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Hillary OWNS TPP and Would Approve TPP and the TTIP
b]First: Hillary Clinton OWNS the TPP. She worked on drafting it, as Secretary of State.
She is the main person who wrote the TPP terms.
She was the main cheerleader for the TPP for years!
here is one of numerous examples of her promoting TPP:
In the fall of 2011, President Obama announced a shift in the United States’ strategic focus toward the Asia-Pacific region on military and economic matters. Inheriting a foreign policy predominantly fixated on the Middle East, the Obama administration set out on a renewed path to align current government resources with future priorities.
In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton penned a piece for Foreign Policy describing this regional policy as a “pivot point.”
Clinton further articulated interest in expanding economic liberalization through agreements such as the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.
This re-balancing became a cornerstone for the Obama administration’s foreign policy objectives, and the principal economic and foreign policy component of the ‘pivot to Asia’ is the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton penned a piece for Foreign Policy describing this regional policy as a “pivot point.”
Clinton further articulated interest in expanding economic liberalization through agreements such as the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.
This re-balancing became a cornerstone for the Obama administration’s foreign policy objectives, and the principal economic and foreign policy component of the ‘pivot to Asia’ is the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The TPP's MAIN BENEFICIARY IS WALL STREET!
The TPP permanently immunizes Wall Street from REGULATIONS. It especially PROTECTS Wall Street from a TRANSACTION TAX, aka a TOBIN TAX.
This earlier post from DU explains:
TPP: Allows Wall Street to sue the government to gut financial and consumer protection regulations.
If you thought the recent bills passed in the house gutting Dodd Frank were bad, it's nothing compared to what the TPP will do to financial regulation.
Not only will it be gutted, but it will be gutted in such a way that prevents future congresses and presidents from ever reinstating it, because it means they can sue us in rigged ISDS tribunals to gut our regulations.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/18/elizabeth-warren-trade-deal_n_6350312.html
If you thought the recent bills passed in the house gutting Dodd Frank were bad, it's nothing compared to what the TPP will do to financial regulation.
Not only will it be gutted, but it will be gutted in such a way that prevents future congresses and presidents from ever reinstating it, because it means they can sue us in rigged ISDS tribunals to gut our regulations.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/18/elizabeth-warren-trade-deal_n_6350312.html
This post from DU explains further:
Elwood P Dowd
Wall Street is responsible for TPP, and the point man for it came from Citigroup.
The USTR office that wrote TPP is infested with corporate lawyers and lobbyists. In this case, its former Citigroup executive Michael Froman who worked for Robert Rubin that's in charge. He was given a 4 million dollar bonus to take the job at USTR. TPP is all about making money and giving more power to Wall Street and their corporate business partners.
Wall Street Pays Bankers to Work in Government and It Doesn't Want Anyone to Know
Citigroup is one of three Wall Street banks attempting to keep hidden their practice of paying executives multimillion-dollar awards for entering government service. In letters delivered to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the last month, Citi, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley seek exemption from a shareholder proposal, filed by the AFL-CIO labor coalition, which would force them to identify all executives eligible for these financial rewards, and the specific dollar amounts at stake. Critics argue these “golden parachutes” ensure more financial insiders in policy positions and favorable treatment toward Wall Street.
<snip>
Other banks’ policies are subtler. Banks often defer certain types of compensation in order to retain talent. When an executive terminates employment, unvested stock options and other forms of deferred compensation are usually forfeited. But several companies let executives’ equity options continue to vest if they leave for a government position, or allow them to keep retention bonuses that would otherwise be returned to the firm. A 2004 tax law banned accelerated payments but made an exemption for employees who leave for government service. Critics wonder whether the gifts are intended to fill the government with friendly faces who will act in their former employer’s interests.
“It fuels the revolving door between banks and the government,” said Michael Smallberg, an investigator for the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), whose 2013 report detailed these types of compensation agreements. The average executive branch salary is substantially less than these millions in awards, so the bonuses effectively supplement the lower pay, raising questions about who the government officials actually work for.
Citigroup is a serial user of these practices, if only because so many of its alumni serve in government. Jack Lew, Weiss’ boss at Treasury, had $250,000 to $500,000 in restricted stock vested after he left an executive position at the bank, part of a $1.1 million golden parachute revealed during the confirmation process. Stanley Fischer, currently the vice chair of the Federal Reserve, had a similar clause in his Citigroup employment contract. U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman received over $4 million in multiple exit payments from Citigroup when he left for the Obama Administration.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026854944
Hillary not only had major input into writing the TPP, but she has been its leading cheerleader:
As secretary of state in President Barack Obama's cabinet, Mrs. Clinton heaped praise on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation agreement that is one of Mr. Obama's top priorities.
In one speech, she said the pact would "lower trade barriers while raising standards, creating more and better growth."
from:
U.S. News: Clinton Walking Fine Line on Trade Deal
Nicholas, Peter . Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition [New York, N.Y] 23 Apr 2015: A.4.
In one speech, she said the pact would "lower trade barriers while raising standards, creating more and better growth."
from:
U.S. News: Clinton Walking Fine Line on Trade Deal
Nicholas, Peter . Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition [New York, N.Y] 23 Apr 2015: A.4.
Hillary Clinton, herself, wrote a piece in Foreign Policy journal advertising and praising and advocating for TPP:
America’s Pacific Century
The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.
• By Hillary Clinton
• October 11, 2011
We are also making progress on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which will bring together economies from across the Pacific — developed and developing alike — into a single trading community.
Our goal is to create not just more growth, but better growth. We believe trade agreements need to include strong protections for workers, the environment, intellectual property, and innovation. They should also promote the free flow of information technology and the spread of green technology, as well as the coherence of our regulatory system and the efficiency of supply chains. Ultimately, our progress will be measured by the quality of people’s lives — whether men and women can work in dignity, earn a decent wage, raise healthy families, educate their children, and take hold of the opportunities to improve their own and the next generation’s fortunes. Our hope is that a TPP agreement with high standards can serve as a benchmark for future agreements — and grow to serve as a platform for broader regional interaction and eventually a free trade area of the Asia-Pacific.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-pacific-century/
The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.
• By Hillary Clinton
• October 11, 2011
We are also making progress on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which will bring together economies from across the Pacific — developed and developing alike — into a single trading community.
Our goal is to create not just more growth, but better growth. We believe trade agreements need to include strong protections for workers, the environment, intellectual property, and innovation. They should also promote the free flow of information technology and the spread of green technology, as well as the coherence of our regulatory system and the efficiency of supply chains. Ultimately, our progress will be measured by the quality of people’s lives — whether men and women can work in dignity, earn a decent wage, raise healthy families, educate their children, and take hold of the opportunities to improve their own and the next generation’s fortunes. Our hope is that a TPP agreement with high standards can serve as a benchmark for future agreements — and grow to serve as a platform for broader regional interaction and eventually a free trade area of the Asia-Pacific.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-pacific-century/
Do Hillary's promises of "strong protections for workers" mean anything?
NO, according to leading scholars of trade agreements, especially the TPP:
Scholars say that promises of worker protections are essentially an advertising gimmick:
The Myth of the Level Playing Field
Faux, Jeff. The American Prospect 23.3 (Apr 2012): 47-50.
The ILO conventions are specifically excluded from the U.S. draft of the TPP.
....According to the industry newsletter Inside U.S. Trade, the proposal states that TPP countries "should take measures to reduce trade in products made through forced or child labor" and should apply their national worker protections to free-trade and export-processing zones.....
....Unfortunately, for many governments in less developed countries and investors in developed countries, exploiting labor is the point- cheap workers represent these nations' comparative advantage. As then-Peruvian President Alan Garcia told a cheering Chamber of Commerce the night that the U.S. -Peru trade deal was signed: "Come and open your factories in my country so we can sell your own products back to the U.S."
....If under these labor chapters, workers can still be intimidated, fired, or even murdered for trying to form a labor union, how effective can they be?" The answer is, hardly effective at all. Almost 20 years after NAFTA, companies violate Mexico's labor laws with impunity.........
Moreover, even the tiny improvement of the United States' TPP labor proposal over the Peru agreement will certainly be watered down in the negotiations. None of the other governments are enthusiastic. Countries like Malaysia and Singapore are hostile, and the inclusion of Vietnam, where unions are an arm of the government and labor oppression is rampant, and Brunei, which has a large number of mistreated foreign workers and is ruled by a 600-year-old autocratic sultanate, mocks the assumption that governments will take labor-protection rules seriously.
Deputy National Security Adviser Michael Froman assured Inside U.S. Trade in January that the Obama team would push for "a high standard labor agreement" but then suggested that labor protections were not that important because the benefits of free trade to American workers would go far beyond whatever the content of the labor chapter turned out to be.
What would TPP do?
Scholars say:
The offshoring of work will accelerate.
Vietnam-where wages are lower than China- will take from what little is left of the bottom end of U.S. manufacturing.
Malaysia and Singapore will pull from somewhat higher up the value-added ladder.
To keep their jobs, American industrial workers will take cuts in pay and see middle-class benefits like pensions and health care disappear.
The TPP will help accelerate the evolution of a two-tier wage system - whereby younger workers get hired for less- into three tiers and more.
Because labor markets are connected, the downward pressure in manufacturing wages will spread to other sectors as well, and from private to public employment.
Wage depression also will expand out to workers in the large, extended labor force in countries with which we already have free-trade agreements.
Among those dragged down in this quickening race to the bottom will be workers in Mexico, where lack of job opportunities is a major factor in the vicious internal drug wars that have already claimed some 50,000 lives in the last five years.
As hard times there get harder, social instability is bound to spill over our borders in some form.
Under pressure from public opinion and Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton recently flip flopped on TPP, with weasel words.
But Hillary's past record speaks the truth. Hillary will pass TPP:
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