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Tell Farmers to support TPP

Faster horses

Well-known member
...it's at the top of my page.
TPP Puts America Farmers First.
"Click here to send a message to Congress to SUPPORT TPP".

Obama is for it, and that pretty much puts me against it, but I truly don't understand what it is all about.

I did a google search and found this:

What Is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multinational trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement. The main problems are two-fold:

(1) Digital Policies that Benefit Big Corporations at the Expense of the Public: The IP chapter would have extensive negative ramifications for users’ freedom of expression, right to privacy and due process, as well as hindering peoples' abilities to innovate. Other chapters of the agreement encourage your personal data to be sent borders with limited protection for your privacy, and allow foreign corporations to sue countries for laws or regulations that promote the public interest,

(2) Lack of Transparency: The entire process has shut out multi-stakeholder participation and is shrouded in secrecy.

The twelve nations that negotiated the TPP are the U.S., Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei Darussalam. The TPP contains a chapter on intellectual property covering copyright, trademarks, and patents. The official release of the final TPP text confirmed what we had long feared: that U.S. negotiators pushed for the adoption of copyright measures far more restrictive than currently required by international treaties, including the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).


The TPP Will Rewrite Global Rules on Intellectual Property Enforcement

All signatory countries will be required to conform their domestic laws and policies to the provisions of the Agreement. In the U.S., this will further entrench controversial aspects of U.S. copyright law—such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—and restrict the ability of Congress to engage in domestic law reform to meet the evolving needs of American citizens and the innovative technology sector. Overall, the TPP's provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding.


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So why is it good for farmers and why should they sign a petition for Congress to "ACT NOW"?
 

Traveler

Well-known member
So why is it good for farmers and why should they sign a petition for Congress to "ACT NOW"?

So we can further erode our sovereignty maybe? Just a guess. Better read the fine print to see how many Muslims it requires us to take in.
 

mrj

Well-known member
I sure would like to see another point of view of that commentary on TPP. I believe it has been supportive of ag trade and better for us than not having it.

And, sometimes it is beneficial to look at who is AGAINST something, Ag groups, that is! Often those who claim to be for the working rancher/farmer and against 'corporates' (I'm assuming those who use that term mean 'corporations') are not supportive of those of us who depend on what we produce and n'eed the best prices we can get. They sometimes seem to be against selling our products internationally, too.

We shouldn't forget that 'consumers' includes far more people in other nations than are in our own! And that many of those people are becoming more wealthy than ever and have developed a taste for US ag products.

mrj
 

Traveler

Well-known member
I'd like to know if there's a chance that any restrictions could be placed on production agriculture, and could it be better if trade deals, maybe with individual countries, that weren't so "all-encompassing" for want of a better phrase, could be worked out instead?
 

Brad S

Well-known member
I'd suggest US ag producers are a trivial political force. Remember how Carter embargoed the Russians to help reduce consumer pain caused by his socialism. Then recall the reality forced onto ag valuations by bank examiners in the mid 80s. - all the while valuations in the rest of the economy were ignored - just to put some sound footing in part of the economy. I can go on and on proving the obvious - ag producers are politically irrelevant or at least expendable. I'd suggest a treaty is a better instrument to protect US ag than political cashe. I'm like FH, Obama could support church ice cream socials and I'd be against it.
 

Traveler

Well-known member
http://m.beefmagazine.com/blog/tpp-more-about-control-trade

Is TPP more about control than trade?
by Alan Newport
Alan Newport
Aug 30, 2016
The Trans Pacific Partnership has been debated for quite some time, with arguments on both sides of the issue. Is it good for beef trade?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been pushed for months now by many agricultural groups as a great boon to all ag industries. But after months of study I have concluded it is far more damaging than beneficial.

First, it's my estimation the actual gains appear small and slow to come. An example is in this USDA publication which specifically mentions trade with Japan. It says Japan will eliminate duties on 74% of its beef and beef product imports within 16 years, with substantial cuts to the remaining tariffs.

Note the length of the timetable, however. Most of the Japanese tariffs are to be reduced significantly or eliminated within 13-16 years. If we think of this as an investment such as we would make on the farm or ranch, is that a good one? How many business investments do you make that don't pay off for 16 years? Even most cows supposedly pay off by the sixth year.

More importantly, Japan has the right under TPP to maintain restrictive import quotas on at least 33 classifications of agricultural goods, so this is no true clearing of the deck.

I wonder what the Japanese agreements might net for U.S. beef producers, considering Japan was recently listed as the largest importer of US beef products at $1.6 billion.

In August just gone by, USDA said farmers (everyone below the packer) were getting 42% of the retail beef value and that percentage is dropping steadily. In addition, the wholesale-to-retail spread has been increasing steadily from about $1.20 per pound in 2000 to $2.50 per pound in 2015, and the farm-to-wholesale spread has been and continues a flat trend, varying from 25-50 cents.

So if we assume for a moment that TPP supporters and the USDA are using retail values for beef, then that 42% of retail price would be $672 million total value for farmers. If we increased our take by an average of perhaps 15%, assuming that might be a reasonable improvement in our pricing after tariffs were gone or fully reduced, then we might see an additional $100 million here at home, distributed in typical crocodile-feeding-frenzy fashion among the three sectors of the beef industry. With USDA's count of 915,000 beef farms, that's about a dollar per operation, or with 30 million cows, that's about $3.30 per cow.


But I expect that is wishful thinking, as the top dogs usually eat more and let only the smallest scraps filter down the food chain; remember the shrinking farm-to-retail and farm-to-wholesale spreads.

Worse however, are these facts: TPP robs the ability of nations, including the United States, to make their own deals, and it puts their fates in the hands of international tribunals, and that it gives immense power to corporations to control the trade decisions of nations through lawsuits and other means.

First and foremost, TPP is an attack on our sovereignty. This means U.S. citizens are the only people in the world who were truly put in charge of our own affairs. Sadly, we have squandered our rights and frittered away our power, handing it over to the elected and bureaucratic megalomaniacs who we foolishly call "leaders," and to the big money that buys them. All these people are in cahoots to give themselves the ultimate power and control. It's Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in real life.

An excellent article in The American Thinker last fall noted the 5,544-page TPP document contains seven things which have little to do with trade and everything to do with world government and cronyism:

A legislative body superior to Congress
A vehicle to pass Obama’s climate-change treaty
Increased legal immigration
Reduced patent protection for U.S. pharmaceuticals
Quotas on U.S. agricultural exports
Increased currency manipulation
Reduced U.S. power and self rule

An example is in Chapter 10, which calls for the opening of U.S. borders to foreign service companies that want to bring foreign workers with them to provide services in the U.S. Chapter 12 calls for the opening of U.S. borders to any foreign professionals they bring in. Chapter 12, "Temporary entry for business persons," provides that visas must be supplied to the professionals being brought into the country by these service companies and that they must be allowed to bring their spouse and children with them.

But under the appendices to Chapter 12, almost all of the other countries participating in the TPP limit immigration to certain professions and limit the length of stay of these "temporary" workers. For example, Japan limits entry to businessmen, specific professions and to technicians who have the equivalent of a Japanese associate's degree. It also limits the amount of time that they can stay in the country to five years. No such appendix appears for the United States.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said just days ago only five of 30 chapters deal with trade, and an examination of the table of contents and chapter summaries shows this is a fair assessment. The rest of TPP regulates an unimaginable number things, including the internet.

Paul Craig Roberts, an economist, journalist and former assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy for President Reagan says one of the primary functions of TPP is to set global corporations above the laws of the nations where they operate.

William F. Jasper in The New American said much the same: "The real agenda behind the TPP is to consolidate and centralize economic and political power. The main organizing entity behind the TPP agenda is the secretive Trilateral Commission ... intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States."

If you want to read more about TPP, remember everyone you read is biased and you'll have to filter through all that and try to discern the truth. Notice, too, that I put a link to the actual TPP document at the beginning of this blog, should you want to read through more than 5,500 pages.

Come to think of it, that should be reason enough reject the agreement.

The article in The American Thinker I quoted earlier says, "The only truly redeeming option of the TPP is that we can easily get out of it ... any country can withdraw from the agreement, simply by giving six months notice."

But I have a better idea. Let's demand Congress throw the damned thing in the incinerator where it belongs. Then we can work on real trade deals instead of setting up international governments.

More TPP links you might want to read:

http://www.tppcoalition.org/about/

(This list is corporate entities given early access to TPP)

http://www.flushthetpp.org/tpp-corporate-insiders/

http://www.aflcio.org/Issues/Trade/Trans-Pacific-Partnership-Free-Trade-Agreement-TPP

Political donations to US congressional members:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/may/27/corporations-paid-us-senators-fast-track-tpp
 

Traveler

Well-known member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/11/10/the-trans-pacific-partnership-is-dead-schumer-tells-labor-leaders/

TPP is dead, of course. I find it curious how NCBA was supporting something Obama wanted so much.
 
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