Obama Administration Gives Up on Pacific Trade Deal

This is literally the exact same argument the first group of people to use the "America First" slogan made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee

And what those people ended up accomplishing was making sure that when the U.S. finally did enter World War 2, it did so more or less unarmed and with its Pacific Fleet sitting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Which meant that it took longer to defeat the Axis than it should have, and a lot more Americans (and people, both military and civilian, in all the other nations that struggled against fascism) had to die to make that happen.

In the age of rapid transit and telecommunications, the world is even smaller than it was then. Which makes hiding behind the oceans that sit between us and the rest of the world even less viable of a strategy today than it was.

A withdrawal of forces from ROK and Japan means that they now have to turn to China for protection from the lunatics in the North.

A world without NATO means that Russia gets to annex Russian-speaking regions of Estonia whenever they want, just like they ALREADY DID to the Ukraine.

It's tempting to believe that there are no militarist nuts with guns in the modern industrial world, but it's not true. What is true is that they've been largely suppressed in the post-cold-war era by American military dominance.

Until now. I'll actually put this prediction down in writing: before the end of Trump's term, there will be at least one shooting war involving one of the players mentioned above.

If anything, I think what killed her is that she is a very unexciting stay-the-course President. No major changes, just incremental improvements. Very likely what is actually happen in any Presidency. What's sad is that the American people punished her for actually being realistic about what a President can actually do.

There's not going to be a new border wall and there's not going to be any more jobs for the middle class. Clinton knows that, Trump doesn't.

President Obama ridiculed him to his face at the Correspondent's Dinner a few years back. The campaign is a Fuck You to Obama and the rest of the establishment that laughed at him as a lightweight.

He worked very hard and won and now he'll be improvising. He'll have to pay back some people that supported his campaign, many of whom have specific political goals. He'll allow them to work towards those. But apart from a big tax cut for the very rich (strangely) I'm almost certain see that he doesn't care much at all about the rest of his platform. Certainly not the Christian-right stuff.

Maybe he has a real conviction about trade deals. It'll be interesting to see if he moves the needle on any meaningful trade metrics.

That's just my personal impression from listening to him talk.

While I give credit that Trump may indeed be well intentioned but the main difference between him and Clinton is that Trump does not understand his words have consequences. Clinton knew to attack Trump the persona and not attack an ethnic group.

I don't agree with Trump but to think he really doesn't want to do the things he's been saying over the decades seems wrong.

It's going to be an awful four years where any of the good things Trump said (the stuff that resonated with Bernie supporters, renegotiating trade deals, infrastructure improvements, term limits and curtailing lobbyist influence ) are going to be flat out denied by this awful congress headed by one of the slimiest most cynical men in our history. Mitch McConnell's congress is a massive roadblock to progress.

This goes for tech too. American companies like Uber, Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple have been able dominate most of the world market. In a protectionist world they will be locked out, just like they are in China today.

If one wanted to look on the bright side, there's a chance that "I am a master businessman who can cut better deals" is a merely way to have something say about foreign policy without having to go to the effort of thinking about it.

Amazon sells their extra servers as a product. The US can start selling their extra nuclear weapons as a product. Business 101!

A couple interesting notes: the author predicts that in a world with less free trade the US would do relatively well thanks to shale oil and our other natural resources (like rivers and rich farmlands).

He also talks a lot about demographic changes. He says in the US this will cause some pain from ~2020-2030 as the baby boomers retire, but we'll recover as millennials enter the most productive years of their careers (40s-early 60s).

However he also predicts much more dire consequences for Russia due to demographic changes, and suggests they might not recover from a decline starting around 2020.

Compare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Russia_Sex_by_Age_2015010...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA_by_Sex_and_Age_2015-0...

I can't repeat the entire analysis from the book in this box but I've found the author's comments to be thought-provoking so far. :)

Of particular interest to the HN crowd, the author also argues that demographic issues mean that right now there is an unusually large amount of investable capital available, but this will soon change as baby boomers begin to retire and switch from accumulating and investing their money to trying to stretch what they've already earned to last the rest of their lives. He predicts we'll see much less money available for risky investments starting in the next few years, due simply to demographic changes around the world.

Of course, how do you keep insurance companies from going out of business under the weight of that provision? That's where the individual mandate came from--which is the least popular part of the law.

So: good luck with making the numbers work, Trump.

Keep in mind Obama also made many (leftist) promises in his 2008 campaign, such as closing Gitmo. Once he understood certain realities though, he had to abandon those promises and become more of a center-left president.

In this election, the Democratic base wanted a real leftist. That's why there was tremendous excitement about Bernie. The Democrats decided to field a center-right candidate instead. The result is clear: they got crushed.

A large daily dose of craven "speaks comfortable untruths for power" mainstream media, who have been owned by the military-industrial complex for decades. The morons at CIA didn't see it coming, that Americans would question the lies of network news, or else they would have attempted to strangle this internet thing in its cradle. They've adapted somewhat, e.g. the "good work" done at Facebook this cycle or the constant fear-mongering about Russia, China, North Korea, ISIS, etc. They just couldn't get their bloodthirsty old gal over the line, though.

The conspiracy theorist in me would like to be a fly on the wall in Pence's personal security briefings. If they hear what they like from him, he'll be our President in short order. Wasn't he a big incarceration fan?

1) A big strong guy, stronger than anyone else, fucks with anyone who tries to change anything

2) lots of strong people stop anyone who gets too destructive

I don't think 1 is remotely sustainable. 2 might be doable.

> In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners.[1]

> How can you take yourselves seriously?

Totally agreed.

If the US had low crime rates, great quality of life, and was seen as universally fair and just - well then 1 might work. But when it's so unjust, unfair, and unbalanced at home, while we spend billions abroad... it stops making sense.

Those things aren't really related, except as far as american attitudes go.

For example, a massive amount of money is spent on health care.

Same thing on the other side of the planet: both Japan and South Korea have very little military might; they depend on the deterrence the U.S. provides. They are looking at China and wondering what happens next.

If the U.S. reduces or removes these relationships, it will dramatically change these nations. Japan and China hate each other. If the U.S. draws back, Japan will complete its transition away from pacifism and will have nuclear weapons of its own in less than a decade. Same with South Korea.

Even if you think that the U.S. is not a leading light of democracy, these are real relationships and altering them has real consequences: more weapons and more tension among more nations in the world.

I agree. However, I also think that a lot of the world, especially Europe, has a strange and unrealistic vision of what a multi-polar world would look like. A multi-polar world looks like 18th and 19th century Europe writ large, with nation states jockeying for power, and war being considered as a logical extension of economic and political policy. It isn't nations coming together and negotiating peacefully at the EU or UN or wherever.

It feels a bit like the U.S. thinks the rest of the world isn't capable of looking after itself.

Arguably because the rest of the world isn't. If you look at the "free world", who actually spends even 1% of their GDP on defense? Heck, half of Germany's air force can't even fly because they've pared their maintenance budgets back too far to buy spare parts for their planes. When France and Italy bombed Libya, they had to rely on the US to provide necessary logistical support, like tankers and reconnaissance, and even the smartbombs themselves. Taiwan explicitly relies on US carriers to guarantee its territorial sovereignty against Chinese aggression. Japan likewise.

A world in which the US is in full retreat is not a more liberal, peaceful world. It's a world in which even more autocratic powers, like China and Russia advance.

EDIT: By the way, I totally agree that the US is overstretched. But unilateral retreat, leaving our allies in the lurch to face hostile powers on their own is not the correct way of addressing that problem.

Well, this was the sentiment of most Americans after World War 1. It took the attack on Perl Harbor for Roosevelt to have enough support from congress to join WWII.

I think that after WWII the US government made part of its foreign policy to use economic integration and military might to prevent any country from ever dragging them into WWIII.

I am personally not worried about China, Russia, the middle east or even North Korea. But I would be seriously worried to see Japan rebuild their military because we pulled our bases out of there.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/trump-or-n...

Of course, US spending could have been even lower still if we avoided using false pretences to engage in a pointless war of choice in Iraq, which, of course, had nothing to do with commitments to Europe or Japan.

(And the government can tax land all they want without disturbing the economy, so basic income is not much of a problem either. At least economically---politically land lavue taxes are hard to push through.)

Can you elaborate on that? What killed Detroit wasn't a trade deal, except to the extent that we allowed Japan to sell autos here at all.

What killed Detroit was a self-administered one-two punch: incompetent executives and engineers who designed awful cars that nobody wanted to buy, and unions who ganged up on their employers to demand outrageous compensation for building those cars.

Because millions of older, former Obama voters in the rust belt can recall when their small towns weren't chained-shut shitholes drowning in drug abuse, hopelessness and commercial devastation.

It was when the plant was open.

Those people, out of desperation, have given us Cheeto Jesus.

By no means am I for trade restrictions - I was just commenting on the fact that the answer (like most of any complex issues) is "it depends".

This plays out in every collective bargaining deal. The company says "here's the offer, if you don't like it, we'll close the place and go to [Alabama|Mexico|China]".

The automation thing is a statistics trick. You look at total value of the finished output which skews the numbers to things like car assembly where many tasks are automated, but ingnore the downstream parts manufacturing, much of which is offshore or in Mexico.

Have you ever seen a textile factory? There isn't a ton of automation for many phases of the work. Just a race to the bottom to places like Bangladesh where it's easy to abuse the workforce.

The economic outputs may be bigger, the cream is only rising to the top.

I've seen conflicting claims on this. Other reports say trade has caused massive job losses.

Anyone who lives in a formerly manufacturing heavy area is going to be find that argument hard to believe. We see companies closing down shops and moving them overseas time and time again.

The middle class is doing just fine, thank you.

If anything, you could try to make some argument about the poorer part of the population (though even they are not really impacted).

I don't think identity politics had anything to do with it. Bernie Sanders was against the TPP as much as Trump was, for many of the same reasons.

Without that part of the trade deal there would be no stoping a small country from what is essentially stealing from a international company. Before trade deals those types of disputes were usually settled with armed conflict.

Edit: Only ~50% of eligible voters voted. Half of those voted for the winner. That's only 25% that actively voted in support of the winner.

Because globalism is not going anywhere. Trump can't isolate the US without dramatic, negative consequences. Trade war with the China ? Economists predict a worldwide recession. Tariffs on Mexico to pay for the wall ? Good luck to US agriculture.

> Globalisation is happening regardless of whether people want it or not.

Why? Globalization is a product of human behavior and human choices. Neither sunspots, cosmic rays, hurricanes, or earthquakes make globalization happen. It seems absurd, to me, to pretend that globalization is this Force beyond our control, that we just have to adapt or die.

That isn't so. Globalization has gone on in the world because we, including and especially the United States of America, made it happen. The governing and business elite has chosen time and again to pursue globalization policies because it seemed like the right thing to do economically and often because it benefited them.

We can choose to enact different policies and go in a different direction any time we want, and even pro-free trade economists like Krugman concede that the consequences will not be particularly dire (see his Brexit commentary.)

The problem is not globalisation or change, its the idea and related political deception that somehow if there are protectionist barriers the emergence of new suppliers, products, new skills, new ideas will go away.

This is but one of several of similar distorted perceptions of reality that underpins the faulted democratic systems. If Society and government should facilitate something it's increased adaptability and acceptance for change, rather than selling the fraud that they can take it away.

There's no total fixed sum of `goodness' to go around in the economy.

That is not free trade.

When it comes to TPP in particular, I am radically opposed to their proposed IP laws. EFF has a short write up on how TPP undermines with digital IP: https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

Most importantly, it's not a "free trade deal". It's just a "trade deal". Australia's trade deals in the past with the US have done things like removed tariffs for all US goods coming here, but not removed tariffs the other way around. We're definitely the little brother in this relationship.

* Cheaper products for everyone

* Competition drives innovation

* Lower risk of large-scale wars

* Ship high-pollution industries overseas

* Improved price stability

In practice, it falls apart because...

- US has a poor social safety net. Low-income workers often end up jobless or in even lower skilled jobs

- Globalism builds bigger corporations, which actively suppress competition

- Big direct wars are replaced with constantly simmering proxy wars

- We can't control environmental degradation in other countries

Don't make multinational all-encompasing trade deals. If you want freer trade, the best way to do it is to make small agreements on a country-by-country basis to tear down some protectionist policies each party has against the other.

This allows you to pick and choose the deals the population wants.

If you guys wanna be better than China, please do it, by being better yourselves, not by making your competitors worse.

That attitude is improper, specially for the most powerful country.

The Obama administration on Friday gave up all hope of enacting its sweeping Pacific trade agreement, a pact designed to preserve U.S. economic influence in fast-growing Asia that was buried by a wave of antitrade political sentiment that culminated with Tuesday’s presidential election.

The WSJ article we are here to talk about actually equates the treaty with free trade.

The article also basically describes an alignment with Congressional GOP with Trump on the subject:

Just over a year ago Republicans were willing to vote overwhelmingly in support of Mr. Obama’s trade policy. But as the political season approached and voters registered their concerns by supporting Mr. Trump, the GOP reacted coolly to the deal Mr. Obama’s team reached with Japan and 10 others countries just over a year ago in Atlanta.

There are reasons not to equate the treaty with free trade and not to equate GOP with Trump but the actual article points out the links.

However, pushing back against the president is only one of many things Congress is designed to do. Other things include governing the country and dealing with its problems. These are the tasks they have been useless at. Long on obstruction, short on governance. It's what their supporters elected them to do, so in some sense they are doing the will of the constituents, but it doesn't make it any more adult or responsible or constructive.