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Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal Endorsed by Major Tech Group (siliconbeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report on SiliconBeat: An industry group representing major tech firms including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, Uber and eBay has endorsed the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact plan "The TPP recognizes the Internet as an essential American export," Internet Association CEO Michael Beckerman said in a statement. "Historically, pro-Internet policies have been absent from trade agreements, which is why the TPP is an important step forward for the Internet sector that accounts for 6 percent of the GDP and nearly 3 million American jobs. "It will be critical that the TPP is implemented in a way that supports the Internet economy." While President Barack Obama backs the trade deal, it has met with strong opposition from critics including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who attacked secrecy around the pact's drafting and has said the deal could weaken U.S. regulations that are good for Americans but might threaten foreign companies' profits.Brier Dudley, Seattle Times Columnist, tweeted, "TPP "taken a 180" since TPA, when there was confidence of passage, Rep @davereichert says. Issues incl. biologic protections, tobacco lobby."
Everything I've heard about TPP sounds so shitty that I propose it be renamed to the Toilet Paper Project.*
* All rights reserved.
TPP drops safe harbor protection from the DMCA. This alone should concern Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter.
It destroys it completely and leaves any freedom on the Internet in ruins. That's just one of many reasons why it has to be relentlessly opposed at all costs.
I am a socialist and a European. I was very surprised to hear that Trump was/is against the TPP. When I heard that, I started following him a bit. I also started paying attention to the campaign. In the end, while I have always been a lefty, I realized I can't stand Hillary, whereas I find some points in Trump which I agree with. Hillary looks like someone who'd sell her own mother for money and power, and would throw anyone under the bus.
Strictly from the POV of TPP, if either Trump or Bernie become presidents, the deal will be dead in the water.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
this bill can make importing foreign labor easier and let them use Investor-State Dispute Settlements to by pass labor laws.
It lets corporations sue governments to overturn laws made by democratically elected governments. DUH! Of course major corps will endorse this shift of power from people to corporations!
All of these organizations have one thing in common: they don't care about you. They don't care about how this agreement could affect your life. They don't care about individuals, they don't care about neighborhoods, they don't care about children, they don't care about liberty, they don't care about jobs, they don't care about culture, they don't care about America, and they don't care about any other country either.
I'm not even necessarily against the TPP. It seems like it's probably bad because of the secrecy and because it was negotiated by elites, presumably for the benefit of elites. But I haven't read it. I'm against these things being decided based on not caring how they affect people.
Since when is Uber a "major tech firm"?
The TPP is a way for US companies to fuck over every body else. It needs to go. Beware of Americans bearing gifts.
So a bunch of nominally-American corporations that pay next-to-no US taxes get to influence US policy, while those of us that pay our full taxes are ignored?
The whole thing was co-written by industry associations with the express purpose of doing an end-run around a Congress that would never have gotten away with passing equivalent legislation chipping away at so many worker, citizen and consumer protections.
Good for corporations probably means bad for the peons... I mean people.
It transfers power from people to corporations. We can vote for governments, we can't vote for foreign corporations. The power moves from people to corps.
Corps get to decide OUR laws, we don't. The proposed "court" is actually a tribunal of corporate lawyers holding meetings in secret.
Once its overturned a countries law, there is no vote that can restore that law.
It's an end to rule by democracy.
It's not that "free trade" is necessarily bad (although all these deals have screwed normal working Americans) - it's that we think like wonks rather than like normal people. Our negotiators and politicians have gone into these treaties assuming they can add provisions to protect various industries. The thing is - that's all well and good if you're dealing with a similar mindset at the other end. A trade treaty with Germany (for example) would be largely honored. But we're not dealing with Germany, France, or England. China, Russia, Korea, etc. don't give a shit about treaty provisions. Contracts mean nothing to them. They'll honor the part the deal that benefits them while ignoring the ones that don't. Intellectual property, copyright, etc. don't matter to them - no matter how many lines of the TPP reference copyright, they'll pirate and steal everything the U.S. creates without breaking a sweat. I can go on for paragraphs about currency manipulation, worker rights, environment laws, etc. The point is, we're basically playing poker with a partner that cheats at every hand. It's fool's errand.
This is why Trump succeeds with Joe Sixpack. Normal people don't understand the nuances of free agreements - but they know the factory down the street closed shortly after NAFTA was signed and the job's aren't coming back.
Any person who reads /. should automatically be opposed to the TPP.
The EFF tells you why, if you even remotely care about stuff for nerds or your rights online, you should work your heart out to get this turd rejected.
The group in question is a LOBBY group, not a "Tech group". This same group lobbies for increases in H1B, lower taxes for themselves, lower protection for workers, reduced regulations at the expense of those same workers, etc.. etc.. etc..
Call it what it is.
When a big part of their mantra is "protecting foreign profits" you know it's all about globalization.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
"The TPP recognizes the Internet as an essential American export" Then why do European politicians support this deal?
The TTP levels the play-field by removing the protective barriers of economies, favoring the biggest of the biggest companies and their expansion. The long-term effect and intended outcome of the TTP and the TTIP is to let America capitalize further on the comparative size of its economies and corporations, and create a global economy entirely dominated by American interests.
Asia and Europe must reject these agreements, or they will lose control over their own economies in time.
What "Investor-State Dispute Settlements" really does is hoodwink the world into having corporations have veto over the ability of nations to set policy which corporations don't like.
The only beneficiaries of this are corporations, and the people who are pushing these bullshit things are people are owners of large corporations, or have been bought and paid for by large corporations.
It's completely in-democratic, and intended to make the worst practices of globalization entrenched in law ... and everybody except "shareholder value" will get fucked in the process.
That Americas foreign policy is now so blatantly corrupted and tied to the wishes of multinational corporations is alarming, and this treaty should be rejected on the basis that it is NOTHING but the US forcing a corporate agenda on the world and acting like it's going to benefit anybody else.
This is literally theft on a global scale, and a massive undermining of national sovereignty purely to advance corporate interests, to which America is so utterly beholden they've become little more than corporate lackeys. And many aspects of this stupid "treaty" are little more than ensuring nation-states are responsible for policing the interests of those corporations.
This treaty is utterly terrible, and will NOT in ANY WAY benefit the citizens of any country ... except of course those who own stocks in, or have been bribed by, the multinational corporations it benefits. The rest of us get royally screwed in the process.
This will undermine labor laws, environmental laws, and pretty much any form of regulation under the insane premise that we must protect corporate profits at all fucking costs.
There is no upside to this if you're not a multinational corporation. Which is precisely why it is getting the backing of multi-billion dollar multinational corporations.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You are aware that most bills passing through Congress are written by lobbyists right? There are 14,000 lobbyists in DC! That's how fucked up this country has become.
i.e., when we didn't know what was in it.
In the 1850s and 1860s there were a class of people who lived large on plantations in the Southeastern quarter of the US who argued that their economies would fail without the use of poor unskilled illiterate non-white laborers working for free. This was not true, of course, it was however true that if they had to pay wages to average American workers of that day these wealthy plantation owners would have had to live much more modestly. These plantation owners were nearly all Democrats with a limited number who were independents, and they were outraged by the moralizers of the what became the Republican party who had the audacity to suggest that there was something wrong with all of this.
In 2016 there are a class of people who live large in mansions in NY and CA etc who argue that their economies will fail without the use of a combination of imported poor unskilled, often illiterate, non-white laborers working for appalling wages, and imported skilled laborers who are tethered to restricted visas and wiling to work for sub-par wages. These modern plantation owners organized under names like Apple, Google, Facebook, etc are nearly all Democrats or Independents and they tend to be outraged by moralizing Republicans with their backward notions of "right" and "wrong", "legal" and "illegal". Some of these These companies abuse people on a global scale, and have become so powerful and wealthy they want to be freed from the laws of nations. TPP is their way to permanently destroy any limits to their access to cheap 2nd and 3rd world labor, and create a super-national scheme to overcome the laws of any nation where they operate, all so their executives and rich investors (few middle- or lower-class people own any of their stock) can afford bigger mansions and better jets.
It's always a fallacy that these cheap foreign workers are needed, as president Eisenhower proved when this same argument was used in the 1950s and he nonetheless deported millions of illegal aliens while not allowing big business to import cheap workers to replace the American middle class - the American middle class did very well and businesses did well too.
This is NOT about economic survival - these are the planet's most-profitable companies and if they cannot pay reasonable wages and use legal labor then nobody else can be expected to.
>An industry group representing major tech firms including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, Uber and eBay has endorsed the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership
That makes me even more certain that it must be bad for the little guy.
I encourage people to listen to what he says, and not just the indignant responses to his campaign rhetoric because it's interesting to hear an 'emperor wears no clothes' candidate as Trump occasionally is. Some of the things Trump says are plain lies, racist, and vulgar—reasons to reject supporting his campaign. But sometimes he tells the truth and gets booed for it (like when he pointed out the Iraq war was based on lies) or describes long-extant US mainstream foreign policy in clear language yet gets unfair flack for it from those who consider themselves a part of the US left (like the call-in to Fox News advocating a war crime). The real horror of his candidacy isn't Trump per se it's that so much of what he says is a plainly-worded description of what's going on and what has been going on for years before Trump's campaign began.
Consider Trump's call-in to which John Oliver provided a remarkably one-sided indignant reaction: On his 2016-02-28 show, John Oliver played a clip of Trump's call-in to Fox News saying "...the other thing with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. They say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families." and Oliver replied "That is the front runner for the Republican nomination advocating a war crime." which is a true but incomplete and certainly nowhere near as damning as Oliver wants it to be.
Oliver never told his viewers that is also extant US foreign policy wherein President Obama hand-picks whom to assassinate with drones every Tuesday (the so-called "Terror Tuesday" meetings) and that these attacks have extrajudicially killed innocent family members of alleged (never arrested, charged, or tried) so-called "terrorists". Some killed on-purpose (like 16-year-old U.S. citizen Abdulrahman, son of U.S. citizen Anwar al Awlaki who was killed in a separate attack 2 weeks prior), some killed without the U.S. knowing who they are killing as the CIA apparently does with some regularity. This is what Noam Chomsky recently rightly described as "massive global terrorism": drone attacks firing missiles that destroy whatever the missile hits as well as a large area around the target, resulting in indiscriminate extrajudicial murder of innocent passers-by. When Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary and senior adviser to Obama's reelection campaign commented on Abdulrahman's murder shortly after it happened Gibbs said "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children." a line on a par with Trump-level tact and recognition of responsibility.
Or when former NSA and CIA director, General Michael Hayden told Bill Maher "the American armed forces would refuse to act [on Trump's orders on torture and extrajudicial killings]" and Trump says "They won't refuse. They're not going to refuse me, believe me." Trump is right—they won't refuse. The proof has been staring the world in the face for years as Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Democracy Now! on 2016-03-29:
Digital Citizen
True although you should oppose the TPP. But how many /. readers do you think will keep your words in mind when Disney releases the next Star Wars movie? I think the likely power-for-power's-sake coveting readership of most tech sites (virtually all corporate news repeaters) will very likely fund known adversaries on copyright and foreign worker law on the basis of "ooh, shiny!" rationalization. And that shows you how foolish they are: prioritizing entertainment over things they need to live (which you've rightly listed).
Digital Citizen
The whole TPP process has been some of the slimy est, underhanded back-roomed corruption in recent political history. It brings to mind the old disco era tune "Do The Hustle" the president should hang his head in shame and resign for maleficence in office. So much for the claims of transparency, he promised us change, just didn't say it would be for the worse.