On the first day of the Democratic National Convention, Bernie Sanders supporters could have flooded the Wells Fargo Center with anti-Trump signs, anti-fracking signs, or anti-1 percenter signs — but instead, they made their message opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
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Every visible sign seemed to be the letters “TPP” covered by the red, circle-backslash symbol universally known to mean absolutely no. No surprise, Sanders just spent months zipping around the country like a socialist tornado kicking up all kinds of populist dust and making the case that free trade deals like NAFTA and TPP sell American jobs to the lowest bidder.
Anyone who believes Clinton or Kaine has a shred of actual animosity toward the TPP should ride a unicorn to work and brush their teeth with fairy dust — because that’s what you do in the Land of Make-Believe.
On the first night of the convention, Bernie Sanders tried to shake the anti-Wall Street, anti-Establishment, anti-free trade Etch-a-Sketch he’s been drawing on all year. “That was fun, but seriously let’s support pro-everything-we-despise Hillary Clinton now.”
Shortly after the TPP deal was announced, Sanders issued a statement calling it a “disastrous” job-killer.
And — I don’t say this often about Sanders — but he’s right.
American workers can’t compete with workers who will work all hours of the day for worse-than-Gilded-Age wages, and the government shouldn’t force them to. All these deals do for America is run up our trade deficit and send away our manufacturing jobs. There are already a record 95 million American adults sitting out of the labor force — we should pursue policies to send that number down not up. These deals are for the kind of multinational corporations that pay to keep Hillary Clinton in the politics business.
After last night’s DNC roll call, we now have the two major party candidates for president: Clinton on the Democratic side and Donald Trump on the Republican side. No matter how many times Clinton claims to be against it, only a Trump victory can stop the trade deal that Sanders and Trump have slammed with adjectives like “terrible” and “disastrous.”
First of all, Hillary spent years lauding the TPP.
Last year, Jake Tapper and his staff at CNN put together an article titled, “45 times Secretary Clinton pushed the trade deal she now opposes.” 45 times! From January of 2010 to January of 2013 she couldn’t wait to tell the world how great the TPP is. She told everyone it was going to tear down so many barriers. But the minute she found out barriers are in this year, she opposed it.
In 2012, she said it sets the gold standard. Now the she’s running for president, she claims she said she “hoped it would set the gold standard.” What she really hoped is that everyone would be too lazy to Google what she actually said.
This is nothing new for Clinton. She’s always suddenly against terrible free trade agreements when there’s an election to be won. In her disastrous 2008 presidential bid, then-Senator Obama had to call her out on the same thing.
“The fact is, she was saying great things about NAFTA until she started running for president. A couple of years after it passed, she said NAFTA was a ‘free and fair trade agreement’ and that it was ‘proving its worth.’ And in 2004, she said, ‘I think, on balance, NAFTA has been good for New York State and America.’ ”
Politifact agreed with Obama.
If Clinton really opposes the TPP now, why would she pick Tim Kaine as a running mate? Kaine supported TPP — but after he was chosen by Clinton, CBS News reported:
“A Clinton aide confirmed to CBS News that Kaine had made a private commitment to Clinton that he would now oppose TPP.”
Anyone who believes Clinton or Kaine has a shred of actual animosity toward the TPP should ride a unicorn to work and brush their teeth with fairy dust — because that’s what you do in the Land of Make-Believe. In Reality-ville, Clinton’s political opportunism is flagrantly transparent — pacify Sanders supporters until their votes are passed.
Close-Clinton ally Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe all but let the cat out of the bag on Clinton’s TPP sleight of hand after his speech to the DNC Convention Tuesday.
“I worry that if we don’t do TPP, at some point China’s going to break the rules — but Hillary understands this,” McAuliffe said to Politico. “Once the election’s over, and we sit down on trade, people understand a couple things we want to fix on it but going forward we got to build a global economy.”
When Politico pressed the longtime Clinton confident if he meant Clinton was just temporarily opposing the TPP to get Sanders voters in line, he said: “Yes. Listen, she was in support of it. There were specific things in it she wants fixed.”
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President Obama likes TPP. His administration worked hard on it for a very long time, and now he’s pushing for it to pass on his watch. Obama’s all-in on TPP.
You know, Obama, the guy who was letting Hillary hang with him on Air Force One while FBI Director Comey was describing her corruption to the world. The guy whose DOJ didn’t indict her for her private server despite the mountain of evidence. The guy who’s about to take the stage at the DNC and tell everyone to go vote for her. Yeah — that guy loves the TPP. And if he wants to push it through the lame duck Congress, Hillary Clinton isn’t going to stop him.
If Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump were to be elected in November, it would be a clear anti-TPP mandate from the American people. No such mandate results from Clinton/Kaine victory. Far from it. When the polls close in November, a hypothetical President Clinton will owe a lot of corporate donors a lot of favorable policy, and I bet not one of them is anti-TPP.
Hillary hired Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was head of the DNC that tipped the primary scales in Hillary’s favor. She reached to her ideological right for a VP. She didn’t fight to make the party platform anti-TPP. How many more times will Sanders supporters let Hillary poke them in the eye before they start poking back?
With Sanders out, Trump is the only hope to stop the TPP.
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