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."

Comments

I wish...

[TimMD909]

Everything I've heard about TPP sounds so shitty that I propose it be renamed to the Toilet Paper Project.*

* All rights reserved.

Soon to lose those firms as members...

[Anonymous Coward]

TPP drops safe harbor protection from the DMCA. This alone should concern Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter.

US presidential campaign and TPP

[blind biker]

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.

Re: US presidential campaign and TPP

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't trust anything Trump says on the campaign trail. If elected, he will do whatever makes he and his class the most money. Not a single politician in the race give a rat's rear end about the commoners.

Re:US presidential campaign and TPP

[Grishnakh]

Yep, that's one big reason I'm planning to vote for Trump if it comes down to him versus Hillary. She's the most obviously corrupt Presidential candidate I've ever seen in my lifetime. I'd rather vote for Bernie, but the DNC has been railroading him from the beginning. If we have to have a Hitler-esque buffoon as President to avoid the disaster that is the TPP, then so be it. And BTW, I live in a swing state, so my vote actually counts. The Democrats have brought this on themselves.

Re:US presidential campaign and TPP

[Tailhook]

Trump has consistently opposed not only TPP but threatened existing trade deals as well, to the point that China has published "warnings" to the US about Trump. Cruz held the typical Republican position on "trade" until recently, and has since even cast votes against the "fast track" rubber stamp authority Congress wanted to give Obama, but it still looks like an election year position. Kasich is your typical US Chamber of Commerce Republican; endless cheap labor and frictionless imports forever. Hillary is bought and paid for by the TPP lobby; she's a Walmart exec for Christ sake. Bernie has a clue; he's been fighting against all this trade crap since forever, opposing Most Favored Nation status for China, NAFTA (both circa Clinton I), etc. I don't see Bernie expound on this nearly enough however. If he'd shout it from the rooftops like Trump does he'd be doing far better in the primaries.

Re:US presidential campaign and TPP

[Anonymous Coward]

If we have to have a Hitler-esque buffoon as President to avoid the disaster that is the TPP, then so be it.

Aren't you a bit worried about your own reasoning here?

"At least I'm not worse than Hitler." should be a line from a Mel Brooks film, not a line used to win an election.

Re:US presidential campaign and TPP

[Grishnakh]

Aren't you a bit worried about your own reasoning here?

Not at all.

"At least I'm not worse than Hitler." should be a line from a Mel Brooks film, not a line used to win an election.

You would think. But you have to look at the choices: Trump or Hillary (as I stated before, with my assumption that the election would come down to those two). So you have someone who's obviously bad (Trump), but being horrible is not a disqualifier in a system where there's only one other choice, and she's even more horrible.

Trump has some major positive traits, from what I can tell:
1) He seems to be very anti-TPP.
2) He seems to be against H1B visa abuse (though he seems to waffle on this like some issues)
3) He seems to be very much against pointless interventionist wars which help out Sunni Islamists.

Now compare this with Hillary: She's very pro-TPP (unless she's trying to woo Bernie voters), she's all in favor of raising H1B limits, and she's a total war hawk and is involved in weapons deals to Islamists, and will undoubtedly get us involved in yet another war in the middle east which has the effect of boosting ISIS or some similar groups.

Now throw in the fact that Hillary is blatantly sold out to Goldman Sachs and the private prison industry.

Given these two choices, I fail to see how Trump isn't the better alternative, by far. If you consider yourself a "progressive" at all, Trump is the only sane choice here.

Maybe we'll get lucky and the DNC will wake up and get their superdelegates to vote for Bernie, or the FBI will prosecute Hillary for the email scandal leaving Bernie as the default, but I'm not holding by breath. AFAICT, the DNC has completely sold out to the warmongers, private prisons, and Wall Street, so in this insane environment, Trump actually makes sense. If he does turn out to be a disaster, the Democrats have only themselves to blame for this mess.

Re: US presidential campaign and TPP

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a single politician in the race give a rat's rear end about the commoners.

Behold foolish mortal, and gaze in wonder at Bernie Sanders.

this bill can make importing foreign labor easier

[Joe_Dragon]

this bill can make importing foreign labor easier and let them use Investor-State Dispute Settlements to by pass labor laws.

Corporate Sovereignty

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:It doesn't support the "Internet economy"

[houghi]

It supports "Internet economy" for "Internet companies". Or did you think they were talking about you?

They all have one thing in common

[Kohath]

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.

Re:They all have one thing in common

[Kohath]

... As a result, our population has expanded; conversely, if we undid that change, our population would be millions beyond sustainable ... millions of Americans would need to simply die off to stabilize our system. ...

This nonsense is beyond ridiculous.

Trade is known to have a lot of positive effects: it increases standards of living in almost all cases. But lack of those positive effects is not a death sentence in a rich country. Stop making up nonsense counterfactual stories to scare people -- a.k.a. FUD.

Re:They all have one thing in common

[fnj]

I know globalization and free trade are economic positives

Everyone whose soul is not sold out stopped reading right there. You could have saved yourself a lot of hot air.

Re:They all have one thing in common

[fluffernutter]

Oh there is no doubt it will change the balance of things. There is a lot wrong with your math. If us buying 2/3 less pants equals a 2/3 cut in employment down the board then that makes the pants cheaper in logistics on the American side and the only cost increase is the person who spent a couple hours making the pants in the first place. So this right away means that things will balance out at some point quite a bit higher then your doomsday forecast of 2/3 of the people selling those pants losing their jobs. If people bought 2/3 less pants, there will still be stores, we will still need transport, there will still be competition. The sky will not fall, people will just be paying more for pants.

No, the pants don't magically last longer. America is a very wasteful society, millions of people throw out pants because they are last years style and NOT because they developed a hole in the knee. Don't underestimate America's capacity to make things last longer, because if America has any untapped potential it is in being less wasteful.

Moochers

[UdoKeir]

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?

Re:this bill can make importing foreign labor easi

[gstoddart]

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.

Trump's belligerancy is quite mainstream.

[jbn-o]

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:

The idea that the U.S. military, in mass, refuses to follow orders if they constitute illegal conduct or war crimes is negated by the entire history of this country, including very recently. You do have isolated members of the armed forces who periodically refuse on grounds of conscience or legal and moral duty. They denounce certain tactics. They resign from the military. They