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