Progressives scored a victory but it's only round one.
June 15, 2015
WASHINGTON D.C., USA - Sep
18, 2014: United States President Barack Obama during an official
meeting with the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko in Washington, DC
(USA)
Photo Credit: Drop of Light / Shutterstock.com
Pro-democracy forces won a big victory Friday when they stalled the
top-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement backed by the White
House and the Republican leadership in Congress.
But it’s only
Round One. The unholy trio of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell (who has vowed to keep any of Obama’s nominees from being
confirmed), Speaker of the House John Boehner (who has thwarted just
about every Democratic legislative proposal of the past several years),
and President Obama (a Democrat, in case you are having trouble
remembering) are as one in a desperate effort to rescue their
Frankenstein-like creation.
Their only hope is to bribe, browbeat,
or brainwash enough House members to change their minds. It could
happen. The journalist John R. MacArthur, writing late last week in the
Providence Journal,
tells how New York Democrat Kathleen Rice flip-flopped. Not long ago,
she opposed fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership because she
worried it would not “protect her district’s working families.” As well
she might; this agreement is everything the giant corporations want; it
decidedly wasn’t written with working people in mind.
But last
week, Rep. Rice suddenly stopped worrying about those workers and went
over to the other side, voting in favor of fast-tracking one of the most
massive giveaways to multinational companies ever -- including
corporations that have been shipping jobs overseas and pocketing their
swollen off-shore profits to avoid taxes.
How in the world could
Rice betray her working-class constituents, the people who trusted her
to look after their interests? What changed her mind? For one thing, the
president assured turncoats like Rice that he would “have their back”
if he had their votes. We can’t know what that means, writes John
MacArthur, “since the political deals that grease the way for unpopular
legislation aren’t ordinarily announced in press releases or high-minded
op-eds. The nasty facts tend to come out later, after the damage has
been done.”
For now, we can only rub our eyes at the spectacle.
Look at this headline in The Washington Post after Democrats defeated
the Obama-McConnell-Boehner-Republican cabal on Friday: “
New questions arise about House Democratic caucus’s loyalty to Obama.”
Say
what? Shouldn’t that headline read: “New questions arise about
president’s loyalty to House Democratic caucus?” Obama often has treated
Democrats in Congress as if they’ve been quarantined for Ebola; they’re
more likely to get into the White House if they dress up on Halloween
as Republicans and go trick-or-treating at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
But
now the president demands they play on his side, with McConnell and
Boehner as co-captains. The evening before the big vote he showed up at
the congressional baseball game, hoping his presence would inspire some
last-inning runs during Friday’s showdown. Republicans at the game
reportedly cheered when the president arrived, while Democrats looked on
in surprise at the unexpected appearance of their often furtive
“leader.”
So now the president and his sworn enemies are allied in
a bizarre mutual embrace of voodoo economics, assuring us that what’s
good for multinational giants is good for struggling Americans trying to
pay their bills while waiting below for the benefits of “free trade” to
trickle down.
As
The New York Times reported,
corporate America has been nearly unanimous in its support of the trade
agreement. No surprise: their lobbyists and lawyers practically wrote
it. And on Friday their CEOs were loud and clear in voicing their
displeasure over the impudence of the House in defying them. The
National Association of Manufacturers, among others, declared that
manufacturers “will not back down in this fight for expanded trade, for
the future of our industry and our country.”
Ah, yes, that’s the
argument: what’s good for global giants is good for workers. Yet we’re
left to wonder at Rep. Rice’s motive for her turnaround when it betrays
the working folk that only a bit earlier she was defending.
The
promise of these trade agreements is at best an illusion, at worst, a
lie – as we learned after the passage of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) more than 20 years ago.
The treaty and the
devastation of jobs that followed would not have happened without House
Democratic Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. For 28 years, he
represented a working-class district in St. Louis. Then he flipped. He
supported fast-track for NAFTA and helped clear the way for the passage
of fast-track by negotiating with the first President Bush, John R.
MacArthur writes, “to insert labor and environmental standards into
future negotiations with Mexico and Canada.” But nothing enforceable for
workers or the environment ever emerged from those negotiations. It was
a hollow promise.
Gephardt
wound up voting against the final treaty, but the damage was done and
he left Congress to become one of the top corporate lobbyists in
Washington. Among his clients has been that great friend of the working
class, Goldman Sachs. How many votes cast for the trade deal last Friday
came from politicians aware of the prospective job opportunities
waiting on the other side of that infamous revolving door?
Or are
we just getting too cynical? The issue before us is not “free trade,”
which, like any policy, has its pluses and minuses. The issue is that a
multilateral trade agreement should not be negotiated in secret, but in
the open by our State and Commerce departments, with input from all
organizations concerned, including those representing workers and
environmentalists.
Then there should come a draft document for all
to see, to be laid before the people’s representatives in Congress
assembled. If and when a majority of them ratifies the agreement, it can
go to the president for signature. This is how democracy should work.
Yet
it’s the precise opposite of how this agreement has come to be. We are
being asked to believe that the administration can argue with a straight
face for a deal conceived in secrecy, drafted largely by corporate
mercenaries, kept from public and Congressional view except with
burdensome restrictions, then presented to Congress for a vote up or
down, neither debate nor amendment allowed. It’s an absolute parody of
the process described in the Constitution.
And where, oh where,
are the “strict constructionists” on the Republican side? What happened
to their proclaimed reverence for every syllable of the Constitution,
their insistence that each must be interpreted precisely as understood
in 1789?
Instead we are told that we must put aside principle and
common sense on the pretended grounds that in the changing world of
global economics, it is a necessary procedure. That’s bull — the same
nonsense used to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act during the Clinton
administration: the word went forth that in a modern economy, controls
and regulations were obsolete remnants of a different era, standing in
the way of universal prosperity.
As we learned, that fallacious
and duplicitous argument led to a windfall for Wall Street bankers who
subsequently had to be bailed out by taxpayers, only to survive and
return to their predatory habits in this “modern economy.”
This whole affair is outrageous. After 226 years of constitutional government, is this where we’ve finally arrived?
So
what can we do against so monstrous a lie? First, call this deal out
for what it is — an abomination. Then let the tsunami of popular outrage
roll. Tell Congress and the White House what you think. But hurry!
Time’s running out, and Obama, McConnell, Boehner and the lobbyists are
working overtime to get the locomotive back on the fast-track.
Bill Moyers is the host of the weekly public television series Moyers & Company.
Moyers has received 35 Emmy awards, nine Peabody Awards, the National
Academy of Television’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an honorary
doctor of fine arts from the American Film Institute over his 40 years
in broadcast journalism.
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