One of the most worrying trends of the last century has been the President abusing his treaty powers to end-run around the democratic process domestically. It's a surrendering of our sovereignty to internationalist interests.
Further, it's in the best interest of the company to support these corporations because they hire millions of workers who pay taxes and without them this country would be as poor as Uganda.
"company"?
> because they hire millions of workers who pay taxes and without them this country would be as poor as Uganda.
You are committing the fallacy of assuming if they don't get anything they want down to the last iota, they will pick up their stuff and go someplace else. That's not true; if they could have done that, they would have done that already for tax reasons.
Possibly a Freudian slip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudian_slip
So, presumably then acting in a questionable manner is fine because lots of "little" people make money from it. There for, if we assume such people understand that their money comes from such practices, they must there for approve?
Ok, so, if it is so important that this corruption exists and it makes the "little man" money, then why is it such a secret? Or are we saying if fine to break laws or act in a shady way, as long as people make money?
I'm sorry, I really don't understand the point of saying that regular people and employees own some stock. I don't see how that justifies or excuses questionable practice. Besides, if its benefiting one bunch of stock holders, it must be that another bunch are somewhere losing out.
If we agree that free flow of commerce benefits us as a society and trade protectionism is harmful, then the debate is between state-sanctioned liberalism (free-trade through policy and partnership agreements) vs actual liberalism (free-trade by removing trade barriers and tariffs).
The Trans-pacific agreement goes well beyond reducing tariffs, it would establish a complex array of new barriers and policies as well:
> [TPP] is a comprehensive free trade agreement, affecting trade in goods, rules of origin, trade remedies, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical barriers to trade, trade in services, intellectual property, government procurement and competition policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership
Large corporations acting out of self-interest would prefer to exploit a heavily state-controlled trade policy to gain advantages over smaller companies who can't afford the lawyers and politicians to navigate the complex legal and political process.
A purely liberal approach is not in the interest of big corps, despite the common perception that big-corp CEOs are all free-market libertarians. They want free-markets for participants, but with strong limitations in place on who can become a market participant.
One could argue that the barriers are necessary to protect consumer interests, but when the barriers (especially during instantiation via secret meetings and later during enforcement) are only navigable by large powerful companies, than the intended protections become significantly weakened. Primarily because - by side effect - the laws become easily influenced/tailored to existing companies, and therefore counter-act any long-term benefit by removing the additional consumer protections that would naturally occur via competition.
I only touched on the corporate perspective, the same sentiment applies to countries within and outside of the agreements.
> If we agree that free flow of commerce benefits us as a society and trade protectionism is harmful
That's not a premise we get to assume. It's for voters to decide. State sanctioned liberalism is anti-democratic to the extent it's not driven by voters, and so is actual liberalism, to the extent it is achieved by preventing voters from enacting protectionist policies.
Treaties are undemocratic by design. The framers worried that a democratic republic would not be able to present a unified front internationally. But the purpose of treaties was to govern international relations, not submarine domestic legislation under the guise of international relations.
Most treaties are CEA agreements that are subject to the presentment clause.
>>International treaties are given to the Senate on a take it or leave it basis,
Regular Treaties can certainly be amended by the senate that then makes ratification conditional.
>>and do not require any approval from the most democratic chamber of Congress: the House.
Hence the two thirds voting requirement for an international agreement that governs foreign relations.
A funny result of that is despite all the negativity, the US actually met the requirements anyway: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/05/usa-meets-kyoto-protoc...