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Comment by PythonicAlpha | Hacker News Reader

TPP, TTIP and the others are just and plainly the fairgrounds of the big corporations. They are those that shape the rules -- and the result is a global eroding of democracies and of peoples rights.

They are bad for environments, for health and many things that are second to the one thing that counts in this game: profits.

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I think profit is part of it, but I think that people running multinational corporations with more money than they could spend on themselves for the rest of their lives if they tried would have interest in shaping law indirectly via the supranational tribunals that are part of these trade agreements.

There are other reasons besides money that people get into politics and this would allow corporate owners to directly manipulate politics for monetary and non-monetary reasons without having to do the whole lobbying and/or running for election thing.

I think that profit is a cop-out when it comes to understanding political motivations. Ideological motivations are real and not merely a cover for monetary profit seeking behavior. There's this assumed idea that we live in a post-ideological era and that all decisions are pragmatic or at worst, motivated by profit seeking. I think ideology is still there, but in our dumbed down world it's never explicitly mentioned as a motivation for anything except as a vague throwaway line (e.g "Let's Make America Great Again!").

Everybody is eating from the trashcan all the time [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18qD9hmU9xg

Sure, convictions do exist. Problem is - they are not representative of general population. Money are working really hard to make sure people with proper convictions land at proper positions. Again and again we are reminded of the fact that USA is plutocracy.

So if the controllers of the corporations aren't seeking even more immense income disparity can you say what motivations you think they do have specifically.

Which laws do they want to force and why?

Profit motive may be a cop-out but it's based on the current facts, corporation rulers have manipulated law and made more profits and then sought to do the same again and again.

> There's this assumed idea that we live in a post-ideological era and that all decisions are pragmatic or at worst, motivated by profit seeking.

I think at worst they are motivated by narcissistic personality disorder and other defects. People who have more money than they could ever use and still seek more don't always do that because they have a rational goal in mind, or filling a real need (other than feeding the monkeys on the back which are these disorders). Sometimes they're simply FUBAR and lack boundaries which can at this point only be enforced from outside of them.

There hasn't been a lot of polling on this that I've seen, but as of the middle of last year TPP was seen as a good thing by the majority of the general population in all TPP countries except the US and Malaysia. In the US it was 49% good, 29% bad, and in Malaysia it was 38% good, 18% bad [1].

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/23/americans-fa...

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