RE: Debate Forum - Week 10 - Trade Agreements
Sorry for being late to the party, Ok TPP lots of questions, lots of areas to cover – but will keep this simple and on topic - the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement is discussed in secret but we know roughly what the 6,000 pages of TPP covers, so we can take an educated guess that it will be bad for the people. What we do know is that it will bind as many countries as possible to the United States as trade partners and give greater power to the government in their effort to take away our sovereignty.
i don’t know that much about the TPP to be honest, but here are a few areas that i think are affected by the TPP and what i believe will be detrimental to our way of life if it goes ahead.
1) At no point does the agreement address the problem with imbalance of currencies. For example, the cost of living in Vietnam is less than ½ of what it is in America/Australia. Why should a business pay you or me $30 an hour when they can pay someone in Vietnam $30 a week? Millions of jobs would be lost overseas.
2) It would increase the Copyright laws on the internet. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, this is an American statute law that has infringed on fair use and free speech on the internet. You can see the affect of this with “YouTube”, with users being flagged for stupid copyright violations because their kids are dancing to a crappy pop song, and investigative journalists being censored based on the new “fake news” tag from the “fake news”. What does this mean? It means that the censorship that we see with copyright law in America will not only get worse, it will be forced upon other countries.
3) Fracking, we’ve all seen the “you-tube” videos where people can set fire to their tap water - The TPP would require the Department of Energy to automatically approve all exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to all TPP countries—especially Japan, which is the world’s largest LNG importer and user. This means lots more fracking, more air and water pollution, more negative climate emissions and further extending our dependence on fossil fuels—when we should be keeping those fuels in the ground where they belong and we should be pushing for clean energy.
4) They are trying to remove the ingredients from packaging. A country such as America will then be able to import say “chicken” Genetically modified, bleached and injected with water to increase weight, full of growth hormones and steroids etc and none of this will be displayed on the packaging. This will affect the poor that can only afford cheap food – and may affect people with allergies further promoting the drug industry.
5) And finally what i believe is the most important of all are the changes in law, it will give businesses from statute based counties the power to override the common law. – goodbye free speech and sovereignty - one step closer to a dictatorship.
Buckle up and hold on tight – it’s going to be a bumpy ride if this thing gets passed.