make sure that we re going to assess how people vote in this fast track fight. well mr. gerard how could a democratic candidate be for the tpp and go to lorraine ohio or pittsburgh pennsylvania or youngstown or akron and say they re for the middle class when these towns, they re all going to get hit hard when it comes to the service industry and manufacturing? i mean, this is where the rubber hits the road if they re going to support the middle class. you ve got a lot of republicans in the house that aren t on board with this because of the sovereignty issue. so where is this how big is this going to play in the campaign as you see it? i think it s going to play very big in the campaign. in fact, i ve said to a number of members of congress today as i ve been visiting with them the politics of this are terrible. the politics when you look at the history of what s happened with trade deals and we re going to be going into on election
situation where there s an imagined threat to all russian speakers in eastern ukraine. these are false claims. the u.n. has just come out with a very important report yesterday, the united nations, an objective body went in to see whether is it really true that russians are at risk inside ukraine, are russian speakers being discriminated against, killed or anything. they discovered that there is no systemic repression of russians. so moscow s basic charge that they are defending russians by doing all this has been rebutted by the united nations. there is no threat to russian speakers. fundamentally what russia is doing is saying there s a concern here and they re right because they re creating it and getting the ben at this time of being the good guy in a situation where they re creating it. politics. why do we care? several reasons. there s a human rights issue that will be going on here, sovereignty issue. also, we look at the responsibles of nato. ukraine not in nato but let s loo
here. because any corporation under this new agreement would be able to say if my future profits are impacted, i can challenge any law in any one of those countries and bring it before an international body, not the u.s. court system. i think the american people would say absolutely not. we want to be able to protect ourselves from outsourcing of jobs, even service jobs that are going overseas. so the sovereignty issue is really something it s a big deal. but, you know, we re also going to be competing with a country like vietnam where the minimum wage, 28 cents an hour. and we know what happens then. go ahead? i would say and the labor standards there are absolutely abysmal. they have forced child labor there. so you want an american worker to compete against somebody who is literally enslaved.
provisions and there s not a dog gone thing we can do. there s a sovereignty issue as well. they can bring grievances in front of an international tribunal. this has brought tea parties on board to oppose this. what does that mean? i know it s a mouthful about circumventing american law, but this means that corporations, multinationals, would be dictating american policy all based on whether they can make a profit or not, correct? and these are the same multinational corporations who are doing business in the united states and around the world who have asserted their provisions in the american tax code so they don t even pay taxes. they make the bulk of their profit in the united states and they don t pay a dime in taxes because they have all these give me provisions and the senate finance committee wants to do this? we ought to see who is behind
that s the sovereignty issue even republicans are very concerned about, the tea partiers especially. this is creating a divide between democrats and the president and the white house at a very crucial time. how is this going to unfold? well, you know, it s a pretty shocking state of affairs, because you have president obama talking about income equality and wisely so. it s a plague in our country. but actually, the data shows that these kinds of trade agreements are one of the major contributors to increasing income inequality. so here we are 20 years into nafta. in nafta, there was a huge offshoring of high paying jobs in manufacturing, but services too. a million jobs gone. now, it s not the total number of jobs, it s the quality of the jobs and the kind of wages. we got lower paying jobs. and as a result, the entire tier of us, even if you didn t lose your job to nafta directly, our wages are down.