Dean Baker, Huffington Post - The elite media were filled with news and opinion pieces on how the election opened the door for the approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact. According to the purveyors of elite opinion, this is one of the key areas on which the Republicans in Congress and President Obama can agree.
That assessment is striking since few, if any, of the winning candidates in last week's election made a point of running on their support of these agreements. Nor did President Obama highlight his work on these pacts in his re-election campaign. In fact, the last thing most voters probably remember President Obama saying about trade was his pledge to renegotiate NAFTA when he was running for president the first time, back in 2008.
The turn of the leadership of both parties and the centers of elite opinion to these trade deals shows the incredible contempt they have for the general public and the political process. We just completed lengthy and expensive campaigns where they had ample opportunity to push the case for these deals. Instead we got panicky commercials highlighting everything from the Ebola threat to ISIS beheadings.
1 comment:
Digby called it on November 6:
All you need to know about the TPP "trade agreement" — corporate sovereignty
by Gaius Publius
A year or so ago I wrote that coming into office, Obama had four high-priority "legacy" items:
▪ Health care “reform” — a privatized alternative to Medicare expansion
▪ A “Grand Bargain” in which social insurance benefits are rolled back
▪ Plentiful oil & gas, and passage of the Keystone pipeline
▪ Passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement
While he accomplished the first almost immediately, and while we now have "plentiful oil & gas" (not a good thing from a climate standpoint), the other three remain stalled. But look for each of them to re-rear its head, thanks to the strengthened bipartisan corporate majority in Congress.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.ca/2014/11/all-you-need-to-know-about-tpp-trade.html
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