How we lost the ability to have any more New Deals

[Baobab]

Recently, a Presidential Candidate put forward the proposition that the US government could stimulate (which?) economic activity by spending lots of money. In the past the US government was able to use infrastructure projects to create domestic jobs for its own citizens. Of course that was true in the 30s and its unambiguous that the United States and other WTO Members can still stimulate the entire global economy by spending lots of money on services.

However, that money likely will soon go to the lowest qualified bidding firms, and its possible that low bidders may hail from all around the world, and purchasers of services may not be allowed to discriminate by country. Winners may not be in the US, thanks to GATS and the pending TiSA, soon there will no longer be a linkage between government spending and job creation. Unfortunately, the neoliberals failed to tell Americans about GATS which leaves many gaps in Americans ability to understand the global services economy, for example on health care.

These changes are irreversible and they make free affordable health care and education FTA illegal . Would somebody please tell America!

[snagglepuss]

1. I had no idea. I thought trade deals were only about manufactured good

and giving the right of corps to sue govts. Sheesh.

Dollars to donuts there are countless others who are as clueless as me. I had been thinking Bernie should hit the Red states or states favoring Hillary solely with TPP ads. After reading your post, I think he definitely should go the route. I don't know a lot about these pacts but compared to many and well informed. People (I include myself) need to be hit over the head of what exactly is coming down the pipe.

[Baobab]

2. What do you want to know about?

You can grok the issue I just was talking about by reading between the lines of their recent announcement of our "victory" over India in the solar energy dispte at the WTO.

See http://www.iatp.org/blog/201602/obama-undermines-climate-efforts-in-solar-trade-dispute

For general info on trade deals one good place is Policyalternatives.ca - go t trade and start reading

under Trade.

Scott Sinclair is really good, so is Ellen Gould.. They have two reports on TPP which just came out, you'll get a lot of info there..

Also Jane Kelsey's book "Serving Whose interests" - which is easy to find on Google, is a really good introduction

[snagglepuss]

3. Thanks for those suggestions. How would you counter the argument from

the pro-trade side side that TPP counters China's growing dominance?