TPP is dead

[santafe2]

The President will not try to push TPP forward in his last two months and Trump has promised to crush it and ensure we bring jobs back to the US. Americans should not be too happy as Trump has no intention to allow Americans to form more unions and make these new jobs pay more than minimum wage. I suspect he'd rather bring Chinese wages to America. Good luck Trump voters, you're going to need it.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politi...ional-leaders/

[gnk]

Re: TPP is dead

Still predicting, huh?

[Thailandnotes]

Re: TPP is dead

The TPP is part of the corporate coup Chris Hedges talks about. Negotiated in secret, granting weird legal powers to corporations, aiming for the intellectual property rights Valenti espoused (“forever minus one year”), it was designed to squeeze a little bit more money out of the people who are living on 4 dollars a day instead of 3. The western press is focused on its navel. Wait til this rebellion erupts in................................................ .....

[jk]

Re: TPP is dead

as i understand it, tpp would have little effect on trade of material goods, and was all about protecting the copyrights of american content creators [mickey mouse will NEVER go out of copyright] and the patents of american big pharma.

[DSpencer]

Re: TPP is dead

The President will not try to push TPP forward in his last two months and Trump has promised to crush it and ensure we bring jobs back to the US. Americans should not be too happy as Trump has no intention to allow Americans to form more unions and make these new jobs pay more than minimum wage. I suspect he'd rather bring Chinese wages to America. Good luck Trump voters, you're going to need it.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politi...ional-leaders/

Damn, this is rich. So you are admitting that when Hillary said she opposed the TPP, she was full of it, whereas you think Trump actually meant what he said.

At this point all I can say is, well done santafe2. You got me. I thought for a while that you were just losing your grip in the heat of the election. But really you've just been trolling us all along. Bravo.

[LazyBoy]

Re: TPP is dead

From May 2015,
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/...d0K/story.html

The president argues that the TPP is about who will “write the rules” for 40 percent of the world’s economy — the United States or China. But who is writing the TPP? The text has been classified and the public isn’t permitted to see it, but 28 trade advisory committees have been intimately involved in the negotiations. Of the 566 committee members, 480, or 85 percent, are senior corporate executives or representatives from industry lobbying groups. Many of the advisory committees are made up entirely of industry representatives.


A rigged process leads to a rigged outcome. For evidence of that tilt, look at a key TPP provision: Investor-State Dispute Settlement where big companies get the right to challenge laws they don’t like in front of industry-friendly arbitration panels that sit outside of any court system. Those panels can force taxpayers to write huge checks to big corporations — with no appeals. Workers, environmentalists, and human rights advocates don’t get that special right.

Most Americans don’t think of the minimum wage or antismoking regulations as trade barriers. But a foreign corporation has used ISDS to sue Egypt because Egypt raised its minimum wage. Phillip Morris has gone after Australia and Uruguay to stop them from implementing rules to cut smoking rates. Under the TPP, companies could use ISDS to challenge these kinds of government policy decisions — including food safety rules.

[dcarrigg]

Re: TPP is dead

From May 2015,
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/...d0K/story.html

This is the real meat and potatoes here. Good post, LazyBoy.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: TPP is dead

Drug prices in poor Asian countries would soar under the TPP because big pharma wrote the fine print. Jack Valenti's “Forever less one day,” is the aim of every “intellectual property owner.” If Tin Pan Alley can establish copyright over Greensleeves, a tune written before America existed, the sky is the limit. Let's pay 40,000 $ for hepatitis C treatments that cost 200 $ to make.

http://reprints.longform.org/in-the-jungle

[FrankL]

Re: TPP is dead

Drug prices in poor Asian countries would soar under the TPP because big pharma wrote the fine print. Jack Valenti's “Forever less one day,” is the aim of every “intellectual property owner.” If Tin Pan Alley can establish copyright over Greensleeves, a tune written before America existed, the sky is the limit. Let's pay 40,000 $ for hepatitis C treatments that cost 200 $ to make.

http://reprints.longform.org/in-the-jungle

Isn't it ironic how the Obama administration didn't do much to fix the healthcare issue in the US (I'd say one of the root causes of the issue is the disproportionate costs for health care in the US), but in addition to not fixing it, it has been actively promoting exporting this model of high healthcare costs to other countries (e.g. TPP)!

[Thailandnotes]

Re: TPP is dead

...actively promoting exporting this model of high healthcare costs to other countries (e.g. TPP)!

So true.

The inequality in Thailand is huge, but there is government healthcare and it's quite good. If you want the best, you have to pay for it out of pocket or buy rich people's insurance (2 grand per year) Under Thailand's healthcare system, skyrocketing drug prices (they are already going up up up) force the government to curtail services and make the tax payers foot the national drug bill.

Many big pharmaceutical companies have huge sprawling plants here. I kind of think TPP was just going to be the icing on the cake.

[DSpencer]

Re: TPP is dead

Isn't it ironic how the Obama administration didn't do much to fix the healthcare issue in the US (I'd say one of the root causes of the issue is the disproportionate costs for health care in the US), but in addition to not fixing it, it has been actively promoting exporting this model of high healthcare costs to other countries (e.g. TPP)!

The US is the loser in worldwide Rx drug price discrimination. We pay more for identical drugs and the rest of the world benefits from the increased R&D that high US drug prices/profits allow. It is debatable whether we are better off with more R&D and new drugs or with lower prices for existing drugs. In either case it would be good for the US if we could pay prices in line with the rest of the world and at least not be the sucker at the table. Regulation in the US ends up with laws like the one forbidding Medicare from negotiating prices.

I didn't vote for Trump and I expect to be disappointed. However, just like in the beginning of Obama's administration I still have a faint glimmer of hope that he will do what he says. This issue is the perfect example. What if instead of letting lobbyists run the show he actually walked the walk and "put America first" and "drained the swamp". What if he put in place a transparent trade deal that actually benefited the US? What if he got rid of regulatory favors written by lobbyists?

Then he starts stuffing his administration full of lobbyists. 60 minutes actually asked him about the contradiction of what he's doing so far with lobbyists vs his rhetoric. His response was "that's all there is down there". Now, it's being reported that they are getting rid of the lobbyists on the transition team. Is it possible he will actually put a dent in the corruption that the voters on both sides want gone? I still doubt it. Even if he tries the new swamp might be worse than the old, but it's at least interesting to watch for now.

[jk]

Re: TPP is dead

The US is the loser in worldwide Rx drug price discrimination. We pay more for identical drugs and the rest of the world benefits from the increased R&D that high US drug prices/profits allow. It is debatable whether we are better off with more R&D and new drugs or with lower prices for existing drugs. In either case it would be good for the US if we could pay prices in line with the rest of the world and at least not be the sucker at the table. Regulation in the US ends up with laws like the one forbidding Medicare from negotiating prices.

iirc 85% of the so-called r&d is for brand extensions, e.g. [making up this particular example but this is the idea] the 5th ssri on the market already has a depression indication, but they want to market it more broadly. the earlier members of the group have been shown effective for e.g. panic disorder. every clinician assumes the new one must be effective for panic disorder, too, but the company can't market it for that indication. thus they spend "r&d" money doing the studies that let them broaden their marketing. 85% of r&d is for this kind of thing.

and r&d is dwarfed by marketing expenditures, including - of course- lobbying and political contributions. i won't retell the story of billy tauzin- i've already mentioned it several times in other threads- but it illustrates the corruption.

don't buy their "r&d" bs!

[DSpencer]

Re: TPP is dead

iirc 85% of the so-called r&d is for brand extensions, e.g. [making up this particular example but this is the idea] the 5th ssri on the market already has a depression indication, but they want to market it more broadly. the earlier members of the group have been shown effective for e.g. panic disorder. every clinician assumes the new one must be effective for panic disorder, too, but the company can't market it for that indication. thus they spend "r&d" money doing the studies that let them broaden their marketing. 85% of r&d is for this kind of thing.

and r&d is dwarfed by marketing expenditures, including - of course- lobbying and political contributions. i won't retell the story of billy tauzin- i've already mentioned it several times in other threads- but it illustrates the corruption.

don't buy their "r&d" bs!

Do you have a source for the 85%?

It's all the product of our regulatory system and letting the lobbyists write the laws. How can anyone be surprised the ACA is a failure when you look at who wrote it?

If I fully believed Trump about draining the swamp and stopping the revolving door, I probably would have held my nose and voted for him. I think the pundits discount the importance of this issue. You don't have to be a political expert to realize that when Hillary gets paid $225,000 for a speech, the people paying that are going to matter a lot more than you if she gets elected.

[jk]

Re: TPP is dead

can't recall the source for the 85%. just spent a little time googling for it, but without success. did find that advertising and marketing is 30% of revenue, total r&d is 12% including the kind of mindless and unhelpful "r&d" i described above.

some snips from the material i encountered along the way:
http://dadaviz.com/i/3194/
Although the pharmaceutical industry emphasises how much money it devotes to discovering new drugs, little of that money actually goes into basic research. Data from companies, the United States National Science Foundation, and government reports indicate that companies have been spending only 1.3% of revenues on basic research to discover new molecules, net of taxpayer subsidies. More than four fifths of all funds for basic research to discover new drugs and vaccines come from public sources. Moreover, despite the industry’s frequent claims that the cost of new drug discovery is now $1.3bn (£834m; €1bn), this figure, which comes from the industry supported Tufts Center, has been heavily criticised. Half that total comes from estimating how much profit would have been made if the money had been invested in an index fund of pharmaceutical companies that increased in value 11% a year, compounded over 15 years. While used by finance committees to estimate whether a new venture is worth investing in, these presumed profits (far greater than the rise in the value of pharmaceutical stocks) should not be counted as research and development costs on which profits are to be made. Half of the remaining $0.65bn is paid by taxpayers through company deductions and credits, bringing the estimate down to one quarter of $1.3bn or $0.33bn. The Tufts study authors report that their estimate was done on the most costly fifth of new drugs (those developed in-house), which the authors reported were 3.44 times more costly than the average, reducing the estimate to $90m. The median costs were a third less than the average, or $60m. Deconstructing other inflators would lower the estimate of costs even further.

Public data on the number of subjects in clinical tests suggests that only 20% of the R&Dbudget allocated to clinical testing is used for drugs which the FDA categorizes asoffering a “significant improvement” compared to marketed products – the other 80% isused for products which do not offer a significant improvement (Love, 2003).





[btw- i have no problem with "me-too" drugs. as a clinician i know that there will be patients who do better with some "me-too" than with some other drug in the same class.]

[santafe2]

Re: TPP is dead

[btw- i have no problem with "me-too" drugs. as a clinician i know that there will be patients who do better with some "me-too" than with some other drug in the same class.]

Only in the US could this have become a political issue.