The TPP Won't Just Cost Workers Jobs - It Could Cost Them Their Lives, Too

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33423-the-tpp-wont-just-cost-workers-jobs-it-could-cost-t
hem-their-lives-too

Americans who once earned family-supporting wages working in factories, foundries and mills across this country began destroying themselves at a shocking rate five years after implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

That’s because such deals—schemes exactly like the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement released last week—encouraged corporations to offshore manufacturing, decimating decent American jobs and the lives of decent American workers.

Unemployed, desperate and despairing, these once-middle-class workers are killing themselves at unconscionable rates with guns, heroin and alcohol-induced cirrhosis. To such workers, the TPP would mean more tragedy, more death. The opposite is true for CEOs, shareholders and Wall Street financiers.

To them, the TPP would mean even more luxury, more wealth. Trade schemes like the TPP further rig the economy in favor of the already-rich and against the hard-working rest.

<snip>

Between 1997, three years after NAFTA took effect, and 2014, the country lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs. The vast majority, according to the Economic Policy Institute, vanished as a result of growing trade deficits with countries that the United States signed so-called free trade and investment deals with.Just since 2001, 56,000 American factories closed. Corporations moved many of these to low-wage, low-worker-safety, low-environmental-protection countries with which the United States has so-called free trade deals enabling the companies to sell the foreign-made products in America with little or no tariffs or duties.

The TPP, the largest so-called free trade deal ever, encompassing a dozen Pacific-Rim countries including forced and child labor violators Brunei and Vietnam, would send even more American industry and jobs overseas.

[Skittles]

1. how long will it take DU's Premiere Corporate Whore to chime in?

[HughBeaumont]

11. You mean there's just one?

[Skittles]

12. Premiere = I suspect the paid rep

[restorefreedom]

2. this HAS to be defeated

this will cost lives in so many ways

[AzDar]

3. This abomination, and those who support it, must be defeated.

[Pastiche423]

4. Why, Obama, why?

I really want to know why.

[MisterP]

5. we'll do the same old song and dance as we've done since 1992--hold our noses,

fool ourselves with talk of "THIS time around," and apologize when our blood splashes their boots

[Pastiche423]

6. Not me

In 2004, I finally gave myself permission to only vote for someone I believed in - no more voting for the lesser evil.

[moondust]

7. A couple possibilities.

1. The Bill Clinton Post-Presidential Quid Pro Quo Platinum Retirement Plan.

2. Private threats on him or his family.

[appalachiablue]

8. K & R. Solid truth.

[pampango]

9. In the last 50 years manufacturing jobs have declined in every developed country while

output has soared. That is true of the US, Canada, Germany, Sweden, you name it. All the progressive countries trade 2 to 3 times as much as the US. The decline of our middle class has not been caused by poor foreigners but by rich Americans.

Thomas Piketty stated that it is the weakening of our unions, through anti-union legislation like 'right-to-work', and the refusal to raise and spread the minimum wage, along with making the tax system more and more regressive and shredding the safety net that has hurt our middle class.

None of Piketty's findings would surprise FDR were he still around.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

10. Soon enough, Americans will follow the jobs

American workers are among the highest skilled and the most vulnerable.