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Comment by dimino | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of abstract "this deal is bad!" stuff, but what, specific, are the issues with TPP? What reason does the president have for wanting to pass it? I generally find him to be a reasonable person, so I don't think he's just being "evil" or whatever.

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My understanding of it is that standardizing trade law and eliminating a wide range of nationalistic trade policies allows for greater operational efficiency, lower average cost of goods, etc. as systems closer to free markets tend to. The problems are

1. Massive disparities in wealth put the less-skilled in wealthy countries at greater risk of being made irrelevant/pushed towards global market rate (which is below minimum wage in the United States for many jobs)

2. Developed corporations gain open access to developing markets, while local incorporations of services that would likely pour more value back into their country receive no protections.

3. Government protections of the environment or workers could end up in an international trade court in which a country's laws are struck down and/or required to pay a fine due to a violation of trade policy. (This came up a lot, esp. from Elizabeth Warren. Obama's response was basically that there's no precedent for it, the handful of disputes the United States has been in, the US has always won. I'm not sure the history for other countries, but this seems to be more fear-mongering than reality as far as I can tell)

4. Read the EFF's rundown of issues concerning impact on digital rights: https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

Overall I'm still very torn, and it seems that reasonable people that are genuinely concerned about increasing global welfare and reducing suffering fall on either side of supporting or opposing this deal.

Thanks for the links (I won't likely read the EFF's take, as I am staunchly against the way the EFF writes its articles), but this feels like a rabbit hole. Cory Doctorow links to an article that links to an article that eventually gets to a World Bank report, claiming that 772k jobs will be lost "Because of the TPP" and that the GDP of developed nations will decrease by .52% for the US and .12% for Japan.

The Tufts analysis, however, is merely a response to another report done by the World Bank claiming, "The model simulations suggest that, by 2030, the TPP will raise member country GDP by 0.4-10 percent, and by 1.1 percent, on a GDP-weighted average basis."

So now you've got the World Bank arguing with economists, Cory Doctorow only linking some of the results of those reports, and this mysterious job loss (where the hell do those jobs go, exactly?) various economists disagreeing with one another...

How the hell do people extract an overarching viewpoint from all this noise? The biggest concern for me is the IP stuff, but I can't tell if this, too, is fearmongering (I go to jail because I cosplayed Darth Vader?? There's simply no way that's how it works, I don't care what the agreement says).

Also the loss of sovereignty seems scary. It'd be terrible of Phillip Morris could sue the US Government for the cigarette labeling, like they did in Uruguay.

Yeh it's all so complicated... The loss of sovereignty stuff seems sort of like fear-mongering nonsense, though. In the case you cite, just last month Philip Morris lost against Uruguay and was ordered to pay $7 million dollars plus cover Uruguay's legal fees [1]. In a similar case in Australia last December concerning cigarrete packaging, Philip Morris lost. [2]

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-pmi-uruguay-lawsuit-idUSKC...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/18/austr...

There's a lot of controversy regarding the specific contents of the TPP, but for me personally, I am against the cloud of secrecy that it (along with most trade agreements) was developed under. It took WikiLeaks to even let the public know of its existence. And after that they refused to let members of congress (our elected officials) from even reviewing the document except for selected sections, under the watchful eyes of a USTR official. No matter what the pros and cons of the TPP, the people had no say in it, nor did our elected officials; and when we tried to get a say, they refused. That's inherently anti-democratic.

I just don't buy this argument, that a trade deal can't be negotiated in secret. The public's control over its government in the US is exclusively through its election system, and the idea that the public "has a right to debate the deal" is, to me, utter nonsense.

You elect officials who you trust to appoint other officials who will negotiate with the US's best interest in mind. If the deal goes through, you elect different people who you trust will fix the laws you don't agree with.

"The people" never have a say in any legislation, not directly, and there are countless meetings that take place on Capitol Hill which aren't open to the public.

We don't have a "democracy" as you describe it, and for very good reason. Populism is reactionary and predatory. It would be very harmful to minorities if we did live in a system where the most popular decisions were the ones that got made. Remember prop 8 in California, or more recently brexit?

You just gave the cookie cutter answer without reading the comment you replied to. Some members of Congress were denied access to the agreement during the negotiations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership#Secr...

I still don't see a problem with barring members of congress from the TPP negotiations. It makes it harder for the Obama administration to convince them to pass TPP, but that's up to White House to decide if that's the most prudent way to negotiate, and apparently they thought so.

The "democratic" part of the TPP comes when the US elected the congress who will or won't pass the resolution, and when the US elected Obama into office to negotiate on our behalf.

> "The people" never have a say in any legislation, not directly,

I "think" that the existence of ballot initiatives (and especially direct initiatives) directly contradicts this. For a real life example of ballot initiatives in action: http://singlepayerhealthcarenow.com/2015/12/27/single-payer-...

You mean ballot initiatives like prop 8?

For as long as we have money (or crypto currencies or whatever the Spice may be) the world will always drive toward domination of those with money over those without. Governments can no longer protect the average person from being dominated by corporations and their interests.

> It took WikiLeaks to even let the public know of its existence.

A trade deal was openly proposed in 2008.[0] Wikileaks did not leak specific provisions until 2013.

I think it's reasonable to expect democratic accountability, which requires transparency in some part of the process.

That's compatible though with allowing a period of time where negotiators are allowed to work on drafts in private. Since legislators and the public are allowed to see the proposed agreement before ratification, I'm not as worried about the secrecy issue.

There was even an openly publicized notice and comment period where citizens were encouraged to weigh in on the draft with any concerns by writing directly to USTR.[1]

There are a lot of aspects of TPP I don't agree with, but the process wasn't quite as cloak and dagger as some have suggested.

[0] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&o...

[1] http://www.flushthetpp.org/your-chance-to-officially-tell-th...

Just to preface, I haven't decided myself on whether TPP is 'good' or 'bad'. Still in the researching phase. And I am very much in the same boat as the original comment wondering why there's such a seemingly strong consensus that it's not just bad from an economic sense, but evil from ethical/environmental/freedom reasons as well. Now all of these maybe true, but my alarm bells always go off when people scream so much hyperbole denouncing a certain thing.

However I have heard this specific argument that it was done in secret with no accountability, which is why it's evil and must be stopped. But, I just don't see much validity in this argument.

1. Initial negotiations happened in private, as I would assume any/all types of treaties, agreements, partnerships of this type would be. Imagine trying to conduct any negotiation out in public, it would devolve into rumor, hearsay, misinformation and be counter productive. For the HN crowd, the best analogy might be trying to conduct a sale of your company, or negotiating some contract with an important ($$) client. Always in secret, until all parties are satisfied and agreed upon.

2. Now, this being a democracy and a government partnership, it needs to be voted upon before becoming law even after all sides have agreed on the contents of the document. And so the full document has been made available here[1]. This allows the entire congress, as well as concerned citizens, to understand the details. An argument can be made that there wasn't sufficient time provided for this review process, but nevertheless, that's what your lawmakers are elected for, to review these types of things, or vote no/yes in response.

[1]: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-full-text-of-the-trans-paci...

yes, especially with TPP I'm not a fan of "this is bad! it will kill regulations! end of story!", that's not even very accurate. I'm opposed to TPP as a whole but there is a lot going on with it, it's a sprawling set of arrangements and "globalization" in the most basic sense is not a bad thing, unless you'd prefer third world countries stay excluded from participating in international economies. It's a mixed bag for sure but globalization is kind of here to stay. I found http://fusion.net/story/265095/tpp-trans-pacific-partnership... which at least explains some of what's going on with TPP and why some people might be in favor of it. In particular, it has some emphasis on the welfare of women and children which is likely why Hillary originally supported it (and I'm sure, in her not very secret meetings, she prefers something 95% like it in any case, just won't be called TPP). The intellectual property stuff is of course absolutely awful.

> There's a lot of abstract "this deal is bad!" stuff, but what, specific, are the issues with TPP?

Imagine a trade deal 100 years ago.

This deal will increase trade in all kinds of products, but it contains a rule saying "only the manufacturer of a machine is allowed to repair it." Anyone repairing a machine they bought would be breaking the law.

"Only a tiny portion of our economy is based upon machines", its defendants will say. "Yes, it has problems, but this increased trade in horse whips makes the deal worth it."

Here is a fairly detailed explanation of how the investor-state dispute resolution mechanism works, an analysis of how similar provisions in NAFTA have been used, and why this is bad for democracy.

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/upload...

There has been a very strong empirical correlation between free trade deals and subsequent negative economic fallout for average US citizens. In addition to what the others have said, this is another such free trade deal, but even larger than any other that has come before it.

Could you share a link(s) to the study that establishes a strong negative correlation between trade deals and the average American? I think the closest thing to a concensus among economists is that free trade produces some winners and losers, but on the whole, it improves overall welfare.

Could you share a link that shows the consensus is that on the whole free trade deals improve overall welfare.

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