US pulls out of Trans-Pacific Partnership
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
If someone believes international free trade is the cause of the gutting of American manufacturing and by proxy, local/regional economies, it's hard to argue that Clinton presented little more than nominal lip service to the cause, at least compared to the way that Trump and Sanders made it a core priority of their campaign and stump speeches.
[0] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trade-tpp-20160926...
Also, she was not that compelling as a candidate. And had all those negatives that I won't go into. Most of them false. But still, why do you put up a establishment candidate on a change cycle (looking at you Wassermann and Brazille, core dems)?
Edit: I don't especially like TPP but I saw it as a strategic shift to Asia for the US. Now China will likely join a TPP-light and really benefit. For better or worse this is going to be a big change over the next 20 years.
Bill signed NAFTA, not to mention moved the Democratic Party to the right on many economic issues. He just looked cool doing it.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/6616
(note the email is from 2015)
As for Trump, he's done 2 of the "Seven actions to protect American workers" he promised for the first 100 days in office (PDF):
https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/_landings/contract/O-TRU-102...
Pretty easy to hit milestones when the goals are low. "Announce intent" and "Stop bill that was never going to pass congress" aren't exactly adroit acts of statesmanship.
OTOH "making a clear, simple statement about something that hits a raw nerve with tens of millions of working-class Americans -- but which Hillary won't touch with a ten-foot pole until way too late" matters a hell of a lot. And has a lot to do with how this man came to get as far as he has, so far.
> Here is a letter I've drafted outlining our position on trade. This draft assumes that Clinton will ultimately support the TPP and TPA, but we may change the letter dramatically if Clinton does not end up supporting the TPP and TPA (ostensibly because the final agreement doesn't cause a net gain in jobs).
The only "new evidence" that would sway Clinton's opinion on the TPP were poll numbers.
Sounds like direct democracy to me! She's following the will of the people!
> “I still believe in the goal of a strong and fair trade agreement in the Pacific as part of a broader strategy both at home and abroad, just as I did when I was secretary of State,” she said in a statement. “But the bar here is very high and, based on what I have seen, I don't believe this agreement has met it.”
Of course Clinton, nor Obama, would sign a trade agreement that wouldn't be a "fair" agreement. But "fair" is not binary. Clinton could just as easily sign the bulk of the agreement as president after she claims that her advisers have negotiated for some concessions to make TPP more "fair". But Trump from the very start said he was going to kill it.
As another example, Trump, and every other politician, has been following the popular sentiment that drug companies (e.g. Shkreli, Epi-Pens, etc) shouldn't be gouging people on life-saving drugs. There's a lot of strong ways to criticize drug companies, and every politician does it because it means free positive press. But Trump outright said in his last president-elect presser that drug companies were "Getting away with murder." [0]
With healthcare in general, it remains to be seen if his promised reforms are going to be a net benefit. Or whether killing free trade will be a net benefit, for that matter. But Trump at least states his views in clear terms. Again, not saying that that's ultimately a great way of governance (massive government decisions and policy are a work of process and compromise), but hey, that's the kind of personality people say they want in their politicians.
[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-drugpricing-idUS...
Sure, if you hate reading history books. The thing is, we actually have quite a lot of evidence about matters of international trade already which one side in this debate consistently ignores in favor of hypotheticals.
TPP was an easy call. For NAFTA he's going to pull some Carrier renegotiate bullshit. Smoke and mirrors. It's too big to kill. Maybe over 10 years. Maybe.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/08/news/companies/carrier-jobs-...
Don't get me wrong I like protecting jobs in the US and have been very pro-US made. But Trump is not that and is just turning the steal-from-middle-class dial up to 11.
No, it doesn't show that at all. It shows that staff had done some preparatory work on the explicitly-uncertain assumption that an ongoing discussion would end up a particular way. Which clearly shows that, at least as far as the author of the email was concerned, what Clinton would end up doing was unknown.
What does this have to do with the discussion? It seems to be purely political advocacy. Personally, I'd prefer we not have it on HN.
Trump made it clear that he wasn't going to change the status quo, but painting it as a change to the status quo is false.
The first part of the comment in question seems fine; the last is an ad for a politician.
It also helped define Trump's campaign because like a lot of issues his stance on it had little relation to the actual facts. TPP had plenty of problem that made it overall a bad agreement. Opposing it was generally smart. However, there was no indication that such a deal would have harmed the US economy. There is also wide consensus among economists that free trade benefits the nation at large. It isn't the fault of the economists that this country does a bad job of sharing the benefits of such deals with the entire population.
China has a couple of free trade deals in the region. It has a multilateral effort (RCEP) which is somewhat stalled and primarily pursued bilateral trade agreements.
This may put American and China toe-to-toe in reaching agreements with Asian Pacific states. There’s a question about the quality of the trade deals that can be reached, if the target nations are clever enough to play Beijing and Washington off against one another.
The Trump Administration has suggested that bilateral agreements are better because they don’t devolve into “least common denominator” the way multilateral deals do; and that they also allow the deals to be quickly withdrawn from or renegotiated to account for new realities.
* Powerful nations want bilateral agreements, because it's the strong negotiating with the weak. Imagine the U.S. negotiating a trade deal with Nicaragua: The U.S. position is overwhelmingly strong; they could walk away and cancel all trade with Nicaragua; the U.S. would hardly notice and Nicaragua's economy would be devastated. (EDIT: I'll add that this is true of the powerful everywhere; e.g., large businesses don't want to negotiate with government or Congress (law and regulation) or a class in court (a class action), they want to deal with individual consumers one by one.)
* Supporters of an international rules-based, law-based order, and of a democratic and rights-based order want broad multilateral agreements. Then the weak nations can band together and resist the powerful; it gives them self-determination, the foundation of democracy; it creates rule of law rather than rule of the powerful. Also, instead of an exceptionally complex system of individual agreements between each pair of countries, it creates one standard - much more like a law. Imagine a global business trying to parse the individual trade deals between every pair of countries from its supply chain to its retail customers - an incredibly, needlessly complex level of regulation compared to one international standard. Imagine if the 50 U.S. states only had bilateral trade deals with each other - that would be 1,225 deals, endless red tape for a national business (and there are many more countries than U.S. states). A major reason the U.S. is so wealthy is that it's the largest single, unified economy; that's what the EU hopes to equal.
For example, in the South China Sea, China says they want bilateral negotiations with each country - they oppose the current U.S.-led international order and want negotiations they can dominate. The U.S. and China's neighbors want a multilateral deal; they want to continue the rule of international law and the U.S.-led order, and want to negotiate from a position of strength.
My guess in this case is that it's a reflection of the fact that Trump, the Republicans, and their big business constituents prefer rule of the powerful.
To add to this comment, there’s more nuance when speaking less generally:
* In cases where there is competition between powerful nations, weaker nations can and do gain advantage by playing the interests of one country off of one another. For instance, during the Cold War the United States and Soviet Union would engage in trade, weapons, and security deals. States caught in the middle understood that both empires were competing with one another to either expand their network outward or prevent the other from doing so (America often included “and you may not trade with the Soviet Union” as an aspect of its bilateral negotiations) would try to internalize the security/strategic value that the empires sought - rather than the pure quid-pro-quo of markets.
* The United States effort with both NAFTA and the TPP were to contain Russia and China, respectively, by building a coalition of countries with trade that excludes each specific United States adversary. This strategically weaponizes the second point above: coalitions of nations together banded together against a more powerful economic force. Similarly, the Chinese RCEP agreement bands together trade centered around the Chinese economy, and excludes the United States. Indeed, the Soviet Union was, as a security/power concept, an idea that a trade network on the Eurasian Supercontinent would be able to outperform and outcompete other continental sized trade networks (the United States), which led the United States to disrupt the trade framework with proxy war, etc.
* Similar episodes are common throughout history: Nasser’s Egypt had tried, unsuccessfully, to create a Republic of Arab nations in the Middle East, so that they could collectively bargain and negotiate with external powers such as Europe and the United States. This was considered a security threat to these powers, because the West much preferred strong-on-weak bilateral agreements, protectorates and mandates.
From the security side of the coin, great nations including China, Russia (now the Eurasian Union), and the United States strategically try to build coalitions of small nations against their powerful adversaries in an attempt to disrupt their ability to successfully compete.
The Trump Administration decision to abandon this represents an idea that the United States will be able to “out-deal” regional competitors (primarily China but also Japan, South Korea) on a one-for-one basis. My guess is that the diplomacy will get very nasty - even if its all in the back room.
> The United States effort with both NAFTA and the TPP were to contain Russia and China, respectively, by building a coalition of countries with trade that excludes each specific United States adversary
As I understand it (I'm no expert in the field), U.S. policy in regard to China is that its rise to superpower status is inevitable, and the U.S.'s strategy is to get China to join a rules-based (i.e., law-based) international order - preferably the existing one - rather than create an anarchic great power competition that often results in terrible wars. On a political level, TPP was designed as a step in that direction; it wasn't intended to exclude China but to compel them to join a rules-based trade regime for the Pacific - i.e., either play by the rules or be excluded from trade. The goal was that they would join.
Interesting. My understanding is quite the opposite: that the U.S. policy in regard to China is that its rise to superpower status is in question.
China is 25 years or more from being on par with the United States in terms of military projection in its own region (much less power projection in distant lands and seas). China has legitimate issues with all of its territories that have strategic resources: its water is in Tibet, its minerals and oil is in its Uyghur region. The United States today has China surrounded by the "first island chain." China's economy is robust, but has inherent weaknesses that could cause it to fracture as it tries to jump the 'middle income gap'. Indeed out of several dozens of states that have attempted jumping the gap, only a couple have succeeded. Ongoing sovereignty disputes in Hong Kong and Taiwan keep the Chinese mainland divided and focused in on its own territory. Japan today could match Chinese military might, and with the right trajectories could maintain an upper hand in the future. America has tried to block Chinese multilateral/international banking efforts (AIIB, ADB, etc) and it's admission into the Special Economic Basket of currencies at the IMF. Today the United States (well, under the prior administration...) is trying to prevent full membership of China inside the WTO, and it's membership isn't guaranteed. India forms a natural check on Chinese regional power as its population is larger than China and its economy is growing at even faster rates. Russia (which shares a huge and important border with China) and America both eye China and it's ambitions and could individually or together align to snuff Chinese expansion where they to find a good justification. China's international investments are questionable, as much of them are in countries with poor histories of solvency (this is a strategic bet on the part of China). It's One Belt One Road infrastructure project is vulnerable to stability issues in Central Asia (of which there is a long history). The people's party in China also (rightly) fears regime change operations in their country - this remains a real possibility. China has a burgeoning nuclear power (DPRK) on its border, a nation in dispute with a long time American military protectorate.
The United States has a lot of issues it can make with China, from internation trade, currency practices, South China Sea settlement, Taiwan and recognition of independence, Japanese security (look at their reform of National Security legislation), Indian bolstering, Korean Unification, Russia's far east, Central Asian proxies, etc.
The United States is hoping that, with containment pressure on all of China's strategic bets that it won't be able to realize its ambitions to greatness - and will fizzle. This is a practiced playbook: it's how the United States prevented the Soviet Union from realizing super power parity. Curiously, the timeline originally predicted by strategic thinkers for the Soviet Union for parity was also "25 years."
Including China into the "rules-based international order" isn't code for "we want a nation as powerful as our own to also rule the international order." The United States Grand Stategy toward China - indeed toward any and every potential adversary - is to prevent their rise by raising obstacles and costs to its succession.
Our understandings are different, of course, and it's great to learn another perspective. I agree with much of what you say, I just think it weighs less heavily. But a few concrete points:
1) A minor point: China's massive and questionable investments in poor countries are not grants, but loans (at least, based on what I've read). They may be creating leverage over those countries via debt, similar to what the West had at least until massive debt forgiveness.
2) 25 years is a larger number than what I understand. Depending on how it's measured, China's economy already is ~75% of the U.S.'s size and growing much more quickly (though with many serious risks, as you point out). Also, they don't need complete parity, just the prospect of parity - that will be enough to intimidate neighbors. Finally, China currently can focus all their resources on one region; the U.S.'s are distributed globally - one reason Obama hoped to withdraw from some situations.
3) My understanding was that the Cold War 'containment' strategy was not based on the assumption that the USSR would reach parity, but that their Communist economic system was fatally flawed, would inevitably collapse, and all the West had to do was wait and keep the USSR contained. At the time, some did claim that the USSR would or even did catch up - IIRC (a hazy memory of the histories I read) Kissinger thought so and so did the CIA at some point(s). But mainly we tried to pressure them into failing; that's the popular wisdom for why Reagan engaged in an arms buildup and 'Star Wars' missile defense. Regardless, based on hazy memory of numbers from the 1970s that I saw a year ago, the USSR and Warsaw Pact grew to around 50% of NATOs economic strength.
> The United States Grand Strategy
From what I've read many times from foreign policy insiders, such a thing doesn't exist. The foreign policy institutions are so massive and complex, from Dept of State to Dept of Defense to the National Security Advisor and staff, to all the large subcomponents of each, to Congress, to all the career bureaucrats that outlast any President, that getting them all moving in the same direction is impossible. Also, those people are disappointingly and shockingly focused on the day-to-day; few have time for grand strategy. As one person observed,
If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, '[t]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,' then the government is a genius.
I think you would enjoy the whole article:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/12/05/how-the-u-s-saw-syrias-w...
1) Yes agreed here. The investments/loans aren't gifts. They are expected back - with interest - and there is real risk that insolvency and default will stall the investments. This gives China leverage, it develops regions that create the possibility of alternative trade routes and supply chains from the US system, and ultimately China expects their investments not only to produce growth but also pay back into the Bank of China.
2) The 25 year forecast is for regional military parity. Economic parity is on a similar timeline, but I don't know offhand what the most recent projections are. If you look at the strategic literature, many analysts (even journalists) focus on China's ascention in 2040-2050: 25-35 years. (25 years is the smaller number of the projections.) You will have difficulty finding analysts discussing Chinese ascension in 2030 or 2020. I would be interested, of course, in any such literature.
3) "their Communist economic system was fatally flawed, would inevitably collapse, and all the West had to do was wait" - this was Cold War propaganda, which reinforced the message that "The USSR is the wrong trade network to be in" ("Our trade network is the one to be in ;)"). The strategic thinkings from the National Security core of the United States was focused on economic warfare of all kinds that would put pressure on the USSR to collapse. The USSR had attempted to organize strategic resources across nations. When these states were flipped, either by "accidents to their leadership", economic pressure from the US trade network, diplomatic pressure, or internal instability, the USSR needed to reallocate and adjust its system. Twenty five years of unconventional warfare intended to cut the Soviet Union from strategic resources in key areas (Middle East and Central Asia), raise its costs with proxy wars and arms races, containment strategies that limited its options for economic flexibility, and pressure on China to pry the Soviet Union apart from the inside ultimately thwarted the attempt to foment the Eurasian free trade network. The Security State in America was _not_ resting on their laurels, waiting for the USSR to "just collapse". The actions of the United States were meant to put as much pressure toward insolvency and inflexibility in the Union as possible.
> From what I've read many times from foreign policy insiders, such a thing doesn't exist. The foreign policy institutions are so massive and complex, from Dept of State to Dept of Defense to the National Security Advisor and staff, to all the large subcomponents of each, to Congress, to all the career bureaucrats that outlast any President, that getting them all moving in the same direction is impossible.
No, the US has Grand Stategies. You can download, for example, the once-leaked copy of the Bush Administration era "Wolfowitz Doctrine".
Now the interagency process of getting a giant organization like the United States government and private sector to act together in coordinated concert? That's another problem entirely, and something that -rightfully- foreign (and domestic) policy insiders complain about. The difficulty of administering a giant bureaucracy is not the same as there being no Grand Strategy: indeed you can find declassified documents, leaked copies (as mentioned), strategic advice for modernization of Grand Strategy and the like.
Thanks, I'll read this later! FP is... okay. It's just so full of childish references ("pee"-otus), quips and nationalist gilding it's hard to read some times. Though some of their authors are very nice when the editing isn't heavy handed and there's not much competition on the subject (incredibly).
I agree about FP; I don't read it regularly but I'll follow a link there. I'd love to know what you do read. I've actually found a lot of quality sources over the years (depending on how you define it); I can send you a spreadsheet listing most of them if it interests you. I'm always interested in finding more and better sources.
Here's one of my favorite hidden gems:
* The Lowy Interpreter
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter
The Lowy Institute is Australia's leading foreign policy think tank, as far as I can tell. They provide expert insight and often a much different perspective than U.S. and European peers, both about the issues we know and also about which issues are important. And it's relatively well written.
Some sources that may interest you: The Federation of American Scientists (fas.org), the Strategic Studies Institute (strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil), OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu/courses/political-science/), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (csis.org).
Reddit /r/geopolitics maintains a wiki with a list of open source references that you may find interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/wiki/index
There's too many things to recommend: foreign news outlets, official press briefings, leaked documents, academic and military history, think tanks and their analysis.
Basic advice: read everything and don't believe any of it.
Also, if you know a forum with valuable, intelligent, somewhat sophisticated discussion of international relations (i.e., non-partisan, non-ideological, non-Internet-style ranting and hyperbole), I would love to know about it.
> read everything and don't believe any of it.
Unfortunately, I lack the time to read even the good stuff. My RSS feed is up to 500+ items per day and I try to be picky about what is included.
If you want to keep the link secret, here's a public key you can encrypt the link to:
-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY----- MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAs+Zefow5vk22331dfQD/ VB/l8CbDNx+fo3r4MUGuOSVBnq2U2mEE0Q91oGSeSluuq7OHRuaZ0O3fKi793+ne LH41NNH8Yn9Dn6dyvyxyM2+mXa7g6pxhb2fjhUl2Sp8DhcaxKlpHSGY0B9sJGu7H oBiFzO3wd/GO0mI0wdW+/7SpqaidjrLiyA2Lftdo3IrVqHCQL0CqbmFC1xK3kAKE xIgWTA07HG3AyJpyUp1tRNP70czWn6Pl9pIufjalgZPjeNNej+R6q7WKLfH8gBZR lWEtsQnag53fyjrn2LySAbXrdRNTXoGecAliONSV6atmiqr1pa6iH6xfPFH+ebON vwIDAQAB -----END PUBLIC KEY-----
Or, if all of that is too complicated how do you feel about https://filetea.me/?
https://filetea.me/n3wYtvASptWSLuUxURLHFMhtw
I wish there was something like it for the publications I haven't read, which makes me think that maybe (a very few) others might find use for what I've done. If you have an idea of how to reach them or utilize it, I'd appreciate it. Please don't share it yourself.
I hadn't used FileTea before; it's perfect for many uses. Does the shared file expire at some point?
EDIT: I should add that it omits some sources that I subscribed to before I started the spreadsheet, including the leading think tanks (Brookings, CSIS, Rand, etc.), the Financial Times ... that's all I can think of off the top of my head.
So I think we both need to be online at the same time for it to work...
The documentation states: "FileTea does not store any file in the server. It just synchronizes and bridges an upload from the seeder with a download to the leacher."
I used my email client as a quick way to encode it and posted the whole MIME part, in case that's somehow useful. The link will expire in a day.
I wonder how Filetea works. Their server does act as intermediary but apparently doesn't cache the file; still, my computer was online with the Filetea tab showing the file still open (but in the background). They refer to leecher and seeder so at least they are inspired by P2P file sharing networks.
This should be easier. Technically, there's no reason typical end-users couldn't anonymously and easily share files on a one-to-one basis. Maybe there is an easier way; I just hardly ever have to do it.
I'm very impressed by the level of effort that has gone into curating this information.
I will get back to you (I'll find you on HN) after digesting this information.
Ironically, most of those small, weaker countries are not democratic.
And this is why "hard Brexit" is such a risky endeavor for the UK.
The EU is much larger and more experienced in trade deals. From day one Britain will be negotiating from a position of weakness. Once negotiations begin, Britain has a hard 2-year deadline... And to make it worse, they don't have people with experience in bilateral trade agreements because the EU has been in charge of those for 40 years.
The British press is trying to spin this inherently weak position into a matter of EU countries looking to punish Britain, or other such nonsense.
Power, soft and hard, depends in large part on pure economic capacity; that enables many things, including economic leverage, larger militaries, and high tech. I don't have the old numbers, but look at this list and imagine their relative power as individual nations before the rise of China and India:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no...
But China and India likely will take two of the top three spots, along with the U.S., leaving those individual European powers far behind - $5 trillion economies in a world of $25 trillion superpowers (making a guess at future growth). They will be small fish among the sharks, no longer with a place at the table or influence on global affairs. A unified EU would be a fourth power, but that takes time, especially the political unification necessary to conduct foreign affairs (where the EU government has unified control of foreign policy - otherwise their words aren't backed up by the actual power). They are moving the wrong way.
China's economy is built on international trade - specifically, their massive exports - and the movement of money and goods. They don't like it in some cases, but that's true of every nation.
By cancelling it, Trump has handed 1/3 of the worlds GDP to China. Because I suspect China will step in and seal the deal.
I know Trump railed about the TPP. But I'm sad no one stood up to defend it. Clinton just flipped flopped. I suppose it's easier for the average American to understand "China is taking you job away" (and that's not the whole truth anyway) then to explain the nuances of soft power.
With TPP gone. We now really only have one form of leverage over China. The military. And I damn glad I'm retired from the Army.
As an Indian, I feel frustrated that the world doesn't think that the economic advancement of India and South Africa are undesirable. Seriously?
Maoism and militant trade unionism in the structured economic sector living in parallel with bonded labor and child exploitation in unstructured economy makes it a world of contradictions.
I fully expect ASEAN countries will move forward with this now.
I never very much liked the TPP as it very clearly represented not only unwelcome international competition and power projection, but also because its chapters (first leaked and then eventually published) very clearly benefit large multinational businesses that lord over the United States' strategic resources, exacerbating issues of economic equality on the homeland. The benefit to the American people was that it made problems for the Rise of China - the real possibility of which could see my generations' children and grandchildren in an America that doesn't dominate the world like we do today.
I always felt like there was a better way: a way to both build America so that it is happy and safe, and create deals that benefit all social classes in the homeland.
I'm fairly certain that the Trump Administrations' instincts here will be to replace economic coercion with military coercion and I'm fairly certain that the administration's replacement deals will just as unequally favor those in America who already wield an outsized share of power.
In this regard I'm glad to see TPP go but I would much rather have seen a more creative administration holding the reins.
I'm assuming now that US companies won't be able to do this, but is the TPP still binding between the rest of the ratified countries?
This is not what the TPP said. Corporations can already sue nations. The TPP defined an arbitration system, one that nations have a long, long history of winning in.
I don't think that was ever true about TPP to start with.
This for example:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kill-the-dispute-set...
The TPP seemed to be more about free flow of capital, rather than free trade as such. Free trade is probably a good thing, but the TPP didn't include free movement of labor, which is certainly a good part of free trade.
The TPP was more "Globalism for me, but not for thee" from the multinationals.
And since Trump's government is backtracking to protectionism, manufacturing jobs will less likely be delegated to countries like Vietnam, and countries like Japan doesn't have its back from US to confront China(Abe must be scratching his head right now, lol), I think it is much less appealing for those countries to hand over domestic control over regulations in exchange for something lesser.
disclaimer: I have no stance on the TPP, deferring to experts who have the time and expertise to correctly evaluate it.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Invest...
There were two main things that the TPP did that caused a lot of controversy: it streamlined trade between signatories, which is great if you're a business owner or a consumer (because it drives down the cost of goods and labor) or a worker in a country with high unemployment and low wages (I'm talking Bangladesh here, not the U.S.). It's not so great if you're a worker in a country with high wages like the U.S. because free trade tends to drive wages towards being more uniform, so if you're in a high-wage country you can expect your wages to go down, or to lose your job altogether.
The second controversial provision was stronger enforcement of intellectual property laws, often allowing corporations to take unilateral measures against alleged infringers that bypassed local laws. The allegation was that this provision effectively turned multinational corporations into de-facto governments, thus undermining democracy.
These are the main reasons the TPP was very unpopular in the U.S.
The argument in favor of the TPP was that the status quo has a lot of problems that need fixing (which is true) and that the TPP, flawed as the process and the result may have been, was our best shot at fixing them (which may also have been true).
Negotiating any treaty behind closed doors, let alone seeing encroachments on discretionary rights like intellectual property in the various leaks, should be met with skepticism and determent.
I live in Canada, and the politician who negotiated on behalf of my country is in the neighbouring city. At some point I hope to have a chance to ask him face-to-face how he justified negotiating that deal in secret.