Why would she do this? What a terrible stance! Bad politics and bad policy! She may have just blown her free ticket to the White House with this one.
Most of the base on the left does not like TPP. She needs to win the base, she is saying whats popular with the base.
The average voter has no idea what this is…
You down with TPP?
^Yeah, you know me.
Of course Hillary is going to oppose this. The liberal base is largely against Free Trade and wants to protect american jobs. This stance is in line with the democratic base. Also, this stance is funny because didn’t Bill Clinton sign NAFTA?
My cynical view is that when it comes to sufficiently esoteric topics, a large percentage of voters will swallow whatever story comes from the side that they already support. You could sell TPP to liberals by saying it kills profit mongering by fat cat corporations, or you could sell opposition to TPP by saying it protects American jobs (as stated above). If you’re a pantsuit 50-year-old woman, Hillary’s word itself influences your opinion.
She probably doesn’t (if she has any sense), but is saying she opposes it to appeal to her liberal base. Unions really pushed hard against TPP. It’s quite frustrating (this goes for both sides; looking at you NRA) to see a fairly small group (unions are what 10% of the workforce now?) have such a large pull in politics.
exactly. and the fact that obama is for it makes her position weird. i’m thinking she’s going to have to change her position when she’s running for president in order to appeal to the centrist voters who are very much pro-trade. who isn’t pro-trade? communists?
Who…cares?
If Bernie Sanders wasn’t this high in the polls at this stage of the game, she wouldn’t have opposed it.
Agree, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, big picture, seems hopelessly stupid.
Basically the US realizes this is the century of Asia, so they want to align with Asia, but they want to somehow do so without aligning with China, who will economically rule Asia. Uhh, how exactly will that work out? Of course almost nobody has the details of the agreement so nobody can intelligently comment, but since at the macro-level it is stupidity, the details do not matter.
Exactly. I would give you an upvote but instead I will clutter this thread with a “+1” or “this” type comment.
This belongs in the feedback forum.
+1
Wrong on so many accounts. This has been in the works for a long time. While tariffs will be reduced, the bulk of it has to do with IP rights, environment and work protection, and other standards, which the US has been getting screwed on for years. This allows a more common standard of the rules. Not to mention TPP is projected to boost global GDP by $223B/year in the next decade. Not immense by a measure of global GDP, but when you’re seeing little growth to declines for much of the developed world, positive basis points count. So in short, there is absolutely value here.
China has purposely been excluded for political reasons and it’s not like other countries in the partnership disagree with that exclusion, namely Japan. I don’t know enough to agree/disagree with the decision to leave out China, but the logic behind it is to pressure it to adapt TPP’s standards. I don’t think whoever wrote TPP was thinking of leaving China out forever…