[harry8]

Secret, but not secret. Secret from the less powerful industries, small and medium businesses, not remotely secret from the more powerful ones. Secret from Non-US industry, not secret from those industries that own congress. Nobody believes hollywood had no idea this was being negotiated as a straight land grab on their behalf. So we all think it's corrupt, nice isn't it?

Let's just call it what it actually is rather than this lip-service bullshit to a reason that is clearly not being honoured. I'm extremely in favour of free trade deals, but you can ruin anything with corruption and that's what is happening here.

Take down your tariffs and subsidies and your country gets richer regardless of treaty. No really. Do a whole corrupt thing like this and everyone gets poorer. Except perhaps the mega-wealthy trying to avoid competition for their businesses and those in their lobby. The thing is the mega-wealthy don't want to be richer, they have far more than they or 4 generations of their family can possibly spend. They want power, they don't want upstart entrepreneurs getting rich. They want their relative wealth to the average to be as high as possible. It's sick, sad and twisted. Fortunately we have the Republicans to stand up for what's right with respect to classical liberalism.

[coldtea]

>Nobody believes hollywood had no idea this was being negotiated as a straight land grab on their behalf.

Absolutely. For one, hollywood, RIAA etc representatives were involved in the discussions as "experts" in the first place. Plus their lobbies set the agendas for what the government is gonna ask for etc.