President Obama's warning about automation.

[JCanete]

15. The notion that TPP is good and that protectionism is bad, is predicated on assumptions that

the only way you can be fair to 3rd world countries is to allow our corporations and their own governments to exploit their workers and reap and poison their(and our) environment, into the 21st century. We have so much technology and so much wealth. It isn't really necessary that we continue with a paradigm of supply-side destructiveness, I mean, aside from the fact that the machine is in motion and stopping it is going to be a bitch.

I am willing to go so far as to say I'm sure there are things in the TPP that were good, though I think that given the last conversation about unionisation "requirements" embedded within it, that that is quite the over-statement. It's interesting to me that you are so negative on protectionism in a far less measured way. Why couldn't it be either a mixed bag, or just done right? Whether it would be is another story, but your inclination to assume it wouldn't be makes me wonder why you're so confident in the way we craft trade policies.

And again, what about the environment? What about the Sierra Club's objections that this was going to lock us and other nations into behaviors that were exploiting and destroying the environment, due to the threat of litigation for changing policies that affected businesses? These are impacts that we can never ever undo. Once arable land is destroyed, or water poisoned, or species eradicated...etc. That's it.

I agree with you on global competition to an extent. Actually, given that our future is going to be so driven by more and more advanced technology, the way we should be competing is not to continue to double down and tripple down on this consumption model, but to invest in that future, from our infrastructure to our schools to the technologies that allows us to better utilize the human resources that we are entirely discarding in this nation. That lack of efficiency and waste is pretty astonishing. It certainly isn't the American people who are winning from this approach.

Again, what we did was to empower other nations to become superpowers, well one, and we certainly enriched our corporations and the wallets of our shareholders, even if our standard of living continued to eek up, and we did it in a way that was deleterious. The gains in the standards of living for people in other nations is good, but it is leveraged against our global future. We could have done it differently, and we could have used protectionism as that tool to do so, to actually promote socially and/or civically aligned values. The only thing we've ever really cared about though, is whether our financial interests are going to be served, and by "our" I mostly mean those in the top 1%. Granted though, we have far less power to influence these trends than we use to. We wasted the opportunity.

Again though, I don't think we should lose site of our agreement on BIG. How do you feel about something like that actually being a part of the Democratic platform?