will draw Clinton out since she claims to be opposed. It also
brings up this threat Clinton cynically uses against him..the
you don't respect Obama meme.
The facts are that most Democrats are against it and Obama can
get personal too when it suits him.
Obama & TPP: Every One That Doeth Evil Hateth the Light
By William K. Black
Quito: April 25, 2015
President Obama wants the world to know that he takes it personally that the Democratic Party’s base opposes his latest effort to sell out the people of the world to the worst corporations through the infamous Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal. Obama blurted out at a press conference a number of conservative Republican memes as his sole basis for pushing TPP. He then launched personal attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren and labor leaders (without naming them). Obama, who is famous for keeping his cool when criticized by the GOP, is thin-skinned when criticized by Democrats. Obama never raged at the Republicans’ “death panel” attacks on him, but he raged at Warren as supposedly making an equivalently openly dishonest attack on TPP’s secret drafting process.
One of the most reprehensible aspects of TPP is that it is (still) being drafted in secret – that it from us, the people – but with corporate lobbyists literally drafting their wish list. Obama made the critical mistake of personally attacking Warren, which is roughly equivalent to a small town mayor launching a personal attack on Jon Stewart. You know the results will be that Stewart will wipe the floor with the mayor.
Or, to move the metaphor to Hollywood, the character playing the President in the movie The American President warns his political opponent to limit his attacks to the President rather than his girlfriend: “you better stick with me, ’cause Sydney Ellen Wade is way out of your league.” Warren is way out of Obama’s league in this arena of protecting the American people from CEOs’ frauds and abuses. Obama is the one who infamously told the bankers he was protecting them from the American people’s demands for the restoration of the rule of law so that the banksters would be held accountable for leading the fraud epidemics that drove the financial crisis and the Great Depression. Obama, being Obama, phrased that in the form of a vile slander of the American people, claiming that they wanted to use “pitchforks” rather than prosecutions.
Here is the “money quote” from Warren and Senator Sherrod Brown’s letter responding to Obama’s attack.
“‘Executives of the country’s biggest corporations and their lobbyists already have had significant opportunities not only to read [the TPP text], but to shape its terms,’ the letter reads. ‘The Administration’s 28 trade advisory committees on different aspects of the TPP have a combined 566 members, and 480 of those members, or 85%, are senior corporate executives or industry lobbyists. Many of the advisory committees — including those on chemicals and pharmaceuticals, textiles and clothing, and services and finance — are made up entirely of industry representatives.’”
In sum, Obama stacked the committees to ensure that the CEOs’ lobbyists would completely dominate the secret drafting of TPP. And everyone in America know that the result of that has to be a Faux Trade agreement crafted to allow the CEOs to plunder with impunity.
Obama is demanding an additional reprehensible element – “fast track” – in which the cynical “CEOs’ Christmas in May” deal cannot be amended to remove even the most despicable provisions of the bill placed like land mines by the CEOs’ lobbyists. I don’t think opposing the TPP should be a partisan issue. Republicans should help lead the effort to stop Obama’s latest sell out.
TPP, of course, is being sold through a full court press of the economists who brought us the financial crisis and the Great Recession and the multiple Great Depressions in Spain, Italy, and Greece. Their lie, as always, is that this travesty of special interest deals drafted overwhelmingly by corporate lobbyists represents “free trade.” They first torture the language and truth before they torture the world.
TPP is the opposite of “free trade.” In the jargon of its economic supporters, it is a moldering midden hiding the secretly drafted “rent seeking” provisions designed to help CEOs enrich themselves at the expense of the people of the world. Adam Smith, who supported freer trade, warned over two centuries ago that when CEOs meet secretly it promptly turns into a conspiracy against the public interest and warned that CEOs use their power to aid their own interests at the expense of shareholders and the public. Smith’s warned that it “ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2015/04/obama-tpp-every-one-that-doeth-evil-hateth-the-light.html
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