Here is a data point that bears on the “liberals versus leftists” stuff folks have been talking about. After the US withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the eleven remaining countries continued negotiations, and they now have reached a deal. According to an article in Politico, the new deal “dropped measures promoting wildlife conservation and labor rights that U.S. environmental groups and unions had considered too weak, but were clearly stronger than nothing.” So the TPP the Obama Administration negotiated, which the left long decried, turns out to be better in some ways for the environmental and labor issues the left prioritizes than what the world has ended up with after the Trump Administration did what the left wanted and withdrew from the deal. This is, as I say, just one data point, but it’s telling.
Here is an epic tweet that sums up (in a polemical way) my basic reaction to the situation:
Ironic this is my feed right now. pic.twitter.com/9GARmdsiK0
— Michael S. Pumpkins (@MikeVirgilio) November 24, 2017
Maybe that’s a little too polemical—maybe the tweet should have featured Dr. Jill Stein instead of Bernie Sanders—but the basic point is, I think, sound. People on both the left and the right have let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and now we are reaping the fruits of that approach to politics.
THANK YOU! A key reason my default position is to favor trade arrangements like this is that I’d much rather we exercise our influence from the inside.
You’re 100% right! The people with no power, who were never even shown the text of the TPP? This is absolutely their fault. Trump had nothing to do with it.
I made the point to say the left and the right. The only people who were for the TPP were the folks in the uninspiring, un-tweetworthy, middle.
On what basis was the middle for the TPP, though? My only issue with it was that they the Obama administration wouldn’t say what was in it. (Elizabeth Warren also mentioned this.) So was the middle just accepting it?
Obama couldn’t really say what was positive for America without starting a trade war with China.. The whole and entire point of the TPP was to gang up on China and use that gang to curtail China’s worst excesses. And that’s why the 11 others have continued with it. That was the point and a trade bloc that successfully did that was the reward… and a reward that many believed would be worth the specific negatives in the trade agreement.. But Donald Trump and the low-IQ Right… aided and abetted by the loony left (who wanted more than the agreement could possibly deliver on the environment but who thought the agreement went to far in strongly protecting IP rights…. where China is particularly egregious) only saw the specific negatives. Now we, as well as China, are on the outside of that and it remains to be seen if the new TPP can do what that old was supposed to, and what will that mean for us…
“Loony left?” Seriously petr? Asking for labor protections was asking too much?
Have fun punching hippies today.
Who said anything about labor protections? Are we having the same conversation? I specifically mentioned the environmental and intellectual property protections: both of which are good things…. as is labor protection… but that hardly matters: the loony part was not settling for half-a-loaf and holding out for the whole, and, as tedf points out, now getting none at all.
I think what this comment misses is that treaty negotiations are not really conducted in public. That’s Not specific to TPP. So demands to “see the text” before it was agreed misunderstood the process.
That said, I think the point of TPP was clear enough. Strategically, the point was to ensure our lasting influence in Asia and not cede the field to China. Economically, the point was what the point of all trade deals is at bottom—decreasing the cost of international trade by lowering tariffs, harmonizing rules, etc.
The question at the time was: do you trust the Obama administration to make a deal that is basically good for America, if not perfect? The answer on the left was “no.”
I reject this premise entirely.
It it’s obvious to everyone that the deal is about establishing ourselves in Asia (and I generally agree that it was), then that’s obvious to China as well.
You guys are twisting logic to defend a lack of transparency. “Just trust us” is not acceptable policy.
Similarly, there is no “shut up and fall in line” clause in the Constitution, fulminate as you will.
The Smart People Who Know Best vastly overreached on this (and other things), paving the road to Trump with their good intentions.
You might want to ask Daniel Shays about that…. Some consider his actions the proximate catalyst for why we have a Constitution in the first place. The suppression of his rebellion being the ‘shut up’ part and the Constitution itself the line to which he, and we, are to fall into…
Lemme see if I got this correct: you’re contention is that the party of personal responsibility has no responsibility… because intelligence? That’s a novel interpretation of causality….
This is a curious example, since it is the crackpot realists whose elitism about trade has provoked the rise of the extremes.
If you want things to keep getting worse, by all means keep doing the things that got us where we are.
“Left” should be in quotes at all times in the context of opposition to trade. The real left-wing position is to recognize that all human beings are equal and deserve equal opportunity to have decent jobs. But the “left” position at present is Trumpian xenophobia.
I wouldn’t go as far as to accuse the left of xenophobia. There are legitimate concerns about adherence to such things as environmental and labor standards.
See below for exactly the kind of America-first xenophobia I’m talking about.
I agree it is a data point. Had we had a Democratic president, we might have had a TPP we could have supported. There were a lot of lefties opposing it, but Paul Krugman is a liberal who opposed it.
We have a president whose idea of negotiation is claiming he turned down People magazine for Man of the Year.
Curious as to how opposing a major trade policy opposed by every major labor union, both candidates in the Democratic primary, and both major party nominees is somehow a fringe leftist position.
The “center” on trade has shifted to fair trade after about three decades of lost jobs, hallowed out communities, and an opioid crisis directly linked to job losses due to global trade. Not to mention rising xenophobia linked to the declining purchasing and labor power of low skilled low educated native born workers having to fight with undocumented immigrants for the scraps that are left.
Take the drive from Chicago-Cleveland-Buffalo-Boston sometime and you see town after town with shuttered factories and mills. These are the places that used to be stalwart Democratic bastions that swung 15-35 points to Trump from Obama-who effectively won this demographic by attacking Romney’s outsourcing record at Bain.
The left by the way is for the Paris Climate Accord which had a far wider environmental effect than TPP would have, an agreement the free traders applauded when Trump unilaterally pulled out of it.
There is a compelling geopolitical argument for the TPP that it would help contain China and normalize several developing countries along Western standards of copyright, labor, and environmental rules. President Obama should have made that case to Congress rather than relying on the likes of Ryan-McConnell to overrule his own party in Congress on fast track. The blame lies at his feet along with the lingering hangover from the failure of NAFTA to provide broad based middle class prosperity.
We don’t want an American Brexit-but we gave the neoliberal elite three decades to govern and they gave us Iraq, inaction on climate, and the 2008 crash. It is time for a populist left to save this country from creeping fascism. The stale center left liberalism of old is not radical enough for the tempo of the electorate, rightly tired of getting screwed by Wall Street and Washington alike.
Many of those manufacturing jobs were on their way out anyway due to factors other than free trade. That’s a message not happily received by those impacted.
Yes, mechanization is the One True Path of Business School. Yes, capital mobility does mean factories will move. I suppose the perspective of the economist is that American jobs must eventually go downhill.
That does not mean the Democratic Party should put its foot on the accelerator.
Frankly, I’ve come around to the point that if every business school is going to teach the future captains of industry to move all the jobs to Asia & automate production ASAP, then the government needs to expand its mission to give more people jobs. People need work. It gives them purpose and pride in life.
While the principle of “better is good” is what we should follow, TPP is not a good example for this. When all the labor unions, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman didn’t approve of TPP, that was a clear sign TPP was NOT in the interest of most Americans.
I see the argument about TPP letting the US introduce labor/environmental protections, and that’s false. The supporters of TPP wanted to sweep the human rights abuses (slave labor of migrants) of Malaysia under the rug to get TPP. So, no when TPP supporters ignore the slave labor of people in Malaysia, you can’t convince other people that TPP will protect a 40-hour workweek and workplace safety, much less regulate pollution.
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/07/malaysia-a-paragon-of-human-rights
This is a good comment, but I think it misses the main point, which is that TPP happened anyway, only without the labor and environmental protections that the US was able to negotiate. No US manufacturing jobs were saved by our withdrawal, as far as I can tell. And we lost the strategic advantages of the deal with respect to China, which I noted in another comment in this thread.
As for the main point, that TPP happened without the US, that’s good (IMHO) because America does not get tangled up in it, especially with those international courts that can overrule laws/regulations in America (like the one that overruled Indonesia’s anti-tobacco law).
It’s time for environmentalists and labor activists to demand a better way to enforce standards on the products that are sold here but manufactured over there: we should be allowed to bring suit in American courts to hold the American companies accountable for what happens in their supply chain overseas.
That’s just naive. Japan, Canada and Mexico are all part of the follow-on TPP. We are tangled up in it, only now without any leverage. I daresay that was tedf’s entire point.
With the UK, Japan, Canada and Mexico are the four largest trading partners with the US. With Brexit and now the follow-on TPP, ALL the rules are changing and it’s going to be quite a tangle.
Joel makes great points on jobs and dignity. I think we overlook how important that is to people, especially since wonky progressives tend to focus on solving the material inequities. It’s why I’ve become a skeptic of basic income. These parts of the country already have high rates of welfare and SSD usage-they don’t need handouts they need jobs.
Sanders had a great plan to end the 35% black male unemployment rate. Hillary has a great plan to rebuild the parts of the country transitioning from coal and heavy industry and end their 20-30% male unemployment rate. Incidentally two populations that failed to vote for the Democratic nominee at the same rate they did in 2012 since our campaign wasn’t focused on bringing jobs back as Trumps was.
Krugman has became a trade skeptic and a skeptic that our unemployment rate is really as low as we think it is. An MIT economist has a great study linking opioid usage with trade dislocation. The hot spots for job loss align almost exactly with the hot spots for opioid abuse which also align with the areas that swung most sharply to Trump last election.
I take Sec. Clinton at her word that she wouldn’t have signed TPP. It was her first and most decisive break with the Obama administration and one we should’ve expected her to follow had she been elected. It’s not accurate to blame the “loony left” or Trump for a policy change the mainstream Democratic nominee also supported from the day she announced for President. Her jobs agenda would’ve been focused on creating jobs in America-not Asia. I strongly believe every Democrat from Warren to Moulton recognizes this sea shift in thinking on trade. It’s one of the major reasons we lost the Rust Belt to Trump.
I can’t deal with the limited nesting, so I’m going over here.
I’m fine with the goal of TPP, if (as we’ve all apparently decided, based on no evidence) it was about isolating China and building up our trade in the area.
But, they refused to show the text ELIZABETH WARREN — presumably a key ally in getting the treaty ratified by the Senate. The Obamans gambled on Republican support for it. That is bad faith negotiating, and anyone who opposed that process (in my view) was right to call it out.
The diary’s original point was “Look, lefties, it happened without us. Thanks a lot.” This is completely absurd and holds up to no logic test. The left had no power in 2016, and it has less power now. Blaming people out of power for an action done by people in power is a faulty argument.
It is also a losing argument.
Two points:
First, of course the Trump Administration is to blame for the withdrawal from the treaty. But that’s the outcome the left said it wanted.
Second, on this issue, Sen. Warren, in my view, is part of the problem. She made the perfect the enemy of the good. She didn’t see the larger picture. The Senate weighs in after a treaty is negotiated. If either party in the Senate takes the view that it should get to sign off on the text of a treaty before the treaty is even signed, well, that seems like the end of significant treaties. What foreign government wants to negotiate with Senator Warren—and 99 other senators? There’s a reason the Constitution assigns the power to make treaties to the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate necessary for ratification. That said, the Obama administration got the deal done, so I would never lay the blame for the ultimate outcome at Sen. Warren’s feet.
I don’t recall the timeline well enough, but if memory serves Warren was looking for broad outlines, not every detail, and it was after the negotiations. But I may be misremembering.
Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren and “Nobel Memorial prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warned that, based on leaked drafts of the TPP, it “serves the interests of the wealthiest.” The Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research have argued that the TPP could result in job losses and declining wages.
On the other hand the National Association of Manufacturers supported it and Michael Grunwald, a reporter who ghosted Timothy Geithner’s book, supported it. I offer this link about Grunwald here as evidence that he’s been accused of having an ideology, though the writer is associated with the center-right.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/the-ideology-behind-michael-grunwalds-repugnant-assange-tweet/278790/
I am going to unbite my tongue and observe that the fact that you want to blame Bernie, or “maybe” Stein, and it doesn’t matter which, signals that this is about your anger and self comfort, not about actual lessons to be learned.
Q: have you learned any of those, other than that it is always someone else’s fault?
If, arguendo, trade is so very complex and special and secret that you cannot even find a way to inform a U.S. Senator about the substance of what is going on, then you are simply playing the wrong game.
Hey, it’s a free country. Really, all I was trying to do was to give an example of “the left” preferring to perfect to the good in what I think was a non-constructive way. This happens on the right too. I just don’t see how anyone can think that a TPP that excludes some good provisions the US pushed for, and that excludes the United States itself, is better than a TPP with those provisions and with the United States in, even if you think the TPP was not perfect.
My reference to Sen. Sanders and to Jill Stein was meant to suggest, gently, that at least some of their voters had the same tendency to insist on the perfect even if it means eschewing the good.
I don’t think the OP is interested in responding to substantive arguments about actual economic objections to the TPP and the growing bipartisan consensus that is shifting toward fairer trade deals. Far easier to continue to create leftist straw men for him to demolish in similar diaries to this one.
It’s worth noting that Sec. Clinton opposed the proposal from day 1 of her campaign. We literally can’t blame Bernie for a position her campaign took at its launch, long before he became a genuine threat.
Some here defended that stance as the ‘real Hillary’ since she also voted against CAFTA and ran to Obamas left on NAFTA in 2008. Just because Trump ran to her left, and the left of his entire party, on trade in the general does not make fair trade a right wing issue. It’s long been pro-worker, pro-environment, and pro-Democrat to argue for fair trade. Only until Clinton passed NAFTA with the Atari Democrats did this issue shift. Prior to Reagan ,both parties were protectionist, favoring free trade only on a bilateral basis with close allies.
I think globalization and immigration are good. I think they both can be better regulated so that they create fewer losers on our side of the pond and our side of the border. I think Sen. Warren, Sen. Sanders, and yes Sec. Clinton all agree with that formula. We aren’t building walls-we can and should build more transparent and reciprocal trade agreements.
You’re right that I’m not interested (in this post) in critiques of the TPP. I am interested in comparison of what we have (everyone else is party to a revised TPP that lacks some protections we fought to include) with the what we could have had. You’re right that I’ve sounded a similar note in some prior posts. My main concern is that we should try to weigh proposals against the real alternatives instead of ideal alternatives.
You say we should have better trade agreements. Great, but at least with the TPP countries, that doesn’t seem realistic at the moment given that they’ve made their own deal.
You want perfect critiques of TPP and won’t settle for anything less?
The TPP is more about protecting the ownership class in the USA than it is a effort to increase trade bringing secure jobs and low cost good to the working class of the USA. It has much more to do with stronger and longer patent and copyright protection, all darlings of the ownership class. The United States International Trade Commission. report on the Trans-Pacific Partnership was far closer in its assessment of the impact of the TPP on the U.S. economy than other studies. Higher prices for drugs, software and other protected items are likely to impose substantial costs on the United States and other parties to the agreement. The overall projected gains to national income by 2032 are$57.3 billion or 0.23 percent. Since this gain is realized over the next 16 years, it implies an increase to the annual growth rate of just over 0.01 percentage point. In other words, the USITC projects that as a result of the TPP, the country will be as wealthy on January 1, 2032 as it would otherwise be on February 15 of 2032. Source: Dean Baker.
http://cepr.net/press-center/press-releases/dean-baker-statement-itc-report-and-tpp
Also, from Dean Baker “Rigged” page 5: Bill Clinton would have much less need to fly around the world for the Clinton Foundation had he not inserted the TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) provisions in the World Trade Organization (WTO) that require developing countries to adopt U.S. – style patent protections. Generic drugs are almost always cheap – patent protection makes drugs expensive. The cancer and hepatitis drugs that sell for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year would sell for a few hundred dollars in a free market. Cheap drugs would be more widely available had the developed world not forced TRIPS on the developing world.