Friday, May 15, 2015

TPP ought to stand for "Truly Potty Paper"

The following post was prompted by the Rolling stone article linked below.

The Trans Pacific-Partnership was written by, and for, those with the most to gain. Elizabeth Warren is quite correct in opposing it. President Obama is... Well, lets just say he's showing who's paying most of the campaign bills for the Democrats now.

If you believe in truly unfettered markets, as well as trickle down prosperity, than this is your baby. If you are an everyday working person, or an environmentalist, than you should be very worried.

Which is no more than to say that, in purely commercial terms, this would represent a big boost to overall trade numbers. The President is correct in that assertion. The problem is that you and I are not the ones who actually benefit directly from such increases. Jobs in some sectors might indeed increase, but the upshot is that wage competition from overseas manufacturing only gets worse. And, as the article points out, there is undoubtedly a lot of fine print that got buried in the secret negotiations that will allow Big Money to do the old "Gold Mine" con once again (you know... That's were they get the gold and you get the shaft); either in an environmental dodge as Warren suggests, and/or in other "stick it to us" clauses in everything else.

The real question here is why a Democrat would be pushing the usual predetermined situation framing that the Republicans do. The kind of thing where the questions is framed as "it's either this 'imperfect trade greaser' or bad job growth."

The beauty of this kind of preconditioning is that it works to take away any thought that the underlying assumptions are absurd in the first place.

If the economic model, and those few who really benefit from it, present choices that either screw you a bunch up front, or allow for a lot more screwing to occur incrementally over time, than its time to stop playing in an obviously rigged game. It's time to frame the situation as it actually affects you, and not how it absurdly benefits them. See this now or learn to love living on "Chump Change."

Elizabeth Warren and President Obama

The Trade Beef Between Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama, Explained

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