“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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David Cay Johnston: Get ready to debate the TPP
We will soon get to see the text – with very little time to examine it
At long last, we are finally about to see the entire text of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a new set of trade rules for the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries.
The final trade agreement was announced, without details, in Atlanta on Monday. Proponents say the deal would grow the economies of all 12 partners. Critics fear it would benefit the biggest corporations at the expense of workers and taxpayers.
As Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, put it, “Wall Street and big corporations just won a big victory to advance a disastrous trade deal.”
Stirring nativist anti-trade sentiments, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed that, as president, he would force Ford Motor and other big companies to move their factories back to the United States. Just what authority the Constitution would grant him to do this remains a mystery.
Even a designated spokesman for the staunchly pro-business American Enterprise Institute said, “The TPP should be carefully vetted … If unsound, the TPP must be rejected.”
Dean Baker: ‘Massive’ Media Hype for TPP
We continue to hear superlatives even as the evidence suggests the trade impact will be trivial. For example, the New York Times reported that US tariffs on Japanese cars will be phased out over 30 years. Wow! The most optimistic growth estimates show a cumulative gain by 2027 of less than 0.4 percent, roughly two months of normal GDP growth.
This doesn’t mean that the TPP can’t have an impact. It will lock in a regulatory structure, the exact parameters of which are yet to be seen. We do know that the folks at the table came from places like General Electric and Monsanto, not the AFL-CIO and the Sierra Club. We also know that it will mean paying more for drugs and other patent and copyright-protected material (forms of protection, whose negative impact is never included in growth projections), but we don’t yet know how much.
Air power inflicts horrific human-rights violations and has been thoroughly discredited as a means of fighting insurgencies
The aerial destruction that rained down on a hospital complex run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, a provincial capital in northeast Afghanistan, on October 3 puts an exclamation point on the story of America’s 14 years of warfare in that Central Asian country. At least 22 people were killed, among them doctors, other medical personnel, and patients, including three children, and dozens were wounded in the attack.
Beyond the obvious, immediate implications of this massacre-which serves as a reminder that for all of those 14 years, the United States has engaged in a brutal, mismanaged and ill-conceived war-more broadly the ruins of the Kunduz hospital are a symbol of America’s unfortunate reliance on air power, including drone strikes and bombers, to combat a host of insurgent groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere in Africa.
E. J. Dionne: Let’s Focus on the Gun-Makers
It’s not just Congress that fails to respond after another massacre briefly focuses attention on the irrationality and permissiveness of our country’s firearms statutes. Those of us seeking change also regularly fall down on the job. We express outrage and move on, leaving the debate exactly where we found it.
Opponents of the big gun interests are often insufficiently innovative in what we propose. Let’s face it: We have been losing this fight. [..]
The time has come to recast this battle as a fight to hold those who make billions of dollars from the sale of firearms accountable for what their products do to individuals and communities. We must call for corporate responsibility, and enforce it by law if it’s not forthcoming. And President Obama, whose outrage about guns many of us share, must be willing to go well beyond what he has done so far.
As is their way, the community organizers and activists at the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) are pushing the president to use the federal government’s purchasing power to promote safer guns. To do business with the government, companies would have to be willing to “remove the barriers to getting smart guns and gun safety technologies to market” and cooperate with law enforcement to “identify and isolate dealers that provide large numbers of guns used in crimes.”
John Nichols: TPP Prioritizes ‘Rights’ of Corporations Over Workers, the Environment and Democracy
The way to begin any discussion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is with a simple question:
Where does this sweeping global trade deal rest power-with the people and their elected representatives in the United States and eleven other Pacific-rim countries, or with the multinational corporations that have been empowered by every previous trade deal of this kind?
The answer, if history is any indication, and if reports on the the secretive agreement are accurate, is that the power will rest with the corporations.
“The deal announced [Monday] is the result of negotiations between corporate interests and trade representatives, which ignored the voices of working families in all twelve countries,” announced Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN). “While details are still emerging, we are concerned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will destroy jobs and depress wages, threaten health and safety standards, harm our air, land and water, and make it harder for patients to access life-saving drugs.”
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