Bad news, but how bad can't be determined until we see the treaty.
A day after President Obama said in a
Hardball interview that Elizabeth Warren is wrong in her views about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Massachusetts senator fired back with a
blog post on her campaign website that gets right to the heart of the matter:
The Administration says I’m wrong—that there’s nothing to worry about. They say the deal is nearly done, and they are making a lot of promises about how the deal will affect workers, the environment, and human rights. Promises—but people like you can’t see the actual deal.
For more than two years now, giant corporations have had an enormous amount of access to see the parts of the deal that might affect them and to give their views as negotiations progressed. But the doors stayed locked for the regular people whose jobs are on the line.
Here's Obama in his Tuesday interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews:
"I love Elizabeth. We’re allies on a whole host of issues. But she’s wrong on this," he said.
"I would not be doing this trade deal if I did not think it was good for the middle class," Obama added. "And when you hear folks make a lot of suggestions about how bad this trade deal is, when you dig into the facts, they are wrong.”
Somebody is definitely wrong. And that being the case, the rush to approve this treaty, this pig in a poke, is obscene.
Before reading more below, please join us in signing the petition to Nancy Pelosi: Oppose Fast Track for TPP.
Legislation with far lesser impacts than this secretly negotiated treaty is fully aired, and often amended, before the votes are cast. Why should the TPP be excluded from this process? As Warren writes:
Sherrod Brown has been leading this fight, and he points out that TPP isn’t classified military intelligence—it’s a trade agreement among 12 countries that control 40% of the world’s economy. A trade agreement that affects jobs, environmental regulations, and whether workers around the globe are treated humanely. It might even affect the new financial rules we put in place after the 2008 crisis. This trade agreement doesn’t matter to just the biggest corporations—it matters to all of us.
We’ve all seen the tricks and traps that corporations hide in the fine print of contracts. We’ve all seen the provisions they slip into legislation to rig the game in their favor. Now just imagine what they have done working behind closed doors with TPP.
Tricks and traps. It's easy to imagine what else of that nature might be in the TPP given what the leaks have already shown.
Mr. President, there's a simple way to find out whether you or Sen. Warren is wrong about this. Show us the goods. Let us see what has been being secretly negotiated over the past few years. Let us citizens have a look at what more than 500 corporate representatives have seen and they have plugged into the TPP.
Let us trust and verify, Mr. President.
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Lefty Coaster has a post on this subject here. Thomas Twinnings has one here.