Whenever a President gets a bipartisan cluster of political establishmentarians to stand with him at a press conference in a show of force behind a particular piece of legislation – be wary. And if the president begins by saying, “All of us agree…” – that’s when all of us regular Americans should rush to the barricades with our pitchforks and torches to defend democracy.
Sure enough, President Obama recently put on such a show, trotting out a supporting cast of old cabinet officials – including the ignominious Henry Kissinger – all standing in support of Obama’s odious Trans-Pacific Partnership. “One of the things that we all agree on,” declared Obama, is that if Congress rejects the TPP deal, “[China] will make the rules” of global trade, “and those rules will not be to our advantage.”
Enjoying Hightower's work? Join us over at our new home on Substack:
But wait – who does “our” refer to? He’s trying to hang his raw-deal corporate trade scam around your and my necks by pretending to speak for “America.” Yet the great majority of Americans of every political stripe adamantly oppose the deal. After all, it was negotiated in secret with about 500 global corporate executives, creating new rules of global governance that are not at all to “our” advantage.
Those self-serving corporate elites wrote rules that – big surprise – give them more advantages over us: More American jobs will be offshored, our food safety protections will be compromised, our medicines will cost more, we and the rest of the world will get more contamination of our environment, and even our sovereign authority to write the laws of our own land will be subverted by a system of private, secretive tribunals open only to global corporations.
Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership is a rotten deal on the merits, but it’s made even stinkier by dragging out that infamous old liar, Henry Kissinger, to vouch for it!
“Obama Showcases Bipartisan Support, Past and Present, for Pacific Trade Pact,” The New York Times, November 14, 2015.
Special rate for original Lowdown readers