TPP: Job Loss, Lower Wages and Higher Drug Prices

[Octafish]

Trans-Pacific Partnership: Job Loss, Lower Wages and Higher Drug Prices

Have you heard? The TPP is a massive, controversial "free trade" agreement currently being pushed by big corporations and negotiated behind closed doors by officials from the United States and 11 other countries – Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam.

The TPP would expand the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) "trade" pact model that has spurred massive U.S. trade deficits and job loss, downward pressure on wages, unprecedented levels of inequality and new floods of agricultural imports. The TPP not only replicates, but expands NAFTA's special protections for firms that offshore U.S. jobs. And U.S. TPP negotiators literally used the 2011 Korea FTA – under which exports have fallen and trade deficits have surged – as the template for the TPP.

In one fell swoop, this secretive deal could:

offshore American jobs and increase income inequality,

jack up the cost of medicines,

sneak in SOPA-like threats to Internet freedom,

and empower corporations to attack our environmental and health safeguards.

expose the U.S. to unsafe food and products,

roll back Wall Street reforms,

ban Buy American policies needed to create green jobs,

Although it is called a "free trade" agreement, the TPP is not mainly about trade. Of TPP's 29 draft chapters, only five deal with traditional trade issues. One chapter would provide incentives to offshore jobs to low-wage countries. Many would impose limits on government policies that we rely on in our daily lives for safe food, a clean environment, and more. Our domestic federal, state and local policies would be required to comply with TPP rules.

The TPP would even elevate individual foreign firms to equal status with sovereign nations, empowering them to privately enforce new rights and privileges, provided by the pact, by dragging governments to foreign tribunals to challenge public interest policies that they claim frustrate their expectations. The tribunals would be authorized to order taxpayer compensation to the foreign corporations for the "expected future profits" they surmise would be inhibited by the challenged policies.

We only know about the TPP's threats thanks to leaks – the public is not allowed to see the draft TPP text. Even members of Congress, after being denied the text for years, are now only provided limited access. Meanwhile, more than 500 official corporate "trade advisors" have special access. The TPP has been under negotiation for six years, and the Obama administration wants to sign the deal this year. Opposition to the TPP is growing at home and in many of the other countries involved.

SOURCE w LINKS: http://www.citizen.org/TPP

[Recursion]

1. The only time falling wages occurred since 1994 were in the wake of 2008

And even 2008 couldn't undo all the wage gains that happened after NAFTA's passage. (For that matter "wages" per se rose after 2008, though incomes fell; incomes are what's important.)

[yourout]

2. Spin it all you want...I saw first hand how NAFTA gutted local manuafacturing.

I lost 1/3 of my customer base here in southern Wisconsin to it.

Most of the workers traded decent paying factory jobs for McJobs.

[Recursion]

4. Clearly not "most" since median household incomes went up, not down

I think "NAFTA" came synonymous with "globalization" in people's minds, but we don't have free trade deals with China or India, who saw the fastest manufacturing growth during that period.

[Dont call me Shirley]

5. Most went DOWN, not up...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/31/wages-arent-stagnating-theyre-plummeting/

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/speedup-americans-working-harder-charts

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/fact-sheets/wages/

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jan/17/economics-globalrecession

[Recursion]

6. Nope. Median household incomes went up, nationwide and for all quintiles

As your links point out, under Bush's disastrous handling of the economy wages fell, but NAFTA was more than a decade before that started.

[Dont call me Shirley]

7. ...

YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR GAINS
Productivity has surged, but income and wages have stagnated for most Americans. If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.

[Recursion]

8. Which is why we should have stronger unions, like Europe and Canada

Both of which, incidentally, trade internationally as a larger part of their GDP than we do.

[Dont call me Shirley]

9. Hell yes!

[Recursion]

10. And without those stronger unions, blocking FTAs won't do a damn thing

I keep coming back to the fact that the vast majority of offshoring went to China, a country with which we aren't even contemplating a free trade agreement. And for that matter, I have no confidence that with our current deplorable rate of organization, we would see any wage gains at all even with a complete cut-off of all offshoring.

[Dont call me Shirley]

11. The ruling elite have done an effective job of turning many Americans against unions over the

past 34 years. Like the fast food workers, who are rising up against low wages and pay theft, trying to coalesce into a union, other workers will demand the need for a union also.

We can hope that these new union movements and the recent elections and actions in Greece will spread like mats of healthy fungi.

[Autumn]

25. I know that when the local manufacturing company went the workers got other jobs

at less wages. I also know that was when a lot of stay at home wives went to work so I think that might have helped the median household income go up.

[sabrina 1]

27. NAFTA became synonymous with American job loss, IT jobs took the first hit, shipped overseas

which led eventually to the collapse of the economy, as more and more Americans lost their jobs, were even forced to train those who were being hired from overseas, to replace them.

Each time you call 'customer service' of a huge Corporation and speak to someone in a foreign country, using American sounding names, like eg, Tony Anderson, which was part of the reaction to the huge outcry, 'fool the public', ask them where they are. I have.

I don't know where you have been, but most Americans KNOW people who lost their jobs, lowered their standard of living when forced to work in low paying jobs, just to survive, eventually in so many cases, even losing their homes.

I know some of those people and I know they will never recover what they lost.

So who should we believe, the victims of these Global Coup D'Etat Corporate policies, or the Corporate memos designed to defend them?

Mexico also suffered horribly, driving people out of the country as huge Corporations took over millions of small businesses.

And with that mission accomplished, they are ready to further destroy the standards of living in once First World nations, again see Europe, and spread this massive 'Shock Doctrine around the world.

I'm happy you appear to have escaped the tsunami of lost jobs and that you are lucky enough not to know anyone who was a victim of these horrible policies. I wish that was true of everyone, but it is not.

[Octafish]

16. So what? Here's what NAFTA did...

NAFTA’s Impact on U.S. Workers

by Jeff Faux
Economic Policy Institute, December 9, 2013

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NATFA) was the door through which American workers were shoved into the neoliberal global labor market.

By establishing the principle that U.S. corporations could relocate production elsewhere and sell back into the United States, NAFTA undercut the bargaining power of American workers, which had driven the expansion of the middle class since the end of World War II. The result has been 20 years of stagnant wages and the upward redistribution of income, wealth and political power.

NAFTA affected U.S. workers in four principal ways. First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as production moved to Mexico. Most of these losses came in California, Texas, Michigan, and other states where manufacturing is concentrated. To be sure, there were some job gains along the border in service and retail sectors resulting from increased trucking activity, but these gains are small in relation to the loses, and are in lower paying occupations. The vast majority of workers who lost jobs from NAFTA suffered a permanent loss of income.


Second, NAFTA strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits. As soon as NAFTA became law, corporate managers began telling their workers that their companies intended to move to Mexico unless the workers lowered the cost of their labor. In the midst of collective bargaining negotiations with unions, some companies would even start loading machinery into trucks that they said were bound for Mexico. The same threats were used to fight union organizing efforts. The message was: “If you vote in a union, we will move south of the border.” With NAFTA, corporations also could more easily blackmail local governments into giving them tax reductions and other subsidies.

Third, the destructive effect of NAFTA on the Mexican agricultural and small business sectors dislocated several million Mexican workers and their families, and was a major cause in the dramatic increase in undocumented workers flowing into the U.S. labor market. This put further downward pressure on U.S. wages, especially in the already lower paying market for less skilled labor.

Fourth, and ultimately most important, NAFTA was the template for rules of the emerging global economy, in which the benefits would flow to capital and the costs to labor. The U.S. governing class—in alliance with the financial elites of its trading partners—applied NAFTA’s principles to the World Trade Organization, to the policies of the World Bank and IMF, and to the deal under which employers of China’s huge supply of low-wage workers were allowed access to U.S. markets in exchange for allowing American multinational corporations the right to invest there.

[font color="green"]The NAFTA doctrine of socialism for capital and free markets for labor also drove U.S. policy in the Mexican peso crisis of 1994-95, the Asia financial crash of 1997 and the global financial meltdown of 2008. In each case, the U.S. government organized the rescue of the world’s bank and corporate investors, and let the workers fend for themselves.[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.epi.org/blog/naftas-impact-workers/

Which is different from what you wrote, Recursion.

[JEB]

24. "socialism for capital and free markets for labor"

That is the agenda. And people are still buying it.

[tenderfoot]

17. Where is this? Mumbai?

eom

[Recursion]

23. The US

If you honestly want to talk about India's wages let me know

[tenderfoot]

26. Well, I honestly don't agree that wages have gone up for most Americans...

since the early 70's. Because they haven't. No matter how you try to spin it.

Honestly.

[sabrina 1]

28. I've spoken to Indian citizens, working for Global Corporations.

Their salaries are nowhere near what an American with the same qualifications would need to live in this country.

And that is the plan, lower the standards of living here, so the US workforce can compete, DOWNWARDS, with the standard of living in Third World countries.

That goal has nearly been accomplished in Europe, where the economic takeover has cost millions of people their jobs, the end goal beiing to make them accept low wages rather than starve.

Thankfully it appears that finally, the people are beginning to revolt against those draconian Austerity 'policies' electing a new Government in Greece, which has already turned down the IMF's latest attempt to further indebt that nation.

When millions of people, billions in fact, across the globe are telling you something and you persist in telling them THEY are all wrong, well, that's up to you.

Fortunately, while these predatory Corporations went Global a long time ago, the people were isolated in their own nations, but now are joining forces and going Global themselves.

If you want to know what these new trade agreements will do to American workers, see what has been going on for years now, with the Longshoremen.

Wonder why THAT story never makes it to the Corporate Media? Because, as members of Congress have said about the TPP, 'if the people knew, they would be opposed'.

Keeping the people FROM knowing is part of the plan.

But they didn't count the internet into their calculations. Though this new 'agreement' will attempt to take care of that also.

[Dont call me Shirley]

3. Call your Reps, Sens, WH to state objections to TPP.

A new global country is being created. It has no borders, no ethnicities, no local rule of law. It is the world of corporate rule. It is a coup d'état by the world's trillionaires and billionaires. One might refer to this new world as the global takeover by the East India Tea Company.

[malokvale77]

13. I think you defined the TPP quite well.

East India Tea Company. I would rather have a whole in my head.

[Go Vols]

15. +1

[Octafish]

19. By all means...

...TPP = Welfare for the Wealthy.

Thank you for putting it into words, Dont call me Shirley. The corporate approach for grabbing the world's loot has been going on since East India Tea Company, quite successfully as evinced by recent history showing these are the richest times in history, with most of the wealth falling into the pockets of the few "stakeholders."



The Shocking Redistribution of Wealth in the Past Five Years

by Paul Buchheit
Published on Monday, December 30, 2013 by Common Dreams

Anyone reviewing the data is likely to conclude that there must be some mistake. It doesn't seem possible that one out of twenty American families could each have made a million dollars since Obama became President, while the average American family's net worth has barely recovered. But the evidence comes from numerous reputable sources.

Some conservatives continue to claim that President Obama is unfriendly to business, but the facts show that the richest Americans and the biggest businesses have been the main - perhaps only - beneficiaries of the massive wealth gain over the past five years.

1. $5 Million to Each of the 1%, and $1 Million to Each of the Next 4%

From the end of 2008 to the middle of 2013 total U.S. wealth increased from $47 trillion to $72 trillion. About $16 trillion of that is financial gain (stocks and other financial instruments).

The richest 1% own about 38 percent of stocks, and half of non-stock financial assets. So they've gained at least $6.1 trillion (38 percent of $16 trillion). That's over $5 million for each of 1.2 million households.

The next richest 4%, based on similar calculations, gained about $5.1 trillion. That's over a million dollars for each of their 4.8 million households.

The least wealthy 90% in our country own only 11 percent of all stocks excluding pensions (which are fast disappearing). The frantic recent surge in the stock market has largely bypassed these families.

2. Evidence of Our Growing Wealth Inequality

This first fact is nearly ungraspable: In 2009 the average wealth for almost half of American families was ZERO (their debt exceeded their assets).

In 1983 the families in America's poorer half owned an average of about $15,000. But from 1983 to 1989 median wealth fell from over $70,000 to about $60,000. From 1998 to 2009, fully 80% of American families LOST wealth. They had to borrow to stay afloat.

It seems the disparity couldn't get much worse, but after the recession it did. According to a Pew Research Center study, in the first two years of recovery the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%. And then, from 2011 to 2013, the stock market grew by almost 50 percent, with again the great majority of that gain going to the richest 5%.

Today our wealth gap is worse than that of the third world. Out of all developed and undeveloped countries with at least a quarter-million adults, the U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.

3. Congress' Solution: Take from the Poor

Congress has responded by cutting unemployment benefits and food stamps, along with other 'sequester' targets like Meals on Wheels for seniors and Head Start for preschoolers. The more the super-rich make, the more they seem to believe in the cruel fantasy that the poor are to blame for their own struggles.

President Obama recently proclaimed that inequality "drives everything I do in this office." Indeed it may, but in the wrong direction.

FORUM HOSTS, PLEASE NOTE: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at [email protected].

Original Article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/12/30-0

TPP and NAFTA and Hudson Bay and EITC show why reporting our concerns to those we trust will do something about them is juist like witnessing a bank robbery and running to the police station only to find the guy you just saw robbing the bank is now sitting behind the desk wearing the sergeant's stripes.

[JEB]

12. Thanks for posting. K&R.

Those pushing this thing sound like used car salesmen. One would think they are on commission.

[Octafish]

20. Quite an Opertion

Outsourcing US Missile Technology to China

The Saga of Magnequench

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Coutnerpunch Weekend Edition April 7 - 9, 2006

Magnequench is an Indianapolis-based company. It specializes in the obscure field of sintered magnetics. Essentially, it makes tiny, high-tech magnets from rare-earth minerals ground down into a fine powder. The magnets are highly prized by electronics and aviation companies. But Magnequench's biggest client has been the Pentagon.

The neodymium-iron-boron magnets made by Magnequench are a crucial component in the guidance system of cruise missiles and the Joint Direct Attack Munition or JDAM bomb, which is made by Boeing and had a starring role in the spring bombing of Baghdad. Indeed, Magnequench enjoys a near monopoly on this market niche, supplying 85 percent of the rare-earth magnets that are used in the servo motors of these guided missiles and bombs.

But the Pentagon may soon be sending its orders for these parts to China, instead of Indiana. On September 15, 2004 Magnequench shuttered its last plant in Indiana, fired its 450 workers and began shipping its machine tools to a new plant in China. "We're handing over to the Chinese both our defense technology and our jobs in the midst of a deep recession," says Rep. Peter Visclosky, a Democrat from northern Indiana.

It gets stranger. Magnequench is not only moving its defense plants to China, it's actually owned by Chinese companies with close ties to the Chinese government.

Magnequench began its corporate life back in 1986 as a subsidiary of General Motors. Using Pentagon grants, GM had developed a new kind of permanent magnet material in the early 1980s. It began manufacturing the magnets in 1987 at the Magnequench factory in Anderson, Indiana.

In 1995, Magnequench was purchased from GM by Sextant Group, an investment company headed by Archibald Cox, Jr-the son of the Watergate prosecutor. After the takeover, Cox was named CEO. What few knew at the time was that Sextant was largely a front for two Chinese companies, San Huan New Material and the China National Non-Ferrous Metals Import and Export Corporation. Both of these companies have close ties to the Chinese government. Indeed, the ties were so intimate that the heads of both companies were in-laws of the late Chinese premier Deng Xiaopeng.

At the time of the takeover, Cox pledged to the workers that Magnequench was in it for the long haul, intending to invest money in the plants and committed to keeping the production line going for at least a decade.

Three years later Cox shut down the Anderson plant and shipped its assembly line to China. Now Cox is presiding over the closure of Magnequench's last factory in the US, the Valparaiso, Indiana plant that manufactures the magnets for the JDAM bomb. Most of the workers have already been fired.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair04072006.html

Offshoring jobs, technology and national security for a buck.

[AzDar]

14. K & R

[Octafish]

21. Obama Blasted for Lumping Critics of Trade Deal Secrecy with 'Conspiracy Theorists'

'If the president is concerned that people don't know what's going on in the negotiations then the president should release the text and remove it from being a state secret.'

Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Published on Friday, May 2, 2014 by Common Dreams

Critics of the highly-secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations responded with outrage after U.S. President Barack Obama charged they have a "lack of knowledge of what is going on in the negotiations" and dismissed their concerns as "conspiracy theories."

The president made the comments this week during a press conference in Malaysia—one of the stops on his Asia-Pacific tour, aimed at advancing the TPP and the U.S. military "pivot" to the region. His tour has been met with region-wide protests against the economic and military agenda of the U.S.

SNIP...

Bernadette Ellorin, Chairperson of BAYAN-USA—an alliance of Filipino organizations in the U.S., told Common Dreams, "President Obama lacks knowledge of how so-called 'free trade agreements' impact people on the ground. The push-back he has gotten over the TPP comes from people who have long-suffered from these impacts."

"He should go back and talk with the parent-less children in the region, whose parents had no choice but to look for work overseas because they couldn't find work in their own country due to these so-called 'free trade' agreements," she added. "He should go back and talk to the indigenous children whose parents were killed by paramilitary groups because greater foreign investment stipulations in these agreements have led to forced evacuations and militarization of their land for the purpose of large scale foreign mining."

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/05/02-5

The president recommended we learn about TPP, just not from Huffington Post.

[sabrina 1]

29. That's the old fallback, isn't it, to yell 'CT' (was that Cass Sunstein's tactic?) at anyone who is

catching on to what they are up to.

[Dont call me Shirley]

33. If not just HuffPo, how about Wikileaks then?

[lonestarnot]

18. $1.45 a day, 18 billion profits for richie rich, kids under water, which we can locate with chips.

Yeah go tpp.

[Octafish]

22. The "End-Game" memo from Larry Summers.

Larry Summers
and the Secret "End-Game" Memo

Thursday, August 22, 2013
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine

EXCERPT...

The year was 1997. US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks. That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks. It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels.

Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game: "derivatives trading." JP Morgan alone would soon carry $88 trillion of these pseudo-securities on its books as "assets."

Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (soon to replace Rubin as Secretary) body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives.

But what was the use of turning US banks into derivatives casinos if money would flee to nations with safer banking laws?

[font color="green"]The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five: eliminate controls on banks in every nation on the planet – in one single move. It was as brilliant as it was insanely dangerous. [/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo/

Thanks for grokking and putting the situation into words, lonestarnot.

[sabrina 1]

30. Thank you for all your do to keep people informed, Octafish. Knowledge is power which is why

one of the first things they knew they had to do was to take over the Media.

[Dont call me Shirley]

34. And the schools.

[sabrina 1]

35. Yes, the schools. Not much time for education anymore. Testing, the profitable substitute for

education.

Bush's Education Publishing Buddies have made out like the bandits they are.

[Dont call me Shirley]

37. My child's school

is sending out a series of emails promoting the wonderfulness of the PARCC tests and the Rotten To The Core curriculum. My child's grades have taken a terrible turn since the implementation of this epic fail curriculum.

[sabrina 1]

38. I'm so sorry. I thought we would get rid of Bush's NCLB once we won everything in 2008.

Instead we got that on steroids.

It was the best way to get Private hands on the huge Public Education Fund. They worked for years coming up with this scheme. Business invented this system, not educators.

It is obvious that no educator would have condoned such a 'system'.

I hope things change before your child and so many others, lose the opportunity to get an education.

We will have to go back to when schools were operated underground if they don't.

[Dont call me Shirley]

40. I wish I had the knowledge to create an underground school.

[kelliekat44]

31. It "could" do all that but do we know anything for sure. Anyone have links to the official doc

so we can read it and think for ourselves about it?

[Octafish]

32. Here's the US Government TPP website.

https://ustr.gov/tpp

Notice how there are no TPP documents, only summaries.

Any idea of who is writing the TPP from that site?

[sabrina 1]

36. Which is why the public needs to know exactly what these Global Corporations are planning for the

future of the American people.

Congress was denied access and/or any participation in writing this agreement.

How on earth can we go on calling this a free country, a democracy, when the people's Reps have no say in writing our laws?

For years they were denied all requests to see what was in these secret documents.

The public outrage finally slowed them down, and forced them to provide a few peeks hoping that would silence people.

It hasn't, not just the people in this country, but people from all 12 nations involved in this have demanded they have access to this secret agreement before anyone tries to push through after which it will be too late.

And that is what they are trying to do. Just 'get it through' then they have nothing more to worry about.

It's outrageous to see the recalcitrance of those involved in this.

You would think we were asking for ponies or something.

All people are asking for is that our Congress and other Governments' Reps be a part of this enormous project, which is their RIGHT.

[LongTomH]

39. Thanks for posting this, Octafish!

I wish I thought I had a chance of influencing either of Missouri's senators to vote against the TPP: both Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill only listen to their billionaire donors.