2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumDemocrats’ civil war over free trade
The most important trade bill in a decade has pitted Harry Reid against President Barack Obama. Liberal Democrat Rosa DeLauro against moderate Democrat Ron Kind. Labor unions against pro-business Democrats. And Elizabeth Warren against virtually everyone who supports a landmark piece of legislation that would allow the president to close what could be the biggest free-trade deal in history.
The open warring among Democrats over fast-track trade legislation, and the partys broader existential crisis on free trade, grew more pronounced Thursday as senior lawmakers announced a breakthrough on the trade bill. Many Democrats still feel the burn, 20 years later, of lost manufacturing jobs from the North American Free Trade Agreement pushed through by former President Bill Clinton and they fear another Democratic president is on the verge of turning his back on working-class Americans by negotiating a trade deal that would send jobs overseas.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/democrats-free-trade-bill-117066.html#ixzz3XYAl0Rjx
msongs
(67,462 posts)UCmeNdc
(9,601 posts)How?
1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)Admiral Loinpresser
(3,859 posts)I believe it is further empowerment of corporate facism. Whether you agree with that or not, it means the emasculation of climate change legislation and green businesses as documented by Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything. It means the diminishment of access to drinking water by native and rural people overseas. We need to be withdrawing from current agreements, not creating new ones.
Until labor and environmentalists have a front-row at the negotiating table, these agreements are nothing less than a major component of the pro-death agenda of the Democratic and Republican Parties and corporatists everywhere.