The TPP was full of provisions that would have made profits higher for corporations and very little that would genuinely protect workers and the environment. This is understandable given that most the voices in the room were representing corporations.
"That's a feature, not a bug. Whence this argument that trade negotiations are somehow different from every single other aspect of good governance? For all other mechanisms of government, everyone agrees that transparency is a vital mechanism for preventing corruption, and that whatever inefficiencies it introduces into the system are a necessary evil. Yet somehow free trade agreements operate on a different set of rules; even though time after time it's been shown that this invites boatloads of the exact corruption that government transparency is meant to combat."
(This argument gets trotted out with such reliability in TPP threads that I can just copy-paste my response from a previous one)
Used to be a lot more compromises made in private, to come up with trade offs both sides could live with but the partisan core supporters would shoot down immediately if they knew. Which leads to our current government, where compromise with the other side of any kind is political suicide.
Yeah, because "coalition governments" have worked so well in countries like Italy. Have they hit the 100 mark yet for number of "coalition governments" formed since WWII?
And the Liberal Democrats made out really well in the "coalition government" that was formed in the UK after the 2010 elections. They went from 57 MPs after 2010 to 8 MPs after 2015. Even Charlie Sheen wouldn't call that "winning".
This is a complete strawman argument, and lacks rational coherence.
its ramifications would have affected billions of people just as if it were a new civil and criminal law, that's what was so scary about it. Citizens aren't bound to obey international treaties. That's why we have governments.
Treaties, free trade treaties foremost among them, are almost never public before the final text is available, because if they were they'd never get that far. Too many interests.
Look, it's a free trade agreement. It says, basically, "no tariffs at all for trade between the signatories". Except of course that every signatory has a list of a thousand "but..." clauses to protect whatever proprietary interests have their ear. So the end results is a big mess of exceptions and clarifications, which is why everyone hates it. There is literally something in there in there that everyone will hate! By design!
I mean, look: it's hardly the most important bill of the decade, and I'm not crying that it failed. But to pretend that this was some collusion of the global illuminati to stick it to the hippies, or white nationalists, or whoever you happen to identify with is just insane.
It's a ?!@#!$ trade treaty, for god's sake.