John Kerry on TPP: "95 percent of the world’s consumers live beyond the borders of the US"

[JDPriestly]

75. Kerry clearly has no or very little experience with the trade courts and has not

looked at the kinds of cases that are increasingly being brought.

De Fazio points to some of the detrimental decisions of those courts. Kerry needs to listen to De Fazio and do his homework on that subject. The court decisions cannot be appealed and are neither transparent nor required to be consistent and really fair. There is no way to enforce respect for our laws, fair labor standards or environmental standards in other countries via a trade agreement short of taking military action.

Further, Kerry admits that the benefits of "free" trade are not distributed in any healthy or fair way within our society. He admits that we need to change many of our laws in order to respond to the changes that "free" trade impose on our society, changes like job losses, like having to deal with people in foreign countries who are hired as cheap service representatives for big companies and often do not speak our English or really understand or care about our ways of doing business or our culture. It can be very annoying to call your phone company, give out your credit card number and maybe other personal information to someone in a far-away country who has your personal data when you know that you cannot bring criminal charges against the person in any police department or court if that person uses your information in some way that you do not want.

Kerry's speech is not persuasive at all to me.

He admits we need to change our laws BEFORE entering into any more agreements like the TPP. He knows that at this time, these agreements are impoverishing Americans and harming our economy. His argument, boiled down to its core is that these agreements are inevitable.

He is wrong. They are not inevitable. We already have very low tariffs. The point of this agreement is not to lower them more. And the agreement cannot establish any enforceable labor or environmental laws. It will take the national will and the denial of free trade to countries that do not impose fair labor and environmental conditions, not granting more free trade privileges to such countries, to use trade to obtain better labor and environmental standards.

Trading in the US, exporting to the US, should be a reward for democratic societies, for societies that demonstrate fair labor and environmental standards.

The Kerry speech is pure hogwash as far as I am concerned.

The Obama administration is, as usual, kissing up to big corporations, last week Nike and now Boeing.

Take care to change American law to give Americans a share of benefits from free trade before you sign TPP into law. And don't agree to international trade arbitration courts. They are horrible.