Some Real Costs of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Nearly Half a Million Jobs Lost in the US Alone

[D Kline]

link

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016...half-a-million-jobs-lost-in-the-us-alone.html


Some Real Costs of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Nearly Half a Million Jobs Lost in the US Alone
Posted on March 1, 2016 by Yves Smith
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, an Assistant Secretary General working on Economic Development in the United Nations system during 2005-15, and was awarded the 2007 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Originally published as a Global Development and Environment Institute Policy Brief

The Trans-Pacifc Partnership (TPP) Agreement, recently agreed to by twelve Pacifc Rim countries led by the United States,1 promises to ease many restrictions on cross-border transactions and harmonize regulations. Proponents of the agreement have claimed significant economic benefits, citing modest overall net GDP gains, ranging from half of one percent in the United States to 13 percent in Vietnam after fifteen years. Their claims, however, rely on many unjustified assumptions, including full employment in every country and no resulting impacts on working people’s incomes, with more than 90 percent of overall growth gains due to ‘non-trade measures’ with varying impacts.

A recent GDAE Working Paper finds that with more realistic methodological assumptions, critics of the TPP indeed have reason to be concerned. Using the trade projections for the most optimistic growth forecasts, we find that the TPP is more likely to lead to net employment losses in many countries (771,000 jobs lost overall, with 448,000 in the United States alone) and higher inequality in all country groupings. Declining worker purchasing power would weaken aggregate demand, slowing economic growth. The United States (-0.5 percent) and Japan (-0.1 percent) are projected to suffer small net income losses, not gains, from the TPP.

This GDAE Policy Brief is intended to help clarify the differences with other modeling studies and to present our findings in a less technical manner.

Flaws in TPP Economic Projections

Optimistic claims about the TPP’s economic impacts are largely based on economic modeling projections published by the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.2 Its researchers used a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to project net GDP gains for all countries involved. These figures have been widely cited in many countries to justify TPP approval and ratification. Updated estimates, released in early 2016 and incorporated into the World Bank’s latest report on the global economy,3 now stress income gains for the United States of $131 billion, or 0.5 percent of GDP, and a 9.1 percent increase in exports by 2030.4

The projections methodology assumes away critical economic problems and boosts economic growth estimates with unfounded assumptions. The assumption of full employment is particularly problematic. Workers will inevitably be displaced due to the TPP, but CGE modelers assume that all dismissed workers will be promptly rehired elsewhere in the national economy as if part of labor ‘churning’. The full-employment assumption thus inflates projected GDP gains by assuming away job losses and adjustment costs.

The modelers also dismiss increases in inequality by assuming no changes to wage and profit shares of national income. Again, this is not supported by empirical evidence, as past trade agreements have tended to reduce labor’s share.

Finally, foreign direct investment (FDI) is assumed to increase dramatically, which contributes a significant boost to economic growth in the Peterson Institute projections, accounting for more than 25 percent of projected U.S. economic gains in the recent update. This assumes that: 1) income to capital owners will be invested; and 2) this will result in broad-based growth. Neither is supported by the evidence. A U.S. Department of Agriculture study,5 which did not assume such FDI-related investment gains, found zero growth for the United States and very modest growth elsewhere at best.

The methodology of the Peterson study is flawed; consequently, growth and income gains are overstated, and the costs to working people, consumers and governments are understated, ignored or even presented as benefits. Job losses and declining or stagnant labor incomes are excluded from consideration, even though they lower economic growth by reducing aggregate demand.

Some economists have pointed out6 additional misleading findings in the most recent Peterson Institute update:

• U.S. income gains of 0.5 percent from TPP in 2030 – This is raised from the institute’s previous 0.4 percent, mainly by extending the implementation period from ten to fifteen years. In any case, added growth of 0.5 percent is very small, about 0.03 percent per year over fifteen years.

• Exports rise by 9.1 percent, but so do imports, because the model assumes fixed trade balances. This excludes, by assumption, the problems associated with rising trade deficits, which have been common after previous trade agreements.

• All displaced workers are absorbed immediately and costlessly in other sectors – again, by assumption. The paper does acknowledge that manufacturing employment will increase more slowly because of the TPP, and that some 53,700 more U.S. jobs per year will be “displaced” annually. But they view this as a small addition to normal labor market “churn.”

More Realistic Economic Projections

We employed the UN Global Policy Model (GPM) to generate more realistic projections of likely TPP impacts. Unlike most CGE models, the GPM incorporates more realistic assumptions about economic adjustment and income distribution, assessing the TPP impact on each of them as well as on economic growth over a ten-year period. Importantly, it does not assume large unexplained FDI surges or investment, growth and income gains due to nontrade measures. The modeling results are summarized in the table.

To facilitate comparison, we used the Peterson Institute’s projected estimates of the TPP’s impact on exports, applying the macroeconomic model to assess the efects of projected TPP trade increases.7 The GPM analyzes macroeconomic sectors – primary commodities, energy, manufacturing and services – but does not contain data on single markets (such as car parts or poultry).

The main fndings include:

• The TPP will generate net GDP losses in the USA and Japan. Ten years after the treaty comes into force, US GDP is projected to be 0.54 percent lower than it would be without the TPP. Similarly, the TPP is projected to reduce Japan’s growth by 0.12 percent.

• For other TPP countries, economic gains will be negligible – less than one percent over ten years for developed countries, and less than three percent over the decade for developing countries. Chile and Peru’s combined gain of 2.84 percent comes to only about a quarter of one percent per year.

• The TPP is projected to lead to employment losses overall, with a total of 771,000 jobs lost. The United States will be hardest hit, losing 448,000 jobs.

• The TPP will also likely lead to higher inequality due to declining labor shares of national incomes. In the United States, labor shares are projected to fall by 1.31 percent over ten years, continuing an ongoing multi-decade downward trend.

Conclusions

In sum, the TPP will increase pressures on labor incomes, weakening domestic demand in all participating countries, in turn leading to lower employment and higher inequality. Even though countries with lower labor costs may gain greater market shares and small GDP increases, employment is still likely to fall and inequality to increase.

In fact, most goods trade among TPP countries has already been liberalized by earlier agreements. Instead of promoting growth and employment, the TPP is mainly about imposing new rules favored by large multinational corporations. The TPP greatly strengthens investor and intellectual property rights (IPRs), while weakening national regulation, e.g. over financial services.

The TPP will strengthen IPRs for big pharmaceutical, information technology, media, and other firms, e.g. by allowing pharmaceutical companies longer monopolies on patented medicines, keeping cheaper generics of the market, and blocking the development and availability of similar new medicines.

The TPP would also strengthen foreign investor rights at the expense of local businesses and the public interest. The TPP’s investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system will oblige governments to compensate foreign investors for losses of expected profits in binding private arbitration.

These pro-investor measures impose significant costs, especially on developing countries. They will exert a chilling efect on important government responsibilities to promote national development and protect the public interest.

Our modeling suggests that TPP skeptics, concerned about the agreement’s impacts on growth, labor incomes, employment and inequality, have good reason to doubt optimistic projections. Our results show negative impacts in all these areas, particularly in the United States. Legislatures in TPP countries should carefully consider these findings and their implications before approving the agreement.

Endnotes

1 The participating countries – Canada, United States, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Australia and New Zealand – have finalized and signed the text of the agreement, but the treaty must be ratified in all of them before it can come into force.

2 Peter Petri, Michael Plummer and Fan Zhai (2012). “The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Asia-Pacific Integration: A Quantitative Assessment”. Policy Analyses in International Economics 98, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, DC. The Peterson Institute study has also been criticized by others, e.g. http://www.sustainabilitynz.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/EconomicGainsandCostsfromtheTPP_2014.pdf.

3 See Global Economic Prospects, Spillovers Amid Weak Recovery, January 2016, The World Bank Group, Washington, DC.

4 Peter Petri and Michael Plummer, “The Economic Efects of the Trans-Pacifc Partnership: New Estimates”, January 2016, Working Paper 16-2, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, DC.

5 See http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/1692509/err176.pdf

6 See, for example, Dean Baker, “Peterson Institute Study Shows TPP Will Lead to $357 Billion Increase in Annual Imports”, January 26, 2016.

7 A robust debate over such modeling followed the release of the GDAE paper, with a critique from Robert Lawrence for the Peterson Institute (“Studies of TPP: Which is Credible

 

[thoughtone]

What difference does it make. Nobody is coming out to vote against it.

 

[SPECTRE1]

What we need to do is lock down companies and their production to a country like workers are now. Than sign a deal allowing workers to move freely to different countries. If you are stuck in a shithole country like me, you can leave without hassle. Once all your best workers moves to a high wage/strong social safety country, the only way to attract workers to your country is increasing wages.

We see this with oil companies, who are forced to raise wages to get workers to leave their home area. They can't move the oil field to a low wage area.

 

[muckraker10021]

TPP Is Not A Trade Agreement

Paul Craig Roberts is the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Reagan.Roberts is a former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, the Scripps Howard News Service, and a columnist for Investor’s Business Daily. Dr. Roberts is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/

The sole purpose of TTP is to give global corporations immunity to the laws of the countries in which they do business. Indeed, TPP allows a private corporation to repeal soverign laws of sovereign countries, which no longer would be sovereign. All a corporation has to do is to sue the country for “restraint of trade” if the corporations’ profits are harmed by the country’s laws. For example, Monsanto could sue France and force the French government to repeal its laws against GMOs.

As Mike Masnick writes, we were promised a debate about TPP, but did not get one. The corporations have greased all the palms with big bucks. Every government that signs on to TPP flushes its sovereignty down the toilet. Corporations are transformed into Global Emperors against whom mere citizens have no recourse.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...-debate-we-were-promised-before-signing.shtml

The first thing to understand is that these so-called “partnerships” are not laws written by Congress. The US Constitution gives Congress the authority to legislate, but these laws are being written without the participation of Congress. The laws are being written by corporations solely in the interest of their power and profit. The office of US Trade Representative was created in order to permit corporations to write law that serves only their interests. This fraud on the Constitution and the people is covered up by calling trade laws “treaties.”

Indeed, Congress is not even permitted to know what is in the laws and is limited to the ability to accept or refuse what is handed to Congress for a vote. Normally, Congress accepts, because “so much work has been done” and “free trade will benefit us all.”

The presstitutes have diverted attention from the content of the laws to “fast track.” When Congress votes “fast track,” it means Congress accepts that corporations can write the trade laws without the participation of Congress. Even criticisms of the “partnerships” are a smoke screen. Countries accused of slave labor could be excluded but won’t be. Super patriots complain that US sovereignty is violated by “foreign interests,” but US sovereignty is violated by US corporations. Others claim yet more US jobs will be offshored. In actual fact, the “partnerships” are unnecessary to advance the loss of American jobs as there is nothing that inhibits jobs offshoring now.

What the “partnerships” do is to make private corporations immune to the laws of sovereign countries on the grounds that laws of countries adversely impact corporate profits and constitute “restraint of trade.”

For example, under the Transatlantic Partnership, French laws against GMOs would be overturned as “restraints on trade” by law suits filed by Monsanto.

Countries that require testing of imported food, such as pork for trichnosis, and fumigation would be subject to lawsuits from corporations, because these regulations increase the cost of imports.

Countries that do not provide monopoly protection for brand name pharmaceuticals and chemical products, and allow generics in their place, can be sued for damages by corporations.

Obama himself has no input into the process. Here is what is going on: The Trade Representative is a corporate stooge. He serves the private corporations and will go on to a million dollar annual salary. The corporations have bribed the political leaders in every country to sign away their sovereignty and the general welfare of their people to private corporations. Corporations have paid US senators large sums for transferring Congress’ law-making powers to corporations. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/may/27/corporations-paid-us-senators-fast-track-tpp
When these “partnerships” pass, no country that signed will have any legislative authority to legislate or enforce any law that any corporation regards as inimical to its bottom line.

Yes, the great promiser of change is bringing change. He is turning Asia, Europe, and the US over to rule by the corporations.

Only those who have sold their integrity for money sign these agreements. Apparently Merkel, a Washington vassal, is one of them. http://sputniknews.com/politics/20150530/1022740004.html

According to news reports, both of France’s main political parties have sold out to the corporations.

It is vital that the American public also know, but not even Congress is permitted to know.

How does it work, this “freedom and democracy” that we Americans allegedly have, when neither the people nor their elected representatives are permitted to participate in the making of laws that enable private corporations to negate the law-making functions of governments and place corporate profit above the general welfare?


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

• 
  If passed, the TPP would:
  • make it easier for big corporations to ship our jobs overseas, pushing down our wages and increasing income inequality,

• flood our country with unsafe imported food,

• jack up the cost of medicines by giving big pharmaceutical corporations new monopoly rights to keep lower cost generic drugs off the market,

• empower corporations to attack our environmental and health safeguards,

• ban Buy American policies needed to create green jobs,

• roll back Wall Street reforms,

• sneak in SOPA-like threats to Internet freedom,

• • and undermine human rights.

 

[SPECTRE1]

Trade will be a big issue this election, so understanding what is going on is important. Some politicians are promising to make smarter deals or agreeing to join trade pacts like the TPP.

Why do companies like Apple move their production to China and other low wage countries? Well I had mentioned that oil companies find this natural resource in remote areas where supply of labor is not sufficient. They have to raise wages to attract workers. Oil is fixed at that location.

Companies like Apple also discover their oil such as an idea like an Ipad or Iphone; however, it can be extracted virtually anywhere. They can setup shop where the supply of labor is sufficient to extract this resource. They don't have to pay a premium to get workers.

What would happen if we created barriers that would force their production in the U.S.? Well China would use its manufacturing prowess to replicate a product similar to Apple.

Their economies of scale, bountiful and cheap labor, and access to technology would allow them to bring this phone to the U.S. at a much cheaper cost. Apple would be forced out of business. It is comparable to integrating black baseball players rather than dealing with an alternative negro league with a more exciting game. Yes I am giving big contracts to black players that would have gone to whites but I am not being forced out of business. I can maintain ownership and control over this product which is utmost importance.

The same thing is happening to China, it is better to lose those jobs and maintain ownership rather than being forced out. We have seen this with Solyndra forced out of business by cheap imports from China. Saudi Arabia cheap oil drives shale producers out of business. Profit and reducing labor cost is one reason but I think the main reason is maintaining ownership at all costs, preventing a Chinese company from dominating the market domestically.

 

[muckraker10021]

Read the articles below.
The corporate television media of mass deception & distraction (CNN, NBC/MSNBC, CBS/VIACOM, ABC, FOX FAKE) — (90% of the American sheeple rely on corporate television as their ONLY source of “news”??) — have all — following their owners (major shareholders) orders — refused to allow the basic irrefutable facts about the TPP and TiSA to enter the consciousness of their somnolent American sheeple viewers.
This action is deliberate.
The multi-billion dollar media conglomerates Viacom/CBS, Comcast, Disney, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner are run by Six White Male CEO's who all support the TPP and control 90% of the corporate-media-of-mass-deception & distraction. They continue to propagandize the mostly willfully ignorant American sheeple with 24/7 PSYOPs presented to them as "NEWS". The "NEWS" can be Totally 100% Lies and such propagandizing lying is totally legal. What the media-of-deception & distraction excels at is propaganda via omission. If you just announce a sensational "headline" without factual context, then you are deliberately lying to the public.
This TPP is NOT a trade deal, but that trade word, "free trade" is the expression incessantly bandied about in the rare instance the TPP is ever discussed on the corporate television media of mass deception & distraction.​

Obama pushing for TPP:
Misinformation and big lies his strategy

by Stephen Lendman | August 17, 2016 | http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/18860


US trade deals are jobs-killing weapons of mass destruction. They destroy fundamental freedoms. They ignore eco-sanity.

They’re abominations vital to end. America needs fair, not Orwellian free trade. Preventing TPP’s enactment into US law is crucial for all working-age Americans and their families.

Obama intends going on the offensive publicly to get Congress on board for its passage. Last October, he touted it in his weekly radio address—featuring a litany of Big Lies, one of many examples of how he consistently betrayed the public trust throughout his tenure.

He claimed (then and now) TPP is “the best possible deal for American workers.”

Fact: It’s an abominable jobs, wages and benefits destroyer. Obama, of course, knows it but lied claiming the opposite of what’s true.

Obama: TPP lets “American businesses . . . sell more of their products [abroad so] they can expand and support good jobs here at home.”

Fact: “American business” want TPP enacted to offshore more jobs than already, accelerating the nation’s race to the bottom.

Obama: “Outdated trade rules put our workers at a disadvantage. And TPP will change that.”

Fact: TPP is anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-vital freedoms too important to lose.

Obama: TPP will hold “partner countries to higher standards and rais[e] wages across a region that makes up nearly 40% of the global economy.”

Fact: TPP lowers the fairness and equity bar in all signatory countries, notably America if it’s enacted into law here.

Obama: TPP “means to level the playing field for American workers and businesses [under] rules [that] are fair . . .”

Fact: TPP prioritizes corporate profits at the expense of worker rights and fundamental freedoms.

Obama claims TPP will undo sins of past trade deals. It’ll exacerbate them on steroids. “It includes the strongest labor rights in history,” he said. FALSE!!

“It includes the strongest environmental standards in history.” FALSE!!

“Without this agreement, competitors that don’t share our values, like China, will write the rules of the global economy.” FALSE!!

He shamelessly blamed China and other low-wage countries for the sins of corporate America offshoring millions of US jobs abroad.

TPP will greatly accelerate the process—transforming America into a nation of maids, waitresses, bellhops, fast-food workers, janitors, bus and cab drivers, along with other poverty wage service jobs for most workers able to have any employment.

Obama intends taking his destructive TPP-touting message on the road to various US cities. He’ll deceitfully lie about the most destructive deal in history if it becomes US law—economic and financial warfare against the rights, welfare and futures of working-age Americans and their families, already suffering under neoliberal harshness he and his successor will maintain with or without TPP.

At an August 2, East Room White House press conference, Obama shamelessly said “I’m president and I’m for it [TPP].” He intends formally submitting legislation to Congress later this year.

It faces stiff opposition, hopefully enough to kill it. Progressive groups like Global Trade Watch lead the fight against it.

GTW highlights its enormous danger, saying enacting TPP “will expand corporate power over our daily lives and our government.”

It’ll “make it easier for corporations to ship jobs overseas.” It’ll “flood US markets with unsafe food.”

It’ll “cause a pay cut for 90% of American workers.” It’ll “undermine critical environmental and climate policies.”

It’ll “raise medicine prices (much more than already) and give expanded powers to Big Pharma corporations.”

It’ll “tie the US closer to known human rights abusers.” TPP is “a partnership between governments and big corporations” against the interests of the vast majority of their citizens.

It’s outrageous unfair trade legislation too destructive to permit.

“#STOP TPP,” GTW stresses!



____________________________________________________

TPP and TiSA… Big Brother and Big Business Together

by Thom Hartmann | August 19, 2016 | http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/68597



President Obama started a fresh push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) on Friday when he sent Congress a draft Statement of Administrative Action.

That action means that after 30 days, the White House will be able to present Congress with legislation on the TPP.

And on Tuesday, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton chose Ken Salazar, who is an aggressively outspoken supporter of the TPP, to lead her White House transition team, despite the fact that Clinton has come out firmly against the TPP.

Salazar's appointment raises serious questions about what we can expect from a Clinton administration, and whether she's sincere in her opposition to the TPP and other so-called "free trade" deals that are still being negotiated.

And it's important to remember why these trade deals are so dangerous to begin with.

Activists from the right and the left have been working hard to raise awareness about the dangers of the TPP and its transatlantic cousin, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

But by far the most sweeping deal that's being negotiated in secret and largely overlooked by activists is the Trade in Services Agreement, also known as TiSA.

TiSA will undermine citizens' privacy and governments' sovereignty, and negotiators are hoping to have a deal finalized by the end of this year.

Paola Casale at EconomyInCrisis writes bluntly about TiSA that, "You may be asking: 'how does this affect me?' The best one sentence response I can come up with is: 'how does this not affect you.'"

Fifty-one countries would be initially governed by TiSA, including the United States, the European Union, and 22 other nations from around the world, representing 70 percent of the world's services' trade.

If it goes into effect, it would cover close to 80 percent of the US economy that falls under the heading of "services."

"Services" is a broad term that covers all sorts of things, such as shipping, air travel, e-commerce, telecommunications, the internet, health care, financial services, engineering and the list goes on and on.

Based on leaked texts and summaries published by the European Union, it's clear that TiSA aims to go even further than the World Trade Organization (WTO) to globalize markets, functionally destroy national borders, and to create new corporate-friendly rules and regulations in sectors like e-commerce and financial services.

TiSA would include a "standstill clause" for financial services, and Switzerland has proposed that the agreement force all signatories to allow "any new financial service" to enter the market, which would virtually guarantee that banks all over the world, freed from sovereign regulation, would adopt the same sort of reckless speculation that destroyed the global economy just eight years ago.

The deal also aims to make it so that banks and e-commerce outlets like Amazon could send an individual's data out of a TiSA country for processing, regardless of national privacy laws, breaking with centuries of precedent on locally kept business records accounting to David Dayen at The New Republic.

Alberto Mucci recently explained in an article on Politico that, "TiSA deals with barriers to services' trade such as the conditions by which lawyers from Norway might be able to practice in the United States or German engineers might gain easier access to Mexico."

In other words, TiSA will have profound impacts on immigration and employment policies in every single country that takes part in the agreement.

More than that, it will cripple our democratic republic by making it even easier for corporations to manage or strike down our public laws.

In recent months under existing trade laws, we've seen Canada and Mexico successfully sue the United States to force us to overturn our "Country Of Origin Labeling" law for meat imports.

And Transcanada is suing the United States right now for $15 billion as retaliation for President Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Dayen also reported last year that under TiSA, "governments may not be able to regulate staff to patient ratios in hospitals, or ban fracking, or tighten safety controls on airlines, or refuse accreditation to [bad] schools and universities. Foreign corporations must receive the same 'national treatment' as domestic ones, and could argue that such regulations violate their ability to provide the service."

Based on leaked documents, we know that democratically passed government regulations would only be allowed so long as they are not "more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of service."

That would likely mean gutting important rules on financial services, foreign investment limits and it could force state-owned public services around the world to compete with foreign corporations.

Almost every single country that's taking part in the TiSA negotiations is already part of the WTO, and the agreement is actually based on the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services, also known as GATS, which includes 159 member countries.

And it's telling that TiSA involves WTO member nations and is based on the WTO, because as Dayen points out, "The only reason to re-write the rules is to replace GATS, which the European Union readily admits." On the European Commission's webpage it says very clearly that "if enough WTO members join, TiSA could be turned into a broader WTO agreement."

In other words, TiSA isn't just another sweeping regional trade agreement like the TPP or the TTIP.

TiSA aims to corporatize markets and functionally destroy borders around the world so that Corporate Big Brother can know everything about everyone, and so that Big Business can sell anything to anyone, no matter the harm it may cause.

Call your lawmakers and tell them that you oppose any trade deal that gives corporations the ability to challenge the sovereignty of governments around the world.

Instead, democratic republics should be able to pass and enforce laws and trade policies that first serve the best interests of its citizens instead of transnational corporations and billionaires.

Just say "no" to TPP, TTIP and especially to TiSA.

 

[muckraker10021]

September 8, 2016

As the Obama administration begins a new push to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership, known as the TPP, more than 200 of the country’s leading economists and legal scholars including his Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe have written a letter urging Congress to reject the 12-nation trade pact. Obama, adhering to the "advice" from his Wall street global turbo-capitalism sponsors has signaled that he will try to get the TPP through congress during the lame duck session after the November 2016 elections.
Watch the video below!!
Have you contacted your congressperson and demanded a NO Vote on this TPP monstrosity??
Why aren't the entire Black Congressional Caucus not screaming at the top of their lungs about this TPP monster???

www.democracynow.org/2016/9/8/leading_economists_oppose_tpp_provision_giving

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>


The Most Brazen Corporate Power
Grab in American History

by Chris Hedges | September 2, 2016 |http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_most_brazen_corporate_power_grab_in_american_history_20151106/
originally published Nov. 6, 2015

Best selling author Chris Hedges, the son of a Presbyterian minister, graduated from Colgate University with a BA in English Literature and went on to receive a Master of Divinity from Harvard. Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He was an early and outspoken critic of the US plan to invade and occupy Iraq and called the press coverage at the time “shameful cheer-leading.” In 2002, he won the Pulitzer Prize. In 2003, shortly after the war in Iraq began, Hedges was reprimanded & condemned by The New York Times for his anti Iraq war position and his opposition to U.S. Imperialism. Hedges resigned shortly thereafter and became a senior fellow at the Nation Institute.​

The release Thursday of the 5,544-page text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade and investment agreement involving 12 countries comprising nearly 40 percent of global output—confirms what even its most apocalyptic critics feared.

“The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”

The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy. The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.

These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup d’état along with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional democratic institutions. The agreements—filled with jargon, convoluted technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse phrasing—can be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.

The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.

The Sierra Club issued a statement after the release of the TPP text saying that the “deal is rife with polluter giveaways that would undermine decades of environmental progress, threaten our climate, and fail to adequately protect wildlife because big polluters helped write the deal.”

If there is no sustained popular uprising to prevent the passage of the TPP in Congress this spring we will be shackled by corporate power.
Wages will decline.
Working conditions will deteriorate.
Unemployment will rise.
Our few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be accelerated.

Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or control.
Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned.
Public services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by for-profit corporations.
Prices for basic commodities, including pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket.
Social assistance programs will be drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault.

Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in compensation from offending governments for impeding their “right” to further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace the common good.

Given the bankruptcy of our political class—including amoral politicians such as Hillary Clinton, who is denouncing the TPP during the presidential campaign but whose unwavering service to corporate capitalism assures her fealty to her corporate backers—the trade agreement has a good chance of becoming law. And because the Obama administration won fast-track authority, a tactic designed by the Nixon administration to subvert democratic debate, President Obama will be able to sign the agreement before it goes to Congress.

The TPP, because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.

There will be a mass mobilization Nov. 14 through 18 in Washington to begin the push to block the TPP. Rising up to stop the TPP is a far, far better investment of our time and energy than engaging in the empty political theater that passes for a presidential campaign.

“The TPP creates a web of corporate laws that will dominate the global economy,” attorney Kevin Zeese of the group Popular Resistance, which has mounted a long fight against the trade agreement, told me from Baltimore by telephone. “It is a global corporate coup d’état. Corporations will become more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised, which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.”

The agreement is the product of six years of work by global capitalists from banks, insurance companies, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and other corporations.

“It was written by them [the corporations], it is for them and it will serve them,” Zeese said of the TPP. “It will hurt domestic businesses and small businesses. The buy-American provisions will disappear. Local communities will not be allowed to build buy-local campaigns. The thrust of the agreement is the privatization and commodification of everything. The agreement has built within it a deep antipathy to state-supported or state-owned enterprises. It gives away what is left of our democracy to the World Trade Organization.”

The economist David Rosnick, in a report on the TPP by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), estimated that under the trade agreement only the top 10 percent of U.S. workers would see their wages increase. Rosnick wrote that the real wages of middle-income U.S. workers (from the 35th percentile to the 80th percentile) would decline under the TPP. NAFTA, contributing to a decline in manufacturing jobs (now only 9 percent of the economy), has forced workers into lower-paying service jobs and resulted in a decline in real wages of between 12 and 17 percent. The TPP would only accelerate this process, Rosnick concluded.

“This is a continuation of the global race to the bottom,” Dr. Margaret Flowers, also from Popular Resistance and a candidate for the U.S. Senate, said from Baltimore in a telephone conversation with me. “Corporations are free to move to countries that have the lowest labor standards. This drives down high labor standards here. It means a decimation of industries and unions. It means an accelerated race to the bottom, which we must rise up to stop.”

“In Malaysia one-third of tech workers are essentially slaves,” Zeese said. “In Vietnam the minimum wage is 35 cents an hour. Once these countries are part of the trade agreement U.S. workers are put in a very difficult position.”

Fifty-one percent of working Americans now make less than $30,000 a year,
a new study by the Social Security Administration reported.
Forty percent are making less than $20,000 a year.
The federal government considers a family of four living on an income of less than $24,250 to be in poverty.

“Half of American workers earn essentially the poverty level,” Zeese said. “This agreement only accelerates this trend. I don’t see how American workers are going to cope.”

The assault on the American workforce by NAFTA—which was established under the Clinton administration in 1994 and which at the time promised creation of 200,000 net jobs a year in the United States—has been devastating. NAFTA has led to a $181 billion trade deficit with Mexico and Canada and the loss of at least 1 million U.S. jobs, according to a report by Public Citizen. The flooding of the Mexican market with cheap corn by U.S. agro-businesses drove down the price of Mexican corn and saw 1 million to 3 million poor Mexican farmers go bankrupt and lose their small farms. Many of them crossed the border into the United States in a desperate effort to find work.

“Obama has misled the public throughout this process,” Dr. Flowers said. “He claimed that environmental groups were supportive of the agreement because it provided environmental protections, and this has now been proven false. He told us that it would create 650,000 jobs, and this has now been proven false. He calls this a 21st century trade agreement, but it actually rolls back progress made in Bush-era trade agreements. The most recent model of a 21st century trade agreement is the Korean free trade agreement. That was supposed to create 140,000 U.S. jobs. But what we saw within a couple years was a loss of about 70,000 jobs and a larger trade deficit with Korea. This agreement [the TPP] is sold to us with the same deceits that were used to sell us NAFTA and other trade agreements.”

The agreement, in essence, becomes global law. Any agreements over carbon emissions by countries made through the United Nations are effectively rendered null and void by the TPP.

“Trade agreements are binding,” Flowers said. “They supersede any of the nonbinding agreements made by the United Nations Climate Change Conference that might come out of Paris.”

There is more than enough evidence from past trade agreements to indicate where the TPP—often called “NAFTA on steroids”—will lead. It is part of the inexorable march by corporations to wrest from us the ability to use government to defend the public and to build social and political organizations that promote the common good. Our corporate masters seek to turn the natural world and human beings into malleable commodities that will be used and exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Trade agreements are the tools being used to achieve this subjugation. The only response left is open, sustained and defiant popular revolt.

 

[muckraker10021]

Close Clinton friend Gov. Terry McAuliffe says Clinton if elected
will flip on TPP, betraying her campaign rhetoric and pledge to Democratic progressive voters
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/terry-mcauliffe-hillary-clinton-tpp-trade-226253

Hillary Clinton with close friend & former campaign manager Virginia Gov. Terry Mcauliffe


Anybody still believing Hillary's transparently bogus public campaign pledge that she is a "Progressive"???