TPP ( Political Stuff )

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If anyone has been aware the TPP ( Trans-Pacific Partnership ) has been released. The TPP is a trade agreement similar to NAFTA it was signed between twelve countries including Canada & the USA. The agreement has been under fire for having clauses that allow cooperations to sue countries if their laws damage their trade. In addition, it has also been said that the TPP enforces harsher laws against piracy, compromises fair use, and lowers tariffs allowing countries to practice dumping along with making it easier for cooperations to outsource jobs. The text is extremely long containing about two million words and fucktons of legal jargon and stuff. I'm wondering if anyone could take a look at one of the articles ( not read the whole thing. ) I've read some sections of it and it's extremely confusing since I'm not a legal or economic expert. Anyways the purpose of the thread is to discuss it if you want to give any opinions about it.
 
A deal that makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker via gutting potential competitors via vicious anti-piracy/anti-intellectual theft laws. It then simultaneously allows corporations to work even more unimpeded by government influence, taking corporations which are already more powerful than most world governments and granting them even more power to choke hold markets. Any governments that try to enforce some decent wages will only disenfranchise those corporations from hiring there, and they'll hire elsewhere instead, reinforcing the class of the perpetually working poor even more. Through this, they'll rake in billions more in profits every year, and those profits will strictly go to the opulently wealthy shareholders instead of to those who actually produce and sell products and services.

It's a rather brilliant scheme, I admit. The thing most don't appear to understand however is that free trade only benefits those who can capitalize upon it. The only ones who properly can, are the ones who already have far more than enough wealth and power. The little guy has nothing to benefit from free trade and, if they live in a country with decent labour laws, or without a powerful industry, everything to lose. Because if your local market's industrialization is smaller compared to surrounding countries (cough Greece cough), your local corporations can't possibly compete to sell products at a lower price than megacorps can simply import and dump in at their own leisure. Tariffs ultimately protect small businesses in local economies from the overwhelming firepower of larger corporations, but TPP does an amazing job of preventing that from occurring.

TPP takes the one government weapon the people have to prevent corporate oligarchies from destroying local economies and rips it into tiny pieces. If you want an example of what that looks like, just take a look at Canada. Walk down a street and just start counting the number of businesses here that aren't Canadian. If America ever falls down, we'll get ripped down with them by proxy, and there's nothing we can do about it, no matter how good our own economy is doing.

There's something broken with Capitalism right now. The system was made in mind to allow the little guy to viciously undercut bigger corporations by outperforming them in the marketplace, by providing a superior service. Except that they can't, because corporations have grown so massive and employed so many changes in law via puppeteer'd legislators, that if any small corporation even started to become a threat to, say, Walmart, or McDonalds, they'd simply be bought out and grinded into a fine powder.

We're hurdling toward a world owned by corporations and it's being done to the sounds of apathy, because those same corporations have successfully gotten the majority of the population addled on pop culture.

It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic... Ah, what the heck, I'll laugh anyway.

tl;dr: TPP is an evil version of NAFTA on steroids that rips power away from governments and gives mega-corps even more power to fuck over local economies in the pursuit of acquiring even more wealth than they already have. And the sad part is? I guarantee someone will argue that this is a good thing, because "free trade is always good", somehow. Even though the little guy cannot benefit from it at all.
 
I agree with most of what you've said; tariffs are a great way to protect domestic trade since it prevents countries dumping a bunch of goods and destroying the domestic industry. One example I think on top of my head is China dumping goods into the African market to put the domestic industry out of businesses since there is no way in hell to compete with an industrial giant like China. In addition, most of those goods are of poor quality but people will but them since they are dirt cheap and they don't have a lot of money either. Outsourcing also has fucked a lot of people, profitable jobs like manufacturing have been shipped to China. Look at cities like Detriot they used to be profitable and economically successful but outsourcing has gutted most of the decent jobs and now the place has gone downhill. I'm very much a protectionist in that sense although there are some benefits of free trade so I am not completely opposed to it. Although, if all the decent jobs are shipped out the middle class will start to become the lower class. Then no one would afford all the goods that are being produced along with all of us plebians fucked.

Another example of this is when NAFTA was passed a lot of manufacture jobs were removed from the market, and hundred of thousands of people lost their jobs and moved into the minimum-wage service industry. The quantity of the jobs has increased, but the quality has suffered tremendously contributing to income inequality. I believe ( I haven't read the whole thing yet ) the TPP will be the exact same thing especially since tariffs will be lowered in the agreement. Capitalism is a great economic system it has lifted millions out poverty and placed them into semi-decent ( considering their living standard ) conditions. But I agree with you that cooperations have way too much political power in our society. That is due to the fact most politicians rely on cooperations for their funding and in exchange they have to kowtow to them.
 
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It's pretty awful in general: it has lots of things huge corporations want that might, but many of those things are bad for the average person.

The biggest offender is the "Investor-State Dispute Settlement" stuff, which is what would allow international investors (the vast majority of which are multinational corporations) to sue countries for doing anything that harms their expected profits. These sorts of arbitration panels made sense to protect multinational corporations from getting their assets in a country seized by the government without any compensation, but in countries with reasonable legal systems there is no need for them and they only give those corporations a huge advantage (largely because the people who make up those panels tend to be corporate lawyers with plenty of incentive to rule in favor of corporations they might work for in the future, similar to how US banking regulatory bodies made up of former and future bankers tend to be horrendously biased toward banks) that undermines a nation's sovereignty. This guy explains how it's nonsense better than I just did.

The TPP also imposes some pretty shitty rules for intellectual property protection. Here's a quick overview of the bad things outlined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which you can read in full here. The TPP outlines some set in stone protections and rights for the owners of intellectual property while only suggesting and encouraging that rules be put in place to protect users (such as the rules the US has now governing fair use of copyrighted material), which means countries that are shitty about their copyright laws can still be shitty. Oh, and if they ever want to move toward being less shitty, unfortunately for them intellectual property matters are governed by the above ISDS thing which means that they can be sued for doing so because it would cut into their long term expected future profits from their copyrights. The TPP declares that the length of copyright ownership in membership nations is life of the creator plus 70 years, which raises the current term in most member nations by 20 years and that doesn't actually do anything productive for creators and innovators. The TPP makes it illegal to bypass DRM even if you're not violating copyright when doing so, which means even things like bypassing a Blu-Ray disc's DRM to create a digital copy of a movie you bought a physical copy of is now totally illegal even if you never share it with others. The TPP's rules on criminal enforcement and civil damages for copyright infringement includes the possibility of jail sentences for any large scale copyright infringement, not just those done for commercial gain as is the standard currently, and it includes the ability for governing bodies to destroy anything that was used to violate copyright or bypass DRM, meaning if TPP comes into effect and you get in trouble for sharing copyrighted files then your computer might be confiscated and destroyed for it. There's a thing in the IP provisions placing very harsh criminal penalties on anyone who gains “unauthorized, willful access to a trade secret held in a computer system" that are for some reason much harsher than the penalties for attaining that information in non-computer ways, and there is no exception for whistleblowers who access or spread such information even if it's something the public should definitely know. The TPP will force most member nations to adopt something similar to the US's shitty DMCA notice-and-takedown system for enforcing copyright claims online, which basically forces internet service providers to become copyright enforcers. The IP stuff is overall pretty shitty for average users, but pretty nice for big corporations that want to hold on to their copyrights for dear life and severely punish anyone who dares to violate it.

Just that shit above is bad enough, but there's more. It imposes stronger limits on how long pharmaceutical companies can hold copyright of life-saving medicines, which means it'll take longer for medical aid groups to get affordable generic versions of them to people in poorer nations, which means it will literally result in unnecessary deaths; here's a statement on this from Medecins San Frontieres (also known in the Canada and the US as Doctors Without Borders). There are some other things that seem to have bad implications for online privacy, and one thing that might allow member nations to enact mass surveillance on other member nations due to a requirement to give telecommunications providers access to international submarine communications cables, but these are more iffy and kind of depend on interpretation.

And all that doesn't even address the concerns of the negative effects that might come from the actual "free trade" aspects of the TPP. It's just a huge pile of shit and I hope that the legislatures of the member nations end up denying it, though it looks rather unlikely at this point.
 
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@Jorick

Thanks for the articles I've read the first one and skimmed through the second one. I was aware that the TPP gave the right for cooperations to sue countries and bypass their national laws, but I wasn't informed on how bad it was for intellectual property and medicine. This really shows the extent were cooperations can exercise power over the sovereignty of a nation, control the laws with that nation, destroy private property, bypass human rights, police the internet and place all of the countries who signed up into semi-oligarchic states. My rhetoric sounds extreme, but it matches the severity of the issue.

The TPP is aligned towards the interests of the cooperations since they pretty much own most of the countries on the list or at least the politicians. What makes it awful is whether or not the TPP is good or not. It's the fact that this has been in the works for several years and the details have been carefully hidden from the citizens of those countries. In other words, a potential economic game-changer has had zero coverage along with zero input from the people, therefore, taxation without representation. The TPP clearly violates the fourth amendment by forcing ISPs to give private information for the government or cooperations and gives them the right persecute and destroy people's private property. It's Orwellian, it's disgusting to the constitution and liberties that people have fought & died for, a fucking disgrace, and it's a shame that the countries are so corrupted that this can go by with barely any media coverage about it.

With that said I think it is going to pass unless there is a major protest or even a revolt which seems unlikely seeing how, conventionally obscure this is. As I said before corruption is inherent in our political because politicians & news organizations depend on support from cooperations in exchange for the cooperations' interests being injected into legislation. It's simple as that, public funding does not pay the bills for all of the advertisements politicians run nor does it support the programs governments run. If there is going any fundamental change so things like TPP or NAFTA will not even be considered the way that politicians and the media are funded.
 
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