So, Bernie has a
cute little webpage where he lists ten reasons why TPP would be bad for America. Unsurprisingly, they are mostly bullshit.
1. TPP will allow corporations to outsource even more jobs.
Who cares? The resulting "job loss" from this is literally true only in the most irrelevant kind of way. Required reading for people stupid enough to make this claim is Paul Krugman's
A Country is Not a Company. Free trade doesn't even lead to a spike in unemployment; usually because jobs also get insourced, as well as monetary policy being able to reduce slack in the labour market.
Besides, gains from trade are in wages and prices, not employment.
2. U.S. sovereignty will be undermined by giving corporations the right to challenge our laws before international tribunals.
Sanders doesn't even understand what he is criticising. ISDS is an arbitration process wherein companies can receive monetary compensation for suffering at the hands of unfair or discriminatory laws; it doesn't allow legislation to be "challenged", and does not allow companies to 'sue for lost profits'. (See: Phillip Morris, Ethyl Corp, Hamburg-Vattenfall).
3 - Wages, benefits, and collective bargaining will be threatened.
This is the opposite of what free trade does; wages and benefits have been doing
just fine since NAFTA passed. This really is a basic concept of economics; if Vietnamese workers can make jeans for $0.50/hr compared to US workers making jeans for $2.00/hr this is good for Americans because jeans will then be cheaper. It's called comparative advantage.
4 - Our ability to protect the environment will be undermined.
There's a decent argument to be made for the environmental externalities of trade; Sanders doesn't make them. He goes on to claim that most ISDS cases are regarding environmental law, but the TPP itself has a public health exemption. So long as the regulations apply to both foreign and domestic firms, and so long as they're actually public health laws, the legislation is fine.
Cases wherein environmental law has been challenged (Ethyl Corp, Hamburg-Vattenfall) is usually due to said law being unduly discriminatory or unnecessary.
5 - Food Safety Standards will be threatened.
He doesn't even make an argument here; it's just playground logic about how Vietnamese food exports could be contaminated and thus the increase in volume will bring illnesses into the US. It's just stupid.
6 - Buy America laws could come to an end.
Good. Although, unfortunately, the US usually manages to get exemptions for this from trade deals.
7 - Prescription drug prices will increase, access to life saving drugs will decrease, and the profits of drug companies will go up.
We've heard the same bullshit come out of groups like Doctors Without Borders. Countries are permitted to ignore pharmaceutical patents for anything on the
essential drugs list, or if there is a public health crisis as long as the drugs are manufactured for domestic consumption. An agreement between developed countries, however, usually results in the patents being honoured in order to incentivise further development so we can all have better drugs.
When it comes to developing countries, they are either excused or subject to mandatory generic licensing of pharmaceutical patents with the exception of drugs considered elective. This was formalised in a WTO agreement called TRIPS, which was amended in the early 2000s to allow third parties to manufacture essential drugs for certain countries and provide them for free (most HIV for Africa is manufactured in the US) since most poor countries don't have the biomedical infrastructure to produce them. The TPP IP chapter reaffirms the primacy of TRIPS.
8 - Wall Street would benefit at the expense of everyone else.
He claims TPP would outlaw a FTT and restrict the implementation of capital controls; utterly baseless.
9 - The TPP would reward authoritarian regimes like Vietnam that systematically violate human rights.
Foreign aid is a much bigger issue in this arena, but personally I will be waiting for Bernie to reveal his plan to improve human rights in countries like Vietnam.
10 - The TPP has no expiration date, making it virtually impossible to repeal.
He would've been better off making a list of nine points.