In his musings on why the president is pushing so hard for his Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, it takes William Finnegan quite a few column inches before he lurches uncontrollably on to the most likely answer: the president very badly wants a foreign policy legacy and the remainder of his attempts at securing a victory in that area haven’t been working out too well.
The question I’ve asked in the past is a little different. We already have bilateral “free trade” agreements with countries representing most of the GDP and most of the trade in the countries of the TPP other than Japan. Is Japan really likely to, for example, open its agricultural markets to us in any reasonable way.
Supporters of the agreement have been unable to mount any defenses of it other than the most anodyne of generic defenses of free trade for an important reason: they’ve been sworn to secrecy.
Once again, this agreement is not a free trade agreement. You can write a free trade agreement on the back of a napkin and agree to it over dinner. The length of the negotiations alone tells you it’s a managed trade agreement and such agreements are only good for us conditioned on the specific terms and the specific terms are secret.
It’s all very mysterious.
My guess is, we’re going to find this agreement and its Atlantic counterpart give a great deal of power to multi-national corporations, making them almost independent of constraints by national governments. Corporations will make their own decisions about where to invest in new facilities, what the working conditions shall be for their employees, how financial flows should be managed internally to avoid taxation, how much attention should be paid to “stockholders’ rights” and the like.
The payoff, I’d presume, is that despite their free-agency, is that the corporations might voluntarily choose to remain links with the nations that spawned them. Sony will always have plants in Japan staffed by Japanese citizens, for example, even after it is wholly bought out by Samsung. Microsoft will bring out American editions of new operating systems before releasing them in Europe. An elderly Kentucky Colonel will smile at us from KFC billboards, even when we see them in Outer Mongolia. Now and then, Apple Computer will pay out some stock dividends in this country and graciously drop a billion dollars worth of taxes on the IRS.
The general idea, I think, is that decades from now when China and India and perhaps others are greater than we are in economic might (GNP, R&D spending, etc.) and greater in some military measures (troops, numbers of aircraft, etc.), that this formidable assemblage of giant commercial firms will somehow deter international enmities, war, and aggression. Think of Norman Angell, rewritten for a new century.
Sorry if the thinking seems a bit mushy. In fact, I personally think this is mushy thinking. Other hand, present day foreign policy discussion generally assumes the US has the capability to rule the world; the debate is over how blatantly we should do so — and I can’t convince myself that’s wonderful course of action for the next century either.
Anyhow, you want to spring such notions on the American republic before or after the Senate’s signed off on the concept?
Shipping, you’re over thinking it. The managed parts of the agreements are to ensure that local elites remain elite locally. The people running America want to insure that they continue with THEIR wealth & privilege, and are quite happy to make common cause with elites in other countries to maintain their position relative their own subject populations. The Warren Buffets of America have more in common with Kim Hong Un & Vladimir Putin than with you or me, and certainly more in common with the oligarchs of our major trade partners.
Shupp, not shipping. These phones with their auto correct features are pains in the ass.
Mike, hopefully my phone likes that better, consider that our elites can’t really seem to plan more than two years ahead, maximum. Consider how these brilliant people have come up with one fucked up policy after another for Iraq, to cite the most glaring example. Do you really think they can plan decades ahead to when China & India are the major powers in the world of nation-states? Naked, immediate self-interest is a far more likely motivator for these jerks.
Shucks, I thought I’d acquired a new nick! Oh, phooey.
Getting back to the argument…. ensure that local elites remain elite locally This is the key that persuades Korea and Japan and Singapore, etc., to sign on to the treaty.
our elites can’t really seem to plan Some can. There are bright, reflective people with long term perspectives almost everywhere you look actually. The problem is that foresight and wisdom don’t make one a political leader or guarantee appointment to high rank, so you live and die in obscurity, remembered at best as “a valued associate.”
But for our nominal rulers, senators and representatives and governors and the like …. I sit here contemplating a 17 trillion dollar GNP, and a 4 trillion dollar federal budget, and the earnestness with which these guys debate the odd 100 million dollar appropriation here and there while ignoring the really large pieces of the budget … and I have to conclude they’re frauds. They’re dumb, or they’re on the take, or both. Both parties.
Also, keep in mind that most of our elected representatives have never taken a statistics or economics course and the last math course they probably took was high school trig and that was a half century ago or more. They have no feel for numbers, don’t know the difference between a billion and a trillion, and have no idea of any implications of any policy other than political ones.
They have no feel for numbers, don’t know the difference between a billion and a trillion,
Then they’re dumb, really really dumb. And this is no small failure — the whole argument for republicanism or representative democracy is that elected legislators will have a better than average capacity for understanding the issues that face a state. That we hundreds or thousands of high school graduates will elect one of the rare college graduates to look out for our collective interests in a national government in other words. We’re getting something much less than that these days — representatives posing as grade school dropouts to appeal to lazy electors — and it’s getting so common and the results are so dire that the philosophical case for representative government is being obliterated. Maybe we really do need to be governed by Philosopher Kings, and we should throw out our present constitution and try to come up with a scheme that gives management of the state to handfuls of bright, idealistic aristocrats rather than an elected army of self-serving plebians.
Uh, no. The idea behind representative democracy is that the elected representative represents his or her constituency. What you’re describing is the argument for aristocracy.
Elections are not IQ tests.