Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Obama's America (Part 2)


A couple of days ago I wrote a post assigning a considerable portion of the blame for the Baltimore riots to President Obama in part because of his administration's economic policies that have increased wealth inequality and done nothing to help financially stressed working class Americans. Thus I would be remiss if were I to fail to mention the latest way that Obama is determined to make matters even worse and to set himself up to be showered with hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate largesse consultancies, speaking fees and book advances upon his retirement from office. I'm talking, of course, about the Trans-Pacific "Free" Trade Agreement, the opposition to which is being spearheaded by Senators Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren, and includes some strange bedfellows:
The Obama administration has been negotiating the TPP deal since the early days of his presidency. Democrats and a bloc of House Republicans lead by Rep. Walter Jones (N.C.) are concerned that the pact -- which has not been finalized -- will exacerbate income inequality and undermine U.S. authority to write its own regulations, while Obama and Republican leaders say the deal will help all Americans by boosting economic growth. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other top corporate lobbying groups support the deal, while environmentalists, organized labor and many Tea Party organizations are opposed. Warren and Brown said that corporate support for the deal shouldn't be surprising.

"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."
So here we have the great President Hopey-Changey, who rode into office in part because of a tsunami of disgust with Wall Street and the abuses of corporate America, looking to cement his legacy by pushing through one last big "fuck you" to the tens of millions of middle class, working class and young voters who placed their hopes in him. This, of course, despite twenty-plus years of evidence that "free" trade enriches the top 10% of the population at the expense of everyone else. What more evidence do you need that the man is a fucking sociopathic monster?

Here we also see the most direct evidence yet of why America is being turned into a virtual police state, which is docilely accepted by most of the population to the point where even Baltimore's black female mayor was throwing around the word "thug," without making any attempt to differentiate between the protestors who were expressing their First Amendment rights and the rioters who were looting and burning cars. This is why all of our electronic communications are being monitored and why police forces all over the country are being outfitted with all the surplus military hardware they can handle. Those in charge know their policies are going to cause greater and greater public outrage as economic desperation worsens and more and more people begin to realize that they have no future.

All of this wouldn't be possible had the Democratic Party not sold its own constituents down the river a long time ago. So is America's liberal party going support its two most progressive Senators and stand firm against their own president? Not hardly...as usual they are more worried about the political fallout than all the lives that would be ground up and spit out by the agreement:
Democrats have been wringing their hands about the potential damage the dispute on Capitol Hill could do to the party, particularly as the 2016 elections get into gear -- a concern that is only compounded by the vitriol now being exchanged between two of its most prominent figures. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has largely avoided addressing TPP in the early stages of her campaign.
Yeah, I'll just bet Hillary is trying to avoid saying anything about this issue, given that it was her fucking husband who pushed through NAFTA and GATT and started America down the "free" trade road to hell.


Bonus: "Hell ain't half full"...so there's plenty of room for Obama

8 comments:

  1. Hey Bill, this was a fantastic read for me - it's like you channeled all my hatred of politics into your two posts. Honest to God, i think that whoever gets in the White House is visited by some nameless guys from probably the NSA who show him/her the missing parts of the Zapruder film and let him know who's actually in charge. Congratulations on becoming our puppet, now here's what we want you to do. . .or else.

    i despised how Obama neglected to prosecute ANYONE for ANYTHING from the former administration and in fact turned into a Republican through his first 4 years giving them practically everything they wanted as his version of "compromise." Then he really got going with the drones and adopting the Bush game plan on foreign policy - let's go fuck some shit up! He also ignored climate change until it's now biting us all in the ass (soon to gobble us up). In fact there are so many reasons now to hate the jerk after 8 years, but the one that galls me is that now i've completely given up politics as a result of having campaigned for this clown, thinking he was the second coming of JFK or some shit. i don't think any of the Republicans would have made things any better, mind you, but his complete betrayal of everyone in favor of Wall Street and the .01% was all i could take. Now i'm just waiting for it all to collapse.

    You nailed it with his penchant for "smooth talk" which is just complete bullshit as soon as he opens his mouth any more.

    Thanks man - spot on.

    Tom

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    1. Hey, thanks Tom. It galls me how many progressives STILL think that Obama (and now Hillary) is secretly on their side and would have done more had his hands not been tied by those "evil Republicans." I've come to believe that it is actually better when there is a Rethug in the White House, if for no other reason than at least then there is no confusion on the left as to who the enemy is.

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    2. Personally, I like how the DP dangles fauxgressive screwheads like Warren and Brown in front of their base of gullible middle class suburbanites and tells them these Kabuki actors are somehow "moving the party to the left." That's freakin' hiLARious. And now that Sanders has Kucinich's old job, we're going to be bombarded with what a wonderful president he'll make right up until the time he loses the primary and throws his support to Hillary. (I really hope Sanders got a good deal for all the shucking and jiving he's doing.)

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    3. Alan - Sanders will be lucky to score double digit percentages in any caucus or primary, or to win more than a handful of delegates. Any political pundit who claims to take his candidacy seriously is either an idiot, a liar or both.

      And what is up with Sanders's HAIR anyway? The man can't afford to buy a comb?

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  2. As a (now unemployed) international trade professional, I can tell you that the TPP is not about "free trade"-- we've had that (low to no tariffs) since the 90s. TPP is about increasing the power of transnational capital at the expense of (democratic?) nation states. Period. I too voted for Obama in 2008 (and Clinton both times) but never again. That aside, if TPP is so wonderful, why is essentially classified? It's "we had to vote for the bill in order to read the bill" all over again.

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    1. You're right...TPP is really the next step down in stripping away national sovereignty. NAFTA and GATT were essentially passive in nature, removing barriers to the movement of global capital, while TPP is active in how it proposes to give capital "rights" that trump the laws of individual countries. Blogger Ian Welsh said it best about TPP the other day: "free" trade is the elites betraying their own population.

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    2. A step closer to total corporate feudalism.

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  3. Bill.., great post. You nailed it. I am just waiting for them to ram TPP through and have Jeb Bush serve 8 years in office. The final nails in the coffin for the working class in America. I never believed Obama at all. I now see him as a smooth talker who is going to walk off into the sunset with his big paycheck from the corporations who bought him from the very beginning. What truly saddens me is the number of people I know who still believe in him and are convince is on their side even as he sells them out. At this point I have given up on both parties to do anything for me or others who work for a living. The presidency has become a racket to see who can pocket the most money.

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