Time to face facts: Assange played the left like a fiddle on TPP

[alarimer]

78. The TPP was a bad idea all around.

It favored corporations at the expense of workers' rights and the environment, as almost all trade agreements do. I am not opposed to them altogether, but I do believe they need to be fair and they usually are not, at least not for most people. They are useful in the sense that countries with strong trading ties usually don't go to war with each other.

And where did the talking point that trade agreements don't cost jobs come from anyway? I find it an odd coincidence that this talking point arose just in the last year, when Trump was winning on the trade issue. All of a sudden, it's "Trade doesn't cost jobs; automation does." Well, both do in fact, although it's arguable that automation may have cost the country more jobs. To most most people, though, it really doesn't matter to them WHY their job is gone. More insidious, though, is the downward pressure on wages due to trade.

(I just noticed that the blockquote function is not working, so the following four paragraphs are from this article, in case that is not clear)

http://www.epi.org/publication/ib244/

While global integration is usually “win-win” between countries, it can still translate into steep losses for tens of millions of workers in the U.S. economy. Crucially, this wage-loss is not restricted to just workers in sectors exposed to trade, but is experienced by all workers who resemble those displaced by imports in terms of education, skills, and experience. Many of these workers probably do not even know that they are being affected by globalization, but they are. Landscapers may not get displaced by imports, but their wages do indeed suffer from job competition with import-displaced apparel workers.

Take the case of China and the United States. Reducing trade barriers allows each to specialize in what they do more efficiently, and this specialization generally leads to national-level gains for both countries—that is, increased efficiency, worldwide production, and total consumption. This is essentially chapter one in trade textbooks.

However, a later chapter in the textbook points out that, when the United States exports financial services and aircraft while importing apparel and electronics, it is implicitly exchanging the services of capital (physical and human) for labor. This exchange bids up capital’s price (profits and high-end salaries) and bids down wages for the broad working and middle-class, leading to rising inequality and wage pressure for many Americans. In the textbook’s index, this is called the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem. (For those more convinced by appeals to authority, the text box Interpreting Wage Impacts provides some quotes from standard economics texts.)

How big is this impact on wages? A reasonably cautious estimate is that between 1973 and 2006, global integration lowered the wages of U.S. workers without a four-year college degree (the large majority of the U.S. workforce) by 4%. College-educated workers saw 3% gains from trade, so inequality increased in this time as well.