When the American people understand that Roosevelt Institute is creating policy to make the American economy part of the International Economic Zones already in place--under one global corporate tribunal creating law and global court with open borders allowing corporations from any nation compete in any other nation, then they understand they seek to completely restructure our US governance and legal structure to that ONE WORLD governance. That is what these terms mean in the Roosevelt Institution policy mission below. So, a Rhee from South Korea or a Wong from China wants to be able to bring their corporations to the US and operate as they do in their own nation. US corporations have been overseas for decades operating in these same International Economic Zones in South Korea and China as the US corporations wanted----free from Chinese and South Korean laws. That is what a Foreign Economic Zone FEZ or as I call them International Economic Zone EIZ is. South Korea and China are saying---we allowed US corporations come to our nations and build global corporate campuses and factories now we want to come to the US and do the same. In Rhee and Wong's case----this may be family global neo-liberal education corporations they operate in Asian International Economic Zones to compete with what NYC Mayor Bloomberg wants to be his global education corporations ---K-12 and university.
The Global Cities Education Network (GCEN), an initiative of the Asia Society Center for Global Education, is an international learning community of city school systems in Asia and North America. School systems are rethinking the knowledge and skills students need for success and the educational strategies and systems required for all children to achieve them.
About the Network
The Global Cities Education Network (GCEN), an initiative of the Asia Society Center for Global Education, is an international learning community of city school systems in Asia and North America. School systems are rethinking the knowledge and skills students need for success and the educational strategies and systems required for all children to achieve them. In both Asia and North America, urban school systems are at the locus of change in policy and practice—at once the sites of the most critical challenges in education and the engines of innovation needed to address them.
Working with Asia Society staff and experts around the world, teams of high-ranking school system and city officials cities across Asia and North America collaborate to identify common, high-priority problems, research best practices, and then develop effective, practical solutions that can be adapted to varying cultural and political contexts. GCEN seeks to share promising practices to develop system responses to systemic education problems, ultimately improving education for all students.
The participating cities are Denver, Hiroshima, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Houston, Lexington, and Toronto. By participating in the network, cities receive expertise and access to the latest international benchmarking research and practice; expertise from around the world, including Asia Society’s decades of work in this arena; implementation support and tools via technical assistance from Asia Society and participating experts; and membership in a global urban learning community. We then seek to share learning more broadly with the educational community.
A critical element of high-performing school systems is that they not only benchmark the practices of other countries, they also systematically adapt and implement these practices within their own cultural and political contexts. GCEN is intended as a mechanism for educators and decision-makers in Asia and North America to collaboratively dream, design, and deliver internationally informed solutions to common challenges with which education systems are currently grappling.
_________________________________________
While Maryland Department of Education and our county and Baltimore City Boards of Education stacked with corporate appointees do not allow citizens to have a voice in what is happening in their schools-----this is from where all policies being installed in the US----as with all International Economic Zones is written----these are global public policy corporations and what they write is what our Congressional, Maryland Assembly, and Baltimore City Hall pols pass. All this talk of STEM and vocational education is tied to this global neo-liberal pre-K - career college structure. Remember, all these structures have existed in Asia for decades and are now simply being installed in our American communities. This is who Michelle Rhee is-----her family no doubt has global education corporations tied to this Asian education structure and she is lobbying and pushing for those Asian education corporations to come to the US to compete with Bloomberg's corporate charter chains for what used to be our hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal funding for PUBLIC K-12.
Career and Technical Education Helps Students Prepare for Global World: Report
NEW YORK, January 6, 2016 — Career and Technical Education (CTE) is a promising way to prepare U.S. students for the increasing number of careers requiring global competency, according to a new report by Asia Society entitled Preparing a Globally Competent Workforce through High-Quality Career and Technical Education.
CTE programs aim to ready students for careers and are responsive to industry needs. These programs encompass automotive technology, agriculture, and construction, but also extend to digital media, advanced manufacturing, global logistics, STEM and others.
“Globally minded CTE programs can provide the rigorous and authentic setting necessary to prepare students for the competitive world economy, while offering a more engaging, motivating, and relevant education experience,” the report authors argue.
The report, produced in partnership with the Association for Career and Technical Education, Longview Foundation and the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium, offers insight into how educators can integrate global competency into their CTE classrooms, including embedding global competencies into lesson plans, establishing international partnerships, and incorporating world language study as part of a student’s program of study.
The authors also share case studies of globally minded CTE programs from across the U.S.:
Global STEM Education Center (Massachusetts) connects local classrooms with classrooms around the world. Students work with their international partners to conceptualize, design, and complete in-depth research and hands-on projects.
Amazing Global Marketplace (Jefferson County, Kentucky) is a business program that inspires and prepares students to become actively involved in the global marketplace by allowing them to participate in simulated international business practices.
Health Sciences and Human Services High School (Washington) requires a semester of Global Health for freshmen. The class uses a project-based learning approach to cover topics such as communicable and non-communicable disease, policies of the World Health Organization, major global health problems, awareness of and advocacy for issues, and debate of health interventions.
Sherwood High School (Oregon) teacher John Niebergall has developed an activity where students simulate global manufacturing by creating components to a product in geographically distributed locations and then shipping those final parts to a single school for final assembly and testing.
Bergen County Academies (New Jersey) integrates international content and perspective across grade levels, core subject areas, and elective courses. All students are required to take at least three years of study in the same core language of French, Spanish, or Mandarin.
TriValley High School (New York) teacher Tara Berescik integrates global perspectives into her agricultural courses. Students have brainstormed trips that would allow them to better understand agricultural practices, pitched their ideas to the school board, created business plans, raised money for travel expenses, and visited four continents.
In the coming months, Asia Society will work to create new tools and resources to assist CTE teachers in integrating global issues and perspectives into their classrooms. For more information, contact Heather Singmaster, Assistant Director, Education, Asia Society. (hsingmaster@asiasociety.org)
____________________________
So, Roosevelt Institute is not protecting our children or families and their public education----they are creating the policies to allow global neo-liberal education corporations compete in the US----they are working to protect the interests of a Wong or Rhee family corporation. What happens to small education businesses and education non-profits our US citizens in communities think are their new businesses? They are put out of business and the competition is only between global corporate brands.
This is the global corporate tribunal court set by Trans Pacific Trade Pact----it eliminates all national, state, and local court power to rule on constitutional law or statute. Our US courts no longer rule on law within US borders on global economic and corporate issues.
What about courts for small or regional business matters? They will not have those court structures----look for JUDGE JUDY to settle those problems for any small business that manages to stay open.
It was Stiglitz under Clinton that pushed deregulation creating monopolies and breaking anti-trust laws in the 1990s ----now he wants to officially shed these US monopoly and anti-trust laws that used to protect free market for US small and regional businesses
Likewise, the political power of various groups determines their ability to have the rules of the market written and enforced in their favor.
THIS IS WHAT CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA are now calling free-trade and open markets.
'In markets with imperfect competition',
ROOSEVELT INSTITUTION POLICY STANCE:
A tentative, piecemeal policy response to help the neediest will not suffice.
We must rewrite the rules of the economy with a focus on restoring a balance of power between the competing interests that make up the modern economy.
But few markets are perfectly competitive; therefore outcomes depend in part on market power, and rules affect this power. Bargaining power, for instance, determines who benefits the most from labor negotiations, and that power is affected by the strength of unions, the legal and economic environment, and how globalization is structured. In markets with imperfect competition, firms have their own form of market power: the power to set prices. Likewise, the political power of various groups determines their ability to have the rules of the market written and enforced in their favor.
________________________
If we look at Stiglitz's World Bank we see how they identify the US as having far too much wealth then an Asia with the developing nations having that $3-10 a day. They call this INEQUITY----and the goal is to move the US down and build Asian middle-class wealth up. But they do not define middle-class as we do in the US-----that is what they call MUCH MORE WEALTHY. Now, the developing nation workers only have that $3-10 a day because global corporations earn hundreds of billions of dollars in profits. The left-leaning solution is to LOWER GLOBAL CORPORATE PROFITS BY PAYING DEVELOPING NATION WORKERS MORE. Global corporations don't want to do that. They want to take wages and wealth from the US and Europe----moving WE THE PEOPLE down to a middle-class of $20-30 a day and bring more Asian workers up to that same level. Keep in mind Asian workers work 12-15 hours a day for that $3 a day. Our US poverty line has workers earning $15-18 an HOUR.
This is why we KNOW the push by Roosevelt Institute for higher wages is not directed as the American worker and this progressive posing $15 an hour policy movement is just that---posing. Trans Pacific Trade Pact with US cities as International Economic Zones will be that tool to bring US workers down to this developing nation wage ---middle-class $20-30 a day.
Social democrats and FDR created the wage structure that took our American middle-class to $25-70 an hour and US corporations still earned millions of dollars in profit.
This is what will have US workers becoming ex-pats moving to Asia to get a job moving in that global labor pool competing for a very small percentage of white collar professional sweat shop jobs. If Asian corporations come to US International Economic Zone----they do not want to pay US wages and that is what Roosevelt Institute means by BALANCING THE POWER BETWEEN COMPETING INTERESTS.
THIS IS WHAT THE ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE CALLS WEALTH EQUITY.
If inequality
were to increase, as has been the case recently, the size of the middle class would probably
expand more rapidly than what I show, because the emerging countries currently have very few
people that surpass the lower threshold of US
D10/day/person.
The US is home to 12 per cent
of the world’s middle class in terms of absolute numbers of people, but it accounts for
USD4.4 trillion (21 per cent) of the USD21 trillion
in global spending by middle class consumers.
The difference is because the US middle class is much wealthier than the average global middle
class consumer.
Look where the World Bank has the US in 2030 regarding middle class---7%. Asian Pacific looks high at 66% but that is a middle-class mostly at $20-30 a day. Now, let's think where much of that small amount will go----children's education.
The Emerging Middle Class in Developing Countries
DEV/DOC(2010)2
28
© OECD 2010
Table 2.
Numbers (millions) and Share (percent) of the Global Middle Class
2009 2020 2030
North America
338 18% 333 10% 322 7%
Europe
664 36% 703 22% 680 14%
Central and South America
181 10% 251 8% 313 6%
Asia Pacific
525 28% 1740 54% 3228 66%
Sub-Saharan Africa
32 2% 57 2% 107 2%
Middle East and North Africa
105 6% 165 5% 234 5%
World
1845 100% 3249 100% 4884 100%
____________________________________________
This is how we know US cities deemed International Economic Zones will allow global corporations to ignore our US labor and wage laws----as Roosevelt Institute has citizens shouting to pass gender and minimum wage laws---it is not identifying the designation of US cities as Foreign Economic Zones FEZ----or International Economic Zones IEZ as the policy enabling TPP to grab hold of our US cities drawing all regional counties into these global corporate campuses and their policies.
'TPP elevates corporations and corporate profits to and above the level of governments. TPP lets corporations sue governments for laws and regulations that cause them to be less profitable'.
Stop Calling the TPP a Trade Agreement – It Isn’t.
May 27, 2015
by Dave Johnson
This post first appeared at Campaign for America’s Future.
This is a message to activists trying to fight the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Stop calling the TPP a “trade” agreement. TPP is a corporate/investor rights agreement, not a trade agreement. Trade is a good thing; TPP is not. Every time you use the word trade in association with the TPP, you are helping the other side.
Trade is a propaganda word. It short-circuits thinking. People hear trade and the brain stops working. People think, “Of course, trade is good.” And that ends the discussion.
Calling TPP a trade agreement lets the pro-TPP people argue that TPP is about trade instead of what it is really about. It diverts attention from the real problem. It enables advocates to say things like, “95 percent of the world lives outside the US” as if that has anything to do with TPP. It lets them say, “We know that exports support American jobs” to sell a corporate rights agreement. It enables them to say nonsense like this about a corporate rights agreement designed to send American jobs to Vietnam so a few “investors” can pocket the wage difference: “Exports of US goods and services supported an estimated 9.8 million American jobs, including 25 percent of all manufacturing jobs … and those export-supported jobs pay 13 to 18 percent higher than the national average wage.”
Trade is good. Opening up the border so you can get bananas and they can get fertilizer is trade because they have a climate that lets them grow bananas and you already have a fertilizer plant. Enabling companies to move $30/hour jobs to countries with $.60/hour wages so a few billionaires can pocket the difference is not trade.
Calling TPP a trade agreement lets TPP supporters say people opposed to TPP are “anti-trade.”
TPP Is a Corporate/Investor Rights Agreement
TPP is a corporate/investor rights agreement, and that is the problem.
TPP extends patents, copyrights and other monopolies so investors can collect “rents.”
TPP elevates corporations and corporate profits to and above the level of governments. TPP lets corporations sue governments for laws and regulations that cause them to be less profitable. Enabling tobacco companies to sue governments because anti-smoking campaigns limit profits has nothing to do with trade. Enabling corporations to sue states that try to regulate fracking has nothing to do with trade.
While giving corporations a special channel to sue governments, labor, environmental, consumer and other “stakeholder” organizations do not get a channel for enforcement. This helps enable corporations to break unions, force wages down and pollute without cost. This increases the power of corporations over governments – and us.
Who Says?
Paul Krugman, “This Is Not A Trade Agreement”:
One thing that should be totally obvious, however, is that it’s off-point and insulting to offer an off-the-shelf lecture on how trade is good because of comparative advantage, and protectionists are dumb. For this is not a trade agreement. It’s about intellectual property and dispute settlement; the big beneficiaries are likely to be pharmaceutical companies and firms that want to sue governments.
Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), in “No, the TPP Won’t Be Good for the Middle Class”:
…TPP (like nearly all trade agreements the US signs) is not a ‘free trade agreement’ — instead it’s a treaty that will specify just who will be protected from international competition and who will not. And the strongest and most comprehensive protections offered are by far those for US corporate interests. Finally, there are international economic agreements that the United States could be negotiating to help the American middle class. They would look nothing like the TPP.
Jim Hightower, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not about free trade. It’s a corporate coup d’etat – against us!”:
TPP is a ‘trade deal’ that mostly does not deal with trade. In fact, of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters!
The other two dozen chapters amount to a devilish ‘partnership’ for corporate protectionism. They create sweeping new ‘rights’ and escape hatches to protect multinational corporations from accountability to our governments… and to us.
On OurFuture.org, “Economist Jeffrey Sachs Says NO to the TPP and the TAFTA Trade Treaties”:
Without touching on the unpopular Fast-Track mechanism necessary to pass these two treaties, Sachs laid out five reasons why, on the substance, they should not be passed or ratified:
1. They are not trade treaties, but agreements aimed at protecting investors.
Josh Barro, “But What Does the Trade Deal Mean if You’re Not a Cheesemaker?”:
Much of the controversy is because the TPP isn’t really (just) a trade agreement. (There’s a reason I called it an ‘economic agreement’ at the top.) A lot of it is about labor, environmental standards, intellectual property and access to markets for services like banking and accounting. And in contrast with the tariff cuts, there’s a lot more reason to worry that some of the agreement’s non-trade provisions would hurt the world economy even as they benefited specific industries.
Techdirt, “If You Really Think TPP Is About ‘Trade’ Then Your Analysis Is Already Wrong”:
Instead, trade agreements have become a sort of secret playground for big corporations to abuse the process and force favorable regulations to be put in place around the globe.
… If you make the facile assumption that the TPP is actually about free trade, then you might be confused about all the hubbub about it. If you actually take the time to understand that much of what’s in there has nothing to do with free trade and, in fact, may be the opposite of free trade, you realize why there’s so much concern.
Timothy B. Lee at Vox, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership is great for elites. Is it good for anyone else?”:
In the past, debates about trade deals have mostly been about trade. … In contrast, debates over the TPP mostly haven’t focused on its trade provisions.
[. . .] As the opportunities for trade liberalization have dwindled, the nature of trade agreements has shifted. They’re no longer just about removing barriers to trade. They’ve become a mechanism for setting global economic rules more generally.
… We expect the laws that govern our economic lives will be made in a transparent, representative, and accountable fashion. The TPP negotiation process is none of these — it’s secretive, it’s dominated by powerful insiders, and it provides little opportunity for public input.
Former IMF chief economist [Simon Johnson] on the problems with TPP:
The Trans Pacific Partnership is a notorious, secretly negotiated trade deal; from leaks we know that it continues ‘Investor State Resolution’ clauses that allow foreign companies to sue to overturn national labor and environmental laws. Johnson’s analysis stresses that trade agreements can be good for countries, but they aren’t necessarily good — and when they’re negotiated in secret, they rarely go well.
Stop calling TPP a trade agreement. It is a corporate/investor rights agreement.
The Global Cities Education Network (GCEN), an initiative of the Asia Society Center for Global Education, is an international learning community of city school systems in Asia and North America. School systems are rethinking the knowledge and skills students need for success and the educational strategies and systems required for all children to achieve them.
About the Network
The Global Cities Education Network (GCEN), an initiative of the Asia Society Center for Global Education, is an international learning community of city school systems in Asia and North America. School systems are rethinking the knowledge and skills students need for success and the educational strategies and systems required for all children to achieve them. In both Asia and North America, urban school systems are at the locus of change in policy and practice—at once the sites of the most critical challenges in education and the engines of innovation needed to address them.
Working with Asia Society staff and experts around the world, teams of high-ranking school system and city officials cities across Asia and North America collaborate to identify common, high-priority problems, research best practices, and then develop effective, practical solutions that can be adapted to varying cultural and political contexts. GCEN seeks to share promising practices to develop system responses to systemic education problems, ultimately improving education for all students.
The participating cities are Denver, Hiroshima, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Houston, Lexington, and Toronto. By participating in the network, cities receive expertise and access to the latest international benchmarking research and practice; expertise from around the world, including Asia Society’s decades of work in this arena; implementation support and tools via technical assistance from Asia Society and participating experts; and membership in a global urban learning community. We then seek to share learning more broadly with the educational community.
A critical element of high-performing school systems is that they not only benchmark the practices of other countries, they also systematically adapt and implement these practices within their own cultural and political contexts. GCEN is intended as a mechanism for educators and decision-makers in Asia and North America to collaboratively dream, design, and deliver internationally informed solutions to common challenges with which education systems are currently grappling.
_________________________________________
While Maryland Department of Education and our county and Baltimore City Boards of Education stacked with corporate appointees do not allow citizens to have a voice in what is happening in their schools-----this is from where all policies being installed in the US----as with all International Economic Zones is written----these are global public policy corporations and what they write is what our Congressional, Maryland Assembly, and Baltimore City Hall pols pass. All this talk of STEM and vocational education is tied to this global neo-liberal pre-K - career college structure. Remember, all these structures have existed in Asia for decades and are now simply being installed in our American communities. This is who Michelle Rhee is-----her family no doubt has global education corporations tied to this Asian education structure and she is lobbying and pushing for those Asian education corporations to come to the US to compete with Bloomberg's corporate charter chains for what used to be our hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal funding for PUBLIC K-12.
Career and Technical Education Helps Students Prepare for Global World: Report
NEW YORK, January 6, 2016 — Career and Technical Education (CTE) is a promising way to prepare U.S. students for the increasing number of careers requiring global competency, according to a new report by Asia Society entitled Preparing a Globally Competent Workforce through High-Quality Career and Technical Education.
CTE programs aim to ready students for careers and are responsive to industry needs. These programs encompass automotive technology, agriculture, and construction, but also extend to digital media, advanced manufacturing, global logistics, STEM and others.
“Globally minded CTE programs can provide the rigorous and authentic setting necessary to prepare students for the competitive world economy, while offering a more engaging, motivating, and relevant education experience,” the report authors argue.
The report, produced in partnership with the Association for Career and Technical Education, Longview Foundation and the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium, offers insight into how educators can integrate global competency into their CTE classrooms, including embedding global competencies into lesson plans, establishing international partnerships, and incorporating world language study as part of a student’s program of study.
The authors also share case studies of globally minded CTE programs from across the U.S.:
Global STEM Education Center (Massachusetts) connects local classrooms with classrooms around the world. Students work with their international partners to conceptualize, design, and complete in-depth research and hands-on projects.
Amazing Global Marketplace (Jefferson County, Kentucky) is a business program that inspires and prepares students to become actively involved in the global marketplace by allowing them to participate in simulated international business practices.
Health Sciences and Human Services High School (Washington) requires a semester of Global Health for freshmen. The class uses a project-based learning approach to cover topics such as communicable and non-communicable disease, policies of the World Health Organization, major global health problems, awareness of and advocacy for issues, and debate of health interventions.
Sherwood High School (Oregon) teacher John Niebergall has developed an activity where students simulate global manufacturing by creating components to a product in geographically distributed locations and then shipping those final parts to a single school for final assembly and testing.
Bergen County Academies (New Jersey) integrates international content and perspective across grade levels, core subject areas, and elective courses. All students are required to take at least three years of study in the same core language of French, Spanish, or Mandarin.
TriValley High School (New York) teacher Tara Berescik integrates global perspectives into her agricultural courses. Students have brainstormed trips that would allow them to better understand agricultural practices, pitched their ideas to the school board, created business plans, raised money for travel expenses, and visited four continents.
In the coming months, Asia Society will work to create new tools and resources to assist CTE teachers in integrating global issues and perspectives into their classrooms. For more information, contact Heather Singmaster, Assistant Director, Education, Asia Society. (hsingmaster@asiasociety.org)
____________________________
So, Roosevelt Institute is not protecting our children or families and their public education----they are creating the policies to allow global neo-liberal education corporations compete in the US----they are working to protect the interests of a Wong or Rhee family corporation. What happens to small education businesses and education non-profits our US citizens in communities think are their new businesses? They are put out of business and the competition is only between global corporate brands.
This is the global corporate tribunal court set by Trans Pacific Trade Pact----it eliminates all national, state, and local court power to rule on constitutional law or statute. Our US courts no longer rule on law within US borders on global economic and corporate issues.
What about courts for small or regional business matters? They will not have those court structures----look for JUDGE JUDY to settle those problems for any small business that manages to stay open.
It was Stiglitz under Clinton that pushed deregulation creating monopolies and breaking anti-trust laws in the 1990s ----now he wants to officially shed these US monopoly and anti-trust laws that used to protect free market for US small and regional businesses
Likewise, the political power of various groups determines their ability to have the rules of the market written and enforced in their favor.
THIS IS WHAT CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA are now calling free-trade and open markets.
'In markets with imperfect competition',
ROOSEVELT INSTITUTION POLICY STANCE:
A tentative, piecemeal policy response to help the neediest will not suffice.
We must rewrite the rules of the economy with a focus on restoring a balance of power between the competing interests that make up the modern economy.
But few markets are perfectly competitive; therefore outcomes depend in part on market power, and rules affect this power. Bargaining power, for instance, determines who benefits the most from labor negotiations, and that power is affected by the strength of unions, the legal and economic environment, and how globalization is structured. In markets with imperfect competition, firms have their own form of market power: the power to set prices. Likewise, the political power of various groups determines their ability to have the rules of the market written and enforced in their favor.
________________________
If we look at Stiglitz's World Bank we see how they identify the US as having far too much wealth then an Asia with the developing nations having that $3-10 a day. They call this INEQUITY----and the goal is to move the US down and build Asian middle-class wealth up. But they do not define middle-class as we do in the US-----that is what they call MUCH MORE WEALTHY. Now, the developing nation workers only have that $3-10 a day because global corporations earn hundreds of billions of dollars in profits. The left-leaning solution is to LOWER GLOBAL CORPORATE PROFITS BY PAYING DEVELOPING NATION WORKERS MORE. Global corporations don't want to do that. They want to take wages and wealth from the US and Europe----moving WE THE PEOPLE down to a middle-class of $20-30 a day and bring more Asian workers up to that same level. Keep in mind Asian workers work 12-15 hours a day for that $3 a day. Our US poverty line has workers earning $15-18 an HOUR.
This is why we KNOW the push by Roosevelt Institute for higher wages is not directed as the American worker and this progressive posing $15 an hour policy movement is just that---posing. Trans Pacific Trade Pact with US cities as International Economic Zones will be that tool to bring US workers down to this developing nation wage ---middle-class $20-30 a day.
Social democrats and FDR created the wage structure that took our American middle-class to $25-70 an hour and US corporations still earned millions of dollars in profit.
This is what will have US workers becoming ex-pats moving to Asia to get a job moving in that global labor pool competing for a very small percentage of white collar professional sweat shop jobs. If Asian corporations come to US International Economic Zone----they do not want to pay US wages and that is what Roosevelt Institute means by BALANCING THE POWER BETWEEN COMPETING INTERESTS.
THIS IS WHAT THE ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE CALLS WEALTH EQUITY.
If inequality
were to increase, as has been the case recently, the size of the middle class would probably
expand more rapidly than what I show, because the emerging countries currently have very few
people that surpass the lower threshold of US
D10/day/person.
The US is home to 12 per cent
of the world’s middle class in terms of absolute numbers of people, but it accounts for
USD4.4 trillion (21 per cent) of the USD21 trillion
in global spending by middle class consumers.
The difference is because the US middle class is much wealthier than the average global middle
class consumer.
Look where the World Bank has the US in 2030 regarding middle class---7%. Asian Pacific looks high at 66% but that is a middle-class mostly at $20-30 a day. Now, let's think where much of that small amount will go----children's education.
The Emerging Middle Class in Developing Countries
DEV/DOC(2010)2
28
© OECD 2010
Table 2.
Numbers (millions) and Share (percent) of the Global Middle Class
2009 2020 2030
North America
338 18% 333 10% 322 7%
Europe
664 36% 703 22% 680 14%
Central and South America
181 10% 251 8% 313 6%
Asia Pacific
525 28% 1740 54% 3228 66%
Sub-Saharan Africa
32 2% 57 2% 107 2%
Middle East and North Africa
105 6% 165 5% 234 5%
World
1845 100% 3249 100% 4884 100%
____________________________________________
This is how we know US cities deemed International Economic Zones will allow global corporations to ignore our US labor and wage laws----as Roosevelt Institute has citizens shouting to pass gender and minimum wage laws---it is not identifying the designation of US cities as Foreign Economic Zones FEZ----or International Economic Zones IEZ as the policy enabling TPP to grab hold of our US cities drawing all regional counties into these global corporate campuses and their policies.
'TPP elevates corporations and corporate profits to and above the level of governments. TPP lets corporations sue governments for laws and regulations that cause them to be less profitable'.
Stop Calling the TPP a Trade Agreement – It Isn’t.
May 27, 2015
by Dave Johnson
This post first appeared at Campaign for America’s Future.
This is a message to activists trying to fight the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Stop calling the TPP a “trade” agreement. TPP is a corporate/investor rights agreement, not a trade agreement. Trade is a good thing; TPP is not. Every time you use the word trade in association with the TPP, you are helping the other side.
Trade is a propaganda word. It short-circuits thinking. People hear trade and the brain stops working. People think, “Of course, trade is good.” And that ends the discussion.
Calling TPP a trade agreement lets the pro-TPP people argue that TPP is about trade instead of what it is really about. It diverts attention from the real problem. It enables advocates to say things like, “95 percent of the world lives outside the US” as if that has anything to do with TPP. It lets them say, “We know that exports support American jobs” to sell a corporate rights agreement. It enables them to say nonsense like this about a corporate rights agreement designed to send American jobs to Vietnam so a few “investors” can pocket the wage difference: “Exports of US goods and services supported an estimated 9.8 million American jobs, including 25 percent of all manufacturing jobs … and those export-supported jobs pay 13 to 18 percent higher than the national average wage.”
Trade is good. Opening up the border so you can get bananas and they can get fertilizer is trade because they have a climate that lets them grow bananas and you already have a fertilizer plant. Enabling companies to move $30/hour jobs to countries with $.60/hour wages so a few billionaires can pocket the difference is not trade.
Calling TPP a trade agreement lets TPP supporters say people opposed to TPP are “anti-trade.”
TPP Is a Corporate/Investor Rights Agreement
TPP is a corporate/investor rights agreement, and that is the problem.
TPP extends patents, copyrights and other monopolies so investors can collect “rents.”
TPP elevates corporations and corporate profits to and above the level of governments. TPP lets corporations sue governments for laws and regulations that cause them to be less profitable. Enabling tobacco companies to sue governments because anti-smoking campaigns limit profits has nothing to do with trade. Enabling corporations to sue states that try to regulate fracking has nothing to do with trade.
While giving corporations a special channel to sue governments, labor, environmental, consumer and other “stakeholder” organizations do not get a channel for enforcement. This helps enable corporations to break unions, force wages down and pollute without cost. This increases the power of corporations over governments – and us.
Who Says?
Paul Krugman, “This Is Not A Trade Agreement”:
One thing that should be totally obvious, however, is that it’s off-point and insulting to offer an off-the-shelf lecture on how trade is good because of comparative advantage, and protectionists are dumb. For this is not a trade agreement. It’s about intellectual property and dispute settlement; the big beneficiaries are likely to be pharmaceutical companies and firms that want to sue governments.
Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), in “No, the TPP Won’t Be Good for the Middle Class”:
…TPP (like nearly all trade agreements the US signs) is not a ‘free trade agreement’ — instead it’s a treaty that will specify just who will be protected from international competition and who will not. And the strongest and most comprehensive protections offered are by far those for US corporate interests. Finally, there are international economic agreements that the United States could be negotiating to help the American middle class. They would look nothing like the TPP.
Jim Hightower, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not about free trade. It’s a corporate coup d’etat – against us!”:
TPP is a ‘trade deal’ that mostly does not deal with trade. In fact, of the 29 chapters in this document, only five cover traditional trade matters!
The other two dozen chapters amount to a devilish ‘partnership’ for corporate protectionism. They create sweeping new ‘rights’ and escape hatches to protect multinational corporations from accountability to our governments… and to us.
On OurFuture.org, “Economist Jeffrey Sachs Says NO to the TPP and the TAFTA Trade Treaties”:
Without touching on the unpopular Fast-Track mechanism necessary to pass these two treaties, Sachs laid out five reasons why, on the substance, they should not be passed or ratified:
1. They are not trade treaties, but agreements aimed at protecting investors.
Josh Barro, “But What Does the Trade Deal Mean if You’re Not a Cheesemaker?”:
Much of the controversy is because the TPP isn’t really (just) a trade agreement. (There’s a reason I called it an ‘economic agreement’ at the top.) A lot of it is about labor, environmental standards, intellectual property and access to markets for services like banking and accounting. And in contrast with the tariff cuts, there’s a lot more reason to worry that some of the agreement’s non-trade provisions would hurt the world economy even as they benefited specific industries.
Techdirt, “If You Really Think TPP Is About ‘Trade’ Then Your Analysis Is Already Wrong”:
Instead, trade agreements have become a sort of secret playground for big corporations to abuse the process and force favorable regulations to be put in place around the globe.
… If you make the facile assumption that the TPP is actually about free trade, then you might be confused about all the hubbub about it. If you actually take the time to understand that much of what’s in there has nothing to do with free trade and, in fact, may be the opposite of free trade, you realize why there’s so much concern.
Timothy B. Lee at Vox, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership is great for elites. Is it good for anyone else?”:
In the past, debates about trade deals have mostly been about trade. … In contrast, debates over the TPP mostly haven’t focused on its trade provisions.
[. . .] As the opportunities for trade liberalization have dwindled, the nature of trade agreements has shifted. They’re no longer just about removing barriers to trade. They’ve become a mechanism for setting global economic rules more generally.
… We expect the laws that govern our economic lives will be made in a transparent, representative, and accountable fashion. The TPP negotiation process is none of these — it’s secretive, it’s dominated by powerful insiders, and it provides little opportunity for public input.
Former IMF chief economist [Simon Johnson] on the problems with TPP:
The Trans Pacific Partnership is a notorious, secretly negotiated trade deal; from leaks we know that it continues ‘Investor State Resolution’ clauses that allow foreign companies to sue to overturn national labor and environmental laws. Johnson’s analysis stresses that trade agreements can be good for countries, but they aren’t necessarily good — and when they’re negotiated in secret, they rarely go well.
Stop calling TPP a trade agreement. It is a corporate/investor rights agreement.
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