I feel like I'd be more outraged if I didn't leave the Democratic Party for abandoning the common folk.
Since when is having common folk have access to cheaper prices and better goods is "abandoning" it?
It's abandoning common people when they're forced to access those "cheaper" prices and "better" goods because they lost their well-paying jobs because they can't compete with low-wages and lack of regulations (affecting the cost of doing business) present in other countries, and thus need to shop around for the cheapest goods that fit their now-reduced budget.
Cheaper =/= better. Often what happens with poor people who purchase second-hand and cheaper goods is that those things are unreliable, and if they break it will end up costing more in the long-run when they have to pay to repair it or purchase an entirely new one after a the warranty period expires. It also costs them valuable time, for example, when a cheap, imported car breaks down and they have no way to get to their job that pays them by the hour.
These treaties undercut health, safety, and environmental regulations and protections, allow countries like China to exploit weak country-of-origin laws, will probably drive up the costs of medicines by extending monopolies from 5 years to 12 (blowing huge holes in government medical program budgets), in addition to probably opening the door for corporations to sue governments directly over changes in law and policy. It also does nothing to address currency manipulation.
So yeah, our stores fill up with more poorly-made, unsafe, cheap garbage, while the price of medicines go up, government healthcare budgets are wrecked, farmers are undercut, environmental pollution worsens, wages are depressed, and the trade deficit balloons, but hey, as long as corporate profits go up and the rich get richer, who's complaining?
The TPP is an objectively bad deal, unless your goal is to empower corporations more and allow inequality to get worse.
One argument that I've heard in favor of the TPP is that those labor and environmental provisions that people hate would be
far, far worse if we weren't at the table, because then China would be the only big power in the room and use their influence set up something with even
fewer protections.
I can't speak to how accurate that take is, not having paid
that much attention to this issue, but it seems plausible, and I would hope that opponents of the TPP could at least seriously address that counterfactual.
