Though most Congressional Democrats oppose Obama's bloodlust to fast track the TPP, under Obama's endless arm-twisting and the sleepless pleadings of corporate lobbyists, their firmness of will on fast track must not be left to chance. If anyone should be considered a traitor to democracy--a little Mengele--it's any Democrat who, full knowing the Democratic minority in Congress is the main bulwark against Obama's and the Republican majority's hard push for fast track, defects from Democrats' principled stance. Only a solid bloc of principled Democrats, backed by an equally principled, smaller bloc of Constitution-loving Republicans, can spare our nation from the horrors of fast track. Defectors from those principled blocs must be visited with electoral punishment.
While this "little Mengele list" has no pretensions of being comprehensive, one notable achiever of that dubious honor deserves special notice. Nobel laureate economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a man whose knowledge and insight I used to respect, has apparently jettisoned his professional objectivity and joined the former "Paper of Record" as official apologist for Obama and corporatist Democrats. Not that Krugman was any great help in fighting prior suspect trade deals like NAFTA, but he did, despite considerable political pressure, once have the objectivity to deflate the Clinton administration's overblown claims for NAFTA as a job creator. Krugman's pooh-poohing of TPP as no big deal, like his willingness to ignore the millions of discouraged and underemployed workers hidden behind deceptively rosy official economics stats, raises grave doubts about his remaining credibility as a guide to economic policy. What's more, in the case of the TPP, he's literally dangerous, lending his vast prestige to complacency over a treaty no believer in democracy should tolerate. Yes, for this Krugman specially merits a "Little Mengele" statuette.
The Pitchfork "French Resistance" against the Mengele Act
Fortunately, a politically astute minority of patriotic, democracy-loving citizens, distributed among numerous activist groups, is organizing heroic resistance to TPP fast track. My own group, Pitchforks Against Plutocracy, is at this point an aspiring movement in its infancy. In certain ways, a quite lamentable fact, since the Pitchfork movement aspires to be a "movement of movements" (MOM), a movement that by focusing on the root source of virtually all legitimate activist grievances--plutocracy--has the potential to unite them all (while each keeps its own identity) into a politically potent voting bloc. Given its obvious usefulness as an electoral "nuclear weapon" to pre-warn Congress of our zero tolerance toward supporters of TPP fast track, the small, newborn status of Pitchforks Against Plutocracy is truly regrettable. In that sense, as in the ferocity of our resistance to tyranny, the Pitchfork movement resembles the underground French Resistance that organized after the Nazis had gained control of France. For by launching a stealth class war long before Americans were even vaguely aware of it, plutocrats' troops are certainly well and widely on the ground.
The good news is that all analogies to Nazi-dominated Vichy France end there, and we are not yet living under armed tyranny. But political trends point strongly in that direction, and if we now tolerate for one second such brazen plutocrat power grabs, such outright mockings of our political passivity, as fast track authority for TPP, the days of such outright tyranny lie not far ahead.
Pitchforks Against Plutocracy, which has tried to plan carefully for its public launch, now has a Facebook page, which we are not yet using as a vehicle of strategy or organizing, but as a gauge of potential support. If you discern the potential of a movement of movements, one strategically uniting varied activist movements in a powerful voting bloc against our common plutocratic enemy--and effectively squelching their power grabs--such as TPP fast track, please like our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CitizensAgainstPlutocracy
Appendix
Focusing on the political context for detesting the TPP, I avoided detailed enumerations of its potential evils. Here are some excellent links:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/31/ten-reasons-why-tpp-must-be-defeated
http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/lori_wallach
http://www.alternet.org/corpor ate-accountability-and-workpla ce/corporate-coup-disguise
(Article changed on January 5, 2015 at 18:28)
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