Here are winners and losers from the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal

[cal04]

Deal seen as win for tech, apparel; negative for pharma, manufacturing
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/here-are-winners-and-losers-from-the-trans-pacific-partnership-deal-2015-10-05?link=MW_home_latest_news


(snip)
Stefanie Miller, a research analyst with Height Securities, said she expects big U.S. technology companies, the U.S. apparel industry and the U.S. agricultural sector would benefit.

“It…appears that the final deal will be a positive for the U.S. apparel industry, which stands to gain from reduced or eliminated tariffs on certain materials up the supply chain,” Miller told MarketWatch in an email.


(snip)
The Semiconductor Industry Association, whose members include Qualcomm QCOM, +2.23% and Texas Instruments TXN, +2.58% , also lauded the deal. The group noted the deal contains rules preventing market-access restrictions on commercial products with encryption, and other new requirements.

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, said it was unhappy with the deal — as did a key member of Congress.

[JDPriestly]

1. From an e-mail from Bernie this morning:

The TPP would also give multinational corporations the ability to challenge laws passed in the United States that could negatively impact their “expected future profits.” Take, for example, a French waste management firm suing Egypt for over $100 million for increasing the minimum wage and improving labor laws. Egypt’s “crime” in this case is trying to improve life for their low-wage workers. Or Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, has used this process to sue Germany for $5 billion over its decision to phase out nuclear power. Should the people of Germany have the right to make energy choices on their own or should these decisions be left in the hands of an unelected international tribunal?

We face the same threats here at home if the TPP passes.

Virtually every major union and environmental organization in the United States is against the deal. Major religious groups are as well because they know what it could mean for some of the poorest people on the planet.

Wall Street, corporate America and their representatives in Congress will try to pass this bad trade deal. This is our chance to make our voices heard.

Click here to add your name to mine to stand against passing the disastrous Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.

[mmonk]

2. The losers are the American people.

There is no other explanation worth discussing. It is my defining moment. Goodbye Democratic Party. Goodbye political system I am ruled by. I will always oppose the status quo. Always because I'm too old to live to see this country become great again. Absolutely. Next.

[JDPriestly]

3. Bernie says we have lost 60,000 manufacturing plants and 5 million decent-paying jobs since 2001.

And now we are being set-up to bleed more factories and more jobs.

When does it end?

When do we stand up for our country and for the American people instead of for the corporations and their profits?

[TM99]

4. It ends with this country is bled dry

like the banana republic that it is and the wealthy oligarchs move elsewhere leaving a devastated society behind them with nary a bat of the eye.

[JDPriestly]

6. Watch our trade deficit explode. That's where you can see the blood of our country shed on the

battlefield of corporate profits.

The American people? Victims all, and they don't even see it happening because it isn't on the 6:00 news.

It's so sad to me.

[pampango]

10. Bernie is right. Manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at about 19.5 million. Went to

about 17.5 million by 2001 - a loss on average of about 100,000 a year over 22 years. Then manufacturing employment fell off a cliff from 2001 to 2010 falling to about 11.5 million a drop of about 6 million in 10 years or about 600,000 a year. We have regained about 500,000 up to 12 million since 2010.



http://freakonomics.com/2013/04/08/kerwin-charles-erik-hurst-and-matt-notowidigdo-on-the-u-s-labor-market/

[JDPriestly]

12. Not nearly enough to justify yet another give-away trade deal that helps corporations and hurts

the American people.

Your chart says it all.

BILL CLINTON signed NAFTA in 1994.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement

BILL CLINTON also extended favored nation status to China in 1994.

Friday, May 27, 1994

Clinton Grants China MFN, Reversing Campaign Pledge
By Ann Devroy
The Washington Post

http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N27/china.27w.html

It was followed by the dot-com boom.

And then, three years after the signing of NAFTA and in spite of the dot.com boom, our manufacturing sector steadily declined.

Other important dates.

We joined GATT in 1948. All went well until the oil crises of the 1970s.

We joined the WTO in 1995,

https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/countries_e/usa_e.htm

For those who are interested, here is a list of the countries with which we have trade agreements:

The United States has free trade agreements in force with 20 countries. These are:

Australia
Bahrain
Canada
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Dominican Republic
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
Israel
Jordan
Korea
Mexico
Morocco
Nicaragua
Oman
Panama
Peru
Singapore


https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements

More information on our free trade agreements:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_trade_agreements

1985 -- free trade agreement with Israel including Palestine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_trade_agreements

We do not need another "free" trade agreement.

As your chart shows, there is a direct relationship between the decline in our industrial sector and the growth in the number of our trade agreements.

And with each trade agreement, we hide our consumption of dirty fuels and our contribution to the death of our planet.

No thanks to these dirty trade deals.

We can trade without "free" trade agreements. These agreements take the control over our trade out of the hands of the American people and into the hands of large multinational corporations. There is nothing "free" about them for the American people.

We do not want or need more trade agreements.

[pampango]

13. Imports are 13% of our economy. They are 30% in Germany and Sweden, 25% in France and Canada.

If imports were the cause of our problems, the middle class in the other countries would be much worse off than ours. They are not.

Of course, those countries have more progressive taxes, stronger safety nets and stronger unions (no 'right-to-work' laws in those countries) than we have. That has a lot to do with it.

BILL CLINTON signed NAFTA in 1994.

Manufacturing employment declined by more than 2 million workers (19.5 to 17.4 million) from 1980 to 1995. From 1995 to 2001 it increased then decreased to end up about where it started. It plummeted under Bush II just as it had under Reagan and Bush I. It increased under Clinton and Obama (it's at 12.3 million in 2015). I don't buy the "republicans are just unlucky, rather than stupid or selfish, when it comes to the economy. And Democrats are just "lucky" rather than smart.

BILL CLINTON also extended favored nation status to China in 1994.

Which was necessary to allow China into the WTO. To keep the world's biggest country out of the world's trade organization makes little sense. Even if we had tried to isolate China, their economy would have taken off. And our trade with Russia deteriorated much more than it did with China, in percentage terms, from 1994 to 2012 when Russia joined the WTO, too. Europe is China's biggest trading partner not the US. Just keeping China out of the WTO would not have changed anything.

We joined the WTO in 1995.

In a way, yes. The WTO came into being in 1995, when it evolved from GATT, so no one belonged to the WTO before 1995.

I have my doubts that the TPP is similar at all to the ITO that FDR created (and republicans killed). If it is, I'll give it a second look. If not, the WTO and existing free trade agreements with most of the TPP countries will just stay in effect.

[JDPriestly]

14. I do not like the WTO. I think that sovereign nations should control their own destinies and

their own trade policies.

The reason that employment was healthy during the Clinton administration was the dot.com boom.

Of course, now, although our country's tax money paid for much of the groundwork necessary to create the internet and our computer culture, most of the industry that makes computers is not in the US but in other countries. We import a lot of our computers and parts.

The 13T sounds like a small number, but when we consumers go to buy goods, they are all cheap and all made in other countries by workers paid what would amount to slave wages if paid here at the prices we pay for necessities.

No question. Republicans are even worse at managing the economy to benefit Americans than are the Democrats.

But the Clintons would be worse than Bernie at managing the economy.

Bill Clinton was lucky because the dot.com boom revved up our economy. Of course the boom went bust and on top of that the Republicans and George W. Bush failed, failed miserably, to regulate Wall Street, failed to recognize or at least to admit the obvious housing boom in which prices rose astronomically and wages were stagnate or in decline.

No question Republicans manage the economy worse than do Democrat. In fact they don't manage it at all. They just put it in reverse and bend the rear view mirror forward and think they are doing their job. And, of course, multinationals and the Koch Brothers thank them for their acquiescence.

But, the contest here is between Hillary -- and Bill Clinton's record which she proudly claims as her own when convenient for her -- and Bernie Sanders. It is between yet another trade agreement and Bernie Sanders and no trade agreement.

In particular, I personally strongly oppose the trade arbitration courts that the WTO, NAFTA and other multilateral trade agreements have established.

I'm for trade, but I want trade in which the US is free to trade or not trade as we wish.

And our trade deficit is horrible. The percentage of the economy that is imported is rather irrelevant. It is our trade deficit that tells the story. Trade agreements are not our friends.

[pampango]

16. That's fine. FDR did not agree and promoted the ITO with GATT which became the WTO.

National sovereignty was, obviously, not his highest priority. Countries working together to solve global problems was more important to him. Hence the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the International Trade Organization and myriad others. Now polls show the republican base opposes all of those FDR creations.

He knew that republicans had unilaterally raised tariffs on the rest of the world 3 times from 1921 to 1930 and the middle class had paid the price.

One of his motivations in setting up the ITO/GATT was to make it more difficult for 'republicans' in any country to unilaterally raise tariffs in the name of national sovereignty as his predecessors had. He may not have known that some future Democrats would rue his actions and want to go 'national sovereignty' on the rest of the world like republicans had done in the 1920's.

Bill Clinton was lucky because the dot.com boom revved up our economy.

The old "Democrats are lucky" argument. I wonder why the dot.com bubble made Clinton so 'lucky' in terms of manufacturing employment but the great housing bubble under Bush saw that employment crash through the floor? Krugman has written that the dot.com bubble was not the main reason for the manufacturing surge under Clinton.

And our trade deficit is horrible. The percentage of the economy that is imported is rather irrelevant.

No. Facts like this are relevant.

If low tariffs were leading to high levels of imports creating a trade deficit despite a healthy level of exports, that is a totally different problem than one where a country has a low level of imports but an even lower amount of exports. Raising tariffs when imports are already low does not help much, though it can be emotionally satisfying, as republicans discovered in the 1920's.

[Scuba]

5. A handful of winners, 350,000,000 losers.

[Populist_Prole]

7. Specious analyst

"big U.S. technology companies" = Outsourcers and abuser of H1b visas


"the U.S. apparel industry" = US branded products produced offshore.


Both are already taking advantage of labor arbitrage.

[closeupready]

8. Yes. The textile industry is being decimated here in the US.

Hard as it may seem to believe, this deal - if approved - will only make the losses worse.

[Populist_Prole]

9. That's why the happy talk is stated in broad, specious terms

A vestige of "what's good for XYZ company is good for you" still being used past its shelf life. Corporate cheerleader macroeconomic muck.

If a company is getting profits selling here, but providing more employment overseas than in the US, I hope they go under.

[mhatrw]

11. Winners = some of the top 0.1%. Losers = everyone else n/t

[Octafish]

15. + Double-plus It.

"He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."