It's been amusing, sort of, to watch the corporate roaches scurrying about, looking here and there for an opening to try to revive the odious fast track legislation.
But, putting aside what we know already, there are two important lessons to learn:
1. We always need to call out phony arguments, like "burial insurance", that politicians want to use to cover their asses when the upshot is they are happy to sacrifice workers to keep a bad system in place.
2. Organizing works--and organizing creates movements.
Ok it's a Hail Mary (via The Wall Street Journal):
Obama administration officials maintained Sunday that they still expected Congress would find a way to pass legislation expanding Mr. Obama’s trade-negotiating powers as the U.S. tries to wrap up a sweeping deal with 11 other countries around the Pacific. House Republican leaders said the burden would rest with the president to shore up support for his trade agenda after Democrats defected late last week, despite a burst of last-minute lobbying by Mr. Obama himself.
But the Democrats, skeptical of how the Pacific trade deal is being negotiated as well as its potential repercussions for U.S. workers, said Sunday they saw little reason yet to loosen their opposition to a package of trade measures stalled in the House.
So, Lesson #1. In the same WSJ piece, this:
Although Democrats have long backed the worker-aid program, many don’t see TAA as fully offsetting the economic blow they expect the Pacific trade deal would inflict on U.S. workers.
“If nothing happens, I’m persuaded that the outcome for American workers is probably net better,” Rep. John Yarmuth (D., Ky.) said last week. Mr. Yarmuth voted against both the fast-track and worker-aid provisions on Friday.
But some Democrats cautioned against letting the trade fight kill a program backed by their party and which expires at the end of September. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D., Va.) said he didn’t expect GOP leaders would make additional concessions, now that the fast-track measure has passed the House.
“Their incentive to come back to the table to negotiate new elements will be severely circumscribed,” said Mr. Connolly, who voted for both measures Friday. “This [vote] may be the last chance to make sure this program is alive and well.”[emphasis added]
My view:
let the Trade Adjustment Assistance program die.
It is a phony program. It sprinkles a few hundred million dollars at hundreds of thousands of workers who had their livelihoods taken away by corporate greed, not to mention does virtually nothing for the communities devastated by decisions these corporations made to run to some other place to exploit other workers.
It tries to mask the cruel reality that the vast majority of the workers who lose their jobs will never find jobs that pay anything near the wages they had before.
And that is not something we should accept as if it is a natural phenomena.
Those are political decisions made by corporations and politicians to sacrifice people. It does not have to be that way.
So, let TAA die--to show even more clearly the foolish, bad decisions made by the president, political parties and the captains of industry who don't give a hoot about regular people.
Lesson #2: a lot of people thought, "oh, this fast track thing is going to pass, what a waste of time, just get over it."
Mostly, though, a lot of hard working activists--I think of the labor movement, which was united, and good citizens groups, and Global Trade Watch was head and shoulders above all the non-labor groups--who banged this and walked the pavement, literally and figuratively. They didn't wave the white flag, and they could have if they wasted a lot of time reading the traditional press as well as, unfortunately, some of the "progressive" new media.
To be sure, we won--for now--because of a tactical campaign that exploited the particular dynamic of tying TAA to the fast track legislation.
But, the MOVEMENT was in the position to take advantage of that tactical moment because it worked really, really hard.
And that's the important lesson: even if fast track rears head again, and even if it passes, all that work creates momentum to blow up a very bad economic system.
Why does anyone think that Hillary Clinton attempted to weasel her way out of a position on fast track? That statement (which was a classic poll-tested attempt to say something AND say nothing of substance) came because of the movement, not because the candidate has all of a sudden seen the light (I certainly respect people who believe that she has undergone a reinvention and is not a populist--I also have some swamp land in Florida for sale...).
It came because all those calls, and all those rallies, and all the organizing has reformed in a lot of peoples' minds a new view about trade and what is right.
Something to celebrate.
(About to board a plane soon so sorry if I don't respond til much later)