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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 6/16/15

Sea Change: Citizens Beat Wall Street And Multinationals In Congress

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Reprinted from Campaign For America's Future

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Something unusual happened Friday. Regular Americans were able to beat Wall Street and the giant corporations in Congress, winning a battle over "fast tracking" so-called "trade" agreements. This sort of thing just doesn't happen very often, but it has been happening more and more lately.

A sea change is taking place. What Politico described as "strong progressive winds" are blowing more and more politicians into the progressive corner. There is broad public opposition to the corrupt, corporate-dominated politics of our country, people are speaking out and making their wishes known, and that is starting to make a difference. This time The Money didn't win.

Sea Change -- Wind At Our Backs

The public is fed up with a government that pushes policies that enrich a few but don't work for most of us. Since the "Reagan Revolution" we have been bathed in corporate/conservative "trickle down" ideological policies 24/7. They tell us that the "job creators" should get breaks and subsidies and "they" will provide "us" with jobs. This has turned out great for about 1 percent of us, but not so much for the rest. Their tax cuts for the rich and corporations combined with cuts in the things government does to make our lives better; their "free trade" policies that broke unions, closed factories, laid off millions and stopped raises; their deregulation of the giant corporations; their refusal to maintain and modernize infrastructure; their privatization of public services; their "corporations are people" nonsense enabling unlimited corporate money to corrupt our elections and our elected officials; and all the rest of their neoliberal, wealth-worshipping crap has hurt so many of us.

People are finally seeing through the smokescreen of "market solution" propaganda and are starting to demand elected officials instead start being on their side. People who analyze and write these things are seeing this uprising developing and crystallizing around the fight to block the fast-tracking of TPP. A few examples:

In a Monday column (that links to a post I wrote) Paul Krugman writes that Democrats believe "... the political wind is at their backs." "The Democratic Party is becoming more assertive about its traditional values...." "Democrats are adopting ideas that work and rejecting ideas that don't, whereas Republicans are doing the opposite...." "[S]omething important is happening, and in the long run it will matter a great deal."

Earlier Krugman tied this sea change to "trade" in particular, in "Decline and Fall of the Davos Democrats" (emphasis added):

"[T]he overall selling of TPP ... has been all lectures from Those Who Know How the Global Economy Works -- the kind of people who go to Davos and participate in earnest panels on the skills gap and the case for putting Alan Simpson in charge of everything -- to the ignorant hippies who don't. You know, ignorant hippies like Joseph Stiglitz and Elizabeth Warren.

"This kind of thing worked in the 1990s, when Davos Man actually did seem to know how the world works. But now Davos Democrats are known as the people who told us to trust unregulated finance and fear invisible bond vigilantes. They just don't have the credibility to pull off arguments from authority any more. And it doesn't say much for their perspicacity that they apparently had no idea that the world has changed.

"TPP's Democratic supporters thought they could dictate to their party like it's 1999. They can't."

Friday's defeat (for now) of fast track showed how the public is starting to hold politicians' feet to the fire, demanding that they work for We the People. John Nichols at The Nation, in "The TPP Fast-Track Vote Wasn't About Obama, It Was About Failed Trade Policies":

"America is moving beyond the point where a politics of partisanship or personality is sufficient to secure support for "free trade" policies that have not worked and that will not work.

"The free-trade model that has been promoted for decades by Democratic and Republican presidents, along with Wall Street interests and multinational corporations, has failed American workers and communities -- and millions of Americans who were part of the president's winning coalitions in 2008 and in 2012 recognize this."

David Dayen at Salon, in "The Democrats' TPP rebellion just drew blood: Everything you need to know about today's shocking vote":

"Trent Lott used to say that you can't pass trade deals in even-numbered years, when the public actually might be paying attention. That's what is likely to happen with more delays. So the clock is the ally of those who oppose the trade deals, and the more they draw it out, the more difficult the climb becomes."

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Dave has more than 20 years of technology industry experience. His earlier career included technical positions, including video game design at Atari and Imagic. He was a pioneer in design and development of productivity and educational (more...)
 

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