General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Here's the source for some of the pro-TPP bull$hit being disseminated on DU: [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Let me read the TPP. If it is so good, let ME read it for myself. Have you read it? The details I mean, not just the summary. Please let me know what is in it. Quote it verbatim if you have read it.
I can demonstrate why I oppose it. The TPP is a trade agreement. We have an enormous trade deficit, one of the worst if not the worst in the world. Workers in other countries do not earn enough to buy our products, and the very rich prefer to buy their luxuries from other countries like Italy, England and France. They buy some things from us, but the trade deficits of those countries show that their products are more desired by buyers around the world. That is at least people who have money are more likely to buy from those countries than from us.
No trade agreement in the world can make people in other countries want to buy from us.
Because people don't want to buy our products, we end up with a trade deficit, that is we borrow money from other countries to buy the products they make. Each dollar in our trade deficit represents not only lost jobs but lost income earned in our country and even lost revenue that is subject to our taxation.
No wonder we run government deficits. No wonder we can't get a reasonable hold on those deficits. No wonder we don't have nearly enough good jobs, jobs that pay well and challenge us for our people.
Then there are the trade courts that allow corporations to sue countries. That puts the corporations on the same level in terms of legal rights in those courts as countries. That is a threat not just to our sovereignty but to the very concept of a sovereign state across the world. It is crazy to equate the right of a country and the right of a nation in a legal system. That is just putting the worship of the Corporate Personhood to far above the rights of man. A corporation is not a human being.
The trade agreements dehumanize working people and elevate corporations to a legal status that is unhealthy and anti-democratic.