The full text of the Trans Pacific Partnership has finally been released. Of course the obvious fact that has been revealed is that much of what its critics were attacking before they read it, isn’t really in it, or true at all. But before we get into that let’s look at some facts about trade and our economy. Much has been said about the factor of job loss due to our trade policies. Here are the facts. Over the past 100 years our job loss by industrial category is:
Food- 3.8%
Machinery-23.9%
Autos-30.9%
Electronics-36.6%
Furniture-42.5%
Apparel-71.5%
This looks like a big deal, until we explore the benefits of our trade policies, just since 1992: Annual U.S. gains from liberalized trade policies are $300-500 billion. Jobs gained by manufacturing and sales specifically for trade are:
1992; 10% of all jobs, (14.5 million)
2014; 21.7% of all jobs (41 million)
Then there is the lowering of prices because of foreign manufacture. From 2002 to 2012 that came to:
TVs-86.5%
Computers-74.8%
Toys- 42.8%
Furnituree-7.1%
Yes, these lower cost goods represent a loss of American jobs but they also represent an increase in demand, which is the single most important factor in a growing economy.
There is no argument that NAFTA cost jobs but there are many arguments that NAFTA and other trade deals have had many benefits to the population in general. The lower prices on many items made outside the country lead to more consumption, and since consumption equates with demand and demand with greater GDP, the benefits are obvious.
Now I’m sure that those that lost their jobs due to trade policies don’t give a damn about the benefits to the general economy. However, they would not be in the predicament they are in now if a Republican congress had been more open to President Obama’s forays into establishing job-creating programs like infrastructure.
Of course the most egregious example is what happens in trade when greedy American companies move their operations to foreign countries to take advantage of the lower cost of labor. The immediate effect is the loss of American jobs. That not only hurts personally and economically, but it becomes a huge political issue.
There isn’t much we can do about other countries manufacturing goods in their own plants and selling them cheaper than we can to our customers. Those who want to put huge tariffs on these goods really don’t understand how damaging huge tariffs can be to our own economy when foreign countries reciprocate. Never the less, there is a way for us to stem this flood of American companies moving plants to, or opening plants in, foreign countries.
The answer is a bill that dictates a special tariff to be imposed on goods entering the country that have been made in plants owned by American companies but operating overseas. For example Nabisco is moving its production to a plant they are building in Mexico. Such a tariff, if enacted, would be imposed on any goods made in that plant and imported into this country, to compete with goods made by Nabisco’s American competitors in this country. The object would be to discourage other companies from following Nabisco, and the many others, that have fled these shores, to make their product overseas. It would certainly reduce the profits of these fleeing companies and could create a fund that could be aimed at helping those workers who have lost their jobs because of this greedy pattern of flight.
The TPP encompasses the nations of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Brunei, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam Singapore and the US. It will promote economic cooperation over an area compromising 40% of the global economy and will eliminate 98% of the tariffs between these countries.
Among the items in the anti-treaty column are; protections that will allow the giant corporate entities to benefit from the treaty by evading national laws that seek to control their activities. This is the most egregious part of the treaty for it allows greedy or dishonest corporations, (Is there any other kind?) to bypass the laws of the countries involved in the treaty. This, in itself, should be a deal killer for the U.S. even though it would mean abandoning numerous benefits from the treaty, the most important of which, would be the control we would surrender to China over trade in the entire Pacific Rim
Still, there would seem to be no rationale for us to allow any corporation to circumvent our laws. What we would be doing in such an instance would be giving up our sovereignty to a business so they can make more profit. It’s ridiculous.
Another problem is the fact that no mention is made of any international push for climate control or any limits in that area. The protections given to corporations by the treaty provides carte blanche to the polluters of the world to go ahead and screw up the entire ecology anytime and any place they can make a dime.
On the other hand the sections that deal with copyright and patent, seem to be drawing just as much attention from a different set of corporate greed mongers. I am speaking of the corporate barons of the World Wide Web who are whining about Internet Freedom which translates, in this case, as the Internet business giant’s right to steal intellectual property from its creators without compensation.
The arguments against extending copyright are ludicrous; especially, Internet companies champion them. Said companiues have already destroyed the music business. Now they would like to destroy the rest of the creative world just so they can make a buck without having to pay for the materials that they will sell on the net.
Internet companies destroyed the music business by releasing all the music they could get their hands on over the net, free. How did they benefit by that? They drew millions of customers to their sites based on the free music content that they made available. Then they sold advertising and other products on those sites, based on the free music content.
Since they weren’t making money directly on the music, they argued that they owed nothing to its creators since they weren’t charging for it.,. Artists who had created most of our best music suddenly found that their source of income had disappeared because they couldn’t get paid for their work. Many of them just stopped producing music, which left a second tier of composers and musicians to make the music we are listening to today. Now the barons of the Internet want to do the same thing with the written and visual mediums. Basically they want to be able to profit from the artists work without compensating the artist. The protections against this practice, built into the treaty, may be the only reason to actually be for it.
I find it interesting that the Intellectual Property section is attacked the most. I don’t understand that. Is it just that a lot of people who have nothing creative to contribute, want to be able to take advantage of other people’s creativity without having to pay the artists for their work, or do these fools really believe that they are entitled to benefit from others work despite their own lack of talent? They use the excuse that to extend copyright will keep huge amounts of information, art and creativity out of the public domain. Not if those who wish to partake of it want to pay for their enjoyment of it. The Internet corporations just want a free ride and they want it at the cost to the artists who create product. Why shouldn’t the artist be fairly compensated for his product instead of having it stolen from him the way the Internet stole music from the composers, musicians and singers who created it.
The fact is, all the creative material that is available without copyright will also be available with copyright. The only difference will be that the artists will benefit from it, not just the slime, who want to steal it from them. There’s an outfit out there called Fight for the Future that is leading the battle to screw the artists out of their fair recompense. It should be calked Fight for the Free Stuff, because that’s what they want. They want everybody’s work for free. Well, f**k them! Their despicable campaign director Evan Greer was quoted as saying that:
“The Intellectual Property chapter confirms our fears about the TPP’s impact on our basic right to express ourselves and access information on the Internet. If the US Congress signs this agreement despite its blatant corruption, they’ll be signing a death warrant for the open Internet and putting the future of free speech in peril.”
What this cynical, lying degenerate really is saying, is that Fight for the Future considers it a basic right to steal the property of a creative artist without compensation and that the free speech that they declare is in peril, will actually be product they will steal from its creator. This will be a death knell for creative product because without compensation artists will cease to create, leaving the World Wide Web to recycle old material until everyone has become sick of everything they display. That’s the way to create the death of the web. This section of the treaty may be the most important reason for us to sign it.
The copyright part of the treaty is nothing new. It simply imposes American copyright law, on the other eleven nations, many of whom have been stealing the work of American artists and not compensating them for decades.
What may be the other side of this coin is the big bugaboo that has to do with medicines and their patents, which according to the agreement can run up to 8 years. The argument against it is spearheaded by the claim that certain nations, like Brunei, have no bar to making medicines cheaper than those made by the company that created them. The argument goes that this is a good thing but actually it is not. If companies can’t protect their inventions so that they can make a profit from them, they will simply not invest in research and development. We will have no new medicines! This is already evident in many instances where certain medicines are not being developed because they are either not patentable or haven’t a big enough potential market. This is, needless to say, bad for people who are sick.
But that does not man we should encourage drug manufacturers to charge anything they like. We are dealing here with medicine, and there should be international price caps on the cost of all medicines.
Patents must protect drug manufacturers, but even while accepting this premise, we must understand that they have already proven they cannot be trusted to set their own prices without charging egregious increases, therefore they must also be regulated.
There has been a great deal of anti-treaty noise simply because none of the details of it have been published until now. This same means of attack evolved over the Iran-Nuclear Treaty. The complaint that treaty details had not previously been released is the most innocuous of complaints because anyone who has ever negotiated anything knows that as soon as everyone hears about what you are negotiating they automatically develop an opinion about it, usually uninformed, incorrect, more often than not, obnoxious. The only way to get any kind of negotiation finished, is to keep it under wraps until it is done and then, before it is signed, publish it for comment, which is exactly the current situation with the TPP