A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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The 12 countries involved have a collective population of about 800 million - almost double that of the European Union's single market. The 12-nation would-be bloc is already responsible for 40% of world trade.
The pact aimed to deepen economic ties between these nations, slashing tariffs and fostering trade to boost growth. Members had also hoped to foster a closer relationship on economic policies and regulation.
The deal was seen as a remarkable achievement given the very different approaches and standards within the member countries, including environmental protection, workers' rights and regulatory coherence - not to mention the special protections that some countries have for certain industries.
This deal would have strengthened our hand when dealing with China concerning tradee. By not completing the deal we left a huge opening for China to lead the trade market globally in any direction it chose. That will have a disastrous effect on our power globally. China has already named this effort to control the trade markets as the new silk road.
JJ 
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Quote:
Originally posted by JJ:
-
The 12 countries involved have a collective population of about 800 million - almost double that of the European Union's single market. The 12-nation would-be bloc is already responsible for 40% of world trade.
The pact aimed to deepen economic ties between these nations, slashing tariffs and fostering trade to boost growth. Members had also hoped to foster a closer relationship on economic policies and regulation.
The deal was seen as a remarkable achievement given the very different approaches and standards within the member countries, including environmental protection, workers' rights and regulatory coherence - not to mention the special protections that some countries have for certain industries.
This deal would have strengthened our hand when dealing with China concerning tradee. By not completing the deal we left a huge opening for China to lead the way globally. That will have a disastrous effect on our power globally.
JJ
I can find equal and opposite views on the TPP, by both Right and Left leaning sources, T.
Looks like Trump might have changed his mind on the issue. Maybe you two finally found something you can agree on?
I just had a funny thought about a future where Trump turns Globalist and all of the sudden T is arguing in favor of Trump's every move, and going forward with the TPP is the genesis of that.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by JJ:
-
The 12 countries involved have a collective population of about 800 million - almost double that of the European Union's single market. The 12-nation would-be bloc is already responsible for 40% of world trade.
The pact aimed to deepen economic ties between these nations, slashing tariffs and fostering trade to boost growth. Members had also hoped to foster a closer relationship on economic policies and regulation.
The deal was seen as a remarkable achievement given the very different approaches and standards within the member countries, including environmental protection, workers' rights and regulatory coherence - not to mention the special protections that some countries have for certain industries.
This deal would have strengthened our hand when dealing with China concerning tradee. By not completing the deal we left a huge opening for China to lead the way globally. That will have a disastrous effect on our power globally.
I can find equal and opposite views on the TPP, by both Right and Left leaning sources, T.
Looks like Trump might have changed his mind on the issue. Maybe you two finally found something you can agree on?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
I don't care what your opinion is jack. You don't read and you have a conspiracy driven, uneducated, ill informed, FOX news concept about everything.
JJ
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Yup. Elizabeth Warren's and Bernie Sanders' hard anti-TPP stance are the things that FOX News is made of.
Idiot.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:How about the obvious interpretation of Trump? Once he was comfortably living in the White House for a month, he sold out Candidate Trump to become the GOP's preferred President?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I can find equal and opposite views on the TPP, by both Right and Left leaning sources, T.
Looks like Trump might have changed his mind on the issue. Maybe you two finally found something you can agree on?
I just had a funny thought about a future where Trump turns Globalist and all of the sudden T is arguing in favor of Trump's every move, and going forward with the TPP is the genesis of that.
Candidate Trump promised to avoid cutting Medicaid. Candidate Trump promised to deliver affordable health insurance to all Americans — at government expense, if necessary. Candidate Trump promised to defend Social Security benefits. Candidate Trump said that wealthy people like Donald Trump would pay higher taxes under his plan. Candidate Trump positioned himself as an enemy of global financial elites and vowed to reimpose Glass-Steagall regulation and break up big banks.
None of those promises were kept.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:How about the obvious interpretation of Trump? Once he was comfortably living in the White House for a month, he sold out Candidate Trump to become the GOP's preferred President?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I can find equal and opposite views on the TPP, by both Right and Left leaning sources, T.
Looks like Trump might have changed his mind on the issue. Maybe you two finally found something you can agree on?
I just had a funny thought about a future where Trump turns Globalist and all of the sudden T is arguing in favor of Trump's every move, and going forward with the TPP is the genesis of that.
Candidate Trump promised to avoid cutting Medicaid. Candidate Trump promised to deliver affordable health insurance to all Americans — at government expense, if necessary. Candidate Trump promised to defend Social Security benefits. Candidate Trump said that wealthy people like Donald Trump would pay higher taxes under his plan. Candidate Trump positioned himself as an enemy of global financial elites and vowed to reimpose Glass-Steagall regulation and break up big banks.
None of those promises were kept.
Yeah. I think I'm just going to start calling him Hillary.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Trump, like much of the public, bounces between the desire to minimize our involvement in long, costly wars and the belief that we should always get our way in the world. The ideal is an intervention that is quick, easy, successful and low on American casualties.
George W. Bush and his administration sold the Iraq invasion on the promise that we would go in, remove Saddam Hussein, liberate the country and be home for Thanksgiving. “I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won't last any longer than that,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured Americans beforehand. It lasted longer than that.
Barack Obama had a similar aspiration in Libya, using airstrikes to defeat and topple Moammar Gadhafi. They achieved the goal but had the unwanted consequence of turning Libya into a terrorist-infested cauldron of violence. Even Obama said the Libya operation was his “worst mistake.”
When you go big, as Bush did, you run a high risk of being fatally bogged down for years in a savage but inconclusive war. When you go small, as Obama did, you stand a good chance of achieving little or making things worse.
Trump has already run this experiment and learned nothing from it. In 2013, as Obama was being urged to intervene in response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons, he tweeted, “Stay out of Syria.” Shortly after Trump took office, the regime allegedly used gas again, and he ordered a missile strike to “deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”
The one-off went quickly, cost little and produced no American casualties. The downside was that it didn’t work. Assad’s forces have not only gained ground in the past year but apparently used nerve agents several times in the past year — and they used them again this month.
To respond by hitting Syrian or Russian targets with missiles would satisfy Trump’s need to assert his toughness. As Naval War College professor Andrew Stigler told me, “They offer gratification without commitment.”
But we can be confident that they wouldn’t change the course of the war, bring down Assad or serve as a reliable deterrent against more gas attacks. More likely, blowing up some targets would simply highlight the administration’s refusal to take action that would alter any important outcome.
This option has a small potential upside but a huge possible downside: a military conflict with the Russians or the Iranians. Both have more at stake in Syria than we do, as well as strong alliances with a government that has all but won the war.
Defense Secretary James Mattis seems to recognize the depth of our predicament. “We’re trying to stop the murder of innocent people,” he told the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday. “But on a strategic level, it’s how do we keep this from escalating out of control — if you get my drift on that.”
www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-perspec-chapman-trump-s
yria-chemical-weapons-war-20180413-story.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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"If it were true that the economic system we have today can’t even bring our most poverty-stricken workers to a semi-decent standard of living – and $15 is not even a living wage, by the way – then why would we defend it? That would be straightforward evidence that we need a better system."
www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/13/how-much-is-an-hour-worth-the-war
-over-the-minimum-wage
President Franklin Roosevelt openly declared his desire to reshape the American economy by driving out “parasitic” firms that built worker penury into their business models. “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country,” he said in 1933.
Inevitably, this vision had its dissenters, especially among business owners, for whom minimum-wage increases represented an immediate and unwelcome increase in costs, and more generally, a limit on their agency as profit-seekers. At a 1937 Congressional hearing on the proposed Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA) – which enacted the first federal minimum wage, the 40-hour work week and the ban on child labour – a representative of one of the US’s most powerful business lobby groups, the National Association of Manufacturers, testified that a minimum wage was the first step toward totalitarianism: “Call it Bolshevism or communism, if you will. Call it socialism, Nazism, fascism or what you will. Each says to the people that they must bow to the will of the state.”
Despite these objections, the FLSA passed in 1938, setting a nationwide minimum wage of $0.25 per hour (the equivalent of $4.45 today). Many industries were exempt at first, including those central to the southern economy, and those that employed high proportions of racial minorities and women. In subsequent decades, more and more of these loopholes were closed.
But as the age of Roosevelt and his New Deal gave way to that of Reagan, the field of economics turned decisively against the minimum wage – one part of a much larger political and cultural tilt toward all things “free market”.
“The minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment than anything since the Great Depression,” claimed Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign. In many ways, Reagan’s governing philosophy (like Margaret Thatcher’s) was a grossly simplified, selectively applied version of neoclassical price theory, slapped with a broad brush on to any aspect of American life that Republicans wanted to set free from regulatory interference or union pressure. Since becoming law in 1938, the US federal minimum wage had been raised by Congress 15 times, generally keeping pace with inflation. Once Reagan was president, he blocked any new increases, letting the nationwide minimum be eroded by inflation. By the time he left office, the federal minimum was $3.35, and stood at its lowest value to date, relative to the median national income.
When Roosevelt pushed for America’s first minimum wage, he was confident that capitalists would deal with the temporary price shock by doing what capitalists do best: relentlessly seeking out new ways to save costs elsewhere. He rejected the idea that a functioning economy simply must contain certain types of jobs, or that particular industries were intrinsically required to be poorly compensated or exploitative.
Economies and jobs are, to some extent, what we decide to make them. In developed economies like the US and the UK, it is common to lament the disappearance of “good jobs” in manufacturing and their replacement by “bad” low-wage work in service industries. But much of what was “good” about those manufacturing jobs was made that way over time by concessions won and regulations demanded by labour activists. Today, there is no natural reason that the exploding class of service jobs must be as “bad” as they often are.
The Fight for $15 has not notched its victories by convincing libertarian economists that they are wrong; it has won because more and more Americans work bad jobs – poorly paid jobs, unrewarding jobs, insecure jobs
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That's about right. Something is going to change because it's getting to the point where it has to.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:ahhhh yes. Another of the forgotten Obama-Gates.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
How can you be a fan of TPP? I can understand why Democratic politicians are, because politicians are liars and don't care about the people anymore than Republican politicians do in general, but as a citizen who happens to be a Democrat, how do you support it?
A reversal on this will be devastating to Trump's reelection chances. If that's the reason why you support it though, that is just sad.Quote:
Here’s one easy way to identify the distorted priorities of the TPP: the term “climate change” isn’t so much as mentioned once in all 30 chapters.
There’s a lot of talk about the Trans-Pacific Partnership because after years of absurd secrecy, the text of the deal was finally released in November 2015. Now, if Congress approves this deal, the TPP can trump common-sense protections for workers, the environment, public health, food safety and much more. It is a deal that strengthens the power of corporations and weakens our democratic institutions by putting global commerce ahead of the public.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/24/wtf-tppQuote:
"In a series of broken promises Trump made to the working people of this country, rejoining the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership would be the biggest yet," warned Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also weighed in, calling Trump's move "a ridiculous reversal and a slap in the face to the hard-working Americans Trump promised to fight for."
Negotiated under a veil of strictly-enforced secrecy by the Obama administration and so-called trade advisory committees stocked with corporate representatives, the TPP was never really even about establishing conditions for "free trade," as numerous analysts have noted.
Rather, as The Intercept's Zaid Jilani argued, the pact is primarily aimed at "protecting corporate profits" by "crafting regulatory regimes that benefit certain industries."
The deal—which was signed in March by 11 Asia-Pacific nations amid fierce grassroots opposition—is particularly generous to Big Pharma, as it "expands monopoly protections and patents for various pharmaceutical drugs," Jilani observed.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/04/12/confirming-he-does-not-gi
ve-crap-about-working-people-trump-proposes-rejoining-tpp
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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