Whoever Is Leaking Trans-Pacific Partnership Drafts: Please Leak More
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All over - stories about propping up the rich on the backs of anyone not rich. The thing is, the middle and lower classes are complicit in their own demise, voting in conservative governments or lackey liberals who don't even make attempts to keep their corporate connections secret anymore - let alone their desires to make life easier on those that already have it the easiest. Just toss a few "abortion" quotes around and the public will distract themselves with infighting while their standards of living are being destroyed, and for the first time in modern history, your kids won't be better off or live longer than you.
Used to be we could say that at least there were scientists and other altruistic professions out there fighting the good fight. But even they are being actively stifled in order to boost corporate profits (US, Canada, others.)
I don't even know. I hate being pessimistic.
Apologies. End rant.
Identities based on direct participation in citizenship, perhaps? http://ipfs.io/
There's reason to hope. As a nation we have faced bigger issues than this and come out on top. Besides, there are still a handful of decent ways out. Social policy like reducing the workweek to restore supply/demand balance in the labor market could work. So could basic/minimum income, although I suspect that it's politically untenable even though it would be cheaper in the big picture. The least efficient but most probable (IMO) approach would be to grow the size of our creaking, bloated menagerie of inefficient social programs.
So far, capitalist societies have generally been far better than Marx assumed at figuring out how to implement the minimum possible social policy to stave off rebellion. I don't know whether to call it optimistic or pessimistic, but I suspect the trend will continue. Hopefully we won't go full Orwell in the process, but I wouldn't put money on it. We're already turnkey-Orwell and I think most of us can tell which way the wind is blowing.
More optimistically, I think there's also a chance that market dynamics will shift for the better due to technological change. Sure, 3D printing has been overhyped to the moon and back, but if rents are increasing while the inefficiency of distributed production is decreasing, then eventually there's going to be a crossing point. Once everyone has self-replicating farms, power shifts back to the people and free market dynamics start working for the masses instead of against them. It'll require a ton of effort and investment to make it happen, but that makes it just the sort of thing to provide opportunity to the HN crowd :)
/crazy speculation
Rent-seeking and leasing of equipment are more likely, ensuring that the power relations of today are secured for the future.
Especially now, with police force having citizenproof MRAPs, drones and all that lovely toys. Or they could tax you to hell and back and then use the toys.
One good example might be the Portuguese Carnation Revolution that took place in 1974. It overthrew a corporatist dictatorship where private enterprise created a feudal system based on state sponsored monopolies handed out to a few families. The dictator himself was apparently modest in his life style, but his friends running the monopolies were very wealthy. Life for the common person improved significantly after the revolution with access to free health-care, more education and better worker rights.
Cuba is a more mixed bag because they don't have the benefit of the massive geographic and population sizes that the previous two countries have, but for the ordinary Cuban, for a few decades, the gains were astronomical.
The seeds of the Iranian revolution were that of a popular, anti-colonial revolt, before it got high-jacked by the clerics and turned into a theocratic shitshow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NKVD#NKVD_activities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_political_repressions
etc, etc...
In my opinion, the middle and lower classes don't vote enough, and therein lies the crux of complicity. If it were somehow required that you had to bring 8 other people with you to vote, if you knew of them - i.e. make it a 'thought-crime' - and knew they were openly stating that they were not going to vote - then it'd get fixed right up.
i.e. a voters bounty for registered, un-voters.
I suppose there are huge flaws in this, but I seriously think it'd be fun for a lot of people if there were suddenly 'vote sheriffs' out there, making sure that people exercised their right to apply power to the politics. People always deserve the whips and bonds they freely choose, when done in freedom. If todays democracy is merely the lesser evil, then a lesser evil even still is total democracy.
At least, I favour organized means of encouraging every 18+ person, citizen, to vote. Voting is meant to solve problems created by incumbent possessors of force, who get too used to their power.
(Note: I also do believe in the right to not vote - i.e. as protest over 'the system', but in the immediate reality of our world today, we need more people actually voting to support their point of view than just those who feel the need to express their point of view. Voting is existence.
If you want to draw parallels between the situation in the US & Canada and the situation in the UK, I would point you at the Conservative government's attempt to stifle education on global warming, and the cosy relationship between the government and corporations, particularly the banks.
I was aware of that argument at the time, but has it panned out that way? I wouldn't be surprised at figures showing either direction. e.g.
1. The initial loan/funding is still from "the government" so from day zero, the government is most likely paying 3x the amount. It'll be years before each student pays this back and until then, "the government" is hardest hit?
2. With the push to send more to university, there'll be more students this year than e.g. 4 years ago. Did projections hold up? At £27k/head it doesn't take a large % increase to make a considerable difference & I wouldn't be surprised to hear that universities have far larger incomes than the past or projected.
3. And then you get into the issue of whether the majority will ever manage to pay off these loans... will we 'all' end up paying for anyway in the end to cover the deficit...? Would it've been cheaper just to tax us to begin with before letting interest acrue?
That was not always the case. Wars, dictatorships, economic cycles, all affect how well a generation does.
For instance, articles such as these always sensationalize some of the issues. This article claims that the agreement would allow corporations to sue governments for instituting policies that hurt their bottom line. This is probably true but this would cover expropriation, which many people feel is unjust. I know many in US cringe at reports of Venezuela's government expropriating business through force. Many would agree that if you have a law abiding business it would be wrong for the government to come in and take all your capital as their own. What I imagine corporations believe is that this should be interpreted more broadly.
For instance, if you agree that expropriation is bad, at what point does negatively harming a brand image effectively become expropriation? If a government makes you put a warning label? Plain packaging? Patent infringement?
Unfortunately, even if you agree with very strong property rights, this will almost certainly not be applied evenly and without special carve-outs.
edit: repatriation -> expropriation
In many instances, the property right is questionable. Much of the property right, such as with IP, was built on the back of a looser interpretation. Disney's earliest years of spoofing mainstream cultural vernacular with Mickey Mouse is perhaps the most well cited example. We could also question the legitimacy of the well documented fleecing of earlier African American musical artists during the 40s-70s that in turn amassed vast libraries of IP.
Art moves as language and relies on an interaction with the language of the culture. The excessive IP is nothing more than a locking away of the keys that permitted the mega corporations to come to power in the first place.
Illegitimate hegemony. Appropriated content. Preserved as capital by those with little to no involvement with its creation.
NPR had a great article about US tariff policy. It detailed a 3,000 page book that's used to set the appropriate tax:
> The book lists the tax that importers have to pay on approximately every single thing in the universe — including, of course, T-shirts. They're right there under heading 6109: T-shirts, singlets, tank tops and similar garments, knitted or crocheted.
The average tax rate on stuff coming into the U.S. is around 2 percent. The tax on T-shirts is much higher: 16.5 percent. That's what we'll be paying on the Planet Money men's shirts, which were made in Bangladesh. But the Planet Money women's shirts were made in Colombia — and those, according to the book of everything, come in duty-free, with no tariff at all. [0]
To me it just seems very arbitrary and hence rife for corruption.
[0] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/12/06/247361423/the-gian...
To an extent, even these forms of capital are accrued on the back of societal and cultural context.
If one inherit's a home from a family member, under what contexts was that permitted? Did we stop to evaluate how much capital and property right was appropriated illegitimately? Did we evaluate government endorsed privilege and bias in the transaction[1]?
Did we stop to evaluate what property was accumulated under corrupt special-interest lobbying such as the TPP itself?
Ultimately, all capital and property is birthed from the culture. In many instances, gender and sex, birthright, race, and a plethora of other chance based factors result in an accumulation or deflation of capital and property.
[1] See legislated housing policies in Chicago for example. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117912/reparations-how-mo...
One can argue that we can vote but most decisions made are so far removed from the democratic process that its effectively meaningless. In my home town of New York City, I hear people argue that such and such should be allowed or disallowed and there should be more discretion from officials. I always then question them as to who these officials are or who the relevant party is that makes such decisions. If they cannot answer, which they almost always cannot, I ask why they have such faith that those unknown, probably unelected officials will make wise decisions. Maybe I'm just a cynic and regulatory capture isn't really as prevalent as I imagine it is.
That argument is unlikely to hold much weight for anyone who isn't an extremist libertarian.
Even libertarian moderates usually accept that property rights are a means to an end (usually liberty, hence the name) and qualify their beliefs about property rights being a good thing to acknowledge that there are circumstances in which they can be abused. Perverse incentives are real and most sane people feel a need to at least acknowledge them in their philosophical wanderings.
Perverse incentives are real but I guess I'm just skeptical of a centralized authoritative body sanctioned to use force can make them any better.
To quote the (extremist?) classical liberal economist Friedrich Hayek, "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design"
I disagree but this is not what I was calling the extremist position. If you are skeptical that there are better ways of achieving liberty than enforcing property rights then you still acknowledge that the fundamental desirable quantity is something other than the property rights themselves. You admit the possibility, as I believe any reasonable person would, libertarian or not, that under some circumstances the connection between enforced property rights and the underlying good may occasionally break down and that you must therefore always ask yourself if enforcing a particular notion of property in a particular instance is a good idea -- even if you tend to lean one way or the other by default.
(The "particular notion of property," by the way, is the bit that is especially amusing to watch libertarians dance around. It's possible to construct notions of property to make nearly anything seem reasonable or unreasonable, revealing the concept to be about as subjective as any other utility metric. But I digress.)
On the other hand if you take the position that property rights are a fundamental good in and of themselves, then you close your ears to arguments like "X company is using Y strategy to take Z's money without adding net value to the situation. They should be stopped." I don't think that's reasonable. People find loopholes in the system all the time and if actions weren't taken to stop them the world would be a miserable place even fuller of monopolies than it is today.
> A candy maker had had the same property for over 60 years when a doctor moved next door. After eight years passed without incident between them, the the doctor built a consulting room right against the confectioner’s kitchen. The doctor then found that the noise from the confectioner’s equipment interfered with the doctor’s ability to work, and in particular to hear with a stethoscope. The doctor filed suit to force the confectioner to stop using his equipment. The court recognized that the confectioner might suffer some hardship – thus admitting to the reciprocal nature of harm that Coase would later recognize – but it argued that to avoid even greater (unspecified) individual hardship and inhibiting land development for residential use, the confectioner must stop
Coase proposed considering how the parties might settle the dispute in a market transaction once the court made its findings; for space reasons I will present a simplified version of Coase’s argument. Though the doctor had won, in a market settlement he would be willing to allow the machinery to continue to operate were the confectioner to pay the doctor a sum that was greater than the doctor’s loss of income from having to either move or install sound abatement material. Conversely, had the confectioner won, in a market settlement he would have been willing to accept payment from the doctor to stop using the noisy machinery if the amount were greater than the confectioner’s costs to move the equipment or install sound abatement material.
In difference with Pigou, for Coase the general principle in cases of damage is that each case should be considered for its particular circumstances: “When an economist is comparing alternative social arrangements, the proper procedure is to compare the total social product yielded by these different arrangements” [0]
I'm not saying one solution is perfect but I am just more open-minded as to how disputes are handled without the use (or threat) of force. It's always interesting how a crowd like HN is so vehemently anti-authoritarian in some respects is willing to grant so much liberty to that same authority in some respects.
As far as "underlying good", that's above my pay-grade. To me, I just read that as either "think of the children" or "national security".
[0] http://michaelbrennen.com/2014/04/12/externalities-2-ronald-...
Given that, the rest of what you're saying based on that unravels quickly.
"Obama has asked Congress to pass so-called Trade Promotion Authority legislation that would prohibit congressional amendments before an up or down vote on the Trans-Pacific Partnership"
http://www.abqjournal.com/582278/news/nms-dems-oppose-trade-...
"Congress, and the American public, will be fully informed of what’s in the Trans-Pacific Partnership before lawmakers vote to make the agreement part of United States law. But he has a point that lawmakers won’t know what’s in the Trans-Pacific Partnership before they cast a separate, precursor vote -- the vote to authorize Obama to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership on a fast-track basis in the first place."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/apr/...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120622/23220319444/ustr-...
[edit for clarity}
Where are these rules written down, surely such anti-democratic actions have to be unconstitutional?
Plus where does USA get off in trying to impose laws on the rest of the world through secret treaty negotiations the details of which are only open to a very limited and controlled politically chosen group and a second group chosen entirely on wealth.
Land of the Free my arse - plutocratic hegemony more like it.
TPP is the most blatant "we're rich we'll decide the rules" that I think I've ever come across.
From the OP:
>"is there any way to look at this situation and not judge it to be a case of massive corruption?" //
No there isn't.
http://economyincrisis.org/content/public-wont-be-allowed-to...
Haha! You can't really be serious!
A great firewall of America?
Bribery as fairly standard practice in business.
Pushing away other countries from your economy.
America does not have a firewall, but they do have means to stop certain things from circulation. A great example is ISIL video. It is expunged from Youtube and Facebook and other social media platforms - Twitter is compelled to delete accounts of ISIL members. The US uses mass social media propaganda to countermessage the ideas of ISIL (http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf).
This not being the only target, there are ways that the US engages with ideas (look up Cass Sunstein's Nudge and work on cultural persuasion) and Air Force social engagement flowcharts.
Bribery in the US is composed on tacit agreements, shared interests and possible financial reprisal. It is subtler but not difficult to call for what it is. In business, agreed. It's there and sometimes in places the US isn't interested in intervening. But it isn't ubiquitous.
The US applies sanctions and embargos, abuses its Export-Import Bank and connections with the World Bank and IMF, and fixes political situations - aren't we in a TPP thread? - with economic warfare. You can't buy salmon in the Eastern tip of Russia right now. The US also hauses tariffs to compete with other nations' industries (cars, sugars, ...).
So it's not all about China anymore - and in fact, East Asia is basically independent of the way it will be felt by most people. So practically speaking, it isn't about China and East Asia at all.
As citizens we feel that inequality of wealth opportunity is the high, urgent priority - and that tools inside the TPP will exacerbate these issues.
As the government the existential threat to the US hegemonic uni-power world order - and by extension the political power and much of the economic opportunity and strategic interests of the US - is the high, urgent threat.
TPP is a bad deal because it only seeks to solve one of these and may actively harm the other - but I remember Obama saying something to the effect of "find me a better deal."
http://www.cfr.org/china/revising-us-grand-strategy-toward-c...
People don't have beef with FTAs because they aren't liberal enough. I know that liberals like to get in on board the hate train but it's a bit disingenuous to pretend that you're on the same page as most of the folk protesting FTAs when you stand at odds on the basic question of whether protectionism can be economically beneficial or not.
But discussion about the TPP, too, is done in an opaque way. Everyone seems to have their favorite issue with it - for example information and piracy advocates will point to how grossly IP law is expanded internationally - others questions why only 5 or so chapters of a couple dozen have to do with trade if it's merely a trade deal - others will alarm at international corporate tribunals, worried that the largest and most aggressive corporations may abuse the liberal world order's tools to concentrate wealth and control.
But to understand the TPP - why it has few trade chapters relative to international law chapters and why IP and American corporate legal capabilities are strengthened as well as all of the secrecy - one needs to understand why the US has been pushing it on the Asia-Pacific region.
Washington Thinktanks and Defense Officials have come to the conclusion that the meteoric rise of China represents an existential threat to the supremacy of US hegemonic world order. The US's grand defense strategy has always been to 'balance' regions of the world where one country may otherwise dominate so that they can not then 'grow up' to play the global power game.
Take Blackwill's recent publication: Revising US Grand Strategy Toward China.
http://www.cfr.org/china/revising-us-grand-strategy-toward-c...
Blackwill suggests a series of measures: the first being to get the TPP out the door to isolate China from international trade in its region. He goes on further to suggest that the DoD should invest in cyberwarfare and other capabilities - indeed these measures are being taken, as the DoD is now partnering with VC firms inside the Valley to steer funding toward national defense.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/23/defense-department-sili...
Secretary of Defense Carter penned his interest in the TPP, publicly stating that he would rather have the TPP than another aircraft carrier.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just visited Congress, whereupon he spoke to them about the new unprecedented collective defense pact (think Asian NATO) being entered into by the two countries which required Japan to reinterpret its constitution. In the speech he discussed the importance of the TPP for defense purposes, and took questions about the rise of China.
None of this is a defense of the TPP. What it is is a call for transparent discussion. We can do one better than those discussing the TPP behind closed doors. We can speak openly about what it gets the US and its allies.
The US does a great deal of good. But it also renders its own costs.
But to speak highly of her, if you would like me to do that, she has done and continues to do incredible things around the world including humanitarian assistance not riddled with policy objectives, treatment of epidemics and disastors, and some incredible interventions and transformations of societies (I do not begrudge what US NGOs/CSOs are doing for North Korea).
"Pax Americana" could have been much worse, I think. And thank god she avoided nuclear war. We owe many people for that.
And either way I love her. I am no Anti-American.
You can't be serious. In the past 10 years, the US has been a much greater threat to world peace than China, by a very large margin.
Superpowers bully.
So the question is about how to handle this situation between conflicting interests. We need to figure out how to keep as much peace as we can with two superpowers, and make them both agree to something they feel great about.
These aren't facts but this is how I feel:
With the opportunity to lift all of humanity from poverty around the globe in our lifetimes, and opportunities to use technology to solve physical mysteries, and with global economic trade both can prosper from I hope, I wish, I imagine that there are ways to find a symbiosis.
I'm afraid of hawks playing a game that forces there to be other hawks - of there being a race to the bottom into a cold war (whose balance and controls have been loosening - the US is not without blame here).
How do you feel about it?
Whenever the US intervenes it's either creating a mess or involving itself in a mess that was created by the US in the first place.
Neither the US nor China are evil or good. They are both rationally inclined to their own interests, which compete. Each have their own issues and histories. The US for the most part tries to find solutions that meet ideals and at the same time meet US interests.
The former seems very reasonable to me (that negotiations happen in secret, and then the final product is presented to the public/congress for a vote), but up to this point I'm still not sure which is the case.
But I'm not sure if there is anything reasonable about non-national security issues being discussed in secret. We're talking about commerce here, not nuclear weapons.
But the elephant in the room with the TPP is China.
Ultimately at a high level East Asia has about as many Chinese as Non-Chinese. This means that a strong economic block uniting non-China East Asia and granting it strong market access actually has a chance of fending off China's economic domination of the region.
Will a C