Secretive Free Trade Agreement Puts Climate, Public Health at Risk

[JEB]

New warnings on TPP, free trade 'regime' fostering 'global emergency situation'
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer

As secretive talks over the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)—the pending free trade agreement slammed as "NAFTA on steroids" and "a quiet coup for the investor class"—continue, new warnings highlight the corporate winners and global losers at stake.


snip:
"We are living a global emergency situation," the environmental justice groups write, and the solution will come from nothing short of a paradigm shift away from free trade policies that threaten the climate, food sovereignty and the global "99%."

"If we are to save nature and humanity, we need to change the system and changing the system means dismantling the free trade regime."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/09/10-5

[delrem]

1. Correct. But there has to be trade, so a regulated fair-trade market does make sense.

For example, a fair-trade agreement would severely penalize those countries which don't have universal health care, which don't have an adequate school system as judged against the higher international norms, and which don't recognize workers' right to free association, including association in unions.

Of course the very idea of it raises wrath!

[avaistheone1]

2. Senator Elizabeth Warren has already alerted us that this trade agreement is not good for our

country or ordinary working and middle-class Americans.

[delrem]

3. That goes without saying.

The DLC Dems and Reps aren't capable of doing *anything* compatible with fair-trade.
That's the current admin, the Clinton admin, the oily promise of a H R Clinton admin.
There's not the remotest possibility that fair-trade is on the agenda of *any* of these leaders - in fact, these leaders make millions selling their grift to billionaires in every dictatorship on the planet, promising rich rewards.

[jtuck004]

5. Yeah, but what are they going to do about countries OUTSIDE the U.S.?

I would, but we don't have a partial sarcasm thingy - like one that just says "sar..."

[delrem]

6. That's what a trade agreement is *for*, whether a 1%er "free trade" or 99%er "fair trade"

[jtuck004]

7. The point being that we DON'T have universal health care, measured against higher int'l norms

our school system ranks 17th, (behind South Korea and Finland, for dog's sake), and unions, having been a tool of and pro-business since Gompers screwed the Industrial Unions over by the 30's and Reagan came along and castrated them in the 70's, just exactly who the fuck are we protecting?

[delrem]

8. Yes, that's exactly the point. Your country is backward according as civilized norms.

Free trade is a race backward and doesn't challenge right wing orthodoxy. Fair trade forces all countries belonging to a fair trade agreement to pay attention to quality of universal healthcare and quality of public schooling.

The idea of fair trade isn't to reduce advanced countries to the lowest possible standard (unlike free trade), the idea is to move into a brighter future.

[jtuck004]

9. How is it going to be brigher by reducing the work available for the people here, and undercutting

their wages? That may not be the idea, but that will be the net effect, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a liar.

And a traitor.

Sounds like a dark cloud ahead.

[delrem]

10. How would fair trade undercut US worker's wages?

I don't think you understand the concept, at all.
bye

eta: I think you show go lighter on words like "traitor". You don't seem to understand that concept either.

[jtuck004]

11. Oh, I bet I do. But you should feel free to list the advantages of

people here losing their jobs to foreign workers who produce Iphones for $22 a day? Or lying-ass Walmart officials who bring in products made by women who are subsequently killed in factory collapses which Walmart says it is too difficult to address, yet when there is a product quality issue they seem to fix it in a jiffy if it is costing them money.

I, and a lot of others, understand it very well, and we also understand traitors and weasels and spies and finks, and the sorry pieces of shit that support them while they sneak around behind closed doors making agreements that are bad for our neighbors and this country, and undermine the little good that unions do.

If they were proud of it it wouldn't be done behind closed doors like a Mi$$ RObMe-esqe plot...

[delrem]

12. dude! You don't understand the concept 'fair-trade'. You just don't!

[jtuck004]

13. So list all the advantages. But I think you protest too much... A. Einstein said

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” So explain the advantages of lower wages to American workers via cheap shit at Walmart while other nations invest in their people.

Alternatively, maybe the advantages don't exist, and it's just a lie, a con job, a screwing of the American people.

Instead of hurling your pointless jabs, let's see some substance. Where's the beef?

What don't I understand about farmers losing their farms because of imports (both here AND in Mexico, btw. Or about factories and lives being shuttered because of trade that is free to the wealthy because they take the cost out of the lives of the working person, multinational corporations who aren't bound by the same limitations as small business in this country by being given tax breaks to keep a couple trillion dollars overseas instead of paying taxes on it and being able to freely move about between countries to avoid regulations and common human decency, or about politicians sneaking around behind closed doors like child molesters, thieves, spies, and traitors, and the low-life people who defend them?

Waiting for your list...

[delrem]

14. You just don't understand the distinction between free vs fair trade!!!!!

Do some reading!

[jtuck004]

15. So you got nothin'. I figured as much. n/t

[delrem]

16. sigh. bye

[jtuck004]

17. I would warn not to let the TPP bite you in the ass on the way out, but

it appears to have done that already.

It would be funny if it weren't for the pain it's is going to inflict on millions more...

[delrem]

18. TPP isn't fair trade! sheeeeeeeeee............sssssssuuuuuuzzzzzzzzzzz help me!

[jtuck004]

19. So lay out facts instead of laying on your keyboard. n/t

[delrem]

20. You can't even distinguish between two words, 'fair' and 'free', and you demand that I educate you?

Forget it jtuck004

[jtuck004]

21. You sure are fond of blank space. That's telling. But then I'm not the one trying to pass damaged

goods off as silk. It's your assertion that regulated trade is necessary, and the TPP is the implementation of that. It favors the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

I'm not leaving, still waiting for any substance. Any at all.

[delrem]

24. LIAR! I never said the TPP is an implementation of fair trade. You LIE!

And your lies are the bed you made.
welcome to ignore

[jtuck004]

25. Well, in case you ever see it, I will repeat what I said, as opposed to what you invented.

Last edited Thu Sep 12, 2013, 01:32 AM - Edit history (1)

"It's your assertion that regulated trade is necessary...

And you in fact did say that, in #1, and the TPP is in fact the implementation of regulation.

But you have had me on ignore for at least the past 5 responses, so I probably can't tell the difference.

[daleanime]

26. ........

[daleanime]

27. Can't say that you didn't try....

[delrem]

28. A pity that you read thru' all that, but thanks for the condolences.

These exercises are lose/lose and every once in awhile I get sucked into one.

Oh well, DU seems to be increasingly polarized by that kind of no-think/double-think and I'm sure it'll get increasingly polarized in the near future. It isn't a good thing for progressives to focus on that kind of disharmony because it can't go anywhere -- even though "internal", it's still the same as trying to work through the reasoning of things with a tea-partier, or even a supposedly "centralist" Republican. It can't be done because they don't, and won't, speak an uncensored language, a language that contains terms that the right wing master class, the 1%, deem anathema.

That was Chomskyesque

The Dem Party progressive caucus is obviously dis-empowered, dis-empowered by a much more powerful and well funded "DLC" group that prefers to bow to Republican directives. To put it clearly, in this view the power base of the Dem Party, the DLC that holds all high places, doesn't recognize progressive thought, so can't recognize a Democratic "middle" and is in fact a Republican faction. In this view the power base of the Dem Party concedes all objectives to the Rep party, then uses millions and billions of campaign funds to play mindgames with voters.

[daleanime]

33. We're not as dis-empowered as they would like us to believe....

it's why their so desperate to 'misunderstand' us, to plug fingers in to ears like children refusing to hear their bedtime.


Continue to talk sense, their time is almost over.

[Sand Wind]

29. Delrem is paid to post on DU...

[jtuck004]

30. One can get paid for this? Woohoo!!

Sign me up...

Oh, wait, do I have to interview with Skinner? I hear he's tough...

[Sand Wind]

31. Here http://www.fsb.ru/ I hope you speak russian...nt

[jtuck004]

32. nyet n/t

[grahamhgreen]

4. This is what Obama should be stopping. Costly Trade Agreements are not free.

[mick063]

22. Let's keep this simple.

A good law benefits a large majority of the population.

A bad law benefits a very small minority of the population at the expense of the majority.

It is about fucking time our legislators and executive branch started implementing some good law. It is about time our judicial branch started interpreting the true "spirit" of the constitution.

There is nothing "free" or "fair" about bad law. For those that claim otherwise, check my definition of bad law again in case it has been lost on you.

[JEB]

23. Nice and simple and to the point.

We have been so inundated with propaganda and abuse of fine sounding words like Free that an honest attempt to communicate using the term Fair just adds to the confusion and anger. TPP is "bad law".