The Impact of the TPP on One State: Maine

[cali]

This is a long but worthwhile read.

The secret trade deal that threatens Maine’s frail economy

Today it’s far more likely that the shoes on your feet were made in Vietnam than in Maine, but a few decades ago the opposite would have been true. Dozens of shoe factories once employed 30,000 workers in Maine, making it the top shoe-producing state. What’s left of that workforce — several hundred New Balance employees — could soon be gone too, thanks to a massive free trade agreement that’s expected to eliminate a series of tariffs on imported footwear. And jobs may not be all the state has to lose.

Negotiations over this new trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), are in final stages this month, which also happens to mark the 20th anniversary of the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). TPP, an agreement among the United States, Canada, and 12 Pacific Rim countries including Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam, could deal a blow to Maine’s shrunken manufacturing industry, just as NAFTA did years ago. That was the point stressed by workers, and echoed by Maine’s Congressional delegation, when former US Trade Representative Ron Kirk visited the New Balance factory in Norridgewock in September 2013.

But concern over the fate of manufacturing jobs has obscured other troubling implications, both local and global, of the TPP and several other free trade agreements in the works. While the TPP is touted as a crucial opportunity to remove trade barriers and boost global economic growth, a growing number of environmental organizations, intellectual property experts, consumer-rights activists, and public-health groups are voicing alarm about its other potential consequences. Many describe the agreement, the details of which are being worked out amid extreme secrecy, as an unprecedented attempt to bypass normal democratic processes and restructure the global economy in line with long-standing priorities of the world’s most powerful business interests. Among those priorities: stronger patent and copyright rules that favor pharmaceutical and tech companies over artists, consumers, and patients, and powerful new rights for corporations, such as the ability to challenge government laws and regulations using private tribunals.

“If [the US trade representative] somehow retains tariffs on shoe imports, that might be a victory for Maine workers,” says Matthew Beck, a labor organizer and vice-president of the Maine Fair Trade Campaign, a statewide coalition of more than 60 labor, environmental, human rights, family farm, and community groups. “But overall the agreement would still be horrendous for workers and countless others around the world, including those who depend on affordable drugs.”

Read more: http://portland.thephoenix.com/news/157007-secret-trade-deal-that-threatens-maines-frail/#ixzz2pQp3Z4sk

[annabanana]

1. "attempt to bypass normal democratic processes" = treason

The TPP is not just a horrible idea. It is treasonous. But instead of surrendering our sovereignty to a "Foreign Power" we are surrendering it to a capitalistic cabal.

[Enthusiast]

3. +1 a whole bunch.......nt

[jtuck004]

2. Robert Reich wrote about our infatuation with the wrong deficit - it's the trade deficit we should

be concerned about, and the policies which make it possible.

We remove those, the people who profit from selling our country out from underneath us will have to find other rocks to crawl out from under, and those jobs can at least stand a chance of being rebuilt here.

It would take 30 to 40 times the amount we are paying the banks that brought us the financial crisis to bring us up to where we need to be, but no one is even going to start investing in such a plan while they can be undercut by our own governmental policies that make it advantageous to move those jobs offshore.

[mother earth]

4. TPTB are not finished driving us off the cliff. Greed is never satisfied. nt

[jpak]

5. Free Trade not only killed Maine's shoe industry - it killed its textile industry as well.

Textile mills along Maine's rivers employed thousands of workers and were the life blood of the city of Lewiston and to a lesser extent Waterville.

Maine's shoe and textile industries allowed thousands of families to afford good apartments, modest homes and automobiles.

All we have left are crumbling buildings and thousands of working poor that rely on government assistance to get by...

Government assistance that Laissez Faire republics want to eliminate.

Republics claim that raising tariffs would cause a Dreaded Trade War.

I have a clue for the GOP - we are in a Dreaded Trade War and we lost.

Raise the tariffs and bring the jobs back.

Yup

[octoberlib]

9. The textile industry in North Carolina was decimated as well, which is why our unemployment rate

continues to be above the norm.

[Demo_Chris]

6. Free Trade kills EVERY industry eventually. nt

[jopacaco]

7. Maine can't survive another major economic hit

I have lived in Maine for 36 years. I moved here shortly after I got married because my husband had fallen in love with the state on a visit to his brother. My brother in law moved to NYC a few years later but we have stayed.
The town we live in had a textile factory before our time that had become a shoe shop and has an annual festival honoring the now defunct egg industry. The town I work in has the same name as a world known shoe brand that is no longer made here - Dexter.
The poverty around here sometimes feels like a 3rd world country. I know people who heat their houses by opening their ovens when they run out of oil (it was -9° this morning), children who wear shoes way too big that were purchased at the thrift store, families with little or no food through parts of every month. These people are the working poor. They work at any low paying job that they can find. Many used to work in the shoe shops and had had decent paying jobs and now are barely surviving through no fault of their own.
Our governor has given tax breaks to the rich and wants to abolish child labor laws. Maine is a beautiful state but it is suffering under the current economic policies. We need to stop the TPP.
Please, buy New Balance shoes made in (the one and only) Skowhegan.

[cali]

8. thanks for the first hand report. btw, what in the unemployment rate in Maine?

[KoKo]

10. Kick...