Working Life

It must be an interesting conversation to behold between the president and his people who are desperately trying to figure out how to prop up this piece of crap called the Trans Pacific Partnership. I really have some sympathy for these guys: how do you make something palatable without telling lies? There’s the list of ten lies/half-truths that just don’t hold water.

Then, there’s the bullshit about the deal not being negotiated in secret, leading one member of Congress to say “We know when we’re being suckered” and another to say, “My chief of staff who has a top secret security clearance can learn more about ISIS or Yemen than about this trade agreement”.

And, now, actual numbers–these are called FACTS–show that a cookie-cutter version of the TPP has cost the U.S. dearly in jobs.

Got it, solution, pesky facts notwithstanding: there’s always a last ditch claim…TPP will, in fact, end cancer and make everyone slim.

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Sometimes, it’s hard to connect the dots between things that happened twenty years ago–because we don’t teach real history in schools and Crazy Birds is more popular than reading a book. So, people who are correctly suspicious/opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership don’t necessarily get the connection to the phrase “fast track” and don’t remember NAFTA which passed, thanks to Bill Clinton, back in 1993 (it came into force January 1994). So, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch lends a hand today with a really great piece of analysis.

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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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