Slashdot Mirror
President Obama Gives Up On The Trans-Pacific Partnership (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes The Guardian:
White House officials conceded on Friday that the president's hard-fought-for Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal would not pass Congress, as lawmakers there prepared for the anti-global trade policies of President-elect Donald Trump. Earlier this week, congressional leaders in both parties said they would not bring the trade deal forward during a lame-duck session of Congress, before the formal transition of power on January 20.
One Canadian law professor had argued the case against the TPP included its unbalanced intellectual property rules and risks to privacy, while the EFF believed it locked in the worst parts of U.S. copyright law and also exported them to other countries.
One Canadian law professor had argued the case against the TPP included its unbalanced intellectual property rules and risks to privacy, while the EFF believed it locked in the worst parts of U.S. copyright law and also exported them to other countries.
The most contentious passages also had to do with corporate super-sovereignty. It made corporations more powerful than sovereign nations and gave them the right to sue governments when national laws impacted business.
Good riddance.
I would love to live in a world where journalists and news media would report facts, not their clever spin. Trump is NOT anti-trade. He is anti UNFAIR trade. It is deplorable that people in many countries essentially slave, in bad and dangerous environs, for pennies. But allowing their cheap often copy "goods" to undersell US made goods has only helped, in the short-term: consumers. But some of the consumers are also producers, so when they lose their jobs due to the cheap imports, they have less (or no) money to spend. Slowly but surely you devolve into a "society" of ultra-wealthy importers, and a growing poorer and poorer working class. To fix this a thing called "tariff" was invented. But politicians found trade agreements, which means reducing or eliminating tariffs, to be an effective power play tool in dealing with other countries. Like so many things, it got so bad with TPP that the public, and Congress, could not ignore it. Trump has seen this happening, and has talked about it, but the liberal media likes to harp on other things. I'm just sad that so many "sheeple" can't see more clearly the big picture. I hate to pick on Walmart, but their growth, and the proliferation of "dollar" stores, and the shrinking of higher-end retailers, are a strong but sad, barometer of our sad economy.
While I didn't vote for Trump nor support his campaign, he's in the black right now as far as I'm concerned:
-TPP is dead
-He finished off the remnants of the Bush crime family by humiliating and crushing Jeb! in the primaries. ("Iraq was a disaster," "9/11 happened on his brother's watch" -- pretty amazing he said this in a GOP primary right in their backyard.) Watch the various YouTube videos and Trump sounds like every leftist I knew circa 2006 waiting for the Democratic Party to say as much. Had that corpse of a candidate John Kerry been as animated in 2004, history might have turned out very differently.
-In an act of bipartisanship, Trump also finished off the remnants of the Clinton crime family by humiliating Hillary and her sycophants with the greatest upset of the modern political era.
That being said, his administration can easily go into the red in a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." But until then, this stuff is more exciting and amusing than Game of Thrones. The more assholes he throws under the bus in his pursuit of petty vengeance and self-aggrandizement, the better.
"Free" trade only works when both trading partners are on equal status. Tariffs were established to balance the equity. The reality is, labor jobs have been shifted to countries with no environmental laws, no labor laws, no intellectual property laws, and government paid health care. When rational people say, "um, wait a minute, that's not fair to American workers", some oligarchy puppet screams "you're against globalism, fair trade, against jobs and a racist!".
Sorry, that's all b.s.. The TPP is a payoff to the rich for their support of Government elected minions. The only way to fix this is get money out of politics.
I actually read the chapter summaries of the entire treaty, and it most definitely IS about trade. And it is ALSO about intellectual property. AND it is about environmental protection. AND it is about workers' rights. AND it is about currency manipulation. Oh, and by the way it's about cutting China off at the knees, which is a big deal for the Obama administration. Obama's much keener on using economics to shape geopolitics than most people realize, which is why he has been furtively supportive of the Dakota Access Pipeline despite it's wild unpopularity with his base: it'll be like pouring gasoline on the Russian economic fire.
This is how the world actually works: major changes require a coalition of interests. In an international agreement, it's actually multiple coalitions, one for each country, plus mulitnational entities like corporations. Every interest in each coalition has its own goals, and when they're done hammering out a consensus it HAS to be about about a lot of things.
It's only through the lens of retail politics that something this big becomes about just one thing.
The thing is, this sucker is monster huge. It will transform all the member countries in ways that will be nearly impossible to undo without inviting chaos.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Correction: He's smart enough to repeal the worst parts of Obamacare, that's what he also said at the beginning too. Though the entire thing should be tossed out, and re-written to be be sensible. If you guys in the US were smart about the whole "mandated healthcare" bit you would have modeled it after our legislation in Canada. And when they tried passing the existing legislation you would have been protesting in the streets. The federal legislation basically boils down to: Feds have oversight, they toss the provinces money. Each province is responsible for care, costs, where things get built, payment and so on. Minimum levels of care are ensured by an independent 3rd party, feds can only step in if the 3rd party says it's inadequate and feds can only take over at the provincial level until the minimum care level is adequate then it's turned back over to the province.
Om, nomnomnom...
That's a strange remark and it shows up now and then. Usually it implies that if Hitler had not tried to exterminate the Jews , people would not be able to come up with an argument against Hitler.
Remember when the TPP was 'the gold standard' of trade agreements and HRC was 'so proud of all her hard work on it' until Bernie Sanders came out against it, then she suddenly had no idea what TPP was? This administration has a really bad habit of satisfying itself with 'any agreement' instead of holding out for 'good agreements'...
>> So why did democrats want it, and republicans not want it?
> Mostly, that is not true. Most congressional Republicans support trade agreements, and most congressional Democrats oppose them.
"It", the Trans-Pacific Partnership, isn't "them", most trade agreements. TPP is a secret deal written by the RIAA and MPAA (who coincidentally gave tons of money to the politicians proposing the agreement).
Yes, in general Republicans support the idea that if a guy in Canada wants to buy a widget from me, and I want to buy a foo from someone in the UK, that's great unless there's some specific reason to prevent or discourage it. TPP isn't that principle, it's a specific treaty with specific (bad) legal requirements for US citizens.
Back when the first full text got leaked, I read through the entire damned thing, and while there were plenty of sections that were not fucking wretched, there was not a single one that began to make up for the many sections that were fucking wretched.
They're tired of elites, so they elect a guy who flies around in a literal gold-plated private jet plane. They're tired of getting screwed, so they elect a professional conman. And they're tired of the wealthy getting everything, so they protest and condemn as socialism every attempt to equalize incomes or provide basic services, such as Obamacare, to the less wealthy.
You ever wonder if maybe there's a reason nobody much cares what these jackasses want?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
At times like this, I'd like to remember Google for having sold us out on the TPP:
https://blog.google/topics/pub...
Thanks for nothing, sellouts.