Discussion for article #237410
This WAS not a vote on the actual trade deal. The actual bill, when completed, will be published in it’s entirety long before there will be a required congressional vote
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Ouch! That’s probably going to leave a mark.
But good on Nancy for this. This particular part of the trade agreement is incredibly bad, not for the least because its very existence is admitting that the over all agreement is a job killer for America. And how do they finance this bill? By pulling money out of Medicad to hurry up its demise…while still living it very light on what should actually be expected. So your job is transfered overseas, your new job training is incomplete, and when you get sick from all that stress of being unemployed? Yeah, sorry…we emptied the Medicad monies so you are on your own, buddy.
Even more bizarre is Obama isn’t lobbying republicans to put more money into this bill, or to not take them from Medicad…No, he is lobbying Democrats and questioning their integrity for not supporting it instead.
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If this bill dies in the House,its a grievous wound to the TPP agreement,however. It very well might even be a mortal wound.
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And that is a good thing?
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I’m assuming this means that Nancy lost all of her House Dem support. Unlike the GOP leadership, she’s very shrewd and if she sees the handwriting on the wall, she won’t stick with POTUS. It’s not in her better interest to do so. So now President Obama will have to push this through on GOP support alone. If that support isn’t there, then it goes down.
I don’t expect that we’ll see the last of this however. Nor do I think it will get that much better.
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Only if you work for a living, care about your food supply, and favor exercising sovereignty over our local environment. If one’s primary concern is supporting the President and those for whom he’s working in this regard, not so much.
But long after we can do anything about it. At that point, it’s all or nothing, and the advocates will be stressing that we can’t possibly back out now for the trivial matter of opposing human trafficking or other such silly nonsense.
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That’s been happening since the 1980’s and will continue unabated with or without TPP.
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Bless you Nancy Pelosi! Perhaps the Democrats haven’t Lost their Minds.
Obama has poisoned my votes for him though.
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So instead of stanching that bleeding, let’s open another vein.
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Wha?
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My point is you’re NOT stanching it. If this goes down, it’s not like we’ve turned any sort of corner.
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Of course FedEx supports Obama’s trade deal. His deal means exporting more mfg. to low labor cost countries like Vietnam and the importing of goods…call it a FedEx boondoggle but a killer for US jobs.
Obama is either stupid or he’s a turn coat.
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From this article: “On Wednesday, WikiLeaks brought this agreement into the spotlight by releasing 17 key TiSA-related documents, including 11 full chapters under negotiation. Though the outline for this agreement has been in place for nearly a year, these documents were supposed to remain classified for five years after being signed, an example of the secrecy surrounding the agreement, which outstrips even the TPP.”
“You need to either be a trade lawyer or a very alert reader to know what’s going on. But between the text and a series of analyses released by WikiLeaks, you get a sense for what the countries negotiating TiSA want. First, they want to limit regulation on service sectors, whether at the national, provincial or local level. The agreement has “standstill” clauses to freeze regulations in place and prevent future rulemaking for professional licensing and qualifications or technical standards. And a companion “ratchet” clause would make any broken trade barrier irreversible.It may make sense to some to open service sectors up to competition. But under the agreement, governments may not be able to regulate staff to patient ratios in hospitals, or ban fracking, or tighten safety controls on airlines, or refuse accreditation to schools and universities. Foreign corporations must receive the same “national treatment” as domestic ones, and could argue that such regulations violate their ability to provide the service. Allowable regulations could not be “more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service,” according to TiSA’s domestic regulation annex. No restrictions could be placed on foreign investment—corporations could control entire sectors.”
“For an example of how this would work, let’s look at financial services. It too has a “standstill” clause, which given the unpredictability of future crises could leave governments helpless to stop a new and dangerous financial innovation. In fact, Switzerland has proposed that all TiSA countries must allow “any new financial service” to enter their market. So-called “prudential regulations” to protect investors or depositors are theoretically allowed, but they must not act contrary to TiSA rules, rendering them somewhat irrelevant.Most controversially, all financial services suppliers could transfer individual client data out of a TiSA country for processing, regardless of national privacy laws. This free flow of data across borders is true for the e-commerce annex as well; it breaks with thousands of years of precedent on locally kept business records, and has privacy advocates alarmed. There’s no question that these provisions reinforce Senator Elizabeth Warren’s contention that a trade deal could undermine financial regulations like the Dodd-Frank Act. The Swiss proposal on allowances for financial services could invalidate derivatives rules, for example. And harmonizing regulations between the U.S. and EU would involve some alteration, as the EU rules are less stringent.”
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Is it possible that David Dayen’s analysis of the information that Wikileaks brought to light on TiSA is mistaken, erroneous, or exaggerated? Yes, of course, but that highlights the problem. The secrecy surrounding the negotiations means that robust discussion of what’s going on behind closed doors is impossible. At this time the proposed agreements are beyond the view of average Americans, and those few officials who have been given the chance to examine the proposals are prohibited by law from discussing them. The standard response is “these things need secrecy and besides Congress will have the chance to vote on them.” However, Congress has only “up or down” authority to vote; amendments are prohibited. Should we be relying on a Republican-controlled Congress as the last decision-maker on this, especially if there’s any chance that such trade proposals appear to supersede the right of state or local governments to make decisions on matters directly affecting them? We’ve already got enough trouble as it is with GOP state legislatures wanting to gut regulations of every sort; do we really want to sign trade agreements that appear as though they’d serve as international legal justification for the Republicans on top of it?
We’ve essentially been told, “Trust us.” Given who many of the interested parties are—multinational corporations beholden to nobody but their major stockholders—my response is, “Why?”
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Obama has done a lot of good things. I’ll be the first one to state unequivocally that he is the one President during my entire life that has made the most positive and direct impact on my ability to survive with the Affordable Care Act
So it’s not about dogging on Obama. It’s about what we should be focused on to bring back the American Dream. This ain’t it.
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And his point is that if this dies, we aren’t opening up another vein.
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So why isn’t Obama focused on stanching it instead of opening another vein?
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Tell me what he can do personally.
Oh bullshit. So far what I know of the TPP it is on balance better than no deal at all, and to try and frame it that if you agree with the goals of the deal that you don’t work for a living, don’t care about the environment, etc. etc. is pathetic.
Even more than that it is fucking ridiculous.
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He can stop advocating for a trade agreement that cedes our right to determine our own future and make laws that favor our own citizens to international corporate titans, for starters.
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