“Fact and Scrutiny”
So this is how Barack Obama is moving into the final 20 months of his dismal neoliberal presidency, which he once (proudly) described as ideologically akin to the Eisenhower White House. He is nauseating much of his own Wall Street-captive party’s electoral base by trying to push through the absurdly regressive, secretive, eco-cidal, and global-corporatist Trans Pacific Partnership treaty – a massive investor rights measure that promises to reduce wages, deepen inequality, undermine popular sovereignty, and assault already endangered livable ecology in the name of (what else?) “free trade” and “growth.”
The treaty is so toxically capitalist and transparently authoritarian that even the leading right-wing corporate Democrats Bill and Hillary Clinton – champions of the arch-neoliberal North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – have to keep their distance from it in accord with Mrs. Clinton’s presidential ambitions.
After going on television to childishly claim that U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s elementarily logical and evidence-based “arguments [against TPP] don’t stand the test of fact and scrutiny” (harsh if inept words for a top party colleague and ally), Obama was at first unable to persuade all but one U.S. Senate Democrat not to block his bid for “fast-track” legislation, which would grant the president to bring the TPP to an up-or-down floor vote with no amendments. A subsequent re-do secured enough sold-out Democratic votes to combine with unanimous Republican support to succeed in the upper Congressional body.
“A Striking Piece of This President’s Environmental Legacy”