It seemed to be something of a Globalist Corporate Charter; all that stuff about corporations being able to sue nations for loss of revenue sounded well dodgy.
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Because it would be better than China doing so?
Why?
The Chinese state has plenty of flaws to be sure, but it is the only viable opposition to large-scale US aggression.
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For better or worse, investor-state dispute settlement clause are a standard part of free trade agreements whether bilateral or multilateral. NAFTA and KORUS, to pick two agreements currently in the news, both have ISDS provisions.
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Because countries like Vietnam and Japan fear Chinese aggression a whole lot more than they do American aggression, especially over the long term?
The Vietnamese do have valid reasons to be wary of China.
The entire world has valid reason to fear American aggression. That is true even in normal times; these are not normal times.
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This lost credibility with me the moment Putin/Russia was depicted as a hammer-and-sickle cufflink. This is the kind of material conspiracy theories/theorists are made of - and while some or all of it may be credible, it’s a distraction from meaningful examination of failed values.
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The tendency amongst US liberals to continue associating Russia with communism is rather bizarre.
Putin is no more a socialist than was Pinochet.
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I assume you refer to the re-election of Yeltsin when it was obvious he wasn’t up to the job, but his oligarch mates were doing deals with Western corporations?
Or did you mean Trump?
I suspect that a lot of what has been happening is payback for inflicting Yeltsin.
I wouldn’t want anybody no more intelligent than I am. And that’s quite a low bar.
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I think that it is important to note that while the Russians certainly did try to influence the election, through means both legal and not, we haven’t seen real* evidence that they actually changed votes after they were cast. The BIG problem isn’t that they tried to get people to vote for Trump. The BIG problem is that people DID, of their own volition, vote for Trump. How much they were influenced by Fox news, Breitbart, Russian hacking, or deep seated sexism is something we’ll probably never know.
*There have been some hints and whispers, but so far they are about a convincing as those who scream about “massive voter fraud by illegal immigrants.”
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The focus on Russia also distracts from the problem at hand.
Yes, Putin helped Trump. That’s been bloody obvious for a very long time.
So what?
Putin is not the immediate problem. Trump is. Bring down Trump, then deal with Putin.
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My impression is that it’s really just artistic laziness-- they need to put a symbol on one side to represent Russia, and few Americans know the two-headed eagle crest of the Romanovs (and now Russian Federation), so they fall back on the hammer-and-sickle, since a lot of us grew up with that image. I’m sure a lot of Americans don’t even know what the Russian flag looks like.
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Arguably, the same could be said about Andropov, or, for that matter most of the rulers of the Soviet Union.
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I find Reich to be one of the most intelligent people alive today.
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The simple fact that we have a GOP President who is pro-Russia and anti-free trade is absolute Bizarro World, kids.
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My grandfather was a communist right up to Hungary…just saying.
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Personally I think all current communists should ditch the hammer-and-sickle. It’s a great symbol from a design point of view, but it’s got too much baggage. Symbols and flags are unimportant, helping the poor and sick, and making a just and free and democratic society are important.
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The problem with that argument is that it ignores the fact that governments can and already do do most of the things that outraged everyone about the TPP.
The TPP wasn’t a new set of laws that every individual nation must enact and start following, it was literally a multinational codification of laws that were already on the book.
It was literally just an agreement if practices already in use so that you can design barriers for entrance or for failure to comply. The only thing not signing I does is allow someone else to control the global trade confederation that will inevitably follow in its wake.
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That sounds like a really poor “their human rights abuses are better than ours!” argument of lesser evils.
