Working Life

So, you really have to work hard at lying or fibbing or misstating the facts to get the traditional media elites to come down hard on you when it comes to so-called “Free trade”. Those elites have been cheerleaders for the rancid NAFTA-style trade deals going back three decades. But, the president has earned it when it comes to his claims about job benefits in the Trans Pacific Partnership: Four Pinocchios, considered “whoppers”, from The Washington Post

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Recently, I’ve written about the ways in which TPP destroys our economic base, jobs, and, when it comes to health care, actual lives (here and here are two recent contributions). So, we should appreciate Nobel Prize-winning Joseph Stiglitz’s voice on the issue of how TPP will threaten the health of millions of people.

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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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As I wrote the other day, an anti-Trans Pacific Partnership rally was set for today to confront the negotiators for this odious deal–a deal that contradicts the president’s own rhetoric to combat inequality. As much of the news was about the approaching snow (as aside: when did New Yorkers become such a soft, coddled bunch to go into full panic mode over a little blizzard?), a hardy group of activists and good people stood outside the Sheraton New York (7th Avenue and 53rd), where the negotiators were meeting, to denounce this travesty. A few pics.

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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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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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Ok, so, Bernie Sanders was more judicious in his demand to the Obama Administration that he have access to a full draft of the current Trans-Pacific Partnership deal. Still, this is extremely important because it is the very secrecy about trade deals–going back decades–that goes to the heart of our ability, as citizens, to function in a democratic society.

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One of the greatest dangers we face from the odious Trans-Pacific Partnership is the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). The pro-TPP forces–who advocate for the non-existent so-called “free trade”–want to ignore the reality of the ISDS and, to do so, they actually have to lie about it. Unfortunately for them, Public Citizen is a tiger that won’t let these lies pass.

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Personally, I have to say I’m a bit queasy about the “Buy American” campaign. Seems to me that the problem is not, ultimately, that people don’t buy American products. It’s that wages are way too low elsewhere — which is what needs to be solved. But, for the record, the Trans Pacific Partnership will obliterate “Buy American”.

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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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