I'm by no means a progressive democrat and I am certainly no fan of Obama. In saying that, it's absolutely necessary to understand republicans are pushing for this just as much as democrats. It's not a red vs. blue issue, it's a red and blue issue.
One last comment, while it is indeed up to our politicians to vote yay or nay on this, it is absolutely up to the people to keep our politicians accountable. Right now, the American people are for more concerned about feelings and witty social media posts to care about the TPP. When Americans stop caring about politicians and stop holding politicians accountable, it's quite easy for them to pull something like the TPP.
no matter how much you care. if politicians can only run a campaign with millions of dollars, and that amount only come from corporations, and the corporations can see who voted on what it wanted, then the public is largely removed from politics.
That should not be news to anyone. The only thing that has recently changed is Citizens United makes it easier to just avoid having to pass through money through more middlemen to bribe politicians.
Before radio and TV, only the rich elite who had the time to research politics voted. After radio and TV, only the rich elite who had the money to buy election ad slots got representation.
It is illegal for corporations to donate money to politicians. 61% of raised funds come from individuals donating up to $2600 each. 23% come from PACs (which themselves may only raise money from individuals, not corporations), and the rest comes from self-funding and political party committees.
Edit: These numbers are from 2010 congressional elections. Also it's illegal for federal elections. State elections have their own rules.
Are the 23% from PACs money given directly to campaigns or does it also include independent expenditures?
Additionally, wouldn't it be better to look at expenditures in later elections such as the 2012 presidential election? Using the 2010 data is a bit biased because the Citizens United decision was only ruled on in 2010.
As for your point of donations being illegal for federal elections, it is true that direct donations are regulated, however outside "independent" spending by corporations is not illegal.
Additionally, Super PACs can accept unlimited contributions from corporations as long as they use the money for independent expenditures.
That Guardian article is intentionally misleading. All it says is that some large companies support the TPP, and some employees of those large companies donate to politicians' campaigns. The data don't show anything other than standard fundraising.
Come on dude, was that statement really so controversial you had to use a green account to make it? If you think there's nothing wrong with the status quo pipeline of corruption from corporate interests to political pockets, then have the courage of your convictions!
I'm not a progressive Democrat, but I understand why Obama is pursuing this deal.
First, let's consider a contrast. Neoconservatives have for decades been obsessed with the Middle East. This is mostly because of its strategic importance as the source of oil.
There presents itself now an opportunity to change this strategic focus because of two trends. 1) Domestic oil production is up; so is fuel efficiency; so is the development of alternate energy. 2) Korea, China, Vietnam, and other Asian nations have growing economies and strategic ambitions. In the future of the U.S., oil will be less important; Asian trade relationships will be more important.
Thus Obama's "pivot to Asia." It has been mocked by Republicans, given the ongoing problems in both Russia and Iraq/Syria (both long-standing Republican policy bad guys). But really, something as big as the U.S. does not turn easily or fast.
TPP is a major component in that turn. It will create or enhance special relationships with a variety of Asian nations. It will firm up relationships that are currently being challenged by China, which has the biggest ambitions of anyone these days.
The details of the policy chapters are almost unimportant; they just need to be balanced well enough among all the parties, so that everyone gains slightly more than they lose. Trade agreements are, almost by definition, not optimal for any given single interest group or stakeholder.
In terms of IP specifically, it's worth considering that the U.S. is far more dependent on IP than other nations. If you think about our most successful companies, many of them make nothing but IP: Apple, Google, Microsoft, TV shows, movies, recorded music, software, pharamceuticals, etc. So U.S. negotiators are going to try for max protection on those things. (Does not mean they will get it.)
A second point would be that China's consumer class is booting up. The US wants to position itself to sell into that, effectively to reverse the trade deficit.
Indeed. I generally like Obama (except for Espionage Act prosecutions, continued existence of Guantanamo detention centers, and drone wars), but this one makes no sense.
Can a conservative republican explain why the Republican leadership is supporting this? I can't really understand why free market people would be in favor of state-granted and enforced-at-taxpayer-expense monopolies. Nor do I understand why extreme patriots would be in favor of Investor-State Dispute Systems. The latter seems like a sovereignty giveaway, to an unaccountable international body. In a way, ISDS seems like big government gone wild, but it's an unelected, unaccountable international government, which should offend small government types, too.
As a "conservative Republican" since the Nixon era (didn't know why it was important that he beat HHH and George Wallace in '68, knew why it was and still is important that he beat McGovern in '72), I can say in short that we don't support these things.
Why does the Republican leadership support them? At the more reductionist level, I've seen it best described as a "donor riot"; rather obviously the interests of the wealthy who identify as Republican are different that the base (and this is one reason why the Emmanuel Goldsteining of the libertarian Koch brothers strikes us as bizarre, then again they've got some truly dangerous thoughts).
At a more general level, these "establishment" Republicans are, or aspire to be, members of the ruling class. We of the base obviously aren't, and I don't think many of us aspire to be.
"Offend" is a good word, we are mightily offended by all this. But there's only so much we can do short of, say, starting a 3rd party that's successful enough to either threaten the Republican party such that it adopts our positions, or replace it like it replaced the Whigs (or there's a thesis that the Democratic party will die since its war on arithmetic means it will eventually fail to keep its promises, the Republican party will replace it as the party of the state, and the 3rd party becomes the natural opposition). Short of that, we can withdraw our votes, which has a strictly limited effect in the Congress, and we can and have withheld our money, which gets us back to that donor riot.
Ah, I should note there's always been a non-conservative faction in the Republican party. Its abolitionist roots were in opposition to the conservative nature of the Whigs, remember the trusting busting and imperialism of Teddy Roosevelt, and the north-east wing in general is much less conservative. Think of Nelson Rockefeller who opposed conservative Goldwater, not so conservative Nixon, and was Ford's first VP. Or former governor of Massachusetts and "severe conservative" Mitt Romney (hint, that's the first and last time I've every heard someone use the word "severe" like that).
> I generally like Obama (except for Espionage Act prosecutions, continued existence of Guantanamo detention centers, and drone wars), but this one makes no sense.
What's there left to like? Legal pot and gay marriage?
Your income taxes, yeah. Your sales tax, highway tolls, certifications (state car inspection, state certifications to operate certain businesses, etc) and additional resource taxes (gas tax, tobacco tax) are going to your state, and your property / zoning taxes are going to your principality.
The federal level matters because it supplants state law. The FBI and other federal agents can arrest anyone in any state where pot is legal statewide under federal law. You just get out of having local PD arresting you for it.
> The FBI and other federal agents can arrest anyone in any state where pot is legal statewide under federal law. You just get out of having local PD arresting you for it.
Not necessarily, as state (including) local agents can generally arrest you for violations of federal criminal law, too.
States, or local authorities within states, may deprioritize such arrests, or prohibit their officers from them entirely, for certain acts that are permitted by state but not federal law, but this is by no means guaranteed (and many local law enforcement agencies have continued to at least selectively make arrests under federal drug laws for marijuana even when the act involved was permitted under state law.)
Eh, i guess we'll see how it all shakes out in the next 5-10 years. Based on prohibition, the feds are in a tough spot. No support from local and state police, because it's not a crime. That said the feds could bring a lot of resources to bare against individuals.
The targeted individuals would likely be screwed. Probably the biggest risk is Colorado fighting the USA directly. Perhaps it's not interstate trade so the US can't regulate, perhaps Colorado sues for lost tax revenue.
For that accusation to work (even ignoring the difference between being a "fan" of Obama and agreeing that Obama is a "progressive" rather than a "centrist", which are really orthogonal concerns), you'd have to have me ever claiming Obama was a progressive rather than a centrist.
Obama is not a progressive and I don't think he's been particularly supported by progressives (other than the fact that they tend to vote for Democrats).
The possible exception is his initial campaign when he was an unknown quantity and, like all such politicians, everyone projected their "Hope" onto him.
The 'you projected your hope onto him' suggestion is popular but doesn't really hold water. He explicitly said things that he did a 180 on. Many of them. For some I'm sure they projected hope on him, but many others who voted for him were just straight up betrayed.
> Obama is not a progressive and I don't think he's been particularly supported by progressives (other than the fact that they tend to vote for Democrats).
A lot of progressives supported Obama in 2008 primaries, especially toward the end of that season, because, as it was clear who the reasonably viable contenders were for the Democratic nomination, Obama generally seemed slightly to the progressive side of Hillary Clinton (which is perfectly compatible with him being a centrist Democrat rather than a particularly progressive one; I don't think anyone in the Democratic party has mistaken Clinton for anything other than a centrist for a long time.)
I'm not poor and I'm against the TPP. My opinion has nothing to do with how it treats the poor. I don't like how it empowers corporate interests at the expense of individual rights.
Poor is relative. The rich at war with everyone are not the 6 figure developers, or even the one-time cashout millionaires who sell their startup to Google. Its the billionaires who control entire swathes of global industry and are ego tripping power maniacs who are addicted to it. Its the Waltons and Kochs, not the Carmacks and Grams. Its even more the dynasties whose names are not national news because they own every news network or their best friend owns it.
If someone else in the world makes as much as you do in a year in a day (or better yet an hour for 99.99995% of people), you are incredibly poor relative to them. And 99.99999% of humanity falls into that class of poor.
The TPP is not being written for the betterment of the "rich" over the "poor". Its being written to make about 70,000 (overwhelmingly) men even richer than they already are, by subjugating national sovereignty underneath their corporate will.
I read stuff like this a lot, and it sounds plausible, but how can you know this? Where can I go to read someone connecting the dots from billionaires working in secret to advance trade deals through corrupt politicians?
My point is that the narrative for my dissent from a bill with strong GOP support is that it violates individual freedom. You might argue semantics, but I claim my motivation has nothing to do with social justice in the progressive sense and everything to do with freedom.
He's not my hero. I didn't vote for him mainly because I'm not in a swing state; but if I were and you ran him against Romney and Paul Ryan tomorrow, I'd hold my nose and go vote for him. I might even go find myself an ACORN volunteer t shirt and go register a bunch of poors to go vote for him too. Go ahead though, and tell me how much better we'd all feel about TPP if your horse would've won.
I haven't had a horse in any of these races. I despise them all; I especially despise those sad true believers out there that pin their hopes to an empty suit.
Gobs of Hollywood money. Obama honestly thinks this is good stuff because people in the passive content business are friends and donors and they like TPP.
Because the US government wants more tax revenue and tax revenue comes from corporate revenue and the salaries/capital gains that flow from it. US companies tend to generate a lot of revenue from IP. Therefore, the US Government has an incentive to help corporations extract more revenue from IP.
PS To those trying to claim he isn't a progressive... Obama may not be the progressive you want, but he is the one you deserve.