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In reply to the discussion: Heads Up!! "Obama Ready to Defy Base in Order to Advance Trans-Pacific Partnership" [View all]OrwellwasRight
(5,312 posts)facts and links and studies supported by evidence: you gave me one citation from a source I have never heard of. Moreover, you can't reconcile the number of Chinese who work in sweatshop conditions with the number supposedly in the middle class. So working in a sweatshop is now middle class job? That's an incredibly low standard. Not a world any worker wants to live in, I can assure you.
The fact is neoliberal, corporate empowering, deregulatory "free" trade agreements do not in fact improve standards of living. They increase returns to the 1%. They have exacerbated inequality globally. I have presented analysis after analysis that says so. You have clicked on no links, read no study, and have denied the reality of decreasing wages and increasing inequality simply because it goes against your David Ricardo/Milton Friedman theories, which simply do not bear out in practice, and have been debunked by a number of labor economists, including Tom Palley, Jim Stanford, and the nobel prize winning Joseph Stigliz -- and then you claim that I am the one who gives opinions? You have a lot of gall. And live in a purple sky world in which facts you disagree with are dismissed as opinions.
Well, go on with you bad self, and keep advocating for your government to pursue policies that benefit the already powerful MNEs and leave the rest of us behind. I'm certainly glad I don't live in your world.