The TPP (as Paul Krugman has hinted at) is not really a "trade" deal - with lowering tariffs and opening markets.

Rather, it is a corportate protection deal: strengthening patents and copyright laws, arranging for non-governmental panels to hear corporate complaints that a country's laws "unfairly" restrict their profits. And just like corporate arbitration panels (for US consumers), these panels will be filled with Ayn Rand-lovin' lackeys. Corporations that lose arbitration decisions do so infrequently, and only because they do something so far beyond-the-pale that even a John Galt lickspittle cannot go along.

Also, those Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanisms have been part of every international trade agreement since 1982, including over 50 that the US belongs to. YOu don't need to speculate about what they "will" do because they already have a track record you can look at. I don't know about the literary tastes of the arbitrators , but corporations very frequently lose. Most countries, including the US, have never lost one of these disputes; those that do lose, mostly Argentina and Venezuela, are countries with extremely weak legal institutions, etc.

This is the ding, ding, ding money comment. These facts, which Krugman knows and ignores, basically prove he's being disingenuous on the TPP.

It's vitally important for liberals to understand that Krugman, who won his Prize for the economics of trade, is on 3 different sides of this issue.

It's really hard to get liberals to see flaws with Krugman, but maybe comparing his textbook to what he calls "textbook economics" will do the trick.

Thanks! I wanted to reply, but it got too long, and then came Monday's Krugman column where he seems to be slowly shedding the pose and I turned it into a blogpost instead. Quoting you, so this is a heads-up.

Chuck Todd took Paul Krugman's advice, and asked Bernie Sanders.

It was 3 days later, in the MSNBC Town Hall on 3/14/16. Bernie Sanders spent more time on free trade than any other topic. Sanders exposed Krugman's, Clinton's, establishment media's, and establishment Democrat's lie, but they still feel the need to call Sanders a protectionist demogogue anyways, like Clinton did minutes later, in her section of the town hall.

Yes, we shouldn't call the TPP a "free trade" agreement because lowering the few remaining barriers to trade is mostly not what it's about. It's a business protection agreement. Its main objective is to protect corporations from the presumed excesses of government regulation. Truly, it's protectionism, but protectionism different from the traditional kind.

It you want to discuss what Krugman "hints" you might as well note what he actually says, most recently (March 11):

I consider myself a soft opponent: It’s not the devil’s work, but I really wish President Obama hadn’t gone there

but also that, while on the one hand the critics and proponents are both guilty of some dishonesty

yes, Mr. Sanders is demagoguing the issue, for example with a Twitter post linking the decline of Detroit, which began in the 1960s and has had very little to do with trade liberalization, to “Hillary Clinton’s free-trade policies.”

That said, not all free-trade advocates are paragons of intellectual honesty. In fact, the elite case for ever-freer trade, the one that the public hears, is largely a scam.

on the other hand the opponents have a special responsibility to do better:

anyone ragging on about those past deals, like Mr. Trump or Mr. Sanders, should be asked what, exactly, he proposes doing now. Are they saying that we should rip up America’s international agreements? Have they thought about what that would do to our credibility and standing in the world?

What I find myself thinking about, in particular, is climate change — an all-important issue we can’t confront effectively unless all major nations participate in a joint effort, with last year’s Paris agreement just the beginning. How is that going to work if America shows itself to be a nation that reneges on its deals?

The fundamental dynamic has been: Democrats struggle to achieve the barest possible compensations for the people who might be hurt by trade agreements, and the best possible enforcements to coax trading partners towards a level playing field.

But each of these goals is extremely difficult to achieve, especially against both Republican and international opposition. As a result, the compensations usually don't work, and neither do the enforcements. Even with the best of intentions, for example, people are hard to retrain, and the jobs you retrain them for have a way of paying less and disappearing faster. Meanwhile, the trade agreements are already in place, hurting Americans who have disproportionately little say in what happens next.

For a trade agreement to work equitably, there have to be far more radical domestic compensations and income redistributions in place than the political system will tolerate. The result is inevitable: the victims of trade increasingly suffer, and when they look at Democrats (and the new trade agreements they propose), our claims that we're looking out for them seem utterly hollow. In their shoes, would you believe Democrats?

I don't necessarily disagree with you about the views of the mayors or of the parts of the Democratic coalition that are eager to engage economically with the world as it moves forward. But I do not know how to manage the paradox.

An additional irony is that we've probably now lost the majority of the jobs we will lose to trade. From now on we will lose them to automation -- by the millions, or tens of millions. We are utterly unprepared for the social impact of this, and neither Democratic candidate for President is even remotely clued in to what's coming, much less ready to talk about it.

Great comment! Making the economic pie bigger is good. The problem is the increasingly skewed distribution of the resulting profits. For a trade agreement to work equitably, there have to be far more radical domestic compensations and income redistributions in place than the political system will tolerate. Exactly. Currently that 'will' does not exist on either side of the aisle.

An additional irony is that we've probably now lost the majority of the jobs we will lose to trade. From now on we will lose them to automation -- by the millions, or tens of millions. Man: you are on fire! We are rapidly approaching an End of Work economy where all but the most unique and specialized skills sets will be subject to automation.

Recently, Google's DeepMind program defeated the No. 2 professional Go player in the world: winning 4 games to 1.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news...
A professional Go player will play (according to the analysis I heard today) about 10,000 matches in his life. The program analyzed 100,000 professional games and played 30 million simulations games against itself. It came up with new joseki (opening patterns) all by itself! The day when all but a few professions can be automated are much closer than people think!

Thanks! Yes, that Google AlphaGo DeepMind AI was quite remarkable, not least because it demonstrated new forms of pattern recognition and deep learning that are far more applicable to generalized tasks we used to believe would always demand human intuition.

Traditionally, new technologies generated huge numbers of new jobs, but today's most valuable new enterprises (Google, Facebook, etc.) have stunningly few employees. People trained by the thousands to be system administrators are now being wiped out en masse by cloud services. Entry-level jobs in areas like newswriting and legal research are already being replaced by AI, cutting off the bottom of the ladder in more and more "white-collar" professions. And there's an immense amount of money now going into figuring out how to finally replace burger flippers with robots -- which means that, as utterly crucial as the $15 minimum wage is, it will not be a long-term solution.

It's really instructive what happens on the rare occasion when new technologies still do generate large numbers of jobs. Uber brings aboard thousands of freelance drivers -- and immediately buys the entire robotics lab of Carnegie-Mellon University so it can replace them with self-driving cars.

When people like MIT's Brynjolfsson and McAfee, or Martin Ford, write about this stuff, they see little alternative to a guaranteed income. That doesn't give people purpose in life, but at least it lets them eat. But the political system is so far from even talking about these issues, it's frightening.

You are right, politicians have to make noises about 'bringing back good jobs', etc., even if they know it is unrealistic. However, we have been shown a way forward: Star Trek! The citizens of the Federation work for personal fulfillment: not subsistence. Star Trek is set about [Edit] 300 [/Edit] years from now and that is probably where we will be by then. Far fetched? OK: can anyone really envision factory workers riding their SUVs to work in 2315?

The Federation has somehow managed to survive the era where we all hate and fear each others' tribes, and build a new era where we go boldly into the future, wielding reason and brotherhood. I hope so! But when I turn on my TV these days I see a lot more Idiocracy and Elysium. :)

Seriously, though, we need to -- I almost said "have a national conversation," but that phrase has reached self-parody -- we need to start talking about the disappearance of work, and the other things we might do to provide sustenance and purpose. So we can have a humane society instead of one where we're all at each others' throats for the scraps. Otherwise it's Trumps all the way down.

One of the things I don't respect about Bernie Sanders is his stupid and simplistic policy on trade agreements. I'm agnostic about the TPP, but given the global nature of the economy I don't think the absence of trade agreements is necessarily better than any trade agreement--and it can be worse. As Brownstein points out, there are winners and losers created by both.

It would be much better if he had the good DLC position of trade has to happen and we need to help the losers from trade, but not actually do anything in regards to helping. Now that's a position you can respect!

No, actually, he can't. His view on trade is at the very core of his identity. And that identity requires a good vs evil view of trade. If he gives that up, he ceases to be Bernie Sanders.

If by "nuanced" you mean the general "global trade is inevitable" framing then no. That is not nuance. It is simplistic, deliberately misleading, and intensely ideological. The nuanced position is "free" trade can be good if the benefits are shared widely. Because the benefits are not shared enough we have to evaluate whether changing the trade rules will be more beneficial than the current situation where we have lots of "free" trade and very little distribution of the gains from winners to losers. That seems to Sanders' position. And Clinton's re: the TPP.

What are you meaning by the word "nuance" here? I really don't understand. The nuance would be the subtle difference between "no trade ever!" and "trade, but only on terms that help everyone or compensates the losers with more than cheap stuff."

Sanders does have nuanced positions on trade, is not a protectionist, has described what a good free trade treaty looks like, how free trade agreements can lift millions out of poverty without impoverishing our workers, and is not a demogogue/populist.

The thing I don't really like about all of that, which is fairly reasonable on its face, is that Bernie Sanders isn't admitting that a perfectly negotiated trade agreement that had all the provisions and protections Bernie Sanders's heart desires... would still precede job losses in various economic sectors. If stuff happens after other stuff, the first stuff looks like it's caused by the second stuff. In a world without trade agreements, is Carrier or whatever any more likely not to relocate? Seems to me like a lot of these deals are set up to protect some of the most thriving parts of the US economy, like pharmaceuticals and entertainment. That's not unreasonable, is it?

Several times on this very thread I have pointed out the evidence that you say you have not seen, and say I haven't, either. Here, though, is my best evidence:

https://twitter.com/Jaaaaay...

No, if you had clicked on the twitter link, you would have seen that was a joke, and you may find that also damning.

I did specifically respond to all of the claims you have made already in this, the discussion on the 10th comment.

You can read the 13th comment to see my response, which has no boilerplate or cutting and pasting, but would be trollish to repeat here.

It seems like when you get right down to it everyone agrees that trade deals are fine in the abstract but flawed in the practical implementation, hence those other people who negotiated trade deals in the past did it poorly and thoughtlessly but under (B. Clinton | Obama | H. Clinton | Sanders) it's a different story because they insist on X. And then the second-level criticism is that Leader's insistence on X is a crock and/or doesn't go far enough, and should include Y. Of course neither X or super-duper Y will stop job losses because not all job losses have anything to do with international trade or international trade agreements. This seems like it's been a particularly dopey debate on "the left" this time around.

FliYrWings - If 86% of exports are coming out of our cities, and if 81% of our population is in cities, it sounds like some serious growth potential exists, and whatever the poorness of the trade deals, it MIGHT begin to show that America IS benefiting from the trade deals, after all. Cities are economic engines in the first place, and if our cities are already making hay with this, the future looks fairly promising. With an entire world out there to sell to...

I REALLY don't think those mayors are stupid. I think they can see the revenue potential. Mayors are like independent agents - they don't HAVE to agree with each other. If so many of them are in favor, we should all pay attention to what it is they are seeing.

In case it wasn't clear, I wasn't saying that the mayors were stupid, not at all. I was trying to say that pretending that there was a silver-bullet trade policy all Democrats should embrace that would be better than all the other trade policies that came before was stupid.

"But as Brownstein pointed out, the way the issue is currently being framed means that a large part of the Democratic coalition is not being heard."

I think you are saying the people who want trade deals passed are not being heard? Can you name the last trade agreement that was not passed because of "protectionist" sentiment? Just one in the last say, 30 years. I'm genuinely asking because nothing comes to mind immediately.

If it is the case that there are none or extremely few instances where a trade agreement was not passed, how can you say the people pushing for these trade agreements "are not being heard"?

When you make globalization "inevitable" how are you going to get the distributive policies that ameliorate the negative effects of trade agreements past the forces that don't want to provide those policies? You are giving them what they want ("free" trade) regardless of whether we institute the distributive policies.

Nothing is inevitable. We have made political choices to put our lower paid workers in competition against much lower paid individuals. We could change that in a heartbeat. But not until there is a real threat of a protectionist backlash will the powers that be allow those policies to be instituted.

I think a good analogy is the spread of social democracy in Europe and America. The possibility and viability of a socialist revolution or government made people who were against providing certain rights or benefits decided to do so in order to avoid a much worse outcome.

Sorry. Globalization WAS inevitable. It was happening outside the USA for decades. It was only a matter of time that the USA finally paid attention and saw the YUGE upside. American businessmen are not STUPID. If there is a market out there, they will find a way, trade pacts or not.

I still go back to the end of WWII. The reast of the world had very little and had to start anew. While they were "coming up in the world" America was selling to itself, to the point eventually that American companies ignored the overseas markets. Well, that time is now long since past. Those countries - SO MANY OF THEM! - are bountiful markets. Selling only to America has become a way to lose out. Joining globalization is in every business' best interests - even if individually they screw it up somehow. For most it will be a great boon.

You mean the way it's been so far?
Or even more so?
And is "great boon" defined as, "be glad your real income has dropped by only 10-20% compared to what your cohort's was in 1970 -- why, you could already be devolved to the level of poaching your own food in the national parklands, were it not for our munificence!"
Oh, wait -- when you said, "For most," you mean "for most BUSINESSES," not "for most WORKERS."
My bad -- I should read more carefully.
I respectfully retract my cavils, above.

Joseph Stiglitz is not the only one to point out that globalization and technological progress do NOT have to hollow out the middle class, and there is no lack of better explicit choices policymakers have:

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-...

But that (very good) post has nothing to do with trade deals. The prescriptions Baker offers are things that can be and should be done regardless of TPP implementation.

No, Yastreblyansky, Democrats and media, who are calling Bernie Sanders a protectionist, are saying that the alternative to passing TPP is no free trade. Baker is offering things that can and should be done INCLUDING fixing TPP, not just regardless of TPP, and telling us why these things are not being done. Baker's paragraphs 6 and 8 are just 2 examples of the protectionism (selective and outright) of TPP, that billions of dollars have been spent to obsfucate and lobby for.

There are many other examples Lori Wallach lists in her own article, "The Choice Is Not Between TPP and No Trade". Why should TPP ban the regulation of especially risky financial products so that democracies legislative, regulatory and justice systems don't matter? Lower our food safety standards? Economic development, including our own, has relied on government purchasing power to spur innovation, yet TPP not only makes that illegal, but insures that GE can profit off government procurement contracts using sweatshops abroad.

American workers are not the ones who are protectionist and are not the ones against free trade. TPP promoters are claiming that privileging powerful interests against free market competition, against free trade and for barriers to entry advances free trade?

The New York Times (and TPP promoters) is implausibly erring or just disingenuous every time it claims, "Part of the problem is that no one has yet come up with a fully convincing answer to the question of how you harness the power of the technology revolution and globalization without hollowing out middle-class jobs."

TPP promoters (INCLUDING those Democratic mayors endorsing TPP) (some of them sincerely believing the billions of dollars that have been spent on propaganda about modern trade pacts) are claiming that TPP expands Made-in-America, when TPP has us subsidize corporations to export investment and American jobs to low wage countries and import their goods back, among other foreign investor protections.

Don't you understand? There Is No Alternative! The big money behind "free trade" needs to get what they want and then maybe they will throw the rest of us a bone. That's how it's supposed to work. If politicians don't implement the policies that might prevent the hollowing of the middle class it's because it is physically impossible and has nothing to do with politics.

When the mill jobs left New England for the South it wasn't an international treaty problem.
When the auto jobs left Detroit for the south it wasn't an international treaty problem.
The problem really isn't jobs moving where labor is cheaper. That will always happen.
If NAFTA is this terrible thing then why was the economy okay in the 90's and not so good since then?
If NAFTA is so terrible then why are so many things made in China that wasn't part of NAFTA?

The problem with all of these free trade agreements since the Canada-US Agreement in the ‘80s is that they are not really about “free” trade. They are about discriminatory, preferential trade. They prefer the goods of one country over identical goods from another. And the fact that the US has led the world in these things for the past 30 some years is ironic.

The Declaration of Independence lists trade discrimination as one of its charges against George III; George Washington warned against it in his famous Farewell Address; non-discrimination in trade was one of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points; Franklin Roosevelt insisted on a clause in the Lend-Lease Agreement with Britain prohibiting it; Winston Churchill, who would not abandon the British Empire Preference, objected and Lend-Lease—while implemented in practice—was never formally adopted.

The distortion of these regional trade agreements stems from the fact that if you’re going to give duty-free treatment to goods from Country X but not from others, you have to determine what it means for something to be “from” Country X. This done in terms of something called the Harmonized Tariff System, which covers every product that is, was, or ever shall be. Not surprisingly, it is largely a maze of detail decipherable only by those who know the industry and its products intimately. This means the companies concerned. A large part of the
negotiations consists in manipulating these provisions to favor the process used by producers in the trade area over those of its outside competitors.

An example: Under the Canada-US Agreement, origin was conferred on ketchup if it was made from tomato paste that was produced in one of the countries to the Agreement. That meant that Heinz could import tomatoes from Chile to produce tomato paste that it then converted to ketchup, and export the ketchup to Canada duty free.
Not under NAFTA. Now the tomato paste itself must be made from tomatoes grown in a NAFTA country. When this change occurred, Mexico—not Chile—became the leading foreign supplier of tomatoes to the US. Great for Mexico; not so great for Chile.

These agreements are replete with this kind of thing. The joke after NAFTA went into force was that you could determine whether an electronic product “originated” in Mexico by looking at the name on the building: it if read IBM or Motorola or Dell or GE, the process
used there “conferred origin on Mexico; if it read “Toshiba or Hitachi or Samsung it did not.

It is too late to do away with these agreements—the toothpaste is out of the tube. The best policies would be (1) to return to the WTO in Geneva and move for multilateral tariff reductions which could make
the regional agreements economically irrelevant; and (2) simultaneously, build a much better social safety net for those who are hurt by the process. There are losers as well as winners from
expanded trade. Economists since John Stuart Mill have known that the gains are larger, and that the winners could fully compensate the losers and still come out ahead. The problem is, we haven’t done that.

>the winners could fully compensate the losers and still come out ahead. The problem is, we haven’t done that.<

The question is, why? Perhaps we have an especially selfish and short-sighted generation of elites nowadays... or they've been completely unmoored from their geographical societies through globalization... or they're simply taking what they can through political contributions and lobbyists, and not thinking about it much... or, in the absence of unions and communists they just no longer feel threatened, as another commenter has suggested.

Maybe it's all of the above. But you pinpoint why the fact that standard economics posits a bigger pie has become so irrelevant to the real debate.

It is almost certainly all of the above -- plus the capture of the mass media by some of the very corporations whose owners and management are the beneficiaries.
There's a reason that Joe Sixpakk's comments in so many website threads sound a lot like Ayn Rand these days -- even as her theories are the underpinning for Joe's loss of earning power.
All of this was laid out in The [infamous] Powell Memo back in (IIRC) 1971.
Google is your friend -- two good intros to the subject, if you're not familiar:

http://billmoyers.com/conte...

http://reclaimdemocracy.org...

FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS should include the following requirements:

1. All corporations, etc. which wish to engage in international trade must register with the United Nations, be subject to international laws, rules and regulations, as well as an international tax .

2. All trade agreements must allow for the formation of International Labor Unions to protect all workers and engage in collected bargaining. These International Unions must follow the same requirements as outlined in item 1.

3. Rules and regulations will be written to protect the environment, protect workers’ safety, health and environments/conditions, end worker slavery and slave wages, consumer, stock market, banking & financial protection laws and protection of national laws applying to the rulemaking, oversight and the enforcement of all of the above.

Bernie Sanders talks about free trade virtually every day. In MSNBC's 3/14/16 Town Hall, he talked about free trade more than any other topic, at one point taking multiple questions from an audience member then from Chuck Todd, starting about 20 minutes in, for more than 5 minutes. Sanders explained how he is FOR free trade, NOT a protectionist, what a free trade agreement he would negotiate and sign should look like, and how you can lift millions out of poverty with free trade without impoverishing our workers.

A few minutes later, Hillary Clinton called Bernie Sanders such a knee jerk, reflexive protectionist, that he always jumps up to announce his opposition to anything international, whether on trade or stopping global warming, before anything is even signed. Your claim and Clinton's, that Sanders is, "simply shouting “no” to trade deals and demagoguing the issue" is not supported by the evidence.

TPP is not really even a free trade agreement, contrary to your claim. TPP is selective protectionism and a protection racket, for multi-nationals to get around country's laws and rules to protect consumers, workers, public health and the environment, while effectively denying recourse to the public being harmed for profit.

TPP is designed to redistribute income upward while protecting big companies from free market competition, innovation and economic development in third world countries, by using selective protectionism and over ruling the protections of democracies.

Doctors in the United Sates would not make two or more times as much as elsewhere, except for selectively protectionist modern trade pacts. It's hypocritical for Ron Brownstein to selectively call blue collar workers protectionist.

Globalization and technological progress do not need to reduce jobs and wages here. That's due to explicit policy choices by those we elect to represent us. Hopefully voters will educate or vote out Mayor Calderon, who should be blocking, or working to fix, TPP.

Except for those living off misrepresenting their voters, or living off investments without thinking long term, modern trade pacts have been about ripping the rest off. The president of the Chamber of Commerce told Davos Hillary Clinton is only temporarily against TPP, to get elected, and will sign it once she is president. The mayors quoted approvingly above are, against their cities' best interests.

Economist Dean Baker regularly debunks the trade treaty propaganda you are promoting, including the Peterson Institute (the guys who claimed cutting earned entitlement spending in a recession will make the economy grow) study, on which the Brookings study is based on, on which the corporate democrat mayors (and you) rely:

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-...

"...exports drove more than one-quarter of all metro area economic growth from 2009-2014."

Wonderful! America is participating in the global economy, and it's being embraced.

Globalization is often demonized, as is NAFTA and TPP and every other acronym you can name.

But, dammit, globalization was inevitable. INEVITABLE.

The transition within America to a truly global economy was always going to be painful, too. Jobs and entire job categories were going to go south - both figuratively and literally. As SOME nations benefited from globalization, some others were going to be hurt. It's not exactly a zero-sum game, but perhaps more so than not.

But eventually, American companies were going to begin to figure it out and how to make the new reality work FOR us.

This is good news to hear. Because once America has this figured out, it's going to be a really, REALLY big deal and good for the country.

That this is coming from mayors and that 86% of exports are coming from urban areas is TERRIFIC news.

This is the kind of news that should regularly get onto the front pages and headlining nightly news. Positive news.

But also, CITIES. Cities are the important places in America. Except for primary season and when an Idaho Senator filibusters, the rural regions are SO not important (sorry to my Illinois farmer friends!). People live in our cities because - as always since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution - THAT is where the jobs are. So this is doubly good news.

Exporting out of American cities sounds like a TERRIFIC wake-up call. 86%, huh? 80.7% of Americans LIVE in urban areas, so that shows that there is some upside to that. A potential need to bring the country boys even MORE into the cities.

And the more that happens, the weaker the GOP will get.

But also: Globalization is good for companies exactly WHY? Because the bigger your market the more you're gonna sell. And you can't get a bigger market than the entire WORLD. When the US companies mainly sold to American markets, that was so 20th century.

A three-fold goody in the news.

Thanks, Nancy!

Now all we've got to do is to connect the rust belt workers with those jobs in other cities. With 5% unemployment, the companies may do some of that connecting, out of sheer need...

It truly is hard to have this dialogue. I can see it even the heartfelt and by no means extremist or unintelligent comments so far. TPP already engages in pretty much what they are calling for in an agreement. Where it lets us down, as often noted, is in other issues entirely, like intellectual property.

The problem is the appeal of having something or someone to blame. If you're on the right, it's those other people. If you're on the left, it's big money. And trade agreements with benefits to trade partners on both sides are the obvious embodiment of both. How to move past this, to insist that agreement is possible but can also be stronger in protections, exactly as with Obama's legacy climate agreement? I don't know.

This is the best round-up I've seen, of what we can do to improve our trade agreements (addresses the problems of TPP and past trade pacts). It's not protectionist or unrealistic to say we can do better.

When even the DNC becomes like a closed pac to support only insiders (meaning big donors), and our consolidated media also supports the policy goals of the biggest donors, voters get misinformed. By this I mean that it's hard for voters to ever even hear that there ARE better alternatives to modern trade pacts, which are more about protectionism and exploitation of consumers, workers and the environment, than about advancing free trade.

"The Choice is not TPP or No Trade" by Lori Wallach:
http://www.huffingtonpost.c...

Here's the problem. As Drmocrats, we look to the experts to help with complex issues. But the "experts" are a nudist colony full of Emperors.

Even restricting oneself to the liberals, Krugman and Delong and Stiglitz and Reich all "say" that there is straight forward "correct" way to analyse the problem. But they all 4 of them come to different conclusions.

The main problem with all these controversial trade deals is they are negotiated in secret by delegates shielded entirely from the political process. If trade deal negotiators were required to conduct deliberations in public and subject to a political process, the outcomes would not be complete giveaways to the hyper-wealthy elite.

"The main problem with all these controversial trade deals is they are negotiated in secret by delegates shielded entirely from the political process"...

WHAT???!!

Constitutionally all treaties in the USA have to be approved by the US Senate.

That is the exact OPPOSITE of "shielded from the political process".

You're blowing it out your ass. You need to join a different echo chamber.

Not to mention the fact that you can't, nobody can, negotiate complicated deals in public, especially but not only among a bunch of different countries. No union contract negotiations are ever done in public.

Union contracts require a form of direct democracy in order to be ratified and implemented. i.e. the membership has to vote. The goals of the negotiation are also subject to more direction from the general membership.

Trade deals are negotiated in secret and then ratified by representatives. The parties invited to form the goals of the negotiations are in the US usually industry or business groups.

I don't think a union contract and the TPP are analogous other than in the broadest "not everyone who will sign the final agreement will be involved in negotiating the agreement" way.

That's correct. None of it is, however, to my point, which was, as I said, that negotiations are never carried out in public.