Heads Up!! "Obama Ready to Defy Base in Order to Advance Trans-Pacific Partnership"

[OrwellwasRight]

250. Europe can't do it.

Europe's labor chapters are weaker than the US's -- they have no enforcement mechanism (as opposed to the useless enforcement mechanism in the US chapters). The EU just looks like it does trade better because they have better DOMESTIC policies. But their agreements do nothing to eliminate sweatshop conditions among their developing country trading partners.

I don't agree that the US (or any country) should be taken to the ICC for trying ban a hazardous chemical or for denying a permit to build a hazardous waste facility or for putting plain packaging requirements on cigarettes. Look, there is no forum in which the Federalist Society-invented concept of regulatory takings is OK. Putting restrictions on your sovereignty to benefit corporations is, as I have already previously stated, of a totally different content and character than doing so to another sovereign nation, as we do in the UN. There is nothing that can make that better.

Your quote from USTR is USTR propaganda pure and and simple. Also it doesn't deal with the fact that ILO conventions have no enforcement mechanism, which makes them the lowest possible status of international trade agreements.

Nor has USTR ever done anything to prove its trustworthiness. It is wrong and lies constantly: about the jobs that will be created by trade agreements:

http://www.epi.org/publication/trade-pacts-korus-trans-pacific-partnership/
http://www.epi.org/blog/transatlantic-free-trade-agreement-job-claims/

About its commitment to labor rights (by the way you do know that the USTR has sat on a case against Guatemala for nearly 7 years???? It is doing nothing effective to protect Guatemalan working people from being abused by their own government no matter what pretty words it uses):
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-15-160

The US has not even ratified 6 of the 8 core conventions. How can the US hold other countries accountable when we haven't even ratified the unenforceable "conventions"? It can't.

About ISDS not being a threat:
http://www.aflcio.org/NAFTAat20

about how strong the environmental protections will be:
http://content.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2014/03/new-report-reveals-environmental-costs-north-american-free-trade-agreement
http://action.sierraclub.org/site/DocServer/TPP_Enviro_Analysis.pdf?docID=14842 (analyzing how the provisions on the table ROLL BACK the Bush era commitments--proving USTR is lying about supporting high environmental standards)

In reference to Krugman, I have referred you to Stiglitz already. You have you answer about Krugman not being a progressive voice on trade policy. He simply isn't. He is a recovering neoliberal who has yet to delve into the destructiveness of the US model in the way that Stiglitz brilliantly has.