It isn't about education or competitiveness. TPP is about shipping jobs to Vietnam - $5/day.

[JDPriestly]

22. And the Brookings Institute has seen the agreement while congressional aides and the rest

of us have not? Why is that? Because they are for it no matter what?

Those are all vague statements about what the hoped-for, fantasy effects of the agreement will be.

If it is so good, let those of us who can read it with NAFTA in mind, . . . . READ IT.

Is that sooooo hard.

If the Brookings Institute can wax heavenly about the TPP and the TPIP, then surely such a venerable group of experts has seen the agreement?

Or is the Brookings Institute just another propaganda tool of the free-traders?

Have you personally seen the agreement, Hoyt? I ask that because you post here nearly every day that I am on-line in favor of the agreement. How can you be so sure it is so great?

Are you just in favor of the theory of free trade? Do you have a personal or business or other interest in advocating for the TPP?

I can tell you that my interest in advocating against it is based on what I have seen as the result of other trade agreements. I would love to be able to read the TPP, but in my experience, the trade courts undermine democratic processes, sovereignty and in particular are incompatible with our Constitution which requires a very specific separation of powers system, elections and guards against over-reaching by our judiciary. The TPP over-rides all those safeguards on our democracy.

In addition, as so many have pointed out, the TPP imports low wages and will in the not too distant future make it impossible for Americans to pay their water, electricity and heating bills. Forget buying cars. Forget education.

Over two centuries, we fought against oligarchy and built a society, a capitalist society, in which ordinary people could have access to education, to skills, to the opportunity to earn a living that allowed them to live in dignity with running water, electricity in our homes, medical care, enough food, and all the things that make our strong middle class and our charities and government help for homeless people possible.

Now, wealthy people are trying to fool us into thinking that all the cheap products from China and other developing countries that we bring in to satisfy our own greed for lots and lots and lots and lots of things -- junk really because they are so poorly made that we have to throw most of them away in a short time -- are just great.

They aren't. First, those producing the products are basically slave labor. We hear a lot of complaints and rightfully so, about our own country's abuse of slave labor for about two centuries.

But when we buy things from China and other underdeveloped countries, we are buying things that are made by people who are desperate and who have no choice but to work for slave wages.

We should instead be making our own products here at good wages and then helping people in other countries make things for their domestic markets. A person living in Bangla Desh should be able to buy things made in Bangla Desh.

The theory behind world trade is that a maximum benefit to all will result if what one country has -- say a raw material or labor -- in abundance and can produce cheaply is exchanged on the international market for what another country has in abundance and can be produced cheaply.

That works for things like trading agricultural products like rice for natural resources like iron ore or oil or even gold or copper, etc.

But when countries trade their cheap labor and ask so little for it and then buy nothing in return, we get what we have today: a glut of cheap, practically slave, labor that eliminates the market for well paid labor. There is no market today for goods produced by labor that is paid a wage that enables the worker to buy the goods made by ANY laborer in the world.

There is no glut in the rice market or the oil market or the copper market. Those are all resources with a more or less finite limit to their quantity.

But there is, compared with the demand for labor, an enormous glut of it. That is especially true of poorly skilled labor. But it is increasingly becoming true for very skilled labor even doctors, teachers, lawyers, technicians, etc.

And right there is the flaw in the economic theory that favors free trade. That theory PLACES THE VALUE OF A HUMAN BEING AND OF A MATERIAL OBJECT OR MATERIAL OR RESOURCE ON THE SAME LEVEL.

Excuse me, but the value of a human being and that human being's needs and potential productivity cannot and should not be valued in an economy as the economic equivalent of a thing or a resource.

Yet the oligarchs, the extremely rich, the people who run things, view one human working in a factory as interchangeable with another. The point for the oligarchs is to reduce the compensation, that is the market value, of the time, the work, the LIFE of a working person in the US to the value of any other working person in the world. That means that for the worker in China whose living standard is rising now if we sign the TPP, he or she will have to compete with workers whose living standard is yet to rise. That means the Chinese worker will now be forced to struggle to make ends meet on even less than he or she is now earning.

We have seen how that has worked here. I live in Los Angeles. The homeless people that i see on the streets now are middle-aged in many cases. Thanks in great part to free trade, they are treated as things that have been thrown out, discarded because they are used up and no longer of any value. They no longer mean profit to our oligarchs.

Meanwhile many Americans live on credit and minimum wage or low wage jobs with no hope of obtaining the life-style of their parents or even their grandparents who, there is a good chance, may have owned their own homes or farms.

The more we trade, the richer the oligarchs get, the less prosperous we are, the worse our jobs are, the more the oligarchs view us and treat us as mere things and not as human beings.

That's why I oppose the TPP.

That's my experience. That is what I have observed in my 71 years of life and my travels.

Now you, Hoyt, tell me again why you think that free trade and the TPP are so wonderful. Cause I'm sorry, but I do not believe that you really think free trade is God's gift to Americans. I really do not believe it. Cause it ain't.

When the people who make things can't afford to buy them, something is wrong. When the sole purpose of making something is not to make society better but to make your own life exaggeratedly better, you have no human values. You are yourself but a thing. You have no real love for others. What is such a life worth? Very little in my view. But that is what we are seeing today. And not just among the Fortune 500. The leaders of a number of so-called "developing" countries are enriching themselves at the cost of their citizens.