The Dems are beaten back in the midterms and suddenly, the President starts sounding like a progressive.
Suddenly, Barack Obama wants to maintain net neutrality and he's muscular about it. The president has made an "historic" climate deal with China, pledging that the United States will cut its planet-warming carbon pollution by as much as 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.
Mr. Obama is even backing away (kinda sorta) from the Keystone Pipeline.
I find it all a bit audacious and, honestly, fraught with bullshit. It is simply not possible for Obama to be a champion of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and, at the same time, be serious, or even honest, in this new progressivesque turn as as champion of net neutrality, mitigating climate upheaval, and turning away from the pipeline.
Not to mention that whatever he does can be undone either by Congress or the next president.
That's all I wanted to say.
Well, almost all... I give you the venerable Bill Moyers who, way back in 2002, nailed NAFTA and its sovereignty stealing provisions in a must-see documentary. It will help you understand just how dangerous the TPP is...
This is the story of how a trade agreement – supported by two Presidents and ratified by the Congress – became an end-run around the Constitution. The terms were influenced by Washington lawyers and lobbyists – and the companies who employ them. It is now played out in rooms like this.
Chapter 11 is only one provision in the five hundred and fifty-five page North American Free Trade Agreement – negotiated to promote business among the US, Canada and Mexico. It was supposedly written to protect investors if foreign governments tried to seize their property.
But corporations have stretched NAFTA's Chapter 11 to undermine environmental decisions – the decisions of local communities – even the verdict of an American jury. The cases brought – so far – total almost four billion dollars.
The claims are being decided not in open court, but in what has become a system of private justice, in secret tribunals. That's exactly the way the authors of Chapter 11 designed it.