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When the going got tough, Barack got in a huff, then he got gruff.
President Obama has worked himself into such a tizzy over the TPP that he’s lashing out at his progressive friends in Congress. He’s mad because they refuse to be stereotypical lemmings, following him over this political cliff called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It masquerades as a “free trade agreement,” but such savvy and feisty progressive senators as Sherrod Brown, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren have ripped off the mask, revealing that TPP is not free, not about trade, and not anything that the American people would ever agree to.
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It is a stealth power grab, written in top-secret negotiations by and for multinational corporations from the US and 11 other nations. This raw deal effectively empowers these profiteering corporate giants to overrule actions by the governments of any of these countries – including ours – that protect consumers, workers, the environment, and other interests from corporate abuse.
Why an American president – especially a Democrat – would embrace this private usurpation of our people’s sovereignty is a mystery, but the great majority of congressional Democrats are not going along. So he’s been publicly scolding them (as though they’re disobedient children), huffily whining that they’re playing politics, “whupping on me,” and making up “stuff” about how this deal allows corporations to challenge and even change American laws.
Yet, rather than offer any evidence that they’re making stuff up, Obama has gruffly made up stuff about them. By opposing the TPP, he prevaricated in a recent speech, the Democrats are anti-trade and want to “pull up the drawbridge and build a moat around ourselves.”
What a pathetic show of presidential petulance! It’s time for Obama to question himself – not his friends.