Clues? Support for the TPP is obvious: concurrent with 70 years of global economic expansion has been expansion of free trade. In that context, in as much as TPP expands free trade, the default answer to the TPP should be, "yes, please".

From a tactical political perspective, if the TPP doesn't happen then most Westerner observers expect China to lead a regional trade pact. That would bind Asian countries more strongly, politically, to China. So from a realpolitik perspective, the answer again would be, "yes, please".

Both of those are reasons why a company like Google and a social progressive/free market politician like Hillary Clinton would instinctively support the TPP.

By contrast to the pros, the cons with the TPP are much more nuanced and specific. With trade pacts, usually you take the good with the bad; that there are negative aspects to the TPP wouldn't normally be a good reason to oppose it. However, given that U.S. state and federal governments have abandoned support for manufacturing specifically, and blue collar jobs more generally, despite decades of economists unanimously making it clear that government MUST make HUGE investments to mitigate the costs of economic dislocation, we've arrived at a point in the U.S. where it's no longer politically viable (and for good reason) to continue to promote free trade at all costs.

So this is why you'd see a politician like Hillary make an about face (sincerely or opportunistically, for w'ever it mattered) while a company like Google would continue to promote it. Hillary has to respond to the political environment, whereas on balance for a company like Google the TPP still makes sense.

You don't need clues. The writing is in huge lettering all over the place. All you have to do is stay current on modern events. Although, to understand the full story here you need to have been staying current since at least the 1990s, when the WTO and NAFTA came into being.

Liberal and conservative thinkers, academics and businessmen, mostly travel in the same circles. People like Hillary Clinton have been part of these circles for decades. Nouveau riche like Schmidt invariably gravitate to the same circles. Anybody can join these circles--either get rich, become a successful politician, or become a widely published academic. But there's no active conspiracy going on between these people anymore than engineers conspire when forming a startup--they merely share the same ideas, which have been roughly the consensus view on liberal politics and economics for some time, and desire to be at the forefront wrt applying those ideas. The TPP is just happening near an inflection point in modern political and economic thinking, and it's catching alot of people off balance.

Then people like Assange or other critics come along and "expose" this stuff like it's been hidden the whole time. Um, no....

Just keep a regular subscription to the New York Times, Financial Times, or similar paper for several years and you'll eventually see the shared mindset emerge. Stay away from fringe publications (which the Wall Street Journal is increasingly becoming), because they tend to be contrarian and typically serve to confuse. At the end of the day it's not about being wrong or right; you don't read other people's opinions to decide what's right or wrong. (Nor do you need them to be able to critique.) Rather, it's like following the stock market--to keep track of the ideas ruling the world you track the principle market in those ideas. They're all out in the open. The side-shows are distractions. And nobody is going to be able to predict the inflection points; anybody selling that is selling snake oil.