We begin APR with Greg Sargent and his interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren about fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement:
PLUM LINE: But don’t you get 60 days to review it after the deal is finalized, with the authority to revoke fast track?
WARREN: The president has committed only to letting the public see this deal after Congress votes to authorize fast track. At that point it will be impossible for us to amend the agreement or to block any part of it without tanking the whole TPP. The TPP is basically done. If the president is so confident it’s a good deal, he should declassify the text and let people see it before asking Congress to tie its hands on fixing it.
Elizabeth Warren and Rosa DeLauro also have an op-ed on TPP in The Boston Globe:
The president argues that the TPP is about who will “write the rules” for 40 percent of the world’s economy — the United States or China. But who is writing the TPP? The text has been classified and the public isn’t permitted to see it, but 28 trade advisory committees have been intimately involved in the negotiations. Of the 566 committee members, 480, or 85 percent, are senior corporate executives or representatives from industry lobbying groups. Many of the advisory committees are made up entirely of industry representatives.
A rigged process leads to a rigged outcome. For evidence of that tilt, look at a key TPP provision: Investor-State Dispute Settlement where big companies get the right to challenge laws they don’t like in front of industry-friendly arbitration panels that sit outside of any court system. Those panels can force taxpayers to write huge checks to big corporations — with no appeals. Workers, environmentalists, and human rights advocates don’t get that special right.
Most Americans don’t think of the minimum wage or antismoking regulations as trade barriers. But a foreign corporation has used ISDS to sue Egypt because Egypt raised its minimum wage. Phillip Morris has gone after Australia and Uruguay to stop them from implementing rules to cut smoking rates. Under the TPP, companies could use ISDS to challenge these kinds of government policy decisions — including food safety rules.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Ellen Shaffer of the Center for Policy Analysis urges senators to vote no on fast-track authority:
The U.S. should certainly engage in a national debate about how to create a 21st century economy that trains and supports the workforce of the future, by allocating public funds to address the needs of a growing and aging population for health care services and housing, innovation to stem climate change and survive the California drought and reversing and repairing centuries of deliberate stigmatization of racial and ethnic minorities and women as an alternative to incarceration.
But in any case, this is not the package the Senate plans to vote on this Tuesday.
John Nichols at The Nation:
Obama’s criticisms, delievered as the Senate was preparing for this week's key votes on the Fast Track request, disregards sincere union members, environmentalists, civil-rights and human-rights activists, as well as Democratic members of the House and Senate, who have an honest disagreement with their president.
It also harms Obama’s credibility, as his comments suggests he may be unaware of the long experience, and the deep insight, possessed by progressive critics of free-trade absolutism. The largest and steadiest public-education project on a major economic issue in modern history has played out over the past quarter-century in union halls and church basements and community centers across the country, as Americans have wrestled with the promises and realities of trade policy.
The people the president says are “wrong” -- a group that includes Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and most House Democrats -- are not unthinking protectionists or crude isolationists. They are supporters of workers, the environment, and human rights in the United States and abroad. They have come to recognize that, while fair trade holds immense promise, free trade along the lines the United States has practiced it in recent decades has done immense damage.
Dana Milbank:
The vast majority of lawmakers in his own party oppose him on trade legislation. Yet rather than accept that they have a legitimate beef, he shows public contempt for them — as he did in an interview with Matt Bai of Yahoo News released over the weekend.
“Their arguments are based on fears, or they’re fighting NAFTA, the trade deal that was passed 25 years ago — or 20 years ago,” he said with a laugh. Sighing, he added, “I understand the emotions behind it, but when you break down the logic of their arguments, I’ve got to say that there’s not much there there.” [...]
The rhetoric suggests that Obama has given up trying to persuade his fellow Democrats to join him in supporting “fast track” approval of the emerging Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and that he’s lashing out at them in anger. The fast-track legislation faces its first test Tuesday with a vote in the Senate, and it looks to be a squeaker. Even if the free-traders get the required 60 votes, supporters won’t have momentum going into a vote in the House, where the legislation faces a tougher slog.
Switching topics,
Michael Tomasky takes Jeb Bush apart on his Iraq War stance:
He made two statements in the interview that we should parse, the first of which was probably a lie and second of which provably was. The first: “I would have [authorized the invasion], and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody.” Really, particularly given what we know now?
Yes, she voted for the war. I’m not defending her vote. It was a craven vote, just like John Kerry’s was, and they never should have cast them. But does it follow that casting a vote as a senator means that, if the senator had been commander-in-chief, the senator would have chosen to pursue that kind of presidency-defining course of action? Would have put the machinery of the state to work—and massive, difficult work it was, involving thousands—trying to advance the lie of tying Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda and justifying a war that had nothing to do with September 11? [...] None of this necessarily means that Bush would, say, drag the United States into a war with Iran. At the same time, let’s be clear on a crucial point: Jeb didn’t say he’d have authorized the war in Iraq solely for the sake of his brother and peace at the Thanksgiving table. He said it also because it’s where the Republican Party still is today. Most of the rest of the civilized world thinks the Iraq invasion was one of the great calamities of U.S. foreign policy history, if not the greatest. But to the neoconservative foreign policy establishment, and evidently still to the moneyed donor base too, it was still somehow the right thing to do.
On a final note,
Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post provides an excellent takedown of what it's really like to run the government "like a business":
A good CEO knows that not all spending is created equal. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. In other words, “running government like a business” means not cutting every government program by 10 percent, as Carson has suggested, but adequately funding the initiatives that offer the highest returns on investment.
To that end, I humbly suggest several places these corporate-minded, fiscally conservative candidates should increase spending...