May 11, 2015

Here you go:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/11/07/why-cant-we-all-get-along-challenges-ahead-for-bipartisan-cooperation/

Poll done in April of Democrats only:

Initial TPA Ballot
Q5. From what you have heard, do you… granting President Obama trade promotion authority?

Strongly support 25%
Somewhat support 39%
Somewhat oppose 13%
Strongly oppose 8%
Don't know 14%

SUPPORT 64%
OPPOSE 21%

Initial TPP Ballot
Q7. From what you have heard, do you… President Obama's proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement?

Strongly support 20%
Somewhat support 31%
Somewhat oppose 10%
Strongly oppose 8%
Don't know 30%

SUPPORT 52%
OPPOSE 18%

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/54e2b1d1e4b043f1c9a2a9ed/t/55424db8e4b04641a244468d/1430408665168/trade-poll.pdf

68% of republicans (74% of 'conservative republicans') will hold a pro-fast track vote against their candidate compared to 17% of Democrats.

I wonder who the 11% that want their politician to support fast track.

http://fasttrackpoll.info/

Poll: conservative and moderate republicans oppose fast track (for the TPP) by a ratio of 85 percent or higher.

On the question of fast-track authority, 62 percent of respondent opposed the idea, with 43 percent “strongly” opposing it. Broken down by political affiliation, only Democrats that identify as “liberal” strongly favor the idea. Predictably, a strong Republican majority oppose giving the president such authority, with both conservative and moderates oppose it by a ratio of 85 percent or higher.

http://www.ibtimes.com/trans-pacific-partnership-tpp-poll-only-strongest-obama-supporters-want-him-have-fast-track-1552039

My guess is that there are many polls on TPP and fast track being conducted now since the latter is before congress. The only one I have seen released recently is the second one above.

... a "rank-and-file" Democrat who doesn't really know what is actually in the TPP, would almost naturally say "Yes" if it were a simple yes-or-no question."

I tend to agree although I think many believe that most Democrats would usually answer "No" given a negative view of past trade agreements. Democrats almost always poll as more supportive of trade agreements, international diplomacy in general, foreign aid, etc. than republicans who tend to oppose almost all forms of international involvement, other than bombing and invasion.

As far as a knowledge of TPP, 30% in that poll said they did not know enough to offer an opinion. Democrats who did offer an opinion supported TPP 52% to 18% - which is consistent with the 1st poll above.

May 7, 2015

Poll: More Americans (particularly Democrats) See Trade Pacts as Beneficial to U.S. Economy

After years of post-recession skepticism, Americans increasingly see international trade pacts as beneficial to the U.S. economy, fueled in part by a jump in support from Democratic voters.

According to a new NBC/WSJ poll, 37 percent of Americans now say that free trade with foreign countries has helped the United States, while 31 percent disagree.

Democratic support has jumped significantly in the past five years. In the latest poll, 43 percent said free trade has helped the U.S. economy, compared to just 27 percent who said the same in 2010. African Americans and Latinos have also registered huge gains in the past five years. Specifically, African American support has doubled since 2010 from 14 percent to 31 percent last month.

Meanwhile, only 33 percent of Republicans say international trade has helped the United States, compared to 36 percent who disagree. But conservative support has risen compared to 2010, when just 21 percent of the party believed that trade pacts boost the U.S. economy.

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/poll-more-americans-see-trade-pacts-beneficial-u-s-economy-n354111

This poll was co-sponsored by the WSJ so take it with a grain of salt. Hopefully, there will be more polls in the near future sponsored by more trustworthy organizations. The opposition of the republican base has remained fairly constant for many years.

May 7, 2015

To play the "Who's for it and who's against it" game:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/11/07/why-cant-we-all-get-along-challenges-ahead-for-bipartisan-cooperation/

Poll done in April of Democrats only:

Initial TPA Ballot
Q5. From what you have heard, do you… granting President Obama trade promotion authority?

Strongly support 25%
Somewhat support 39%
Somewhat oppose 13%
Strongly oppose 8%
Don't know 14%

SUPPORT 64%
OPPOSE 21%

Initial TPP Ballot
Q7. From what you have heard, do you… President Obama's proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement?

Strongly support 20%
Somewhat support 31%
Somewhat oppose 10%
Strongly oppose 8%
Don't know 30%

SUPPORT 52%
OPPOSE 18%

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/54e2b1d1e4b043f1c9a2a9ed/t/55424db8e4b04641a244468d/1430408665168/trade-poll.pdf

And in the "Who's against it column there are plenty of "Crooks, criminals, traitors, liars, and repukes" as well.

Join Donald Trump and tell Congress to stop Obama’s bad trade deal!
Sen. Jeff Sessions blasts Obamatrade (that's the right's pet term for TPP; makes it sound like Obamacare in order to fire up the conservative base)
Mark Levin Opposes Fast Track – and Congress should, too!
Dick Morris: Obamatrade = Unrestricted Immigration
Lou Dobbs & Ed Rollins blast Obamatrade
Americans for Limited Government: No Fast Track for Obamatrade
Eagle Forum: No Fast Track for Obamatrade
TheTeaParty.net: No Fast Track for Obamatrade
Center for Security Policy: No Fast Track for Obamatrade
Obamatrade: A gift for Sharia regimesAlan Keyes blasts Obamatrade and those who love it
Conservatives hate Obamatrade even more than Democrats do

http://obamatrade.com/

May 2, 2015

If past international negotiations/agreements did not work as planned, the progressive approach is

to stop negotiating with other countries and have the US act unilaterally. Withdraw from NAFTA and other trade agreements as well as the WTO. (No one is going to trust "renegotiation" even though that sounds good.)

Tell other countries that the US had decided to impose pro-American trading rules on the world. FDR and Truman had a excellent opportunity to do this when American power was at its zenith and blew it with their stupid "multilateralist" ITO and GATT. (Oh, and thank you republicans for killing the ITO in the Senate or this 'multilateralist' crap would have been even worse than it is. If only you had won control of congress in time to kill GATT as well. Oh well.)

We hope you understand what we are doing with these new rules - but we really don't care whether you do or not. We are big and strong. You? Not so much.

Acting unilaterally without respect to what other countries want may have a conservative history to it but the world should trust us on this one. We know this sounds like the trading world of Coolidge/Hoover that FDR thought he had banished forever, but trust us. This is a progressive version of C/H unilateralism on trade whether you can tell the difference or not.

However (and we hate to go all 'republican' on you) we really don't care whether you trust us or not. We are doing what we think is in our national interest and you can't stop us. And don't give us that ol' "America the bully" or "American exceptionalism" stuff! Have you seen how many planes and ships we have compared to you? We are 'exceptional'! No one wastes money on the military like we do! And "bully" is in the eye of the beholder and the 'beholder' is, by definition, weaker so who really cares!

Negotiations are for weak liberals! Taking unilateral action is for strong conservatives and progressives! So, according to these rules, anyone who goes the "international negotiation route" to improve things is, at best, a 'weak liberal' but, more likely, is a 'corporate sellout', corrupt politician selling his support for a comfortable retirement.

TWP

April 30, 2015

"Almost half of all Canadians (48%) either can’t say or don’t know how they feel about TPP."

Overall, 41 per cent of Canadians support the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation free trade deal the Canadian government hopes will expand its ties with various national markets in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, among others. Eleven per cent oppose the idea. Importantly, almost half of all Canadians (48%) either can’t say or don’t know how they feel about it.

Among the half of Canadians who have formed an opinion about the proposed TPP, therefore, the margin of support is almost four-to-one (41% and 11% respectively).



The Canadians surveyed were presented with a list of global regions and were asked to choose up to two with which Canada should try to develop closer trade ties. The same line of questioning in an Angus Reid sounding taken last year yielded similar findings in terms of Canadians’ overall favoured trading partners, but – interestingly – this latest poll recorded higher numbers for all markets.

The United States and the European Union topped the list with each being named by roughly half of respondents (49% and 48% respectively in the current poll, compared to 36% and 37% last year).
China remains third among prospective partners, with 40 per cent of Canadians favouring an enhanced trading relationship with this nation (compared to 34% a year ago).

http://angusreid.org/trans-pacific-partnership/

April 27, 2015

Great Revealer of True Motives and Beliefs strikes another blow for truth, justice and

the American Way. Job well done.

April 24, 2015

He is not going to release an unfinished agreement here any more than with the Iranian agreement.

I loved Woodrow Wilson's #1 point in his 14 points.

However, the UK and France would not even follow this principle during the WWI peace negotiations and I have not seen any evidence that the world as a whole has proven willing to live by this. In the real world you can't go around releasing everything that everyone is saying in the negotiations unless you want international negotiations to grind to a halt everywhere. I suppose the US or some other important countries could refuse to conduct any more negotiations until Wilson's point was followed. But I'm not sure that Democrats want a world without international negotiations in which disputes are handled by other, less diplomatic, means.

The republicans called for release of information on the Iranian negotiations because they did not trust Obama and they wanted to blow the negotiations up. I am glad that did not happen but they were right (in a warped sort of way) to try that tactic. It would have wrecked the agreement if they could have gotten one side or the other to release the text of the negotiations while they were still ongoing.

Republicans complained about FDR's 'secret tariff agreements' in the campaigns against him in 1936 and 1940. "Secret" trade negotiations are nothing new.

April 23, 2015

Blame it on FDR and his Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934 and International Trade Organization in 1944.

Reciprocal Tariff Act of 1934

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) into law in 1934. RTAA gave the president power to negotiate bilateral, reciprocal trade agreements with other countries. This law enabled Roosevelt to liberalize American trade policy around the globe. It is widely credited with ushering in the era of liberal trade policy that persists to this day.

After the Civil War, Democrats were generally the party of trade liberalization, while Republicans were generally for higher tariffs. The RTAA marked a sharp departure from the era of protectionism in the United States. American duties on foreign products declined from an average of 46% in 1934 to 12% by 1962.

The administration decided to take advantage of having a Democratic-controlled Congress and Presidency to push through the RTAA. ... In 1936 and 1940, the Republican Party ran on a platform of repealing the tariff reductions secured under the RTAA.

How RTAA changed the world

As American duties dropped off dramatically, global markets also increasingly liberalized. World trade expanded at a rapid pace. The RTAA, though a law of the United States, provided the first widespread system of guidelines for bilateral trade agreements. The United States and the European nations began avoiding beggar thy neighbour policies (which pursued national trade objectives at the expense of other nations). Instead, countries started to realize the gains from trade cooperation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_Tariff_Act

The ITO:

The original intention was to create a third institution to handle the trade side of international economic cooperation, joining the two “Bretton Woods” institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Over 50 countries participated in negotiations to create an International Trade Organization (ITO) as a specialized agency of the United Nations. The ITO Charter was ambitious. It extended beyond world trade disciplines, to include rules on employment, commodity agreements, restrictive business practices, international investment, and services. The aim was to create the ITO at a UN Conference on Trade and Employment in Havana, Cuba in 1947.

The Havana conference began on 21 November 1947, less than a month after GATT was signed. The ITO Charter was finally agreed in Havana in March 1948, but ratification in some national legislatures proved impossible. The most serious opposition was in the US Congress, even though the US government had been one of the driving forces. In 1950, the United States government announced that it would not seek Congressional ratification of the Havana Charter, and the ITO was effectively dead.

https://www.wto.org/English/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/fact4_e.htm

FDR inherited high tariffs and little trade from the republican trio of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. If he had left things alone, we would probably not have the 'free trade' we have today. Perhaps we are lucky that republican won back control of congress before US participation in FDR's International Trade Organization came up for approval. republicans, of course, refused to even bring it up for a vote.

April 22, 2015

"Obama is one of the bad guys. He is an actor. A salesperson. His job is to come out and trick

the population ..."

That is certainly one real possibility. And one the majority of the republican base, which opposes the TPP and does not trust Obama, endorses. Closely tied to that theory would be the belief that his goal as president is to enrich himself and his family which is his motivation to be a 'bad guy', 'actor', 'salesperson', 'trickster', etc.

Up to now I had viewed Obama as sometimes wrong (IMHO), but not as inherently evil and corrupt. But I don't know him personally. He could be all those things.

Other than the 'bad guy' theory, the only other reasonable explanation is that he really believes that the 'free trade agreements' with Canada, Mexico, Australia, Chile, Singapore and Peru needed to be 'renegotiated' and the WTO rules applied to the other countries improved upon.

April 21, 2015

Here you go:

Democratic support for both treaties is stronger than that of Republicans: 60% of Democrats see TTIP as a good thing compared with 44% of Republicans, while 59% of Democrats look favorably on TPP compared with 49% of Republicans.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/11/07/why-cant-we-all-get-along-challenges-ahead-for-bipartisan-cooperation/

Poll: conservative and moderate republicans oppose fast track (for the TPP) by a ratio of 85 percent or higher.

On the question of fast-track authority, 62 percent of respondent opposed the idea, with 43 percent “strongly” opposing it. Broken down by political affiliation, only Democrats that identify as “liberal” strongly favor the idea. Predictably, a strong Republican majority oppose giving the president such authority, with both conservative and moderates oppose it by a ratio of 85 percent or higher.

http://www.ibtimes.com/trans-pacific-partnership-tpp-poll-only-strongest-obama-supporters-want-him-have-fast-track-1552039