For those wanting to learn more about what TPP might bring to the world, I suggest listening to the 1993 debate between VP candidate Al Gore and third party Presidential candidate Ross Perot - Gore-Perot NAFTA Debate
It's a 1 hour and 15 minute debate, but the first 10 minutes will give you a lot of insight into why TPP needs to have more scrutiny.
In the first 10 minutes, Perot makes the point that free trade was supposed to raise living standards for developing countries, but that didn't happen, he says. Instead, "by design" their living standards declined.
I suggest listening to the whole thing.
I don't think free trade will ever end, but I do believe it can be made to work better.
We know free trade will create winners and losers - is it really so much to ask to try to do more to help those displaced and degraded by decisions made that are largely out of their power to influence?
Do we really want to keep wages at less than $1 an hour in most of the developing world while CEOs and other executives suck up billions and billions and billions more? What is the point to concentrating that much wealth in so few hands? Where is the concentrated wealth going to be spent? And on what? What to what purpose?
Personally, I think it's time to wake up and realize free trade in its current form simply ain't working.
10:16 AM PT: An interesting exchange happens at 30:00, where Perot lays out his take on what many American manufacturers will do when NAFTA passes - ie, buy/take manufacturing companies with high labor costs and marginal profits, strip those companies of their labor (and costs), pick up and move to Mexico ... he seems to be right on that count.