The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – “Kill it with fire.”

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Updated 10/17/2015.

Current status of the TPP:  The agreement has been negotiated. Now it goes to Congress for an up or down vote.  It cannot be amended.  In theory, it could get voted down.  In practice, I’m not holding my breath.

News and posts:

Robert Reich with a short summary of the TPP – what we know of it, that is:

Click here for more info on the TPP.

My posts re the TPP:

Related Reading (last updated 5/24/2015):

BONUS:  Dan Kervick on neoliberal trade policies such as NAFTA and the TPP, hippies and hippie-punching vs labor-punching:

Neoliberal trade-spearheaded creative destruction has been destroying families, communities, effective government and much of the social contract for years in the United States, and people are tired of it. No amount of phony-baloney rhetorical ammunition the administration might manufacture for you can cover up the fact that this is yet another pro-capital, anti-people, anti-worker race to the bottom deal.

Can we please get our various “lefts” correct? Standard neoliberal poundings of trade deal skeptics are not instances of hippie punching. They are instances of labor punching. The hippies and their cult of libertine personal freedom were not notoriously enemies of free trade and global economic liberalization. Most of them grew up to be perfectly well-adjusted NPR-listening neoliberals themselves.

Neoliberalism was an anti-labor movement. It was made up of the traditional, but newly strident anti-labor right-wingers, like Reagan and Thatcher, and third way liberals who married cultural liberalism with economic liberalization and pro-capital, pro-entrepreneur, anti-union sentiment. Not all of the hippies became neoliberals, but a lot of them did. Labor had much more trouble with the hippies than the neoliberals ever did.