? You will end up on a list. No job, no mortgage for you and your family, ever. And no more air travel. So, since this will pass anyway, is it still worth your life (and your family's)? You want to sacrifice everything you - and them - ever had or will ever have for a lost battle?

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure you're wrong on all counts, but IANAIL. Trade treaties do not override fundamental principles, they would be nullified by the ICJ if they did. I believe one of those principles is state sovereignty, hence TTIP, TPP et al cannot hold sway over domestic legality. Furthermore, it is not retroactive, and all prior agreements will remain free of the greater protection afforded by these treaties.

The treaties exist to provide protection and a level playing field for foreign investors, and to stop nasty moves like expropriation of property, and other dick moves by the governments to screw over fairly entered agreements. Then breaches of that treaty go to arbitration, not "tried in court". The ICJ rulings deal mainly with breaches of International Law, not breaches of contract.

We'll have to wait for the tobacco industry ruling to come through before we can be sure how things will turn out if you gut an industry for public health reasons.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you're saying you think the us government will bomb a country because that country decided they wanted to charge a tariff on something protected by TPP?

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[JesseMcDonald]

Do you want to outlaw something traded under this agreement in your own country?
Nope! Your government will be tried in an international court!

You seem to be trying to complain about one of the very few good aspects of this agreement.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[gstoddart]

Well, here's the problem with all of this: this was a treaty America wanted, actively pushed it as being important, and allowed industry to write most of it (like all US laws and treaties are written by industry).

America pushed this on the rest of the world, not the other way around.

If there's a treaty expanding copyright terms and otherwise giving corporations the upper hand, it's being championed by Americans, and pushed on other countries.

Sorry, but this is hardly the first treaty the US has championed which only serves corporate interests. And the rest of the world has no sympathy when Americans suddenly say how bad this treaty is -- because it's your government who pushed for it.

Your government has been so thoroughly coopted to serve the interests of huge multinationals, you should be yelling at your own politicians, instead of acting tough by saying you'll grow a pair and tell the world this is an unfair treaty. We already know this.

Why do Americans keep thinking this is being done to you by other countries? It's your own politicians who drive this crap.

So don't whine about your sovereignty, because this is what the rest of the world has been dealing with for years. And it usually is the US threatening trade sanctions if we don't give up OUR sovereignty for YOUR interests.

Cry us a river, you're not the only ones getting fucked over here. But you have been driving the bus.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[TheSync]

The only way to save America from these type of shenanigans is to spark an all out trade war. No it won't be good for the economy but freedom is more important than that.

Is it really "freedom" to allow the government to take away our freedom to trade?

Personally I feel that government has no right to limit my ability to purchase goods or labor from anyone one the planet that I want to. THAT is freedom.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical Demoblican shill. Everyone knows that the Republicrats have it right on every single issue, and the Demoblicans are wrong on every single issue. It should be obvious. Here, lemme post a meme

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[TheSync]

America pushed this on the rest of the world, not the other way around.

That is BS. Japan's Abe and Canada's Trudeau are out there pushing it. Japan needs TPP because it is is another weapon to beat up their entrenched special business interests. Canada wants to expand exports to Asia.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

I agree with you on this one - to a degree.

The goal of this treaty is to central world government - even if it's not outright stated. In general I'm against outlawing most anything, but that dictate shouldn't come from a different bunch of control freaks. In general I'm for as decentralized power as we can get. The whole idea of tiered government instead of monolithic is when decisions are made locally you know exactly who to nab at the grocery store so you can tar and feather them in the parking lot. It's a little harder to do when it's mysterious corporate overlords on another continent.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Sir_Eptishous]

Backbone has nothing to do with it.
This is all about money. Plain and simple.
You seem to think our elected representatives actually care for the interests of those who voted for them.
They care about those who fund their campaigns.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Sir_Eptishous]

sed -i 's/Americans/Multi-National Corporations/g'

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that "Canada's Trudeau" has only been in power for like, two days, right? He literally started yesterday morning. If you want to blame a Canadian leader for TPP, blame Harper like the Canadians do.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[rock_climbing_guy]

I wish more people understood it the way you do. In the USA, the law is that Congress cannot bind a future Congress to enact any particular policy. This is an end-run around this law by those who want to permanently cement their place at the top of the pyramid.

By the way, Trump and Sanders both oppose TPP. Clinton was for it before she was against it ::ducks::

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[rock_climbing_guy]

This agreement is not about trade. It is about setting policies that megacorps want, many of which have nothing to do with trade.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

Seems like I mentioned funded by George Soros.......

So I think I'm on the right page.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

Ted Cruz scares me - he was also for it because he was against it. He's done too much flip-flopping for me to be comfortable with him. I honestly believe the members of the Republican party that are libertarians trying to bring the party in line with freedom are a good thing. Rand Paul, his father before him, there's a couple of others. Cruz scares me because he looks like one of that bunch - but does stupid crap on occasion that makes me think he's a poser, and he's got a more solid following than a lot of the ones I question less.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[david_thornley]

I looked at the Intellectual Property section and didn't see anything obviously bad that isn't already in another treaty. (It even has nice words about the Public Domain and the purpose of copyright and patent law, that at least get the principles written down in an agreement.)

What's bad about the IP provisions?

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Sir_Eptishous]

Right... Soros. Easy scapegoat. You know I'm surprised you would use a phrase like "Replublicrat" and then try to pawn it off on a left leaning billionaire.
Where do the Koch brothers fall in your worldview?
Are they Republicrats, or are they the ones with "backbone" you're waiting for to come and save us?

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[david_thornley]

So, Clinton may have favored it, learned more about it, and decided against it? Here at Slashdot, I'd expect people to be more sympathetic towards changing minds.

Also, it's a treaty according to the Constitution when ratified by two-thirds of the Senate, not otherwise. It can be passed into law by a majority vote in both houses plus a Presidential signature, but that is US law and not an international commitment. There may be a reluctance to repeal it, but there's no legal reason why Congress couldn't do it down the road.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

I consider the U.S. government "occupied by hostile forces". The people funding the election campaigns (big bankers/Soros) are the ones not only running the U.S. government but the world. Most of Europe is worse off than us, they're already deep in the rabbit hole, but we're hot on their heals.

"America" does not want this, just like we didn't want CISPA, the Affordable Care Act, or any number of legislations we've fought tooth and nail against.

I semi-blame "just vote" campaigns. I don't think we should be encouraging people who don't care about what's going on to vote, they tend to take bullshit bait easier than those who are informed, then the trap is sprung.

The same people funding the crooked campaigns are the same ones funding the "just vote" bull crap.

No "America" does not want this, this is wanted by the corporate cronies what hold the leashes of the corrupt establishment leaders (Pelosi, Boehner ), the same exact people who hold the leashes of corrupt European leaders (Merkel, Löfven). Germany is on the verge of a revolt at the moment due to bringing back the Stasi to enforce social media censorship and forcing villages to take "migrants" in the largest Cloward and Piven scheme ever executed.

The TPP is part of that Cloward and Piven strategy.

It's written so that countries that aren't part of the TPP now can be added later.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like someone who doesn't understand government.

The US Pushed this because they're in the process of aligning the small nations of South East Asia and the Pacific Rim South American countries away from China. It's an effort to curb China's growth so they never grow into a power that can actually threaten the US.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

"international court!"

It isn't even a court of justice in the usual legal sense of the word. Its creation is not like that of the International Criminal Court, rather it is a WTO-ran panel to settle disputes between states and corporations.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

Squirrel!

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[AK Marc]

No treaty is unbreakable. You don't lose sovereignty. The government can break a treaty, then wouldn't be required to show up in international court.

Treaties are above all law, other than the Constitution. You can't end-run around the Constitution, but a treaty can give more power to the government, in direct violation of the 10th Amendment, But the Supreme Court has ruled that the 9th and 10th Amendments are legally void, vague and redundant.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[AK Marc]

So if Peru makes Cocaine legal and tries to export it to Singapore, Singapore would need to change its laws to allow cocaine? How is that a good thing for Singapore?

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

America pushed this on the rest of the world, not the other way around.

"America" only in the sense of a bunch of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats that were bought and paid for by a variety of ultra rich International Corporations. This isn't American vs the world. This is ultra rich monarchs, dictators and warlords having their way with all of us.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[JesseMcDonald]

I agree with you there, but I don't have any problem whatsoever with a government, at any level, agreeing not to commit acts of tyranny over any of its citizens—even if a majority of its citizens are in favor of such acts. Even if it does come at the behest of big, bad multinational corporations, in this one rare instance the TPP has the effect of enhancing the sovereignty of individual citizens over all the levels of government that would try to rule them.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

How long has it been since the president or congress has given a shit about the 4th, 9th, or 10th?

How long has it been since the supreme court actually respected the 9th or 10th in a ruling?

Ever single regulatory agency in existence is an end run around the 9th and 10th. As long as the people in power are the ones placed by the corporate interest that want this treaty then we will have this treaty. After this treaty has been in place 15 or so years it will be so concrete it will be next to impossible to get around.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

The problem is when a big multi-national treaty imposes tyranny is has the same effect you're praising - in reverse.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[nehumanuscrede]

Well, here's the problem with all of this: this was a treaty America wanted, actively pushed it as being important, and allowed industry to write most of it (like all US laws and treaties are written by industry).

America pushed this on the rest of the world, not the other way around.

If there's a treaty expanding copyright terms and otherwise giving corporations the upper hand, it's being championed by Americans, and pushed on other countries.

Sorry, but this is hardly the first treaty the US has championed which only serves corporate interests. And the rest of the world has no sympathy when Americans suddenly say how bad this treaty is -- because it's your government who pushed for it.

Your government has been so thoroughly coopted to serve the interests of huge multinationals, you should be yelling at your own politicians, instead of acting tough by saying you'll grow a pair and tell the world this is an unfair treaty. We already know this.

Why do Americans keep thinking this is being done to you by other countries? It's your own politicians who drive this crap.

So don't whine about your sovereignty, because this is what the rest of the world has been dealing with for years. And it usually is the US threatening trade sanctions if we don't give up OUR sovereignty for YOUR interests.

Cry us a river, you're not the only ones getting fucked over here. But you have been driving the bus.

**************
  Let's get a few things out in the open:

1) This thing ( as are most things worth knowing ) was kept secret from everyone including those Americans you seem to rather enjoy putting all the blame on. *
2) For non-Americans, does your government listen to you ? Can you talk, call, or email your Representative and actually make a difference ?

Yeah, us either. There are only two ways to get noticed:

A) Extreme Violence will get everyone's attention. Make sure what you need to say is short, because your life is going to be a rather short one as well.
B) Extreme amounts of money to buy any legislation you want

If you wield neither method, you're just another peon in a sea of peons that will never have a voice.

So guess who our Representatives DO listen to ? Yep, the very same corporations who both wrote the draft and will benefit from it.

So, I'm curious. Short of an armed revolution, what would you propose we Americans** do to remedy this situation ? Seeing as how our government doesn't bother listening to anyone other than their Sugar Daddy corporations with unlimited funding, I am truly curious as to what steps you would recommend taking.
I know ! Maybe we should do another Occupy Movement ! Because that worked out so well the last time we tried it :|

Tip: Protests are a laughable waste of time as evidenced by the aforementioned Occupy Movement. Once they tire of your silliness, they'll declare you to be a hazard, terrorist, nun-killer, whatever and remove you and your fellow protesters by force. Resist, and watch them grin ear-to-ear as any restrictions they may have had are removed and their behavior turns lethal.

* The American Government does not represent the will of the people any longer. Hasn't for a long time. Anyone claiming otherwise is naive.

**The extremely small fraction of the populace that even still gives a shit are far outnumbered by those that do not. As their votes are just as powerful as mine, Quantity > Quality. We lose. Every. F*cking. Time.

So, to conclude, make sure you understand where the f*cking blame really sits and that the American Government represents only the American Government in all matters. They could give two shits about what anyone else thinks. ( Including their own citizens )

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

But does it actually do away with sovereignty?

You can try whatever you want in international court. The power of sovereignty is the power to say, nah, changed my mind. Fuck off.

I'm not stating, I'm asking: is that power revoked? How? How does enforcement work?

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Dangerous_Minds]

What's bad about the IP provisions?

Everything: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[JesseMcDonald]

"The same effect ... in reverse." You mean the opposite effect? Empowering governments—and thus, indirectly, the corporations they represent—at the expense of individual citizens?

I think I made it clear that I think most of TPP is awful. Since they insisted that it be pass/fail via the fast-track process, I think that it should be unceremoniously rejected. Even without that, I doubt it could be amended into anything worth passing. However, any government giving up the power to make a product or voluntary action illegal is always a good thing, no matter who introduced the concept or applied the political leverage necessary to get it passed. So what if it's in the corporations' best interests? It's still the right thing to do.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[KGIII]

All of these claims could have now come with citations. I'm not calling you wrong - I don't know. I do notice a complete lack of them and a great deal of what appears to be hyperbole.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[sjames]

You don't seem to like it either. Have you instructed your government to have no part in it? How'd that go?

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[jbengt]

Treaties are above all law, other than the Constitution.

That is explicitly not true (in the USA, at least). Properly ratified treaties trump the US constitution. Because of the way it was "fast tracked" I'm not sure if this would count as a treaty or just a trade agreement, though.
IANAL, YMMV, etc.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

"That is BS."

No it's not... get a clue.

Property laws have always expanded over the last 200 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/media/File:Copyright_term.svg

Trade is war:

http://www.amazon.com/Trade-War-Yash-Tandon/dp/1939293812

Kim dotcom raid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMas0tWc0sg

http://williamblum.org/essays/read/overthrowing-other-peoples-governments-the-master-list

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]

"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of tramautized soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[AK Marc]

That is explicitly not true (in the USA, at least).

So explain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Constitution trumps treaties.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anne Thwacks]

What's bad about the IP provisions?

127.0.0.1

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

"what would you propose we Americans** do to remedy this situation ?"

Vote. Why the fuck are you not all voting? ..and vote for the right fucking people instead of the same two-party puppets over and over again. Yes you have options, stop trying to convince yourself you don't, because "everybody votes republican or democrat" is a fucking lame excuse.

No sympathy for any American who mindlessly votes rep or dem, or does not vote at all.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Short of an armed revolution, what would you propose we Americans* Short of an armed revolution, what would you propose we Americans*

Vote for Bernie... seems to be the only one not obviously in the pockets of the rich. If he gets in and can't make a change it will expose in a way that even Joe 6-pack can understand who really runs the show... it will take a few election cycles to flush the turds but in theory this is how it's supposed to work.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

Short of an armed revolution, what would you propose we Americans** do to remedy this situation ?

How about we stop buying shit from those companies that are fucking us over?

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

The citations are in the documents linked to by the article - go read it and find them.

Here's a reasonable outline if you need assistance.

The actual document is NOT an easy read.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[sabbede]

I'm guessing you aren't what, in International Relations, is known as an Institutionalist. Personally, I rather like the development of formal international rules, norms and systems. What with them acting as the foundation of a peaceful and democratic international order and all.

It's the rise of Rousseau's Social contract on a grand scale.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is - that the US doesn't have the ability to carry a trade war. They have nothing left to trade except IOUs, and foreigners are leery of taking them anymore. Add that to the grossly over-inflated US GDP (really about one quarter of what it's claimed to be) - and any so-called trade war would be a tribal skirmish.

We can do it militarily (like with Iran) - but that's about it.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[sociocapitalist]

"Protests are a laughable waste of time"

I'll draw your attention to the successful civil rights movement, which took a long time and a LOT of protesting.

It took a lot of civil disobedience, arrests, etc. but at the end of the day we now have a black sitting president - something completely impossible to imagine 70 years ago.

When enough people become in bad enough shape, then a revolution of some sort will occur. It may be civil disobedience or it may be all out revolution, depending on how long it takes to get to a boil and what steps are taken by those in power to keep things from boiling over.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

I signed no contract and will not be held to one.

As soon as a system exist people look to exploit it. Why create the tools of our own enslavement? I am a voluntarist. I look to enslave no one and I don't want a master. I believe in equality, as soon as systems exist those who run them become masters.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[KGIII]

Oh, I'll definitely need assistance. The linked document was from early this year. The full and finalized text is just released by New Zealand. I'm going to wait for a good analysis based on the full and final version of the text. :/

Then I'll get out the torches and pitchforks, if required. I did look at the full text. I gave up the effort to parse it pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah... I know... I still want facts and whatnot before I get outraged.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[TechnoJoe]

Short of an armed revolution, what would you propose we Americans** do to remedy this situation?

http://www.conventionofstates.com/

It constantly floors me the foresight America's founders had. They had a process for amending the Constitution (pass two-thirds of Congress and be ratified by three-fourths of the States), but they asked, "What if the federal government gets to much power? How do you change it then? Surely, Congress won't pass an amendment that restricts its own power."

In response, they put in a second way to amend the Constitution that has never yet been used. Two-thirds of the states can call for a Convention of States, attended by delegates of state legislators. This cuts Congress and the federal government completely out of the loop. They can pass amendments that Congress would never vote for, like term limits. Best of all, whatever comes out of here still needs to be ratified by three-fourths of the states, so they can't go crazy.

See also: The Liberty Amendments

Re: It also does away with national sovereigty!

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you seen the Phantom Menace? The whole Star Wars saga began with a trade dispute!

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[sabbede]

I gather you aren't familiar with Rousseau either. If you have any interest in political systems I would strongly recommend the reading of "The Social Contract" and the preceding "Discourse on Inequality". The latter begins with a criticism of the theoretical 'state of nature' described by Hobbes and Locke, so a familiarity with "Leviathan" and the second of the "Two Treatises of Government" might come in handy. Though to be fair, those are both more than important enough to read on their own.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[pecosdave]

I know about the "Social Contract". I had a lot of respect for it when I was younger, before I realized it was a concept that though benign in intent is begin exploited in concept to enslave the productive in the interest of the non-productive.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[sabbede]

There is no intent, it is a descriptive, not prescriptive, concept. Nor can the social contract itself be used to enslave - that is a fault in systems built upon it. The contract simply describes and legitimizes the formation of societies.

Re:It also does away with national sovereigty!

[rock_climbing_guy]

I am sympathetic toward changing minds. I know some people who have unbendable beliefs about politics in their minds: that certain things are always a certain way, and they pick up nuggets that reinforce their beliefs and cast off everything else. Those people scare me.

Hillary is not one of those people. Hillary is a political animal who tells people what they want to hear. She probably had more knowledge of what was in TPP long before most of the rest of us. She knows better, and she knew better. She was trying to line the pockets of the rich and powerful, plain and simple, and now wants to deny it.

We have to pass it to see what's in it

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

That usually works out well, right?

Re:We have to pass it to see what's in it

[thegarbz]

Don't worry citizen. We are from the government and we're here to help.

Government

[Anonymous Coward]

Not regarding this specifically, but why the hell do we have elected officials if we constantly have to fight them to not screw us over? I thought the basic purpose of government was to protect people from one another (at least in the US), but instead it's like a game of who can buy these idiots the biggest prize in exchange for doing their bidding. The entire system is fucked. We need a constitutional amendment prohibiting corruption, special interests, and long term office. The entire benefit package assigned to people in Congress should be restricted to like 10% above the national median and they should be prohibited from taking a job, consultancy, or anything remotely related to their job in Congress for at least a decade after serving. Career politicians and the entire industry around them should be abolished. If that means the people running the government aren't experienced in government, then fine. Let them simplify the laws and stop fucking us over.

Re:Government

[Anonymous Coward]

The bigger problem is that they get to keep whatever is in their election fund when they retire. Imagine being a senior representative or senator and having a company like Microsoft wanting something from you. they have connections to other donors, so donor limits won't apply.

Take a look a President Obama. He wasn't terribly rich despite being a senator, but now he's going to retire pretty comfortably. All that on $400K a year? After 8 years that's only $3 million. Comfortable? Yes, but not President comfortable.

Re:Government

[fustakrakich]

Well, the moment you vote for people that will give you all those things, the problem is solved, without the need for any more regulations. It would mean the the voters can see and vote past the money. The entire problem is ours to fix, through personal choice. There is no other way without a monarchy or dictatorship.

Re:Government

[Anonymous Coward]

Not regarding this specifically, but why the hell do we have elected officials if we constantly have to fight them to not screw us over? I thought the basic purpose of government was to protect people from one another (at least in the US), but instead it's like a game of who can buy these idiots the biggest prize in exchange for doing their bidding. The entire system is fucked. We need a constitutional amendment prohibiting corruption, special interests, and long term office. The entire benefit package assigned to people in Congress should be restricted to like 10% above the national median and they should be prohibited from taking a job, consultancy, or anything remotely related to their job in Congress for at least a decade after serving. Career politicians and the entire industry around them should be abolished. If that means the people running the government aren't experienced in government, then fine. Let them simplify the laws and stop fucking us over.

We already have that Constitutional Amendment. In fact, we have two of them.

The 9th Amendment and the 10th.

Among the unspecified rights "retained by" or "reserved to" the people, are the dual rights to ethical government, and ethical practice of law. Under these rights, even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided if ANY reasonable alternative exists.

Rights retained by the people can not - by definition - be taken away by any entity of government: not local government, not state government, not the Congress, the President, or the Supreme Court.

Everything - that politicians are doing, have done, or ever will do - that is unethical or corrupt is already illegal, because it violates the highest law in the land.

For example, most of the 2700 or so pages of federal tax code consists of provisions to benefit special interest groups. You can hide a lot of loopholes in such a large document, and the size of the document alone creates an artificial demand for the services of accountants and legal professionals (two special interest groups with a lot of lobbying influence). Since the government could reasonably condense the tax code down to something simple and straightforward (perhaps 20 pages or so, note that simple doesn't necessarily mean flat), it is required to do so as a matter of both governmental and legal ethics. The IRS is enforcing an illegal law! The word Nuremberg should come to mind when any educated person thinks about that ...

A similar issue applies with respect to Obama Health Care. At over 2000 pages of new law, it compares quite poorly to the Canada Health Act, (the Canadian federal law - the provinces have their individual codes - is only 14 pages including the French translation!).

There are a lot of potential benefits to improving health care, but everything has to be done ethically if we're not going to create more problems than we solve.

The lawyers involved in writing these US laws, in judging them, and so forth can all be presumed to be engaged in unethical practice of law. The legislators involved, and the executives such as the President can be presumed to be engaged in unethical government, directly contrary to the oaths they have sworn, oaths that are preconditions to holding those offices in the first place!

Similarly, a lot of aspects of intellectual property law, including some things in this treaty, violate rights retained by the people, such as the right to ethical practice of law. I won't belabor the point, since it comes up a lot on this forum.

No treaty can take away rights retained by the people: the Bill of Rights supersedes the original text of the Constitution in all respects where the people choose to assert rights retained by them (the assertion of those rights does not in any way require going through the normal legislative process, and is independent of voting). As such, the Bill of Rights supersedes the treaty power. If this were not the case, the government could violate any right it

read it and weep

[Anonymous Coward]

Read it and weep. TTIP and TISA yet to go. This was all planned back in 1985 when the Masters of the Universe began the Narrative and implemented several measures to discourage women from tech careers. Look at the graphs. 1985 is when women started being turned away from tech careers. The entire intention was to lead to the current persecution of assigned males in tech careers.

Of course, if you want to be pedantic, the trail of evidence goes straight back to the architects of the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking system.

Y2K was the original event intended to put their script into action, but there was no disaster on this worldline cluster, so instead they flew some planes into buildings and detonated planted charges. Then they played you xenophobes! Love the genital mutilating Jews! For Zion! (A fat lot of good their sky wizard will do in 15 or so years.) Daesh was all to easy to enter from the wing and take center stage.

This "misogynerd" Narrative has been all to easy to sell to cows.

Stay away from major cities beginning around 2019. There will be riots in every major city, followed by martial law and FEMA concentration camps. Pay no attention to this "chemtrail" theory. It's too absurd. The chemtrail theory was created specifically to discredit anyone who disagrees with the Narrative.

My divergence readings have been going down for several weeks now, and for several days now they've been hovering around my original reading after landing. Any of you familiar with what John Titor related as concerns time travel will know that this is VERY FUCKING BAD and should not happen. The shitstorm is coming. Prepare for the year from hell, otherwise the walk to the gas station will be for your own good.

Re:read it and weep

[Beerdood]

Read it and weep. TTIP and TISA yet to go. This was all planned back in 1985 when the Masters of the Universe began the Narrative and implemented several measures to discourage women from tech careers.

I don't know about you, but I don't think He-Man and his crew sought to discourage women from employment in certain fields. His actions appeared to be fairly progressive for the mid-80's. After all, his twin sister had basically the same job in a male-dominated career of villain foiling and he seemed perfectly fine with that.

I love that show.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see what you selected behind door number 1:
*Bwa Bwaaaaa*
It's a Zonk!

So are Region 1 and Region 4 & 6 meged?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't have free trade if items from one region don't work in the other, just through configuration. I would like one of the trade officials to explain how the free TPP trading region freedom is supported by the region coding of media players which divides it up.

What happens to NAFTA?

[rockabilly]

Of course, I didn't read anything but would love someone to tell me if this affects NAFTA in any way...

Re:What happens to NAFTA?

[tlhIngan]

Of course, I didn't read anything but would love someone to tell me if this affects NAFTA in any way...

It does, actually. It puts you in a very bad spot because while the principle in general is if two treaties contradict, the treaty ratified later has precedence, it doesn't mean that's always true. And many a trade dispute has happened because of it and the interpretation of which treaties are in effect. And naturally, when there's a contradiction, you get long drawn out lawsuits and cases as everyone argues back and forth.

If you're an international relations lawyer, I say your business will be looking up over the next 30 years or so.

In short, both are in effect. Where they contradict, lawyers (and the mightiest, most likely the US) win.

Given its length

[Anonymous Coward]

whoever commenting here, including me, haven't really read it.

Remember Trump and Sanders

[liquid_schwartz]

Remember that only 2 people are against this: Trump and Sanders. The Clinton's gave us NAFTA and fully supported this agreement as the gold standard. The Republicans always push for "free trade". For the sake of yourselves and your children vote either Trump or Sanders. If it weren't for "free trade" we'd all be making approximately double what we are now as shown here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

or here:

http://www.epi.org/blog/inequa...

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

Protectionism is a good way to make an economy poor. People have this ideal that they'll make twice as much salary and have a bigger piece of the pie, except they don't realize the pie just gets smaller.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[Anonymous Coward]

Protectionism is how South Korea and several other Southeast Asian states even got out of economic backwater status. Protectionism keeps globalism from crushing the local workforce to dust under another country's lower standard of living. Protectionism keeps those industries alive at home rather than importing their products from abroad and leaving your country at the mercy of the "free market".

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that only 2 people are against this: Trump and Sanders. The Clinton's gave us NAFTA and fully supported this agreement as the gold standard. The Republicans always push for "free trade". For the sake of yourselves and your children vote either Trump or Sanders. If it weren't for "free trade" we'd all be making approximately double what we are now as shown here:

NAFTA

Following diplomatic negotiations dating back to 1990 among the three nations, U.S. President George H. W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas, each responsible for spearheading and promoting the agreement, ceremonially signed the agreement in their respective capitals on December 17, 1992.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[DarkOx]

On the domestic scale sure on the international scale not always the case. What you have said has been in the economics text books so long most people accept it uncritically but it fails to consider the long term effects of trade imbalances.

Generally with a nation as large and divers as ours with an array of resources as vast as ours one would be tempted to think trade imbalances could not occur but they do. The problem the free traders consistently fail to deal with is that the economies of our trading partners are not in many cases as market oriented as our own and our own economy is not really a true open market anymore either. The rules over and above the enforcement of private property rights create opportunities to game the system and so the system gets gamed.

If we were to:
Drop the new Obamacare employer mandates
Drop the individual mandate
Drop all payroll and corporate taxes
Replace income taxes with a flat tax
Either rollback health/safety and environmental protections -or- restrict trade to nations with comparable regulation and enforcement

Then we could have free trade with the remaining partners. Otherwise the ability to game the system is always going to temp people to shop the market the imposes the least penalty for the negative externalizes of whatever it is they do and lowest cost labor while still selling the output of that production into the more lucrative American market and enjoying the gifts of our society themselves. Their will be a net outflow of wealth until the US reaches nearer equilibrium in terms of median personal wealth with the rest of the world. I know there are many on the left of the political graph who think there is Justice in that, and may influencers on the Right side who don't care because they are 1%ers doing the gaming and don't care what happens to the rest of us.

Personally I'd rather the USA stay the worlds richest nation! That is almost certain to be whats best for me, my family, and my friends. I have no desire to try and hold any other nation down or prevent the expansion of the middle class around the world. Good luck to them, but I see no reason we need to give away what's ours to enable that. Now some lefties are going to return to say we unfairly came by what we have. Yes okay maybe if you want to say we took the land from the Natives, but other than that no not really if you look at the whole of those situations and the alternatives.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[TheSync]

What you have said has been in the economics text books so long most people accept it uncritically but it fails to consider the long term effects of trade imbalances.

So what are the long term effects of trade imbalances? The US has had a trade deficit with the world for 35 years, yet we still are the center of global entrepreneurism, have plenty of massive global companies like Google, continue to increase our manufacturing output, and have high growth rates and low unemployment rates in comparison with most other large highly developed (rich) countries.

If the US is importing things, it is because they can be made elsewhere less expensively and thus benefit us from importing them because we can buy more goods for less. The United States is the world's largest economy with $18 trillion GDP, representing 22% of nominal global GDP. The US trade deficit of $500 billion is less than 3% of our GDP. It is almost nothing. Our exports are $2.3 trillion!

My industry depends on the ability to purchase high-tech goods from vendors across the world (US, Canada, Europe, Asia) so that there is competition between them to keep our costs down, and also the business depends more and more on the ability to invest in foreign companies, plus much of our growth is coming from selling consumer-oriented wares overseas to distributors in growing economies like India and China.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[thegarbz]

For the sake of yourselves and your children vote either Trump...

The world has officially gone to hell. We just don't notice it because of air-conditioning..

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[liquid_schwartz]

The US has had a trade deficit with the world for 35 years...

Coincidentally the middle class has been declining for roughly the same time. Also unless you are completely unaware of history you will note that workers now put in *far* more hours than they use to. Why is that? Race to the bottom. If China et al are willing to put in more time than so should we. Ultimately we can have a happier lifestyle via protectionism or we can sink to the lowest standards the planet has to offer. Regarding economists and free trade, you know full well economists have contrived scenarios where free trade makes sense but in the real world it's a race to the bottom. Free trade works between similar standards of living yes. When you have large imbalances in the standards of living then it settles to the new lower standard. Unless you are someone who has immense schadenfreude in lowering your standards of living then you should be against a race to the bottom.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[Anonymous Coward]

You can trade freely as soon as I can emigrate freely.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[liquid_schwartz]

Google "NAFTA" and you will see:

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Clinton said he hoped the agreement would encourage other nations to work toward a broader world-trade pact.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

The economics textbooks are based in incorrect theory.

Productivity forms the basis of wealth economics. Everything requires human labor to produce; we can mitigate this by many factors, ranging from advanced techniques (technology: the science of improved techniques) to simply finding an available limited supply.

For example: humans can produce gold by producing electricity and using that to run a fusor to convert vaporized lead base metal ions to gold by fusion with hydrogen; this requires so much labor investment (to produce electricity, mostly) that simply mining gold out of the ground is cheaper (less human labor involved in total). When the mines run dry, this will invert: we currently use fusors to make cesium because producing it from pollucite mining takes more human labor time (rather, more time times labor unit cost; eventually it just becomes time, but the markets turn over on cost).

Similarly, transitioning from blacksmiths to assembly lines changes from many, many hours of expensive, skilled labor to very few hours of cheap, unskilled labor. The transition comes because the labor time multiplied by labor price (wage) is lower per unit produced; that doesn't make a nation wealthy, though. What makes the nation wealthy is transition from 800 hours invested in making a particular good (say, a kitchen knife) to 4 hours invested in making that same good (the cost of all the oil, the machinery, maintenance, machine operators, mining of ore, refining of ore...). We now have 796 hours of unused labor time--that means unemployment--and can apply that labor to producing new goods.

That's the first point, and you must understand how it fits into the overall movement of an economy. First, however, you must understand the point itself: if you have 1,000 hours in which to do work, you can only perform 1,000 hours of work (tautology). Therefor, if you reduce the work required to produce your current set of goods by 500 hours, you have time enough to make twice as many of the same goods *or* make the same goods plus new goods. Wealth is developed by increasing the production of goods per person available, which only happens by increasing the production of goods per labor hour; the growth of a large amount of wealth allows a nation to skim some of that per-person productivity to provide things like welfare services and public roadways without destroying the lives and livelihoods of anyone (i.e. without shoving the poor into starvation or the rich down into the middle class).

On to the second point: Markets.

I mentioned unemployment. Look back up, you'll see it.

Each time you find a way to produce the same with less labor, you reduce your need for employment. This is fine, so long as you don't remove too much of the labor force all at once; that's a long conversation I'd like to pass over for now, but perhaps we can leave off the finer points for now and simply agree that 0.5% of the jobs moving around year to year is fine, while 50% of the jobs vanishing in one year is very bad.

With the reduction of labor, the cost to make a good goes down; profits made by charging a higher price than labor costs can stay the same with a lower price. Factors ranging from direct and indirect competition to the simple consumer pressure of inflation (people hate seeing prices rise) helps push these prices down toward costs, rather than just offering permanent higher profit margins. (Inflation works this way because the buying power of money moves constantly toward the total income divided by the total productive output for a reasonable period of time: goods cost about what they're traded for. In other words: If people have 20% more money *and* there are 20% more goods being sold, you have no inflation; if people have 20% more money *and* there are no more goods being sold, you have 20% inflation; and if people have 20% more money *and* there are 10% more goods being sold, you have 10% inflation, but goods aren't 10% more expensive.)

With this reduction

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

Nobody knows that stuff because economics is based on the idea of value, rather than wealth. They even measure productivity in dollars; economics theories are all targeted at predicting the shelf price of goods and services, not the state of an economy.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[AK Marc]

Repeal the 16th in an amendment that allows for a national sales tax, but leaves in revenue tax for corporations, as well as a land tax on the states (not the people within them) and a head tax on the states (not the people within them).

The original idea was that the states would tax, but the feds wouldn't. Instead the fed would essentially charge the states for the cost of them. This was well tied in with the idea that senators were selected by the states, not the people within.

Personally I'd rather the USA stay the worlds richest nation!

Too late. Sure, some of the richest people, like Richard Murdoch, add in a US citizenship to their pile of citizenships, but only to get around laws against foreigners owning too many of specific things.

Replace the Income Tax with a sales tax (charged double on things shipped from overseas) and replace the ACA with single-payer health care, and replace welfare with UBI and our tax burden would be cut nearly in half, while improving services. But the "small government" conservatives hate those ideas and want a larger, more controlling central government.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[radarskiy]

The key word is "ceremonially". As the treaty had not even been ratified by the Senate by that time, the ceremonial signing meant nothing. As the verye article you link to states "Bush, who had worked to "fast track" the signing prior to the end of his term, ran out of time and had to pass the required ratification and signing of the implementation law to incoming president Bill Clinton."

While Clinton did not originate NAFTA, he fully supported it: "NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement."

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[Iamthecheese]

I believe that's the most cogent basic economics course I've ever seen. In a few pages of text you've said as much as most textbooks on the subject. Thank you.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[Anonymous Coward]

And other people like yourself seem to think that just because the pie gets bigger, you're going to get any of it.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

I've actually been working on a lengthy explanation of economics based in the generation of wealthy economic systems--wealthy nations. The problem is all existing economics are basically merchant and accountant shit: they try to predict prices, and call that economics. Nobody really has theories about the cost of labor, the market impact of cyclical improvement, what inflation actually is, why we can have welfare and what determines what kind of welfare system we have, or even what causes scarcity and supply-and-demand.

Economists say things like "goods become scarce" without figuring out things like "at a point, it's technically possible to produce more of a good to meet demand; however, each additional unit of that good requires a larger investment of total human labor time than previous unit good, thus holding a higher cost, and requiring a higher price, increasing the cost of living until the consumer is priced out of the market, thus producing the range of supply-and-demand economics called 'scarcity'." They also fail to realize that "supply" is unlimited up to the point where that changes in some way, including up to a point where an entity controlling the means to production at current costs decides to restrict supply (if similar means to production are claimed by competitors, you get competition; if DeBeers owns all the good diamond mines, you get monopoly price inflation), and so get confused about demand not increasing price sometimes and price increasing with reduced demand other times.

Mind you, I'm the guy who ran through the government's finances since 1950, drew up tax theories and market theories, and explained why we need to change our economic policies at this point, but not e.g. in 2010. I'm a bit obsessive.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[DarkOx]

I am small government conservative and I don't hate those ideas. You are correct about the tax the states plan being the original assumption about how the Federal Government was to be funded. The trouble is the Civil War happened! For good or ill (mostly ill IMHO) one of the things that came out of that is people started seeing the USA as a single entity rather than a group of member states.

Americans are already upset about the economic disparities that exist today. What say West Virgina look like without the massive disparity in the Federal tax revenues it generates vs what is distributed there? Not good. I don't think 'Americans' would accept the likely outcomes. I doubt other state representatives would be 'cool' about some states perpetually defaulting on their taxes while their state paid either. Its unfortunate but its the reality. Some how equal opportunity has morphed into equalizing results and rolling that back is darn tough.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[AK Marc]

The trouble is the Civil War happened! For good or ill (mostly ill IMHO) one of the things that came out of that is people started seeing the USA as a single entity rather than a group of member states.

Yup, the south fought for a strong central government and though they lost the war, managed to get what they wanted when the Union united as one against them. The strong central government they wanted came to pass, just not under their control.

What say West Virgina look like without the massive disparity in the Federal tax revenues it generates vs what is distributed there? Not good.

Huh?

WV takes in $1.76 per dollar sent to the feds. So what would they look like with a $1:1 return? Worse. Much worse. Why do you hate WV so?
http://visualeconomics.creditl...

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[sabbede]

That's rather selfish and short-sighted.

Trade = Democracy = Peace.

Trade and democratization are inextricably co-variant. No democracy has ever gone to war against another, nor have any nations with free trade agreements.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[sabbede]

You missed several key issues.

For one, the reason these trade agreements and the process of designing them is so long and drawn out is to compensate for the systemic issues you raise.

Secondly, it is not a zero-sum game. Gains in partner nations do not cause our economy or wages to fall by the same amount. Growth on both sides may even accelerate. In other words, we aren't giving up our share of the pie, the pie is getting larger.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[sabbede]

...what?

Where did you get all of that false information? It's like saying that all of computer science is targeted at rendering scenes.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

From economists.

Have you not read up on labor theories of value, intrinsic theories of value, and subjective theories of value? Economics is essentially about determining why goods and services hold the price they hold, how they come to have those prices, and how to calculate the correct price.

My wealth theories are about the *capacity* of human society for production of goods, support of population, and provision of services. I explain things like changes in labor application (technology) providing ways to produce more with less labor, thus allowing government to distribute large amounts of product and services without damaging and destroying the economic function of its population.

For example: if it takes 60% of available labor time to feed your people and 80% of available labor time to build and maintain road and rail systems, you can't do both; your society isn't at a level of technology where it can sustain overland transit infrastructure. Invent a new steel production process which produces higher-grade steel with less fuel and less labor time, and now you only need 40% of your labor time to build road and rail infrastructure--you can, theoretically, do that. Further, you can build farm tractors (steel is now cheap to produce and form), and so a good tractor design cuts back your labor time required to feed your population to 20%--now you're sinking 60% of your labor time into food and rail infrastructure, and have 40% to apply to other things. Whatever you were doing before that ate 40% of your labor time fits into that.

It's obviously more complicated than that: with 60% labor producing food, the other 40% is making other stuff. You have to slim these down in total to find time to make new things. Slimming down the cost (labor time) to make steel makes basic farm implements cheaper and better, which may cut a little time off making food and *anything* better made with cheap steel. Eventually, you get enough steel production capacity and cheap enough steel to roll out railroads in your spare labor time. With unemployment fluctuating between 4% and 10%, you've actually got a reserve labor force that can pick up things like that (look at all the jobs Keystone XL will "create"--most of them are temporary construction jobs).

Look at what makes up macroeconomics. It's all about effects of production capability--money, government policy, unemployment, employment, financial markets, supply and demand, scarcity--and how they affect the effects. In other words: they write about how market conditions affect market conditions, instead of how basic production capability gives rise to market conditions and produces supply-demand behaviors, unemployment and underemployment, welfare systems, the median and basic standards of living, income inequality, viability and impacts of progressive tax systems, trade advantages, and so forth. All of these things are just obvious effects stemming from a basic economic system of labor efficiency, not founding theories of economics or policy.

I'm writing Economics in assembly, and they're all working in PHP.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[sociocapitalist]

Protectionism is a good way to make an economy poor. People have this ideal that they'll make twice as much salary and have a bigger piece of the pie, except they don't realize the pie just gets smaller.

Lack of some protectionism sees job flight (incoming by visa or outgoing by overseas outsourcing) - especially in today's world. When you're unable to get work you'll be reconsidering your position on this.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[sociocapitalist]

"Personally I'd rather the USA stay the worlds richest nation! That is almost certain to be whats best for me, my family, and my friends. I have no desire to try and hold any other nation down or prevent the expansion of the middle class around the world. Good luck to them, but I see no reason we need to give away what's ours to enable that. Now some lefties are going to return to say we unfairly came by what we have. Yes okay maybe if you want to say we took the land from the Natives, but other than that no not really if you look at the whole of those situations and the alternatives."

How about a middle ground where the West doesn't lose quality of life and the rest of the world catches up?

The question is one of speed. If the imbalance is slow enough for the west to adjust to, then we remain unharmed.

Of course that's not what's happening as all the corporations take advantage of doing as much as they can to reduce labor costs (and shift the benefits to tax havens but that's another story) as fast as they can.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

Doesn't seem to be happening. The 70s are often cited as the US starting point for influx of Chinese goods, but some sources claim it all started earlier; yet unemployment seems to not care, and simply cycle.

Rose-tinted glasses for the past; bleak, muddy shades for the present?

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[DarkOx]

That is exactly my point as to why we can use a fed taxes the states, states tax citizens or counties, that in turn tax citizens model.

The American public won't stand by while their fellow citizens suffer and starve. Which is what would largely happen in places like WV if we adopted that model and made any pretense of requiring each state to shoulder their fair share.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[AK Marc]

There is nothing that would prevent a redistributive model. It would just require that the tax on California be explicitly 1.5x the return. Or have the redistributive portion come out of the corporate or other taxes. The theory is that the feds should guide the states.

But to tax the people of the states at a federal level, then refund that tax to the states for the states to spend on state programs (like how some Medicaid works) would make the founding fathers say "You are doing it wrong". Why do we tax federally to refund that to the states? The states should tax locally and spend locally, and the feds can top up missing funds. The US was designed to have the states fight for power among themselves, with the feds to keep everyone playing nice. Instead, we got the feds fighting with the states, and the fed always wins, here and everywhere else it's been done, like the USSR (at least up until it broke up)..

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[sabbede]

Again, concepts of value are but one part of economics. An instrumental part, yes, but instrumental in the formal sense - value is an instrument for quantifying the variables in the systems with which economics is concerned.

What you spend so much time describing are no more than other facets of economics. Neither novel nor unique; in fact, rather commonplace.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

Which writings am I to look upon, then? I'd quite like to have modern economists--people with Ph.D.s and master's degrees--stop telling me these things I say about labor and production are bat-shit crazy and completely contrary to "real economics".

Can you show documentation where the purchasing power of a unit of currency continuously approaches the total productive output (which is equivalent to the total buying power) over a period divided by the total income (in currency) over that period? That's where inflation and deflation come from: if money increases proportionally more than production, then you're paying more per unit good produced, thus inflation. It's not the other way around: inflation is not prices increasing, because prices can increase as goods become cheaper or don't become cheaper, and thus the increase in price may only reflect a fraction (a large fraction, typically) of inflation. That is to say: if it costs half as much to make something, but there's 3 times as much income relative to total production, that thing costs 1.5 times as much--but you have 200% inflation, not 50% inflation.

How about theories which show that cost of labor needs to be kept low, and that income inequality is not harmful when kept within bounds (and is beneficial depending on the overall wealth of a nation)?

There are a lot of things I have never seen and which economists keep telling me are not aligned with any theory modern or past.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[sabbede]

I'm not saying either of those things. I'm not even saying your approach is wrong. What I am saying is that you are wrong about economics not including the matters you describe. You have some of the details wrong, but it's not like you're being graded.

For example, you divide by the money supply, not income. Income isn't a determinant for the value of currency, that's a function of GDP, money supply, and because currency is traded internationally, interest rates. Mostly. It's complicated, and that complexity is compounded by international interactions. Also, inflation isn't directly about prices, it is again about the money supply - the simple function for the value of money is GDP/Money supply, inflation occurs when the supply of money grows faster than GDP. The resulting increase in prices is due to the decrease in the value of money.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

For example, you divide by the money supply, not income. Income isn't a determinant for the value of currency, that's a function of GDP, money supply, and because currency is traded internationally, interest rates.

Actually, wrong.

This "money supply", does it include capital which is only sitting idle in bank accounts? Of course not. The rich have $39.6 trillion just sitting around; were they to attempt spending it all in one year, they would fail. They'd cause mass inflation and severe economic damage, but they'd never manage to purchase enough goods. It cannot be done; the goods aren't there, and the prices would have to ramp up fast enough to offset the money they're spending.

Income is money which is spent. When you buy from a business, that business discounts wages from its income; it gives those wages to workers, who count it as income. As such, the cycle of expenditure is that goods are made, services are provided, and money is spent for those goods and services. Unpurchased goods and services become an expense which increases the cost of goods, requiring those goods's prices to increase to cover the labor expended--for example, by low yield (not all semiconductors are functional) or by overproduction (a business must recover its losses in such sunk costs--we even regulate farms such as to prevent them from overproducing and causing an increase in the price of grain, a strange inversion of supply and demand).

Income includes all interest banks actually collect. It includes all money rendered for automobile service. It includes the ticket price of movies. It includes the price of food sold. It includes all worker's wages, all business profits, all taxes collected.

Income includes every last cent expended for every good and service rendered.

That means income *is* what people paid for goods and services. Even income sent to charity is income rendered for a service; if the charity then stocks that income instead of spending it, that income moves out of the money system, and so the income going forward is reduced by that much: your "money supply" appears to shrink.

This doesn't discount all of those complex factors you included; it factors them all in. It's like saying weight is a matter of calories absorbed by your body versus calories used by your body: this involves what you eat, how the microbes in your body process it, how your digestive system absorbs it, how much your basic metabolic rate changes day to day, how much water you have, how much muscle mass you're gaining, how much physical activity you engage in... none of which matters to the simple, direct fact that the amount of calories your body absorbs minus the amount of calories your body uses controls the change in your weight.

Economists have all these theories about GDP and inflation in order to explain the price of goods. They don't have theories explaining the wealth and capabilities of a society as a result of the per-capital buying-power income. I've provided such theories to economists, and they've told me it's patently ridiculous to think of things in that way because money is what drives economy; several have explained to me that productivity *is* money, and that you measure an increase in productivity by an increase in money. Nonsense like that makes you realize GDP is real GNP, and real GNP is GNP adjusted for inflation, and inflation is money growing faster than GDP, so... all these numbers are made up? (The truth is they measure prices on shelves and compute inflation by a sample of price fluctuation, which fails to account for increases in efficiency).

Part of it is an obsession with measuring and creating formulas. We have all kinds of models like the Drake Equation where we throw in a shitload of unknown and unknowable variables and say you can calculate some value (e.g. the number of inhabited planets in the universe, the extent of damage of a nuclear attack on the global climate, the timing of the stock market) from a bunch

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[sabbede]

I'm sorry, but you are mistaken. The money supply does in fact include deposits, and more. I chose not to delve into that for the sake of brevity.

From the Federal Reserve: http://www.federalreserve.gov/...

There are several standard measures of the money supply, including the monetary base, M1, and M2. The monetary base is defined as the sum of currency in circulation and reserve balances (deposits held by banks and other depository institutions in their accounts at the Federal Reserve). M1 is defined as the sum of currency held by the public and transaction deposits at depository institutions (which are financial institutions that obtain their funds mainly through deposits from the public, such as commercial banks, savings and loan associations, savings banks, and credit unions). M2 is defined as M1 plus savings deposits, small-denomination time deposits (those issued in amounts of less than $100,000), and retail money market mutual fund shares.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

Again: their theory is wrong. The real world doesn't work that way.

I know what it says in economics papers. I know what Ph.D. holders and master's theses say. THEY. ARE. WRONG. Factually incorrect.

There was a time when we believed that iron was a mixture of the element Earth with the element Fire. Our loincloth-wearing contemporaries believe money sitting in reserve is factored in by the market, even though the market has no idea that money exists because it isn't getting spent.

Money is loaned into existence. Theoretically, infinite money exists. The government could have printed up an extra $785,000,000 trillion dollars LAST NIGHT and have it sitting in a vault, without telling anyone; by the Federal Reserve's reasoning above, that would cause inflation. In the real world, it won't, because THAT MONEY ISN'T AVAILABLE TO BE SPENT ON GOODS.

There's about $12 trillion of income in the US each year nowadays. If $0.2 trillion of that goes into bank accounts, never to be spent again, the economy will behave in the following years as if $11.8 trillion of income were acquired. That is to say: with our income being $12.1T, $12.7T, $13.4T, and so forth, we'd have an economy where $0.8T more money was PUT INTO CIRCULATION in the second year, but $0.2 was TAKEN OUT OF CIRCULATION by settling itself neatly in someone's mattress or in gold bullion.

All the markets care about is that the money isn't available to buy goods with. There's $1000, but $200 of it sits in bank accounts; they made 10 pounds of goods, and can only sell all of it if they sell it all for a total of $800, because that $200 is NOT coming out to play. This affects the buying power of money: labor and production-per-labor-hour stay the same, money being spent for that productive output changes.

You can wave around papers saying, "Yes, well very smart people are saying this," and the response is, "Well very smart people are frequently wrong. They thought fire was caused by the release of a gas called 'phlogiston' which saturated things like wood; eventually they realized this was stupid."

That shit the Federal Reserve says above? The same thing appearing in classical and contemporary economic papers? The SAME LINE OF THINKING being written RIGHT NOW in some kid's Master's Thesis? It's wrong. It doesn't matter that experts believe it; they're wrong.

My theories do not align completely with contemporary or classical economics. They follow the same general outline--a lot of the thinking is in the right direction--but make observations the field has missed because its mode of thinking is wildly different and cannot cope with reality. The bone has developed wrong, and must be broken and set correctly.

By the by, the people writing Ph.D. thesis are saying the same thing--with different theories at odds with mine, but still with the assertion that last decade's Nobel Prize in Economics winners were bluntly wrong about stuff.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[sabbede]

What? The definition of the money supply isn't some theory or belief. And it does include what is in your bank account, under your mattress, etc. Nor is it theoretically infinite - banks do "create" money through lending, but they are required to keep a 10% reserve, limiting how much can be created. You deposit $100, they "create" $90 through lending. That $90 gets redeposited, and $81 is lent, then $72.9 and so forth. Sum(initial deposit * 1/.10)

You are correct that the $785,000,000 would not be counted in the money supply, but that is because until it has been put into circulation it is just a vault filled with worthless paper. The Fed won't count it as part of either M1 or M2 until it leaves the vault for delivery to banks.

Half of your arguments are pointless - just canonical economic theory restated and presented as if it were novel. The other half are flat out wrong, apparently because you aren't familiar with the concepts and terms. You can't continue to insist that this or that isn't counted in the money supply when it is formally defined to do so! Nor can you claim familiarity with the subject when you clearly don't understand even the most basic terminology. I don't care how many papers you say you have read as you cannot have understood their content. It's like attacking CS for spending too much time discussing oysters because people are talking about perl.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

The definition of the money supply isn't some theory or belief.

It's part of economic theory. Your economists theorize that money not spent is money still reaching an invisible hand into the market to affect prices; I theorize that money not spent is money the market is naive to, and thus does not exist in the market, and cannot exert its pressures on prices.

just canonical economic theory restated and presented as if it were novel

I've got write-ups following Adam Smith's thinking to show where it broke down, such as where he identifies that division of labor increases output, and then simultaneously claims that the value of a thing is its labor costs to produce, the labor costs a consumer would incur to produce it himself, and the level of desire (perceived value) a consumer has for it.

Even Adam Smith comes quite close to some of the things I've said, and then veers off in another direction to reach incorrect conclusions. You think Ricardo, Marx, George, or any of our contemporaries have fared much better? For that matter, how would you imagine they'd fare much worse?

The thing about incorrect theory is it's never a matter of being devoid of understanding; it's a matter of having the pieces in the wrong order, and mixing in a few incorrect pieces. That's why programming, engineering, and management methodologies get sneered at by people who have a lot of experience doing things the wrong way: they know all the things those frameworks tell them; they don't apply all those things in the best manner, and they discount the value of a structured approach. These are people who hammer pieces of wood into the rough shape of a house because they already know how to nail things together and how a house looks (floors, walls, roof), and the whole explanation of doing all that stuff in a specific order is just telling them to do things they already know how to do.

You can't continue to insist that this or that isn't counted in the money supply when it is formally defined to do so!

Child, in the 1800s, negroes were formally defined to not be human beings. They were farm animals to be put to burden, bought and sold. We had formally accepted that the negro brain was not capable of the full intellect of human consciousness and was thus lesser. This is how they were defined.

Those definitions were wrong.

You can't just define reality. You can't just say, "Well, the money supply includes money that the market doesn't see, and the market reacts to money that doesn't interact with it at all." It doesn't. It doesn't matter how many times you get on your knees and pray to your idol statues of John Keynes and Paul Krugman to hold you steady in the darkness with the guiding light of your economics mantra; you pray to false gods, and the world will happily roll straight across your superstitious beliefs of magical money locked in boxes, ignoring what it does not see or touch, and acting as if such things do not exist.

Dollars unspent do not exert the push of their spiritual energy upon markets.

I don't care how many papers you say you have read as you cannot have understood their content.

I understand their content better than the writers of that content. The content of modern economics is incorrect.

Nor can you claim familiarity with the subject when you clearly don't understand even the most basic terminology.

Earth, fire, air, and water are elements, no? How can you say hydrogen, helium, and iron are elements? You clearly don't understand the most basic terminology of chemistry.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[sabbede]

First, my original point was that the questions you're trying to ask are not new. Your (very) few substantive points have either already been made, or are being studied as we speak. You seem to be operating under the mistaken belief that your ideas are brand new. Were you more familiar with the field, it's breadth and depth, and the various schools of thought within you would know this. In fact, you would likely recognize the schools which takes the same approach you do instead of wasting your time thinking they don't exist.

You're also conflating distinct issues and getting lost in ambiguous terms. For example, common markets for goods and services are not concerned with the money supply in-and-of itself in any way; only the value (i.e. purchasing power) of the currency used. Therefore, their interest in the money supply is entirely indirect and the inference you're so rudely making is baseless. Foreign exchange markets, on the other hand, are very and directly concerned with money supplies (as well as interest rates), as currency is the commodity they trade. In other words, it is the supply side of that market.

You can't continue to insist that this or that isn't counted in the money supply when it is formally defined to do so!

Child, in the 1800s, negroes were formally defined to not be human beings. They were farm animals to be put to burden, bought and sold. We had formally accepted that the negro brain was not capable of the full intellect of human consciousness and was thus lesser. This is how they were defined.

You should be ashamed. Not only is that a rhetorical and logical fallacy, it's a fucking insult to humanity and worse, to reason. There is no basis for the comparison whatsoever. The supply of money is a measurable, quantifiable value. It includes that which you claim it does not, which is your mistake, not the field's. The false equivalency you argue only makes you look more the fool.

I provided the definition of the money supply. It would be one thing if you were arguing that it didn't include something it should, or that it does include that which it should not; but instead, you are insisting that it doesn't include that which it explicitly does. Why? It's as if I said, "Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to it's radius" and you responded with, "You moron, it's what you get by dividing the circumference by half the diameter! Mathematicians must not know what they're talking about!"

Earth, fire, air, and water are elements, no? How can you say hydrogen, helium, and iron are elements? You clearly don't understand the most basic terminology of chemistry.

Your arrogance is almost as astounding as your ignorance. You know next to nothing, yet presume expertise superior to that of Nobel laureates. How about you actually take a class in economics and develop some semblance of real understanding, instead of remaining a pretentious know-it-all. As it stands, you are clearly far too ignorant to realize just how much you don't know.

Perhaps then you will be worth talking to.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

Not only is that a rhetorical and logical fallacy, it's a fucking insult to humanity and worse, to reason.

It demonstrates that scientifically-accepted human ideals are often wrong in spectacular ways. You seem to not understand that this isn't a new argument; people have had the same arguments in the past, with different beliefs, which we now hold as ridiculous and obviously stupid, while some speak up with new arguments we hold as ludicrous--a few of which will one day be the well-accepted scientific truth, while the common positions today are looked upon as ridiculous and obviously stupid.

I provided the definition of the money supply. It would be one thing if you were arguing that it didn't include something it should, or that it does include that which it should not; but instead, you are insisting that it doesn't include that which it explicitly does.

The definition used is ridiculous in the context it's used in, and garbles a scientific pursuit into an unrecognizable mess. There's a reason I use terms like "total income," "wealth," and "buying power," and dispense with terms like "value": the whole concept of "value" is as much a fantasy as the concept of the divine power of Ra, God of Sun, blessing your cropland with the rich gift of fertility. I occasionally provide "valuation" as a term, specifying that an individual, group, or market may hold a flawed ideal of how much buying power a thing translates to; "value" defines what buying power a thing *does* translate to, which is idiotic. Things don't have "value"; they have costs and prices.

It's as if I said, "Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to it's radius" and you responded with, "You moron, it's what you get by dividing the circumference by half the diameter! Mathematicians must not know what they're talking about!"

At one time, pi was defined as 22/7. While everyone agreed it was the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, and the value you get when you divide the circumference by the diameter (not half the diameter), we've since refined how to compute pi.

Similarly, your idea that money supply--that money laying fallow in banks, not operating within markets--somehow affects prices in those markets, leading to inflation, without ever being spent, is ridiculous. The idea that the circulation of money in relation to the production of goods determines the buying power of a unit of currency is sound; the idea that any money *not* being spent is "in circulation" is ludicrous. That money seems to have its influence because, necessarily, it is money that *has* been spent and *has* had an impact at one point; but it's since *removed* from circulation, and the new round of spending is discounted by the amount of money which was acquired by a party and then not spent over again by that party.

Yes, I know modern economists believe that sacking your millions into a mattress for 30 years still lets those millions cause inflation; this line of thinking suggests you can show up with several hundred billion dollars and start spending like crazy and *not* cause sudden inflation, since those dollars were in circulation under your bed for the past decades. That's a ridiculous conjecture.

As it stands, you are clearly far too ignorant to realize just how much you don't know.

Mirror, know thyself. You cling to your Holy Writ, which you have read, which you have accepted, and which you have taken to worship. I have read your Holy Writ and I have found it full of inconsistency, unable to account for the real world, and afraid to approach the difficult questions. It is a distraction.

Your entire line of argument has been "other people disagree with you, and they're right." My line of argument has been, "It doesn't work that way in real life; those assertions are ludicrous." I've even given an (extremely) simplified explanation of why; I've even reminded you that th

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[sabbede]

It demonstrates that scientifically-accepted human ideals are often wrong in spectacular ways.

No, it is a fallacy. Science did not produce that belief.

I accept that science is often wrong, theories are replaced all the time. This is very much the case in economics. However, it is inappropriate for one to decry those theories when one does not understand them, their roots, or the terms with which they are described.

Your entire line of argument has been "other people disagree with you, and they're right."

No, from the start it has been, "Some people agree with you; sometimes many, sometimes few. But you clearly don't know enough about the subject to realize it."

At one time, pi was defined as 22/7. While everyone agreed it was the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, and the value you get when you divide the circumference by the diameter (not half the diameter), we've since refined how to compute pi.

I am so sick of you. Pi has never been defined as 22/7. Engineers have used that as an easy approximation, but never has it been defined that way. You have rather effectively demonstrated my point though - your arrogance has blinded you to your glaring ignorance.

I'm going to try this one last time before I decide interacting with you is futile. The value of a unit of currency, physical or virtual, is a function of the nation's total wealth (usually measured by GDP) and the total amount of that currency. It doesn't matter where it is or if it moves. That has no effect whatsoever on it's purchasing power.

If you want to say there is a tipping point where the removal of too much currency from active circulation causes runaway deflation, then you're right. If you think you're the first one to recognize that, you are very wrong.

If you're so interested in economics, study it. You'll be amazed by how old your ideas are.

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders

[bluefoxlucid]

The value of a unit of currency, physical or virtual, is a function of the nation's total wealth (usually measured by GDP) and the total amount of that currency. It doesn't matter where it is or if it moves. That has no effect whatsoever on it's purchasing power.

So. The rich have $33.6 trillion sitting in accounts doing nothing. Am I to believe that they can spend all that money by January and have zero impact on America's economy and the global economy in general? No inflation as a result of massive expense? No shortages of goods? That raising the total income of America's economy from its current $12.6 trillion to $46.2 trillion will do absolutely nothing?

That is your assertion.

If you're so interested in economics, study it. You'll be amazed by how old your ideas are.

The framework is old. The ideal that all production costs are labor--that even the liberation of coal from the ground rather than its production from chemical methods is simply an available lower-labor means of producing coal--is fairly classical. Many of those specific points you claim are wrong, however, are radically different from anything I've seen. You're using the claim that money supply divided by GDP defines money's value as a way to show that my claim that total income--total money spent on goods--divided by total production--total purchased goods and services produced--indicates the purchasing power of a unit of currency is not new.

There's a big difference: I don't pretend that money that's supposedly out there somewhere doing nothing is part of the economy; you do. I also don't purport to measure GDP by measuring money; I don't really measure GDP at all, except to say in the relative sense that the same labor-hours produce more goods, and the same goods are produced by fewer labor hours, and that this is a trend which has specific implications for the economy. At current, I don't see a good way to measure productivity: the practical implications of reduced labor for goods go far beyond the relative labor costs and associated purchasing power paid for those goods. Small changes in productivity can have dramatic impacts on quality-of-life or on population growth; they can also have nearly no impact, just getting shinier toys into people's hands.

Think about the invention of cheap steel processes and the sudden ability to create affordable railroads, compared to the dramatic miniaturization of computer hardware and the ability to create smart phones: the cultural and economic impact of smart phones over cell phones is actually tiny compared to the cultural impact of railroads. Money doesn't come from railroads; it has to be printed and produced. All you'd get is lower costs, lower prices, and the same total income--the same amount of money spent on everything, and no increase in GDP even though production and productivity both increase dramatically.

By the by, how do you measure a nation's total wealth? A nation of 5 million population with the productive output of America's 320 million citizens would have *quite* a high standard of living, you know. Doesn't it seem obvious that a nation's wealth is a function of per-capita production, equal to per-capita buying power? A nation can't be wealthy if it produces only enough to feed and clothe half its citizens, no matter if that nation produces a hundred times more than the next small nation-state whose citizens all have fine silk gowns and plasma TVs.

No coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else is in the Pacific?

R'lyeh.

Chew on that for a bit. It's happening.

Vote trump to kill this job killing bill

[Joe_Dragon]

Vote trump to kill this job killing bill.

And not only will this kill us jobs it will also cut off cheap med's as well and then add the GOP 2016 health insurance plan. Now jail / priosin is looking good for people who are job less and need a DR.

Re:Vote trump to kill this job killing bill

[Anonymous Coward]

Vote Trump? Seriously? Do you know who you are talking about. His daddy gave him a company, he bankrupted it, and would have remained in debt had his dad not later died and left him millions, which he has used (along with connections to organized crime) to buy everything he can, including foreign mistresses who seem unconcerned that he hates immigrants so much. He is staggeringly incompetent, possessed of the ego that only a spoiled trust fund baby with zero capacity for self-evaluation could possess.

And you want to give this guy nuclear launch codes?

Please don't vote.

Re:Vote trump to kill this job killing bill

[Anonymous Coward]

He is staggeringly incompetent, possessed of the ego that only a spoiled trust fund baby with zero capacity for self-evaluation could possess.

How is that different than what we've had in the White House for the 2000s?

Re:Vote trump to kill this job killing bill

[cfalcon]

Will this thing seriously hit the desk of any president except this one? Also note that your best bet to actually stop TPP is to get your representative and senators on board with voting against it. The "fast track" means that Congress can't try to amend or change it in any way, giving them go / no-go vote on it whenever it comes to vote (now that the draft is public, I would assume this will occur as fast as they can to minimize the time for the mainstream media to report it as anything but a "trade deal").

Re:Vote trump to kill this job killing bill

[liquid_schwartz]

As inequality grows and the prospects for a nice middle class lifestyle get smaller people will get desperate and what formerly would have been inconceivable suddenly looks reasonable. This is not new and is a sign that things are getting seriously out of whack. I'm voting Trump or Sanders solely on the "free trade" issue. I expect that Hillary will ultimately win since the media has been clear about who they expect to get elected and has been manipulating everything in her favor once she started to seriously look like she might be in trouble. After another 8 years at the current rate of decay things will be more dire and Trump will look very reasonable by comparison to who will be the front runners then. This will continue until something changes. Best case the 1% relent a bit to save what they have. Worst case we get a dictator. But something has to give.

Does anyone trust those .... ?

[no-body]

Yearlong secrecy, closed doors, only some "chosen few" have a say and can vote... as it appears. What really is going on, nobody knows but one can only guess who will be benefiting from all that stuff.

Late capitalism symptoms, assets are accumulated on certain layers of entities developing their own laws and procedures ballooning even more.

Are actions performed benefiting the general population as a whole - hardly. Common sense actions are prevented and converted to serve those new laws in use harming instead of helping.

If one looks at the arrogance and deny of individuals in this "other reality" to serve and supply common needs, it's disgusting.

How many commons getting well, minimum pay or sustainable pay, have to work to create value to pay one higher uppers, be it a C?O, hedge fund or money manager? The value sucked in by some small layer in the upper crust needs to be generated somehow, who does it, the baloon blowers up there?

Interesting times we life in, that's for sure. ...

How do we know that it is the *REAL* full text?

[Taco Cowboy]

Your analogy is only partly valid because the so-called 'full text' may not the the real full text !

They have been cheating us for so long, what is there to keep them from cheating us just a little bit longer?

Found Guilty in International Court Means Nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

The US is in breach of NAFTA on multiple accounts, even being found guilty in the international court. The US has even admitted that they are breaking the law and yet nothing happens.

The same stipulations they are breaking in NAFTA also apply to TPP, so the US is already in violation of TPP, and what will happen? Nothing!

I don't know how US can be a part of any agreement because they like pulling out of them, or just plain breaking them, but don't you dare even come close to the line, or the mighty US bully will hurt you, even if they are fully across the line themselves.

FIGHTING them?!

[Anonymous Coward]

why the hell do we have elected officials if we constantly have to fight them to not screw us over?

Fight them? I remember a lot of people voting for Democrats and Republicans over the last decade that this deal has been worked by them, but I don't remember many people fighting them. Which election are you talking about, where America finally fought them?

Just kidding. I know that you have jack shit to point at, if I ask you which in which past election we fought them. Perhaps you're talking about a future election, where we might start fighting.

You know, there's a lot of money being spent to tell you that you should vote for Democrats and Republicans, but none of that money actually has any power at all, if you decide to not do whatever they say. If America votes against them, then all their efforts are for nothing. Their bullshit only works, because you and I are ok with it working. The instant we decide that we don't trust them, it all changes.

We just aren't there yet. We still completely trust them, and are convinced they sincerely have our interests at heart, nobody else could possibly do better, and they aren't really corrupt. Ask voters, and nearly all of them will tell you: they're going to vote for Democrats or Republicans, or they're not going to vote at all.

We are ok with this. We are not fighting. Anybody who says they're fighting: show me the numbers. Show me the races where voters told the Democrats and Republicans "We don't want you people anymore. We are fighting you." Show me where this fight is happening. I think you can't.

Darth Sideous

[Anonymous Coward]

And Queen Amidala, has she signed the treaty?

Re:Darth Sideous

[Tulsa_Time]

Time for some aggressive negotiations....

Re:Darth Sideous

[Sir_Eptishous]

Meesa think dis isn t da treaty yousa look for.

EULA

[andrewa]

I'm as likely to read this as I am a typical EULA, and likely to get just as fucked either way...

Hmmm, and why couldn't they release it early?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another awesome deal negotiated by incompetent bung holes in the white house..... Seems he's really good at fooling most of the people most of the time....

Bad idea

[plopez]

I know of no agreement that, while increasing profitability while impoverishing people. I am trying to parse through this. and see what implications there are.

The opposition line up

[plopez]

Includes not only Bernie, Hillary, Warren, Unions, and Environmentalists; but some Conservatives are referring to it as "Obamatrade". Not quite ringing support from the Conservatives. The overall vote might be dicey if the Dems and independents abandon Obama and pick up a modicum amount of support from the Republicans.

Re:The opposition line up

[Anonymous Coward]

Fast Track passed. Barely, but it passed. Will anyone who voted for Fast Track decide not to support the TPP in the end?

Was the leaked version accurate?

[renderhead]

Has anyone confirmed the previously leaked text against this official one? Do I need to re-read it if I already read it when it was leaked?

Re: How do we know that it is the *REAL* full text

[ZeroWaiteState]

It actually can't be the full text, because portions of the agreement are classified until several years after the agreement is ratified.

"and open new Asia-Pacific markets"

[tlambert]

"and open new Asia-Pacific markets" ... to the massive manufacturing juggernaut that is the United States Of America.

Too soon, after the Detroit bankruptcy? My bad...

6,000 Pages

[ewibble]

6,000 pages is ridiculous, how is anybody supposed to fully understand and agree to that. It is just a way hide important detail in a ocean of boredom.

Re: 6,000 Pages

[AK Marc]

You just grep for the piece you are intersted in, and nobody understands it all, especially those voting for it.

Re: 6,000 Pages

[bigpat]

6,000 pages is ridiculous, how is anybody supposed to fully understand and agree to that. It is just a way hide important detail in a ocean of boredom.

Took years to even negotiate, but they want congress to just rubber stamp it. How about this... as soon as every congressman is able to pass a comprehensive test detailing the bills text, then they can be allowed to vote on this.

Mass, subterrainian civil disobedience

[WOOFYGOOFY]

This is such an over-reach, especially the intellectual property parts, it's going to lead to mass civil disobedience in the form of a fundamental attitudinal shift from one of basically respecting the law to one of basically disrespecting it *on the part of everyone* including society's intellectuals, academics and cultural leaders.

That's the deeper danger of this kind of law making, not to mention the content of the law itself. It leads to contempt for the law, contempt for Congress , the Executive and the Judiciary. Contempt leads to mass, defacto civil disobedience where ignoring or subverting the law becomes the norm, as in the days of prohibition.

How is this good for the country?
 

Re:Mass, subterrainian civil disobedience

[david_thornley]

What, in the IP section, is worse than treaties and statutes that are already US law? There hasn't been mass civil disobedience (there has been massive lawbreaking, but that's not the same thing) over those.

Re:Mass, subterrainian civil disobedience

[tlambert]

What, in the IP section, is worse than treaties and statutes that are already US law? There hasn't been mass civil disobedience (there has been massive lawbreaking, but that's not the same thing) over those.

It mandates ISP monitoring and reporting, because since RIAA and MPAA can't figure out how to do it, they figure the ISPs should have to work as unpaid employees to figure it out for them.

The reporting part means your ISP is no longer a common carrier, because they are required to tattle on people specifically.

It transfers said information without a warrant or court order.

Technically, this was designed to enforce copyright in NZ and Australia, and is basically a ratification of some of the things that Telstra does, which no one likes, and which Telstra can now point to and say "But dad told us! We had to!". The problem being , no one wants to license all the content that the U.S. produces for rebroadcast in those countries, because, seriously, sheep don't watch "Survivor!", but there are one or two people who'd like to.

At the same time as creating a uniform copyright law and application zone for said law, it fails to address the issue of region encoding, and staggered releases for things like new movies; in other words, the people behind the law are able to still perform manual market segmentation when selling media to maximize their profit, by e.g. encoding DVDs for regions 1, 4, or 6, but the people who have to abide by the new law can't ignore the region encoding as if it were *acutally* a uniform copyright law and application zone.

Big media gets to have their cake and eat it too.

I've only read about half the thing so far; I'm sure there's going to be some more brilliant stuff about copyright.

Now if you want to talk about something *other* than IP... perhaps you'd like to talk about the export of the remainder of the U.S. blue collar textile industry to slave labor factories in Malaysia? Because that's kind of in there, too...

Re:Mass, subterrainian civil disobedience

[david_thornley]

Thank you. The IP and Internet stuff is what I'm primarily interested in. I know very little about the textile industry (I assume it produces textiles).

Re:Mass, subterrainian civil disobedience

[sociocapitalist]

This is such an over-reach, especially the intellectual property parts, it's going to lead to mass civil disobedience in the form of a fundamental attitudinal shift from one of basically respecting the law to one of basically disrespecting it *on the part of everyone* including society's intellectuals, academics and cultural leaders.

That's the deeper danger of this kind of law making, not to mention the content of the law itself. It leads to contempt for the law, contempt for Congress , the Executive and the Judiciary. Contempt leads to mass, defacto civil disobedience where ignoring or subverting the law becomes the norm, as in the days of prohibition.

How is this good for the country?

It's not good for the country - it's good for the American nobility.

China left out? Hmmmmmm.....

[TiggertheMad]

Negotiations have been going on for years, led by the United States and Japan — with China conspicuously absent from the list of signee

One might almost view this as a partnership between all the non-china countries on the pacific rim to compete with the growing Chinese economy. While it is good for corporations, it reduces economic friction (tariffs, etc.) and makes it easier for everyone to compete with them. I am not sure that I am for this agreement, but I can see why it might have been created. The EU seems to be a similar creation, enabling the many small European countries to compete with the US and China.

Re:China left out? Hmmmmmm.....

[Frosty Piss]

To quote the parent...

Blaw, blaw, blaw,, blaw, blaw, blaw, blaw, blaw, blaw, blaw, blaw...

Thanks!

The TPP is Unconstitutional on the face of it

[WillAffleckUW]

For example, it unconstitutionally signs away Rights guaranteed in the Canadian Constitution in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Which is not possible.

No treaty or act of parliament can do that.

Period.

And it scr3ws US people too, but they're sheep.

Re:The TPP is Unconstitutional on the face of it

[Anonymous Coward]

{{Citation needed}}

Re:The TPP is Unconstitutional on the face of it

[WillAffleckUW]

It's searchable online. I'm not going to do your work for you.

tarrif elimination schedule question

[PhantomHarlock]

New Zealand's tariff elimination schedule is pretty straight forward. It shows what it currently is and what it will be up to 7 years out (most are completely eliminated the first year.)

On the US's schedule, it lists the "base rate" which I assume is what it is right now sans TPP, and then columns representing the other countries, which all say "EIF". Does anyone know what that stands for? Does that mean that for those countries the tariff is eliminated completely?

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders (protectionism)

[WillAffleckUW]

Not really. If the things being traded are Intellectual Property, and the deal is to extend drug patents, which expired quickly in most of the TPP area allowing cheap generics, then protectionism means 2000 percent drug price increases vaporize.

net gain.

And how much is my IP in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US (where I have been published and sold services too) diminished when we all know half of the Japanese, South Korean, Australian, Kiwi, and Chinese markets are full of pirated IP anyway, none of which will change under this fake treaty?

"chicken tax" on light duty trucks

[PhantomHarlock]

Another question. Does anyone know if the TPP eliminates the chicken tax for participating countries?

I did not find any mention of it in the US Motor Vehicle Trade document that is part of the TPP documents.

Re: How do we know that it is the *REAL* full text

[david_thornley]

Anything the US ratifies, or passes into law, will be on the public record. Any portion of the agreement that is not made public is not part of the Congressional vote.

Most current presidential candidates are anti-TPP

[eutychus]

2016 presidential candidates on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal

Based on my understanding of their positions:
Clinton (D) - Mixed, mostly against as a presidential candidate
O'Malley (D) - Against
Sanders (D) - Against
Bush (R) - For
Cruz (R) - Mixed, initially for. 1 of 5 Rs in the Senate that voted against the TPA bill
Fiorina (R) - Unclear due to lack of details... possibly for
Huckabee (R) - Against
Jindal - (R) Mostly against
Kasich (R) Unclear
Paul (R) Against, 1 of 5 Rs in the Senate that voted against the TPA bill
Rubio (R) For
Santorum (R) For
Trump (R) Against

The Chinese are absent

[Anonymous Coward]

from this "deal", because they know better than throwing themselves under the American's bus.

Re:The Chinese are absent

[tlambert]

from this "deal", because they know better than throwing themselves under the American's bus.

The Chinese are absent from this deal because they get whatever the deal gives to anyone else the U.S. trades with for free, without having to make concessions on their side of the table. The Chinese have MFN - Most Favored Nation - status, which means that the U.S. can not apply restrictions, nor charge more tariff, to China, as it does to the least restricted and tariffed trading partner.

In addition, this give the Chinese an "American Hole", in the same way that NAFTA gave the U.S. a "Mexican Hole". If China is having a problem getting favorable terms with any of the 11 other nations (and, later, the other 2 nations considering joining the party), then they need only transship and do minor changes (the easiest is to just run a shrink-wrap operation in the ports at Hawaii, and (re)shrink-wrap the boxes) making it a product where "final assembly" (the term is intentionally vague) occurs in the U.S. and therefore it's subject to the TPP thereafter.

The NAFTA version of this is to ship products which would ordinarily be tariffed through Mexico, and run through a maquiladora for similar treatment, such that they are technically "Products of Mexico", rather than where the major manufacturing and assembly took place, and therefore not tariffed, due to NAFTA.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Remember Trump and Sanders (protectionism)

[bluefoxlucid]

Money is not wealth; and intellectual property *is* protectionism.

Clinton is bought and paid for

[bigpat]

Take a gander through all the foreign nationals and governments that have laundered thinly veiled bribes through the Clinton Foundation.

Clinton helped write it

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you have it wrong. Clinton, being the Secretary of State, went to those other countries and actively campaigned them to support it. Remember her big "trip to Asia", that's what she was doing. Don't come here pretending she is just a third party observer to it, she was the one telling the countries in Asia to sign it for 4 years to boot.

She changed her mind after spending the better part of her time for 4 years pushing it? No, she changed her mind because it began polling poorly. She help write it, push it, get it passed and everything else possible. Clinton may have had more to do with it getting put into place than any other single person in the world. Don't come here telling us "she changed her mind and give her a break".

Why New Zealand of all places?

[sethstorm]

This kind of "release" seems like it wasn't meant to be easily found.

US citizens don't want it

[Anonymous Coward]

RINOs and Democratic elites only.

Re: How do we know that it is the *REAL* full text

[Anonymous Coward]

Details like that only matter when they facilitate corporate profits. When they stand in the way they become completely irrelevant.

I Refuse To Believe It

[Anonymous Coward]

The TPP has been so secret for so long, I just cannot believe that it has been released. This must be the Most Sooper Sekret majic decoder ring evar!!

It's a fake. Either that or one of the following released it:

Kim.Com
Bradley/Chelsea Manning
The Pirate Bay
Anonymous
Julian Assange
Edward Snowden
Someone we thought was Anonymous but turns out not to be

Cheap shot

[Anonymous Coward]

I was with him until "(Don't like that, ladies? Tough. You were just fine with collective guilt when the shoe was on the other foot. Enjoy your turn!)".

Thankyou Eric Raymond for making it clear you are a complete and utter ass. Fuck you, you toxic son of a bitch.

"let's give ourselves more money"

[Anonymous Coward]

We had enough of the Jewish Dream already thanks.
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
https://encrypted.google.com/#q=yellen+bernanke+greenspan+jewish
http://unitedwithisrael.org/act-now-declare-jerusalem-as-israels-eternal-capital/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Froman

but you don't hear it right. just anti-* right.

Re: ESR's warning about "honeytraps" at tech confs

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] a fairly well-written summary I wrote [...]

[...] Well, that's an unbiassed assessment if I ever heard one.

>> It is. Trust me. He mostly writes shitty ones.

Press release

[Anonymous Coward]

The original posting reads like a press release...with both ends of the political spectrum opposed, how did this POS pass Congress? Anyone who believe in the two-party political system in the US is a fool. Seig Heil!

Yet some of the TTP will be secret for 4 years

[kattisch]

So if you liked the Iran deal negotiated by the Obama, you are gonna love the TTP. Some of the TTP is to remain secret for 4 years and yet Congress is being asked to vote on this and the American people are being asked to support it. Then, we go to an article in the Wall Street Journal which shows a dairy farm in New Zealand and dairy farmers and it says that New Zealand wants to boost exports of its dairy products under the TTP. That's kinda funny because how do you have diary men in New Zealand and dairy men in the US and dairy men all over thinking they are going to be able to sell more dairy products because of this pact. It doesn't work that way. Same with cattlemen in Kansas and cattlemen in Australia. One of them is going to lose. So, when you look at the history of Trade Partnership Agreement with the US, you don't have to think long as to who that loser is going to be. History has shown that the US continues to hemorrhage jobs and pretty much always comes out on the losing end of the deal. So, if you really think your government is protecting you. Think again! Either way write your Congressmen--the deal isn't done until the ink dries!