Sorry to say this but I feel Obama's strong promotion of the TPP

[JDPriestly]

105. Finding the balance between democracy which means that an individual has a voice in the

making of the laws that govern him or her and cooperation between nations is difficult.

The trade agreements we now have and that are being contemplated do not find that balance in my opinion. They are being written by business interests. There is nothing wrong with business and there is nothing wrong with the fact that businesses have interests. But there is something very wrong when corporations and business interests make trade agreements that grant to them and their interests the authority to overrule democratically determined laws and usurp democracies.

So that is my problem with the trade agreements.

For example, corporations can hire people in any country they want according to the labor laws of that country. In poor countries, they can heavy handidly impose lax labor regulations and in that way also lax environmental regulations on those countries and their working people.

But people in the so-called "wealthy" countries that have labor standards that protect not only the people who work but also the environment in which they work and live cannot go to any country they want and live and work in the environment, safety conditions and other conditions that they have democratically imposed in their countries or in their workplaces.

So the trade agreements challenge and destroy our system of worker protections beginning with the definition of the workweek as normally 40 hours to the OSHA regulations to Workman's Compensation and right on down to the minimum wage. They do that in a most undemocratic way.

And that is why I do not like the trade agreements.

A person in India can make service representative calls to the US and thus take jobs that serve Americans and could be performed by Americans. That is detrimental to American workers because the person in India is not competing for American wages. That drives wages in America down or alternatively drives unemployment up.

And I do not for one minute believe the official statistics on employment in the US. I doubt that many people do because we just meet too many people who are unemployed. Sometimes anecdotal information is misleading. And sometimes it is more reliable than the official, doctored statistics.