Trump to China : Here, take over PacRim, it's yours.

[Triloby]

So let me get this straight....

Trump wants to renegotiate our trade deals with other nations to try and give us a better bargaining position with other nations in terms of commerce. But the TPP was essentially designed to do just that; to prevent China from becoming too influential as a world power and in getting better trade deals with the Pacific Rim. But now that the TPP is dead with Trump as president now, other nations have no reason to forge better business relations with the U.S. due to tariffs and other trade barriers already imposed on them. Now China has the ability to offer better trade deals and foreign relations with the rest of the Pacific Rim than the U.S. does.

Except that the TPP had flaws of its own. It was developed and negotiated in secrecy, and most people didn't even know about what was contained in that bill until WikiLeaks leaked certain portions of the agreement to the public. Even then, people had serious concerns about this agreement giving major corporations and other large groups far more power than they already have when dictating world commerce.

I seriously don't even know what to think anymore....

 

[Brainonska511]

Except that the TPP had flaws of its own. It was developed and negotiated in secrecy

Why is this a flaw? No country would be stupid enough to publicly negotiate such a large deal because of the variety of interests that will try to latch on and twist the public discourse to their advantage. It's not like the general goals of what they were trying to achieve were kept secret.

 

[Triloby]

Why is this a flaw? No country would be stupid enough to publicly negotiate such a large deal because of the variety of interests that will try to latch on and twist the public discourse to their advantage. It's not like the general goals of what they were trying to achieve were kept secret.

The secrecy about the agreement didn't bother me that much. I can see the importance of wanting to keep a lid of the more sensitive details away from the public.

It's the implication that we would be giving corporations and other large organizations even more power than what they already have right now. One of those implications being that a corporation would now have the ability to sue an entire nation legally for whatever reason possible. I just don't see it as a good thing considering how easy it would be to abuse such an agreement for the benefits of even fewer people.

 

[JSt0rm]

So let me get this straight....

Trump wants to renegotiate our trade deals with other nations to try and give us a better bargaining position with other nations in terms of commerce. But the TPP was essentially designed to do just that; to prevent China from becoming too influential as a world power and in getting better trade deals with the Pacific Rim. But now that the TPP is dead with Trump as president now, other nations have no reason to forge better business relations with the U.S. due to tariffs and other trade barriers already imposed on them. Now China has the ability to offer better trade deals and foreign relations with the rest of the Pacific Rim than the U.S. does.

Except that the TPP had flaws of its own. It was developed and negotiated in secrecy, and most people didn't even know about what was contained in that bill until WikiLeaks leaked certain portions of the agreement to the public. Even then, people had serious concerns about this agreement giving major corporations and other large groups far more power than they already have when dictating world commerce.

I seriously don't even know what to think anymore....

The tpp has been in negotiation for 9 years. Let that sink in. lmao.

 

[Balt]

You can blame it on Trump, but really he was just responding to what a lot of Americans wanted.

So many people lament the loss of the US influence in the world, but somehow don't realize that things like TPP are necessary to maintain it. They think it's about trade and only trade.

 

[Brainonska511]

They think it's about trade and only trade.

They also think economics is a zero-sum game.

 

[bshole]

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016...-middle-class-is-larger-and-richer-than-ever/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timwors...too-rich-to-be-middle-class-now/#6cb723702a60

http://www.npr.org/2016/07/07/484941939/a-portrait-of-americas-middle-class-by-the-numbers

The problem with all of those is that they are doing everything in absolute dollars and not purchasing power. In the end, the ONLY thing that matters is purchasing power. You and I both know that. In my example I would need to make 240K to achieve parity with a 1930s engineer. I believe purchasing power peaked in the 60s so it would be even worse if compared to the 60s.

For example,

In 1950, a family sending their child to the University of Pennsylvania would only spend 18 percent of their annual income (if they paid in cash) to send their kid to study. Today it would consume 79 percent of gross annual income. Even if we look at net take home pay a regular family in no way could send their child to school without going into massive student debt.

Think about that. Massive debt is now a de facto requirement for higher education. This was not the case 50 years ago. That marks a DRASTIC decline in purchasing power, an UNSUSTAINABLE DECLINE.

http://www.mybudget360.com/cost-of-living-2014-inflation-1950-vs-2014-data-housing-cars-college/

 

[ivwshane]

The problem with all of those is that they are doing everything in absolute dollars and not purchasing power. In the end, the ONLY thing that matters is purchasing power. You and I both know that. In my example I would need to make 240K to achieve parity with a 1930s engineer. I believe purchasing power peaked in the 60s so it would be even worse if compared to the 60s.

For example,



http://www.mybudget360.com/cost-of-living-2014-inflation-1950-vs-2014-data-housing-cars-college/

Yeah I'm not sure what you are talking about, I kinda remember the thirties as not being that great so I don't know why that would be your starting point. Inflation has been relatively stable for decades now and has even trended slightly down.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

 

[bshole]

A progressive take:

The simple argument against the TPP boils down to this: The TPP, just like the NAFTA, is supported by Republicans and opposed by progressives; it gives corporations the power to challenge laws and was sold as a job creator. Most importantly, both trade deals were supported by lobbyists, corporations, and special interests and opposed by labor unions and environmentalists.

Time proved that labor unions and environmentalists were the ones who were right all along about NAFTA. The government promises of more jobs were simply… just promises. Thanks to NAFTA, the United States lost around 700,000 good paying jobs to Mexico, and income inequality soared. Corporations, on the other hand, got what they hoped for and benefited greatly from the deal. Now the same groups are trying to convince you that the TPP will create good paying jobs and that the concerns by labor unions and environmentalists are unfounded.

There’s a saying: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing, but expecting different results.

Yes! It’s insane to believe that the TPP will be a job creator.

http://progressivearmy.com/2016/07/04/simple-argument-tpp/

 

[bshole]

Yeah I'm not sure what you are talking about, I kinda remember the thirties as not being that great so I don't know why that would be your starting point. Inflation has been relatively stable for decades now and has even tended slightly down.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

Well here is an in depth analysis of the 60s vs today and it looks MUCH worse than a comparison with the 30s. A whopping 87 percent drop..... 87 percent drop..... that is a friggin mountainous drop.

Workers’ wages buy less and less. In fact, workers have lost purchasing power during the past half-century. Comparing prices to wages, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose more than six times from 1965 to 2011—while the minimum wage rose less than five times.

Professionals also suffered. According to the Engineering Workforce Commission, a senior engineer’s salary has gone up about five and a half times. In short, workers work longer to earn money to buy the same goods.

Today’s minimum wage employee works 12 percent longer to earn a gallon of milk compared to 1965, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Today’s senior engineer works almost twice as long to buy a gallon of gasoline, according to the Department of Energy.

So, in real terms, wages have fallen. The drop is larger than it appears. Look at costs to see why.

Dairy farm statistics show that a cow produces two and a half times the milk compared to yesteryear’s cow and the Department of Commerce reports that labor per cow has fallen by two thirds. These two improvements alone—there are others—eliminate about 87 percent of the effort to make milk.

Efficiency is not the only way for companies to reduce costs. Businesses also remove certain features that consumers don’t want to pay for. For example, milk used to be delivered to a home in a glass bottle. Today it comes in cheap plastic containers that consumers pick up at the store. A more recent example is wine, which is moving from expensive corks to cheaper screw tops.

Yet as fewer labor hours go into producing goods, workers work longer to buy the goods. Using the hour as a measure of costs, we can calculate how much more work a wage earner must produce to buy milk today. But it’s harder to measure the reduction of work that goes into production. We know that it’s less by empirical evidence, but we only get a sense of it.

By switching to gold, we can measure both wages and prices on an absolute scale—in ounces—and we can make precise comparisons. To convert the price of anything to gold, just divide the price by the current gold price. For example, in 2011 if a big-screen TV was $785, then divide that by the gold price of that year; the television set cost half an ounce of gold.

The bottom line is that, in terms of gold, wages have fallen by about 87 percent. To get a stronger sense of what that means, consider that back in 1965, the minimum wage was 71 ounces of gold per year. In 2011, the senior engineer earned the equivalent of 63 ounces in gold. So, measured in gold, we see that senior engineers now earn less than what unskilled laborers earned back in 1965.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspi...f-american-wages-is-an-ugly-one/#1cc75a8f5b2a

 

[norseamd]

Pres Jinping sents his compliments for Mr Trump's great business skills.

 

[norseamd]

It's honestly not a shock. By scrapping the highly misunderstood TPP (it became a political punching bag for both left and right), we're giving up a lot and sacrificing future soft-power in the region.http://nyti.ms/2eohUwi

TPP wasnt worth shit. And in fact it was more detrimental than beneficial, except to large scale corporatists.

 

[NostaSeronx]

TPP wasnt worth shit. And in fact it was more detrimental than beneficial, except to large scale corporatists.

Till this person realizes that without TPP, China has lower tariffs than the United States. Which means without TPP all the business will go to China. The only large entity with a United State bias is Japan. Everything else is pro-China and anti-America and profits from that fact with increased Chinese trade.

America's dominance and thus capability of preventing another World War is falling away.

 

[1prophet]

America just produce/sell different kinds of things now, like intellectual property. Competing with cheaper countries on for example textile production makes no sense, no matter how much the dummies feel like they deserve middle class wages for low-profit work. The point of these agreements is horse trading some of what we want with what textile producers etc want, eg better IP protection for access to markets sort of thing.

"dummies feel like they deserve middle class wages for low-profit work."

and this mentality that has permeated the so called liberal democrat party is the root cause of it's demise, sad to see the party that used to look out for the little guy and gave us much of our environmental, labor, and safety laws that made America Great has become drunk with the corporate koolaid and has become republican in heart in favor of someone in a foreign country without those protections that gives them a cheaper price for some garment that is ready for the trash heap after six months.

Intellectual property ain't worth shit if you can't enforce it like you do in the United States , so now that American corporations have moved their factories their along with the technical know how thinking that they can get rich off licensing (without having to worry about all those rules and regulations including those nasty unions) like their crooked brothers in the financial industries who skim gravy off the top of financial transactions without actually producing anything, what are they going to do now that their IP golden goose is gone?

and the TPP or any other agreement ain't going to fix that no matter how much they tell you so

The 2013 report of the prestigious bipartisan Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property certainly indicates that Chinese cyber-theft should top the list. It states, “The scale of international theft of American intellectual property (IP) is unprecedented — hundreds of billions of dollars per year, on the order of the size of U.S. exports to Asia,” and concludes, “China is the world’s largest source of IP theft.” The FBI agrees.

At FBI headquarters in July, the head of FBI counterintelligence, Randall Coleman, said there has been a 53 percent increase in the theft of American trade secrets, thefts that have cost hundreds of billions of dollars in the past year. In an FBI survey of 165 private companies, half of them said they were victims of economic espionage or theft of trade secrets — 95 percent of those cases involved individuals associated with the Chinese government.

Take the case of Vringo. A NASDAQ-listed communications technology company, Vringo found that ZTE, a Chinese telecommunications giant, has been using Vringo patented technology for years without paying licensing fees. When Vringo asked for compensation, Chinese regulators launched what the U.S. firm sees as a retaliatory investigation. Vringo’s complaint, now in a New York court, claims that China’s companies, government, and courts are colluding in the abuse of patent rights of foreign companies in favor of Chinese competitors.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/24/china-is-stealing-american-property/#ixzz4QtYB7NMG

 

[norseamd]

Till this person realizes that without TPP, China has lower tariffs than the United States. Which means without TPP all the business will go to China. The only large entity with a United State bias is Japan. Everything else is pro-China and anti-America and profits from that fact with increased Chinese trade.

America's dominance and thus capability of preventing another World War is falling away.

Maybe US should consider joining with Modi in developing Make In India then?

 

[sdifox]

Maybe US should consider joining with Modi in developing Make In India then?

Except they are part of BRIC.

 

[ivwshane]

Well here is an in depth analysis of the 60s vs today and it looks MUCH worse than a comparison with the 30s. A whopping 87 percent drop..... 87 percent drop..... that is a friggin mountainous drop.




http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspi...f-american-wages-is-an-ugly-one/#1cc75a8f5b2a

What is it you are arguing about? I made a claim and I backed it up and you are trying to counter it by pointing out a long term trend that may well be true but it's irrelevant to my original point.

 

[agent00f]

"dummies feel like they deserve middle class wages for low-profit work."

and this mentality that has permeated the so called liberal democrat party is the root cause of it's demise, sad to see the party that used to look out for the little guy and gave us much of our environmental, labor, and safety laws that made America Great has become drunk with the corporate koolaid and has become republican in heart in favor of someone in a foreign country without those protections that gives them a cheaper price for some garment that is ready for the trash heap after six months.

I'm just telling it like it is, and it's only unfortunate that you've been so long afflicted by political PR copy that reality appears like a conspiracy.

First let's be very clear that it's been the "liberals", or more accurately the democratic party here which has been keeping middle america above water. For example, half those people in the rust belt voting for trump wouldn't have jobs if the democrats didn't waste considerable political capital pushing through the auto bailout, against all republican efforts I might add. Similarly if not for centrist democrats (defined by the clintons) there's no doubt the military industry would be cut back, and that's how considerable & abundant white welfare is distributed in this country.

Again, let's stress that it's the "liberal" blue coasts who're paying for all this through the federal tax system. Liberals for whatever reason do not stress all that they sacrifice; I suspect because they nurture some humility about their good works & charity. Now consider how their political counterparts talk about who's responsible or taking credit, and it becomes pretty clear the ethics of the situation.

Now that you're aware of the facts, consider the propaganda that's been effectively pushed to make you believe what you do. To be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong to think that rich people have their interests, but it's also pretty obvious democrats no matter how centrist are the only ones who give a shit about the little people.

Intellectual property ain't worth shit if you can't enforce it like you do in the United States , so now that American corporations have moved their factories their along with the technical know how thinking that they can get rich off licensing (without having to worry about all those rules and regulations including those nasty unions) like their crooked brothers in the financial industries who skim gravy off the top of financial transactions without actually producing anything, what are they going to do now that their IP golden goose is gone?

and the TPP or any other agreement ain't going to fix that no matter how much they tell you so

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/24/china-is-stealing-american-property/#ixzz4QtYB7NMG

Good thing smart people thought of that and made enforcing IP central to the TPP.

 

[norseamd]

Except they are part of BRIC.

Uh, do you know what BRICS really is?

 

[agent00f]

So no go? No evidence at all? Nada, zip, nothing? All hot air bullshit and not a single evidence? Uh huh. What else is new from the brain power of jstorm and his crew.

Yeah, I am a low information iq bafoon as you claimed, you figured out me perfectly, eh? See the evidences of your claims above.

I do not need to remind you in that thread that I asked for evidences of armed invaders that just invaded and left after they took what they wanted and you gave me something else and pulled the 99.99% as facts and who is the low iq moron again?

What's that old saying? Better keep your mouth shut and let others think you are a dummy than speak up out loud (accusations in this case for you) and remove all doubt.

Everyone can see you don't have the IQ to comprehend hyperbole.

 

[Svnla]

Everyone can see you don't have the IQ to comprehend hyperbole.

More hot empty air from the big mouth newbie, running away little child.

If you are going to play that game, I can play it too. I can quote multiple posts about how I support ordinary chinese. How about I post them, then you apologize to me in public and leave this place forever? Deal?

Dear the readers, look at this lying newbie will fold and run like a bitch. Would not dare to take on my challenge, again.

All talk, zero action. LOL.

 

[agent00f]

More hot empty air from the big mouth newbie, running away little child.

Correction, everyone but you.

 

[Svnla]

Correction, everyone but you.

Cowardice chicken.....how sad it is to be you..being called out in public and unable to step up and take the challenge. Bend over, grab your ankles, and do what you were born to do.

Look how I will ignore your pathetic ass until I poke you again, so you can foam at the mouth.

 

[agent00f]

Cowardice chicken.....how sad it is to be you..being called out in public and unable to step up and take the challenge. Bend over, grab your ankles, and do what you were born to do.

Look how I will ignore your pathetic ass until I poke you again, so you can foam at the mouth.

Easiest case to make, ever.

 

[sdifox]

Uh, do you know what BRICS really is?

http://thebricspost.com/china-proposes-brics-free-trade-area/#.WDbVXhmvDqA

They have been working on a free trade deal. Wonder if they'll just roll it all into one to replace TPP.

You have to look at long term implications. China is not exacly sitting still. They are the first ones to go on human clinical trial with CRISPR. Given their laxer rules (what rules) they'll make good advance on gene therapy.

Meanwhile Hollywood already has a horror movie in production about CRISPR.