Tag: nafta
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange knows more about the contents of the TPP than most members of Congress and is doing much more to inform the American public than any of our so-called representatives with the lone exception of Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL)… Very, considerably larger than NAFTA, it is mostly not about trade. Only five of the twenty-nine chapters are about traditional trade.
“The Commission’s report on the potential economic impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) comes at a turning point in American trade policy. “We all recognize that trade can be beneficial. The issue is not whether Members of Congress such as myself could pass an Econ 101 class, as President George W. Bush’s Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Gregory Mankiw, recently put it. Instead, the issue is whether we are going to face up to the fact that our trading system today is much more complex than the simplistic trade model presented in an Econ 101 class.
Though a tightly held secret throughout the years-long negotiating process, publication of the entire text confirms the deal’s many woeful inadequacies which had been gleaned from leaked drafts and public statements by those privy to its contents.
Shouldn’t it be a trade violation to threaten to move someone’s job to another country? Shouldn’t we negotiate trade agreements that increase people’s wages on both sides of a trade border? These are the kinds of agreements we would make if We the People were negotiating trade agreements with representatives of the working people in other countries. Unfortunately that is not the kind of trade agreements that our current trade negotiation process produces.
