Working Life

Going back to NAFTA more than two decades ago (wow, time flies when Administration after Administration screws workers year after year, eh?), deals have been made by presidents to buy votes. With Bill Clinton and Robert Reich promising a whole host of goodies, NAFTA passed narrowly–my favorite deal struck in memory was Clinton’s promise to establish a North American Development Bank with $3 billion…which bought the votes of a few Democrats like Rep. Esteban Torres (D-CA) and Rep. Ed Pastor (D-AZ). The bank? Ooooopppppssss…didn’t happen beyond a trickle.

You see, the sale of one’s soul–and the livelihoods of millions of people–for a piddling appropriation turns out to be a bad deal just on the narrow merits of what’s promised:

Most deals are broken.

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I’ve previously written that the president is a coward, hiding behind Nike and a whole host of other corporate sponsors in his pitch to pass the Trans Pacific Partnership. Probably the lowest he’s gone is accusing people of “making stuff up”, specifically when it comes to the view that, oh, pshaw, the TPP and so-called “free trade” deals will not undermine American regulations.

So, Mr. President, what dismissive comments can you conjure up now, in light of YESTERDAY’S undermining of an important food safety regulation because of the very secretive and corporate-friendly trade deals that TPP is a bad seed of? When Americans eat tainted meat, fall sick and die, what will you say?

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Here it is, for the world to see.

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I start from the basic presumption that the president, and most of the people who work for him, are very, very smart people. So, when the president’s point person on the Trans Pacific Partnership, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, marches up to Capitol to testify on the TPP and gives false information, you can only conclude that he’s lying and intentionally misleading Congress. That’s the upshot of what happened on Tuesday.

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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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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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I got a couple of emails about my post yesterday that posed the idea that the danger from trade deals is higher than the spying uproar underway. And those emails were, how should I say, skeptical about my point. Fair enough. Let me expand.

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