Working Life

It’s pretty simple: you can’t advance a progressive agenda, or even one you call “liberal”, that claims to want to combat inequality AND go all out to ram through the Trans Pacific Partnership using the odious “Fast track” authority. Here are the contradictions.

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Over the years, the Democratic opposition in the House to so-called “free trade” has grown, with more members opposed to so-called “free trade” than say back in the 1990s; the Senate has continued to be a disaster when it comes to building opposition to trade deals–basically, if you can’t stop it in the House, it’s […]

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The president just keeps spending our money, his time and a chunk of political capital on the putrid Trans Pacific Partnership, one of the newest corporate-backed trade deal–“newest” because every trade deal since NAFTA has been all about protecting corporate interests. Nothing seems to move this president to understand that this is a horrendous deal. And, while a lot of focus has been paid to the TPP, another very bad deal is in the works between the U.S. and Europe–and it will potentially make millions of people sick. Or kill them.

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It’s sort of a tiring exercise. Each time some so-called “free trade” deal comes up, the president at the time (read: Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama) trots out a whole series of phony arguments to make the case for a very bad agreement–bad if you are anything but a corporation. You have to willfully ignore past evidence to swallow the same old tired arguments used to ram through these crappy agreements. But, let’s celebrate an anniversary here to trumpet the collapse of any plausible argument being used to sell the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

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Excuse me while we interrupt the hocus-pocus exercise of throwing a meager bone to a few workers on the minimum wage (a proposal, by the way, that is pathetic at $10.10 an hour) to point out: the few cents you think you are putting into a person’s left pocket by hiking a smidgen the minimum wage you are, then, yanking out of that person’s right pocket a whole lot more by promoting the horrendous Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and its malignant so-called “free trade” predecessors.

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I was going to write something else about the foolishness of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) but, hey, WikiLeaks beat me to it. This dumbness on the part of the Democratic Party to wrap their arms around so-called “free trade”, stretching all the way back to Bill Clinton and his (and, I know people want to conveniently forget, ROBERT REICH’S) passionate embrace of NAFTA, is the sad gift that keeps giving. And, now, another Democrat is happy to walk all over the environment to achieve…what? More stupid trade policy.

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So, hard to know if this will lead anywhere but it’s a positive, and comes from an odd place in certain respects.

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Time flies when you’ve been screwed. I’m going to write some more about this but, for the time being, let’s not forget that it’s been 20 years since NAFTA was passed…and it was bad shit then and bad shit now.

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The Trans Pacific Partnership is another putrid so-called “free trade” deal. All these NAFTa-style agreements are a core reason behind the collapse of the middle class across the world. And, at least with the TPP, some senior Democrats are making it clear to the president: this deal is dead on arrival without significant changes.

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Big, bad things often get done–things that shred our economic security and undo some pretty basic constitutional ideas–because, after years and years of listening to sound bites and catchy phrases, it’s easy to let the bi-partisan elites thunder ahead on very bad policy. That’s the case with so-called “free trade.” But, something is happening that is slowing down that monumentally foolish, and destructive, rush on very bad trade deals — and it’s connected to the broader revolt out there, sometimes quiet, sometimes noisy.

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