Bernie Sanders: RT if you think the TPP should be stopped....

[JDPriestly]

17. I'm with Bernie on trade. No to more trade agreements, especially

if they involve international trade courts that will decide matters that should be decided only through the democratic and judicial processes established in our Constitution and law.

No to the TPP. And lets renegotiate, one-on-one, country-by-country, our existing trade agreements with the nations with which we want to trade.

I recall when, in the 1940s through the 1970s, China was viewed as a backward, rather helpless country. It had enormous overpopulation and was unable to feed its people. In addition, it was governed by a kind of crazy regime that abused the most fundamental human rights.

We began to trade with China and it now has a large trade surplus while we have a large trade deficit.

And much of China's economic prowess and domination in the world today is due to the insane amount of low-cost goods that we and other developed countries import from it.

Meanwhile, our industrial base is disappearing, nearly gone. We exported our jobs, butt not just our jobs, we also exported our pollution, the dirty smokestacks, the coal-burning factories, the bad environmental policies that we had before we shipped them off to China. And now we want to send even more work to countries in which the people will reduced to working without protective environmental or workplace standards.

No to the TPP. Let's learn to make products with environmentally safe processes and factories here in the US.

As long as we still have homeless people on our streets in the US, we should not be shipping jobs to other countries. We need first to insure a life of dignity for every American and then trade with other countries. We can do that through a system of one-on-one trade agreements as opposed to regional trade agreements. We can exercise leverage with one-on-one trade agreements that will truly lift up the countries with which we trade as well as our own country.

These regional trade agreements are not just a race to the bottom when it comes to labor and environmental and product quality standards but also when it comes to human rights issues.

And shame on us. China, a country in which human rights abuses are so common and in which much of the industry is either owned by the government or closely regulated by the government (and not for environmental safety or labor fairness) has surpassed us in terms of economic progress and output. We have very creative inventors and businessmen, but I have to ask what is wrong with our system that we have fallen so far behind China in terms of our balance of trade?

I do not think the problem is that our wages are too high to be competitive or that our environmental standards are too restrictive. I think the problem is that so much of our economy is in the hands of greedy private individuals and companies that sell us the idea that privatization is the way to go but that produce their products in a country in which the government decides much economic policy and then sell those products to us for profits they then hide in tax havens around the world.

The success of China begs the question as to what economic theory and system is working in the world today. Are we even told the truth about the Chinese system that has created such an economic behemoth in that country?

I'm asking questions about our economic system and just whether it is competitive enough. Questions I never thought I would ask.

And I am also questioning the wisdom and utility of yet another trade agreement. I think we need to rethink our attitudes and assumptions about our economic system considering the slow growth and lack of adaptability in it. (Where are our high speed trains? Look what China and Japan have built?) And we need to say no to regional trade agreements until we have made a thorough and objective study of their impact on our economy and have explored whether one-on-one trade agreements would be a better way to enter the arena of world trade.