Dancing With the Stars: The TPP Tango

This just in: Quasi-contestant Joe Biden has hurt himself badly during rehearsals and might get kicked off the show even before his rumored debut this weekend. Since he was so instrumental in behind the scenes arm-twisting his former Congressional colleagues into granting Boss Obama fast track authority to negotiate the biggest corporate coup the world has ever known, there is no way he can turn such a giant pratfall into a graceful waltz to the White House.

No matter that Bernie Sanders has been practicing and perfecting his own moves against the Trans-Pacific Partnership for years now. Hillary Clinton will refuse to dance the volatile head-snapping TPP Tango with him at next Tuesday's Democratic preliminaries. Instead, she'll perform her own solo version of the bait-and-switch Quick Step Flip Flop in hopes of making Bernie look like a wallflower before a viewing audience of millions.

To much orchestrated fanfare, Hillary has now "come out" against the TPP in much the same way that she "came out" for marriage equality. She lifted her calculating moistened finger to the wind and detected the prevailing direction. It read Due Left.

Practiced mover and shaker that she is, Hillary gave herself plenty of wiggle room in her preview number with PBS's Judy Woodruff. (Parenthetical parsings and asides are my own)

JUDY WOODRUFF: So let’s start with the big announcement from President Obama this week about a trade deal.

HILLARY CLINTON: Right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The Trans-Pacific Partnership. The U.S. and 11 other countries covering 40 percent of the global economy, 800 million consumers. It’s already started a big battle between people who love free trade and people who care more about protectionism. Where do you come down?

HILLARY CLINTON: I think that there are still a lot of unanswered questions, but for me, it really comes down to those three points that I made, and the fact that we’ve learned a lot about trade agreements in the past years. Sometimes they look great on paper. I know when President Obama came into office, he inherited a trade agreement with South Korea. I, along with other members of the Cabinet, pushed hard to get a better agreement. We think we made improvements.
Now looking back on it, it doesn’t have the results we thought it would have in terms of access to the market, more exports, et cetera.

(Mistakes were made. The audience and judges are asked to pay no attention to the inconvenient truth that Hillary pushed hard for the TPP during her tenure as Obama's Secretary of State, a grand total of 45 separate times, to be precise.  During a 2012 visit to Australia she called the Mystery Package that she now claims to know nothing about "the gold standard" of trade agreements. It seems in retrospect that she trusted herself without verifying herself. Just what we need in a commander in chief.)

JUDY WOODRUFF: So are you saying that as of today, (wink, nod) this is not something you could support?

HILLARY CLINTON: What I know about it, as of today, (nod, wink) I am not in favor of what I have learned about it. And there’s one other element I want to make because I think it’s important. Trade agreements don’t happen in a vacuum, and in order for us to have a competitive economy in the global marketplace, there are things we need to do here at home that help raise wages and the Republicans have blocked everything President Obama tried to do on that front.
So for the larger issues — and then what I know, and again, I don’t have the text, we don’t yet have all the details, I don’t believe it’s going to meet the high bar I have set.

(That was quite the crafty disingenuous two-step, other than the unfortunate gaffe of "making an element," whatever that means. What little she claims to know about it, this very minute, is that she is not in favor of what little she deliberately has chosen not to know. Then she clumsily pivots to pretending to defend Obama against the same Republicans who are very much on board with the TPP. Smoke and mirrors won't necessarily get you that coveted mirror ball trophy, Hillary!)  

JUDY WOODRUFF: So is President Obama wrong? I mean, he’s vigorously descending (sic) this. He is saying that it does protect jobs. He says that when it comes to worrying about jobs that automation and technology are more responsible than trade agreements.

HILLARY CLINTON: Look, I think the president has been extraordinarily effective in making as strong a case as could be made and I think his hard work and that of his team has certainly moved this agreement, again, based on what I read about it because I can’t read the agreement yet, quite a distance. But I do worry that we’ve got an equation here. How do we raise incomes in America?

(Woodruff obligingly turns the conversation into a paso doble bullshit fight between two plutocratic politicians. Hillary obligingly defends the "descending" Boss and pretends that she was not an integral part of the "team" which has been selling this deal from hell for years. Based on what she now reads about what she cannot read, she ignores the Woodruff question and asks an off-topic rhetorical one of her own.  How do "we" raise incomes in America? She does not know what she does not know. If that worries her, you can imagine how much it worries people who are only a paycheck or an illness away from outright destitution.)

HILLARY CLINTON: On the one hand, trade is a part of it, but it’s not the only answer, and on the other, if we don’t get more investments in education and science and research and infrastructure and clean energy the kinds of things that will create jobs here at home, then I’m afraid on net it won’t meet the high bar that I’ve set.

(This was typically sneaky. Whenever you hear a centrist politician say "on the one hand," get ready for the dance move called the Heel Turn. Hillary learned this technique from Bill, the Heel. Another way of describing it is feinting to the left while slyly moving right.

Granted, she is nowhere near as adept at the footsy subterfuge as Obama, who  perfected the Michael Jackson Moonwalk early in his tenure, with such variations as promising a public option while secretly delivering to the insurance and drug cartels. The latest version has him calling the job-destroying TPP "progressive, and good for workers." 

As Hillary pussy-foots around her own real agenda for crass electoral purposes, she is dog-whistling loud and clear to Wall Street that she will, in fact, eventually support the TPP. But first she needs enough fig leaves to cover herself. These are known as "side deals." For example, she will probably endorse the TPP if the Republicans pass a temporary highway bill to provide a few temporary jobs. She might negotiate a little extra temporary financial aid for permanently displaced workers. Plus, if she can get her wealthy donor friends to fund more social impact bonds to place their cynical bets on a few token suffering people, she'll then feel so much better about throwing most of the people under the bus. This, in essence, is the definition of the High Neoliberal Bar. Screw people economically as you embrace them socially. Preferably accomplish this twisty strain of a stretch in front of as many corporate media cameras as inhumanely possible.)

JUDY WOODRUFF: But just quickly, if this agreement is rejected, Asia experts are saying this is going to influence — it’s going to decrease the influence of the U.S. in Asia, it is going to give a boost to China, which is trying to become more dominant, and doesn’t it conflict with your pivot to Asia when you were secretary of state?

HILLARY CLINTON: I don’t think so, because the best way that we can exercise influence in Asia is to remain the world’s strongest economy here at home and that means we have to have more middle-class jobs, more people being in the middle class, more people being able to get into the middle class, and we haven’t looked at this from a competitive perspective because the Republicans have stood in the way .And so for my analysis, I think that there is a strong argument that our leadership, our strength, our influence begins with having an economy that is producing good jobs with rising incomes, and I see the connection there. 

Exercising Influence Peddlers

(A patriotic, partisan, parochial and an utterly meaningless little word salad. Say "middle class" often enough -- say, three times in one paragraph -- and you might get a few people believing that there still is such a thing as the middle class. In Clintonland, the enemy is never the oligarchy -- it's those crazy Republicans.)

To sum up all the fears, and to be fair,  Hillary does deserve a very tiny amount of credit for throwing a flimsy toy plastic monkey wrench into the corporate takeover of the world. But her backers know that it's all part of the electoral game. They can afford to bide their greedy time as they continue to rake in record profits and amass most of the world's riches at the expense of everybody else.

And for the duration, Hillary will bust her moves as she prepares to bust our chops. If you just can't wait for her Democratic debate performance next week, here's a fun clip to tide you over. Thrill to Hill and Bill grinding it up at Vernon Jordan's birthday bash this summer.

Life In The O-Zone

Regular readers know that I always refer to President Obama's weekly addresses as his "dog whistles to Wall Street." Never has his purpose been made more abundantly clear than in today's edition. The theme and tone of his spiel to the ostensible public were eerily similar to his congratulatory pep talk to the oligarchs of the Business Roundtable (BRT) earlier in the week.

Let's compare and contrast the two speeches.

 First, there's the sickly-sweet opening salvo of today's address to Regular Joe and Jane, struggling (if they are really lucky) to get by on stagnating wages and precarious employment, as the top .01 percent have sucked up more than 90% of the wealth regained in the seven years since the financial collapse. Obama praises the plebs for having the good grace to be crushed by capitalism and then urges them to pretend that they are co-owners of its cancerous progress:

Hi, everybody.  It’s hard to believe, but it was seven years ago this week that one of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks went bankrupt, triggering a meltdown on Wall Street and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  And in the months that followed, millions of Americans lost their jobs, their homes, and the savings they’d worked so hard to build.

Today’s a different story.  Over the past five and a half years, our businesses have created more than 13 million new jobs.  The unemployment rate is lower than it’s been in over seven years.  Manufacturing is growing.  Housing is bouncing back.  We’ve reduced our deficits by two-thirds.  And 16 million more Americans now know the security of health insurance. 

This is your progress.  It’s because of your hard work and sacrifice that America has come back from crisis faster than almost every other advanced nation on Earth.  We remain the safest, strongest bet in the world.

 Of course, you might not know all that if you only listened to the bluster of political season, when it’s in the interest of some politicians to paint America as dark and depressing as possible.  But I don’t see it that way.  I’ve met too many Americans who prove, day in and day out, that this is a place where anything is possible.  Yes, we have a lot of work to do to rebuild a middle class that’s had the odds stacked against it now for decades.  That’s the thing about America – our work is never finished.  We always strive to be better – to perfect ourselves.

Now, here's how he truckled to the top .01 percent: the billionaires and CEOs of the most powerful multinational lobby in the world (i.e., the Permanent Ruling Class) on Wednesday: 

 Seven years ago today was one of the worst days in the history of our economy.  If you picked up the Wall Street Journal that morning, you read that the shocks from AIG and Lehman were spreading worldwide.  The day before, stocks had suffered their worst loss since 9/11.  In the months after, businesses would go bankrupt, millions of Americans would lose their jobs and their homes, and our economy would reach the brink of collapse.  

That’s where we were when I became chief executive.  Here’s where we are today:  Businesses like yours have created more than 13 million new jobs over the past 66 months -– the longest streak of job growth on record.  The unemployment rate is lower than it’s been in over seven years.  There are more job openings right now than at any time in our history.  Housing has bounced back.  Household wealth is higher than it was before the recession.  We have made enormous strides in both traditional energy sources and clean energy sources while reducing our carbon emissions.  And our education system is actually making significant progress with significant gains in reducing the dropout rate, reading scores increasing, math scores increasing.  And, by the way, more than 16 million people have health insurance that didn’t have it before.

So this progress is a testament to American business and innovation.  It’s a testament to the workers that you employ.  But I’m going to take a little credit, too.  It’s a testament to some good policy decisions.  Soon after we took office, we passed the Recovery Act, rescued our auto industry, worked to rebuild our economy.....(yada yada yada: read the whole mutual masturbatory thing if you haven't eaten recently.)

Very similar words in the two speeches, and yet how very differently nuanced. To regular people, Obama is their president, and "progress" belongs to them. To CEOs, he is their Chief Executive, or if you want to be truthful, their Chief Operating Officer. Progress belongs to them. Both the sacrificial lambs and the high priests of finance are part of the same American family living in the O-Zone. In Obama's centrist world, everybody deserves the credit and nobody bears any blame. Especially Obama, who tellingly refers to himself as the royal "we" in his cozy confab with the Masters of the Universe. As he boasted to the bankers back in 2009, he has been the only thing standing between them and the pitchfork-wielding rabble.

 As far as regular unwitting Joe and Jane should be concerned, once upon a time a bank suddenly went kaput for no apparent reason and without any deliberate criminal malfeasance by anyone. And then the poor shlubs, the collateral damage, lost everything. Just as miraculously, everything is now A-OK in the O-Zone. Everybody bounced back. Obama unbelievably credits the plutocrats for the pretend rescue of Regular Joe and Jane! He doesn't mention that 33 million people still lack basic health insurance, that the poverty rate is getting worse, and that the recovered jobs are not identical in either salary or security to the ones that were lost, never to return.

The subtext of today's lecture to Regular Joe and Jane is this: if you haven't bounced right back with the help of wealthy people and corporations, then you obviously didn't work hard enough and sacrifice enough. The "folks" that Obama claims to meet on his frenetic, polluting, carbon-spewing, criss-crossing, double-crossing political junkets in Air Force One are all successful entrepreneurs who lifted themselves up by their own bootstraps. Therefore, if you're still stuck on the couch, feeling depressed and poor, your mood is the result not of reality, but of Republicans spreading doom and gloom throughout this great wonderful land of ours. So chin up, Amurkey!

The oligarchs of the O-Zone are never inconvenienced, never shamed, never blamed. The seven-year statute of limitations on their high crimes and misdemeanors has run out. And even when it hasn't, as in the case of the General Motors ignition switch deaths, those responsible are not being held responsible. They're getting kissed with the usual paltry fine (refundable via those tax breaks, forced union concessions and pension-gutting) and an admonishment to behave nicely in the future. If Regular Joe or Jane is dead or maimed because of their shoddy workmanship and an ensuing criminal cover-up, then that is too bad. Because as Vice President Joe Biden constantly brays,"Osama is dead, and General Motors is alive!"

 Obama does not once mention the term "wealth inequality" in either of his speeches. As a matter of fact, that term was permanently banned from his lexicon after a brief tryout last year.  He is not about to bite the plutocratic hand that has, does, and will continue to feed him handsomely.

The president still commiserates over the pain that temporarily winced the super-rich when the Market crashed seven years ago this month. Unlike clueless Regular Joe and Jane, the rich were forced to read all about the crash they caused in the Wall Street Journal. Obama proclaims it as one of the worst days in the history of "our" economy. But, now that they have fully recovered, they can pat themselves on the back as they kick everybody else in the backside.

"Household wealth," Obama braggingly gushed to the BRT fat cats this week, "is higher than it was before the recession."

Of course it is... for the households of the BRT and the Forbes 400 billionaires. As a matter of fact, America's richest families have sucked up virtually all the wealth regained in "their" recovery, profiting obscenely in the Obama years at the expense of Joe and Jane:

The top 10 percent now hold more than 84 percent of the nation's household wealth, with the Joes and Janes in the bottom half trying to make do with a shockingly meager 0.8 percent of the share:

The racial wealth gap is at its widest since Reagan-era 1989, then got artificially depressed during the Clinton-Bush era subprime mortgage/deregulation bubble, then started increasing again after the stimulus ran out and bipartisan austerity was enacted with Obama's full urging and cooperation in the wake of the 2010 House GOP rout. Now, white families own on average 13 times as much wealth as black families:

 I don't know what world Obama is living in, but it certainly isn't ours. The manufacture of an alternate reality is not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing. It's a parallel universe inhabited by the rich and the powerful who own the politicians of both establishment parties.

Facts are stubborn things, as are the liars who deny reality. The O-Zone inhabited by the current White House occupant is the immoral equivalent of the Stand Your Ground law, itself the creation of the same multinationals and oligarchs that the neoliberal Obama so cloyingly serves.

Social psychologist Leon Festinger, the father of Cognitive Dissonance Theory, puts it best:

"Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart. Suppose he is then presented with unequivocal and undeniable evidence that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting people."

Obama is such a true believer in the Market as the cure for what ails us, rather than the disease that threatens to kill us, that he rashly told the plutocrats at the BRT that he will complete the corporate coup known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership by the end of the year. His vow of fealty to the plundering multinationals:

There are going to be unprecedented protections for labor standards and environmental standards, but also for IP protection, also for making sure that when any company here makes an investment, that they’re not being disadvantaged but are instead being treated like domestic companies for commercial purposes.

And so the notion here is, is that we’ve got 11 nations who represent the fastest-growing, most populous part of the world buying into a high-standards trade deal that allows us and your companies on a consistent basis to compete.

This was a not-so-veiled reference to Investor State Dispute Tribunals, in which a corporation replaces a sovereign judicial system to rule, mainly in secret, for the rights of corporations over the rights of citizens. Big Tobacco, for example, would have the right to run roughshod over laws which prevent sales of cigarettes to children in countries like Malaysia. The poor would have to fork over any alleged profit losses to the billionaires being thwarted in their desire to kill poor children with their poisons.

The word "investment" as used by Obama and the rest of the elite political class is simply a euphemism for wealth extraction and plunder. Investment is a means  for the rich to get richer off the labor and assets of the poor and working classes. It is not only criminal. It is a form of insanity.

And as all too scarily evidenced by the other night's marathon performance by the GOP candidates vying to replace Obama in the White House, psychopathy has not only gone mainstream, it is viewed as a necessary tool for the survival of the richest and all those who serve them.

TPP: A Pimper's Paradise

As expected, the Obama administration has decided to ignore the atrocities of the Malaysian slave trade in order to make the world even more comfortable for global plutocrats and their unfettered capital.  This cynical move is all of a piece with the long American tradition of deploring the behavior of countries our officials don't like (Russia, North Korea, Iran) while turning a willful blind eye to the deplorable behavior of countries which either buy US weapons of mass destruction (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt), or allow the extraction of their human and material resources for the benefit of the American ruling class and its corporations.(name just about any third world country.) These fire sale-type extractions usually follow bribes in the form of loans from the International Monetary Fund. The collateral is the imposition of austerity on poor and working people. Since the countries are rarely able to make timely repayments, the plunder by creditors is then free to proceed with a vengeance.

Malaysia is one of the twelve nations included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In order for Barack Obama to salve his alleged conscience enough to sign the accord, his State Department has simply "upgraded" Malaysia to a less-bad level of human rights violations. This is despite the recent discovery of a mass grave containing the murdered bodies of hundreds of enslaved people, or as pseudo-democratic governments like to euphemise them, "human trafficking victims." 

Dave Dayen writes in The Intercept:

The move to officially upgrade Malaysia from Tier 3 to Tier 2 in the department’s annual report on human trafficking came despite scant evidence that the country has improved oversight of the businesses that enslave workers within its borders. It has raised concerns among some anti-trade activists that the decision was made for purely political reasons.
The trade promotion authority that Congress approved, which was signed into law by President Obama in June, came with a condition: No country on Tier 3 of the human trafficking report could get “fast-track” status for trade agreements signed with the United States.
In other words, trade deals with a Tier 3 country could not go to Congress for a guaranteed up-or-down vote without the possibility of filibuster or amendment. Malaysia is one of 12 countries negotiating TPP. The White House tried on multiple occasions to neutralize this language without success. So the State Department’s upgrade for Malaysia could be seen as a Plan B.

(snip)

Despite the White House’s contention that trade deals like TPP are “the most progressive in history,” it appears to be overlooking significant forced labor violations to get it passed.
In 2014, the State Department demoted Malaysia to Tier 3 status for being a destination “for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and women and children subjected to sex trafficking.” Malaysia’s 4 million foreign workers are threatened by large smuggling debts and confiscated passports that put them at the mercy of recruiting companies. Women in particular, recruited for hotel or beauty salon work, are routinely coerced into the commercial sex trade. And forced labor runs rampant in agricultural, construction and textile industries, producing the same goods that would get duty-free access to U.S. markets under TPP.

Of course, the human rights catastrophe in Malaysia is already the direct result of American foreign policy as inflicted by the IMF. By "progress," Obama presumably means that the slave trade can forge ahead even stronger than ever, if and when the TPP is ratified and signed into ignominy. Just as he and previous presidents have always feebly insisted,  the inclusion of "deplorable" nations in the global free market will be predicated on the flimsy promises of said nations to do the nicey-nice in the future. 

As The Nation reports, the very existence of the State Department's tiered rating system of human trafficking nations is itself a cynical ploy to make the United States the global moral arbiter which can and will grant altruistic clemency to hardcore delinquent nations like Malaysia -- on the mere promise that they will mend their ways. And once they don't mend their ways, the US more often than not will turn another willful blind eye to the broken promises. The fact that Colombia, for example, continues its abysmal record of assassinating trade unionists with impunity after Obama's signing of CAFTA is a case in point.

The Obama administration, as have other human bondage apologists before it, carefully concentrates on only the "trafficking" part of Malaysian slavery -- thus reducing it, in the court of public opinion, to just what it sounds like: a minor traffic violation rather than felony murder, kidnapping and rape. Maybe if Americans were able to view the abused victims of the Malaysian slave trade as thousands of Bill Cosby victims who are never allowed to escape his coercive clutches, they could then begin to feel some empathic outrage.

The transatlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 18th centuries was not about the "movement." It was about permanently enslaving 11 million Africans, on top of merely "transporting" them across the ocean. Malaysia, too, is more than a "route." So, the question must be asked: where are the 21st century abolitionists?

The reason that Barack Obama can so easily condemn the predations of a Bill Cosby while easily accepting the existence of slavery is the usual one: money, and lots of it. Slavery is a truly progressive growth industry, generating billions of dollars in profits every year, a profit margin greater than any other industry in the world, whether legal or illegal. The State Department estimates that one woman or child is trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation every 60 seconds.

As researcher Siddharth Kara writes, 

Trafficked sex slaves are by far the most lucrative slaves in the world. Only 4.2 percent of the world's slaves are trafficked sex slaves, but they generate 39.1 percent of slaveholders' profits. To benchmark the astounding profits generated by the exploitation of sex slaves, one need look no further than the fact that the global weighted average net profit margin of almost 70 percent makes it one of the most profitable enterprises in the world. By comparison, Google's net profit margin in 2006 was 29 percent, and it is one of the most profitable companies in the United States."

Slavery has always been an integral, even necessary, part of capitalism. Globalization and "free trade" deals have made it even more so, creating as they do crisis situations in countries bearing their brunt. As jobs disappear and wages plummet, millions of women and children become vulnerable to exploitation. The IMF's prescription of the "shock doctrine" of austerity in the name of the free market has actually encouraged and accelerated slavery. Malaysia found itself in the neoliberal crosshairs in the early 90s, as speculators and hedge fund predators "invested" money in the country, leading to bubbles and currency devaluation. Then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohammad was blunt in his assessment:

We are told we must open up, that trade and commerce must be totally free. Free for whom? For rogue speculators. We had tried to comply with the wishes of the rich and mighty, but when the big funds use their massive weight in order to move the shares up and down at will and make huge profits by their manipulations, then it is too much to expect us to welcome them, especially when their profits result in massive losses for ourselves. The currency traders have become rich, very very rich through making other people poor.

The IMF/banking cartel did not take this radical rebellion against the Invisible Fist graciously, and the longest-serving prime minister in Malaysia's history was eventually forced to resign, with much help from Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and austerian vice president Al Gore.

 Punishment by the IMF/global banking cartel for debtor states' failure to adopt "reforms" (austerity) always comes with a price. Just look at Greece. Just look at Detroit. Just look around your own foreclosed neighborhood.

And now, with the Obama administration's renewed, tacit acceptance of Asian slavery as an engine of economic growth, it is not hyperbole to label any complicit politicians who vote for "trade deals" not only whores, but pimps, high and free on capitalistic crack.

The victims of the global sex trade are the comfort women of the plutocrats -- each and every one of whom calls himself a devoted family man, or a simpering feminist with a shallow verbal penchant for "empowering" poor women and breaking the glass ceiling.

Where are the 21st century abolitionists? Where are the protests? Where are the scolding magazine covers that shame and call out the political pimps and the plutocratic predators?

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength". -- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

 "The fact is some folks are just opposed to trade deals out of principle, a reflexive principle. And what I tell them is, ‘You know what? If you’re opposed to these smart, progressive trade deals, then that means you must be satisfied with the status quo.’ ” -- Barack Obama at Nike Headquarters, May 2015, doing Orwell one better. Not only is slavery free, and freedom slavery, but the whole abomination is eminently sane. The slaves are just too damned stupid to realize that their progress across national borders is preferable to just staying put in their miserable countries of origin.

"This is a testament to when we're not vigilant in defense of human rights, what can happen". -- Barack Obama on his visit to the Senegal Slave Trade Memorial, June 2013.

Fast Track Zero Hour

(*updated below.)

Never having met an idea or a lower House vote for the public good that it couldn't crush through sheer inertia, corruption, stealth, or just a flick of its contemptuous middle finger at the body politic, the United States Senate will once again try to give President Obama authority to fast-track democracy into permanent oblivion.

Zero Hour begins on Tuesday, June 23, at approximately 11 a.m. President Obama probably won't need to make a personal desperate appearance this time.  Neither will the mass media. The pundits are too busy analyzing and marveling at how casually and boldly he was able to say "nigger" while they make their squeamish PC excuses about why they can't allow us to actually hear him say "nigger" on TV. "Nigger" might be a trigger.... it might remind viewers that the secretive TPP is actually a deal for a resurgence of the slave trade -- among its many other abominations.

A typical deflection/distraction, broadcast by The Terror Channel, (aka CNN)  whose programming is sponsored by the same voracious multinationals dictating the secret terms of the corporate coup trade packages:

 While it's grand that they're talking about finally retiring the Confederate flag in Dixie, the rest of the globe's population will watch in horror and disbelief as the plutocrats turn the planet into one great big toxic plantation.... if Obama and his plutopals get their way. For some reason, the president thinks "Obamatrade" is a legacy to be proud of. The realization that he is a right-wing free market ideologue, and always has been, is slowly beginning to dawn even on some of his biggest fans.

So he chose last week to schmooze with a comedian about race. It's the politics of mass distraction. The post-racial president comes out of his closet and boldly suggests that racism is still in our DNA -- a statement which, by the way, sickeningly dog-whistles the racist right wing ideology (biology is destiny) of Charles Murray, whether Obama meant it that way or not.

But the centrist punditocracy celebrates his refreshing honesty and bravery even as he displays the most egregious dishonesty and subterfuge about the TPP. His administration has even threatened to prosecute any member of Congress who divulges its details to the public.

  Sorry, but you don't get to call yourself anti-racist or liberal, and then not speak out against the TPP.  It's just as white-supremacist as the hate group that inspired the Charleston massacre. It supports the Malaysian human trafficking cartel and perpetuates labor abuses against Asian people making 40 cents an hour in sweatshops, and family farmers eking out a bare bones existence both here and abroad. The TPP will off-shore more American jobs and further depress American wages and have an adverse economic affect on already oppressed Black and Latino Americans. It's a de facto acceleration of global slavery -- which has its roots not in bigotry, but in greed and unfettered capitalism.

  So as reader Valerie urges, call your Dinosaurs one more time and tell them so. Remind them that as the populist climate heats up, those electoral extinctions sure have a strange way of occurring without warning. A list of their phone numbers is here.

Video accompaniment is here.

*Update, 6/23: The Senate advanced Trade Promotion Authority (fast-track), 60-37. The same Democratic quislings who'd voted for it previously -- Michael Bennet (D-Colo), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) -- were not swayed by the wishes and demands of their putative constituents, aka The Little People, to change their minds. With any luck, they will go down in electoral history as The Unlucky Thirteen.

"It's a great day for the big money interests, not a great day for working families."  -- Bernie Sanders, democratic socialist of Vermont.

"Occasionally, even President Obama gets things right." -- John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

Now the Democrats, Obama included, can pretend to fight for the regular folk by throwing  a few extra crumbs to a couple displaced workers. (Trade Adjustment Assistance) The Republicans will pretend to balk, but in the end each side will embrace slavery and plutocracy. 

The silver lining is that once Obama completes his deal, we will have an actual opportunity to see it. Hell will hopefully break loose. So we should keep up the pressure. Another silver lining is that 11 other countries also have to approve this travesty. A lot of their citizens (notably in Australia, Canada and Japan) are less than enchanted with it, too. The battle against neoliberalism is global, because neoliberalism itself is global. Individual nation-states are rapidly becoming superfluous to the interests of capital.

The TPP Tango

For want of a fig leaf, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-.01%) had to find another way to cover herself.  So she took to the House floor on Friday afternoon to announce a trial separation from Barack. She really still loves the guy, really wanted to find a way to Yes, but then all of a sudden he was going way too fast for her. It has nothing to do with that slobbery kiss a few years ago in the wake of her advice to "embrace the suck" -- when all she'd really meant was that Democrats should join with the GOP in cutting struggling people off their long-term unemployment benefits to get a budget passed. Awwwkward, yet oh so titillating.

  The real awkward moment came on Thursday night, when he showed up, armed security entourage and beer in tow, at her charity insider baseball game, expecting her to fast-track all the way home on the TPP without even touching first base -- which in a functioning democracy, would include the release of its actual contents to the public. He didn't even call first, the cad.

Not to be suspicious of Pelosi's virtue or, god forbid, ethics, but let's be perfectly honest here. She is really hot to consummate the corporate coups disguised as trade deals. But she has simply been unable to catch a privacy break. (also look at her uncivil bringing-up-the rear treatment by Obama at the game, above) Not only were members of her own caucus publicly dissing her for whipping pro-TPP votes behind their backs on a fevered daily basis, but her own constituents back home in San Francisco were beginning to act up. Hanging up on their calls wasn't working. They just began showing up at her office in person, showing all the telltale signs of discontent and opprobrium:

Nancy Pelosi presumably wants to stay in Congress well past her sell-by date. Therefore, after bragging about what a great speaker and leader she's been all these years (regardless of her refusal to impeach war criminal George W. Bush when she had the chance) she regretfully took out her little jar of harmless designer sand and sprinkled it all over Obama's fast-track luge run of dreams. But she and Barack both see this for what it is: a theatrical attempt to retain an outward appearance of democracy and propriety. They and their pals in Congress will be back at their orgy of greed again as early as next week. They just need to  provide a slightly larger fig leaf than the weak, separate, cynical Trade Adjustment bribe proffered by the GOP to grease the skids for TPA (fast track). Even paltry displaced worker assistance was voted down by the Dems, partly because it involved robbing Medicare recipients to pay for worker re-training. As   Pelosi hinted, restoration of Medicare funds and horsetrading with Republicans over some infrastructure spending might be just the ticket for a smoother trip to TPP paradise for the oligarchs.

The fix is still in. Fig leaves are a dime a bribed dozen, so therefore we progressives must not rest on our laurels. Today's temporary victory is by no means the "stinging defeat" for a cruelly spurned president that the corporate press is making it out to be. A New York Times news analysis* by Jennifer Steinhauer, for example, makes the TPP all about personalities instead of about the actual corporate power-grabs contained therein. To Steinhauer, we have ourselves a breach of etiquette problem instead of a corruption problem.  It was neither fear of the electorate nor a new-found moral compass, but the same old Beltway "dysfunction" that caused Democrats to "abandon their president", she says.

After years of Republican derision of President Obama’s fiscal agenda, which they frequently describe as socialism, in the end it was the president’s own Democratic Party that deprived him of what would have been the largest economic policy victory of his second term.

The stunning defeat was the culmination of years of political dysfunction in Washington, with a twist.

Where do you even begin? Instead of ordinary citizens both here and abroad temporarily dodging the cruel neoliberal bullet (hollow point, because once TPP enters the body politic, it explodes into a thousand little bomblets ripping apart the whole fabric of democracy) we have a multimillionaire politician being stabbed in the back by a twisting Democratic knife.  It's all about Obama -- a true hollow man for the ages.

After decades of watching presidents secure trade agreements from South Korea to Mexico, even in the face of opposition from their base, Democrats have broadly come to the conclusion that such agreements exacerbate income inequality. They refused to come out in sufficient numbers to help Mr. Obama bring a broad agreement over the line.

Steinhauer insinuates that only bitch-slapping Democrats have come to the "conclusion" that trade deals exacerbate income inequality. She doesn't bother to research whether or not this is true. She cares only about the spurned hollow man.

Mr. Obama’s struggle also reflected a longstanding policy of the administration of maintaining a cool distance from Capitol Hill, enraging members of both parties. He delegated most of the arm-twisting to his unpopular trade representative, Michael Froman, thus allowing a populist figure, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, to take up much of the oxygen on the debate. She railed against trade deals on television during the period when the White House was trying to seduce those on the fence.

Can there be a mainstream article mentioning Elizabeth Warren without taking the obligatory dig at her? In this episode, we envision Warren greedily sucking up all the oxygen as she "rails" (like a banshee) to torture poor Barry. Slanted journalism like this is how public opinion gets manufactured to side with plutocratic interests. This is the journalism of what Tariq Ali aptly calls "the extreme center."

Steinhauer snarkily and falsely and centristically concludes,

As they return to their home districts for the weekend, Democrats will now have the distinct pleasure of experiencing what Republicans have undergone for the last few years — a narrative of their party in disarray and divided.

Huh? With all but 39 House Democrats "spurning" lover boy, the party is hardly divided. It is, however, beginning to lean ever so slightly and gingerly to the left.

The Times editors chose wisely when they assigned Jennifer Steinhauer to concoct her Beltway-centric TPP confection. Before her current gig covering Congress, she covered Hollywood. She is also the author of a new recipe book about how to recreate such toxic junk food classics as Twinkies and Sno-balls in your own kitchen.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

She gushes, "For Americans of a certain age, memory lane is paved with Ho-Hos."

Just like the paving stones of Pennsylvania Avenue, K Street and Capitol Hill.

Blue Dogs, Devil Dogs, Horn Dogs, Corn Dogs, All-American stadium Hot Dogs -- it's one big happy cash party for all the greed-junkies who are slow-dancing the TPP and trampling the rest of us underfoot in the process.

 Wall Street didn't even blink in the wake of the "stinging defeat." Maybe because Friday's vote is in reality a teasing butterfly floating for more bribery dollars?

*Update, 6/13: Sorry to mix metaphors from the above post, but since publication last night, New York Times reporter and Obama publicist Peter Baker horned in on Jennifer Steinhauer's piece in order to bat cleanup, relegating her to second banana in the byline department. Baker rewrote the lede, spinning the narrative in a way most favorable to Obama. His overwrought pathos begins:

  He made it personal. He appealed to their loyalty. He asked them to give him what every modern president has had. He argued the facts, disputed the politics, quarreled over the history and at times lashed out at those who still refused to stand with him.

This makes Obama seem like a hero-martyr rather than the hapless knifing victim portrayed by Steinhauer. Baker goes on to repeat the White House excuse that Friday's vote was just another one of those procedural snafus, and that Obama is actually victorious. The vote was belittled as "a nasty little issue" by one of the political operatives in Baker's part of the news analysis. The White House is also quoted as finding Nancy Pelosi "oddly in a mystery zone" -- which, I suppose, is a politically correct way of saying that she's senile. Before voting against all aspects of the trade package, Pelosi is described by Baker as having been "uncharacteristically shaken" and "vague." Baker all but called for an assisted living ambulette for this woman. You almost feel sorry for her.

Key word: almost. Maybe Jennifer Steinhauer can whip up a batch of Devil Dogs and bring them over to Pelosi as she engages in yet another secretive frenzy of weekend whip counting. The vagueness is a big act. It's how these people flirt and seduce one another.

Obama's Snafu

 *Updated below.

The giant middle finger that Barack Obama has been giving us these past six years is now dangling at the root, the victim of its own terminal corruption. And yet he and his sycophants persist in downgrading yesterday's crumbling of the "pillar of his presidency" into an annoying little hangnail.

"It's just a procedural snafu," whined Josh Earnest, the aptly named White House press flack of the "stinging defeat" Obama suffered from members of his own party, who shockingly denied him the right to "fast-track" democracy into oblivion via the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership.

If you want to get Panglossian about it, Snafu (situation normal, all fucked up)  is slightly better than Fubar (fucked up beyond all recognition.) And, let's face it: the Democrats of the Senate did not suddenly go all populist overnight, despite the good work of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in exposing the TPP for the nasty corporate coup that it is. The Dem poobahs (Reid, Schumer, etc.) were pissed because Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled a fast one on them, and didn't include the fig leaves (currency manipulation rules, monetary aid for displaced American workers, feeble union protections, and anti-child labor measures) that would otherwise have allowed Democrats to sell out their constituents. These people actually still love the TPP. Most of them don't even care about those odious investor state tribunals replacing sovereign court systems.

What makes the TPP now so Fubar and so toxic for the selfish interests of the oligarchs is that Japan, one of the countries negotiating the deal, is adamantly against any TPP clause forbidding it to manipulate its own currency. Barack Obama is damned if he does go along with Democratic demands, and damned if he doesn't.

Hot damn!

Another reason that the TPP may now be Fubar is that people are finally paying attention to it. And Barack Obama has only himself to blame. He has essentially fingered himself and the neoliberal agenda, for all the world to see.

  If he hadn't publicly and pettily dissed Elizabeth Warren, falsely and chauvinistically accusing her of greed and mendacity, the gossip-loving mainstream press probably wouldn't have bothered with the TPP story.

 His trip to Offshore Sweatshop Central (Nike) last week didn't help his pro-plutocracy public relations campaign, either. Nor did his simultaneous announcement allowing Shell to drill for oil in the ecologically fragile Arctic. Nor did his onslaught of fund-raising for his half-a-billion-dollar Chicago shrine, and his announcement of a sketchy greed-washing "initiative" that would raise money by and for corporations for the ostensible purpose of trickling down to the same minority poor people that Obama's Wall Street-friendly policies have already thrown under the economic bus.

Even Obama's most diehard fans are at least mildly peeved and disappointed with him at this stage. He has skipped Lame Duck mode entirely, prematurely careering straight into Post-Pre$idency Clintonoid Nirvana.

Despite yesterday's heartening victory, we must not rest on our laurels. These people don't quit, and they don't take No for an answer. But their greedy quest for more, more and more suddenly got a whole bunch of new roadblocks in its way, and their journey is not going to be the walk in the privatized park they thought it would be.

Sunlight is still the best disinfectant.

*** 

Before yesterday's Senate vote, the New York Times published an odious little editorial that urged the parties to go along to get along and bipartisanly compromise on the TPP, including whatever fig leaves are necessary to ram it through. Needless to say, readers were neither amused nor placated. My comment:

How is a compromise possible on a treaty whose terms are being kept from the public? How is this possible when the White House has threatened to prosecute any member of Congress who divulges details they are allowed to scan only under the watchful eye of the Security State?

Rather than urge a smarmy bipartisan compromise under cover of darkness, I just wish the N.Y. Times had noted how undemocratic this whole process has been. The only reason we know some of the details we do is because of WikiLeaks.

The clause allowing investor state tribunals to subsume sovereign court systems even contains a sub-clause dictating that it remain a classified secret for at least four years from the date of ratification. That's how bad it is. That's how much the billionaires and corporations dictating the terms of this deal know how bad it is, and how much we would hate it if we were allowed to know about it.

As Margot Kaminski of Yale's Information Society Project wrote in a Times op-ed last month, fast track authorization is "little more than a euphemism for Avoid the public, and benefit the fortunate few."

The citizens of the 11 other countries are standing against the secret TPP as well. They're also worried, and rightly so, that multinational corporations headquartered in the US will quickly ignore any labor protections for their low-wage workers built into the agreement as a fig leaf to ease passage.

Free trade agreements kill -- economically, socially, and literally.


*Update: 

It was all pretty much a head fake. We are now back to full-bore Fubar, and Barack Obama has put his damaged middle finger in a splint, the better to screw you with, my dears. The Washington Post reports that the men in a room have reached their deal and agreed to make the currency manipulation a separate bill, thus ensuring that any final TPP package would be acceptable to Japan. Obama must be so relieved.

 The Democrats apparently also got a grudging concession from Republicans on compensation for the American workers becoming collateral damage in the latest attack in the class war -- if and when the TPP and TTIP make corporations free to further depress wages and exploit those abused workers in already ill-protected countries like Vietnam.

So, after yesterday's Kabuki, the full Senate will start their show over with a Thursday matinee, with multiple melodramatic bravura performers vying for attention and lobbyist dollars in the first act of the Plutocrat Grand Prix Theater. Watch those phony plastic traffic cones begin falling like dominoes.

Just more evidence, in case you still needed any, that the much ballyhooed and bemoaned Congressional gridlock the pundits love to kvetch about only applies to measures that might benefit the little people. I hope you didn't waste any of your time today calling your Group of Ten senators with your premature thanks for their phony stance yesterday. I hope you will continue to bombard them with warnings of what they can expect at the ballot box as they "cave" to giving the center-right president authority to turn the screws in utter secrecy. The first tranche of Democratic quislings includes Carper of Delaware, Cantwell and Murray of Washington, Wyden of Oregon, Nelson of Florida, Warner and Kaine of Virginia, Bennet of Colorado, Heitkamp of North Dakota and Cardin of Maryland. These are all Obama needs to supplement the loyalists in his own Republican Party.

Meanwhile, members of the House are expected to vote on Fast Track as early as next month. Get ready for another stampede of lobbyists to make those hordes of holdouts an offer they can't refuse.

Fake to the Left

 (* and **Updated below, 5/8 and 9)

What kind of mellow skunk spliffs are the corporate Democrats smoking these days?

Hint: beware of fake populists bearing gifts. It's all about maintaining the oligarchs in the lifestyles to which they are accustomed while throwing a few crumbs at the rest of us. The propaganda is busting out all over like a field of giant boils.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-Wall Street) has penned a totally out-of-character editorial demanding a living wage for fast food workers.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D-One Percent) has announced an awesome  $5.5 million in reparations for victims of police brutality and institutionalized torture.

Hillary Clinton (D-Empire) has finally broken up with hubby (ideologically speaking) and embraced criminal justice reform. She's also in semi-breakup mode with her paramour, Barack Obama: no deep-throated endorsement of his Trans-Pacific Partnership corporate legacy pillar for her! She is even going him one one better on relief for undocumented immigrants.

What is going on here? Need we even ask?

 It's campaign season, and  therefore it is time for some serious triangulation which the media are pretending to take seriously. Those heretofore fiscally conservative Democrats are delivering promises to the Left in order for their party to stay viable. They are also dog-whistling to the Right. To wit:

Andrew Cuomo is still running TV commercials shilling for charter schools, for the benefit of the hedge-fund billionaires who stand to profit handsomely off poor minority students. To accomplish the destruction of public education, he needs the electoral support of parents working in Walmart and McDonalds. He is the last man standing/sitting of the Three Men in a Room. Two-thirds of the people who decide things in New York State have already been indicted, and Cuomo is still not out of the woods. So what better time for him to throw a placatory bone to the electorate?

Rahm Emanuel just survived an embarrassing challenge from slightly to his left in the mayoral race. He must pretend to be chastened after being called out on his cronyism and allegiance to the One Percent. Therefore, each person tortured into making false confessions to the Chicago PD over the past several decades will get an average of $100,000, plus such perks as free community college tuition to make up for the ruination of their lives. To many people, this signals that Rahm has been rehabbed. But not so fast: at the same time he's offering free psychological counseling to the victims of the police state, the state has ordered the city's largest mental health system to be shut down. This is called robbing from the poor to give to the poor. If a few hundred men are to receive reparations, then hundreds of thousands more must suffer. It's the neoliberal way. It pits poor people against one another so that the oligarchy can stay entrenched.

Hillary, Hillary, Hillary: the woman of the people will say whatever it takes to appeal to the regular folk, even as she becomes the first Democratic candidate in the age of Citizens United to blatantly court SuperPac dark money. She is raking in the bucks while claiming to want to overturn Citizens United. However, since she never gave us a time frame for campaign finance reform, we can assume that she wants to overturn the Money is Speech doctrine sometime after her granddaughter wins her first dynastic presidency, perhaps 40 or 50 years hence. Wall Street has already signaled that they know her campaign rhetoric is so much B.S. Needless to say, however, her latest craven actions are being dubbed "bold and risky" by the passive-aggressive New York Times.

While she bathetically bloviates about keeping immigrant families together, she remains mysteriously silent on her demand last year that child migrants be returned, without legal recourse, to the Central American violence they had fled. Some families just have to be "sent a message" that they are not welcome in Hillary Clinton's America. Humanitarianism is relative, and coldly calculated. Some asylum-seekers are more important and equal than others. Plus, children do not vote or donate to political campaigns. 

These three Wall Street Democratic players are flimsily faking Left so that Barack Obama can catch their deflated ball and run with it down the right field line to score a touchdown. He is openly teaming up with his Republican friends to push through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and he is going out of his way to gleefully rub his supporters' noses in it. What better way to signal his disdain than traveling to the Oregon HQ of Nike this Friday to hype NAFTA-on-steroids?

Nike is the poster child for the off-shoring of labor to sweatshop countries.  Although the company has refused to say how much it pays the workers at its factories in Vietnam (one of the 12 countries negotiating the TPP) the average hourly wage in that country is only 30 cents. Nike sneakers retail in the US for well over $100 a pair. Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike, is not only allowed to see the TPP details being kept from the public -- he is dictating the details.

The Nike-Obama Partnership is nothing new. In 2013, Parker traveled to Chicago to join the first lady in selling his brand as a cure-all for America's so-called obesity epidemic. While Rahm Emanuel was closing a record number of schools in the name of austerity for the masses and prosperity for the asses, Michelle Obama and Parker lectured the proles on the necessity of exercise. What better, "value-added" way for kids suffering bipartisan food stamp cuts to lose even more weight: they should sprint across town to their faraway new schools in Air Jordans manufactured by kids even poorer than themselves. Never mind that the parents of these kids can't afford the Nike brand. Nothing gets in the way of Public-Private Predation, euphemized as free market solutions to social problems caused and perpetuated by the free market.

Nike gets away with paying child laborers pennies per hour by ostentatiously "investing" $50 million in order to shame slightly less hungry American kids into getting off their lazy butts in order to become active consumers of brand name couture. The Nike Brand and the Obama Brand feed off one another.

Michelle and Mark (Invisible Free Market God Is Shown at Your Right)

The Family That Brands Together Stands Together

So Obama is no longer trying to pretend to be on the side of the people who elected him. Like a corporate logo, he's just doin' us. He's in The Zone: the Twilight of His Presidency Zone. His visit to Nike is not only his dog-whistle to Wall Street -- it's his bullhorn to Wall Street. He is cynically signalling to his past, present and future paymasters that even should the TPP go down in defeat, he tried. He really, really tried.

These truly are the times that try our soles.

Nike's Obama Brand (Odor Eaters Recommended, But Not Included)

*Update (5/8): Odor-Eater alert! Get ready for the next Big Lie, once again brought to you by Obama's favorite steno, Peter Baker of the New York Times. The headline makes no effort to hide its shameless mendacity: Nike To Create Jobs If Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Approved.

The article then goes on to claim, without a shred of evidence or a shred of investigation, that the Sweatshop of the Pacific will create 10,000 new American jobs -- if and only if Nike and the rest of the global corporacracy are allowed take over more sovereign legislatures and court systems. The Times should be sued for journalistic malpractice, and Baker should go to work for Fox News. 

**Update (5/9): As of this morning, Peter Baker had revised his article a pretty amazing eight times. The invaluable NYteXaminer has the Diffs, allowing us to watch the frantic propaganda spin out in real time. The narrative morphs from Nike's job creation being uncritically reported as fact by the newspaper, followed several hours later by a smarmy Nike "linking" of the trade pact to job creation, then on to both Obama and Nike using the passive-aggressive "linking" word, then Baker rewriting the lede into the usual lazy he said/she said battle of the partisans (Obama accuses Democrats of lying and he is usually mean, according to Peter Baker, only to the Republicans!) and finally, modifying the presidential temper tantrum into a more righteous "scolding" of Democrats. I wrote two comments, the first addressing the initial sneaky changes to the article,  and the other remarking Obama's public hissy fit:

At least the editors now have the decency to change the headline of this piece to Nike merely "linking" passage of the TPP to 10,000 new American jobs. When it first appeared early today, this is what the Times slavishly and unquestioningly announced: "Nike To Create Jobs If Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Approved." The piece was online for hours before its more "balanced" revision was posted, and it was opened up for reader comments.

Readers giving the homepage a quick glance this morning would have been under the (desired) mistaken impression that the creation of 10,000 new jobs was engraved in stone and was a fact, not just an "aspiration."

I'm wondering if the 10,000 figure is simply the monetary equivalent of how many jobs COULD be created, should the CEO and board and investors choose not to pocket the windfall profits from this corporate coup. If their claim or promise is further revised to read it would "support" 10,000 jobs, then there's your proof of the bait and switch. Obama has already been awarded the maximum four Pinocchios by Glenn Kessler for using similar phony jobs numbers to push this deal from hell.

This article does not attempt to verify Nike's claim that its Vietnamese wage slaves are being treated any better. What salary are they paid? The Nike CEO, himself worth a cool $23 billion, has refused to say. I wish this newspaper would do a little more investigating. Coverage thus far of the TPP by all of the mainstream media has been, to be blunt, abysmal.

***

To paraphrase Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama should put up or shut up.

After he'd previously accused Warren and other Democrats of lying about the TPP, she and a group of fellow Democrats had challenged him to make the terms and conditions of the deal public, so that the public and the reps they elect can make an informed decision without being subject to what can now only be called presidential badgering, even attempted extortion. (if you don't do what he wants, it just naturally follows that you love unemployment, hate the middle class, and are not "patriotic.")

To date, Obama hasn't had the decency to reply to the Democrats he smarmily professes to love. He resorts to throwing a public temper tantrum the day after shamelessly raking in even more millions from the wealthy donors he serves.

Obama might not have a political agenda, but he is definitely campaigning for what promises to be a long and lucrative post-presidential career. He is fully embracing his lame duck (or should I say golden goose) status and thumbing his nose at the people who elected him.

The man just squandered a huge chunk of whatever public support he still had left. And he doesn't seem to care. He is resorting to the lowest form of sophistry.