Working Life

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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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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