trade policies

Raise your hand if you think Hillary's "adoption" of Bernie's positions of anything is more than just soon-to-be-abandoned primary posturing with no significance regaring her adminisration's future policy agenda. Now go put on a dunce cap and sit in the corner. Sure, she no longer publicly insists that the TPP is the "gold standard" of trade agreements, but there are indications that she's never really changed her mind about the horrible treaty she helped negotiate. Ironically, Trump will hammer her if she backs away from the flip-flop Bernie's campaign forced her to make.

Japan's Parliament is debating the TPP this week. But our Congress isn't. For all the GOP bullshit about letting the voters decide who the next Supreme Court just will be, they certainly have no intention of letting the voters decide who their next congressmembers will be based on a TPP vote. The strategy for thwarting the voters-- rigging the system, if you will-- is to keep it as quiet as you can and then vote on it after the election, probably during the lame duck session so that defeated members have been bribed and blackmailed into supporting it.

It became clear during the 2008 Democratic primary that Obama knew what was wrong with NAFTA and knew he could use it effectively as a weapon against his neoliberal, free-trade-supporting opponent, Hillary Clinton. Once Obama got into office he seems to have forgot his NAFTA-related trade promises-- and worse. We'll get to the TPP in a moment. Recall that on November 17, 1993-- quite late at night-- the House voted on NAFTA, the George H.W. Bush "free trade" bill that he tried to pass but couldn't. Bill Clinton assured Wall Street he would get done. And it got done.

Hillary was a big booster of the catastrophic Bush-Cheney decision to invade Iraq and disrupt the stability of the Middle East. Bernie was adamantly opposed. It turned out it be the worst American foreign policy decision in at least a century. And it is far from the only example of Hillary's instinctually bad, Republican-oriented decision-making in terms of foreign policy. Take a look at the video up top that shows her shilling for the terrible Panama Free Trade Agreement, juxtaposed with Bernie carefully laying out why that agreement was a terrible idea.

I bet everyone inside Fortress Hillary in Brooklyn breathed a sign of relief when the Panama Papers of money launderers and assorted financial criminals started leaking and didn't show any Clintons, Mezvinskys or any of the other shady characters they've surrounded themselves with. I'm told, though, there's plenty more to come.

"It’s remarkable to me that anyone, Republican or Democrat, when given the breathtaking power to choose the rules by which we all live, would be so impoverished in spirit that he or she would be unable to come up with anything useful to do-- whether before, during or after an election."Matt Fuller did a very smart column for HuffPo Tuesday about how anti-Establishment Republicans want to

Income of Americans age 20-24 since 1979 compared to other age groups (source; click to enlarge)by Gaius PubliusThe Sanders- and Trump-led (for now) political rebellion is not going to go away. There are only two questions going forward:

Shouldn't Pres. Trump pick the next Supreme Court Justice?The Republicans don't want Obama picking a replacement for Antonin Scalia-- and Don Trump agrees.

Donald Trump talking about trade during his March 8 victory speechby Gaius PubliusShorter Thomas Frank: It's easier for liberals to blame Trump voters for racism than to blame themselves for the job-loss and pain of the working class. I want to share a piece about Donald Trump, racism and working class voters. It's long enough (and good enough) to ask you to read the whole thing.

Friday night there was a news-dump of more Hillary e-mails. For reasons that will be obvious in a moment, one particularly interested me. Longtime Clinton Family retainer Sidney Blumenthal is a really good writer and a very strategic thinker.