R.K.: Let's talk about free trade.
A.R.: Okay.
R.K.: Obama is rabidly for free trade and the worst free trade agreements that we've ever seen; the TPP, Trans Pacific Partnership, and its counterpart the Atlantic one. Where does that fit in with liberalism and progressivism and the left?
A.R.: Well, here you go. I think that's a great question. One of the more revealing moments that I can think of in the recent months, or years, was I'm sure a lot of your listeners will recall the speech that Obama gave that was supposed to be about inequality. This was supposedly a landmark statement, it wasn't much.
It's like most of his speeches. It's much more gestures than content, but what struck me about it in particular is the same time that he makes the gesture towards being concerned with inequality, in almost the same moment he's twisting the arms of Congressional Democrats to get them to vote for the TPP which, I agree with you, is frightening in its scope and potential, and I think it's clear now, as Lori Wallach at Public Citizen, on whose board I've sat for sixteen years, have been arguing since NAFTA, that these trade agreements aren't about trade anyway and what they're ultimately about is consolidating corporate property rights trans-nationally which includes, among other things, driving down weight scales in the entire region covered by the agreement. It's like an accelerant poured on the fire of the race to the bottom.
And I think that that is particularly instructive with respect to the notions of equality and inequality under neo-liberalism, right, because it's completely... I mean, the way that Obama can give that speech in the abstract, where he bemoans the existence, or the problem of growing inequality and then at practically at the same moment in the concrete, lobby for a trade agreement that will deepen and intensify inequality probably on an exponential scale points to the contradiction at the core of democratic neo-liberalism.
There were gestures that we get but the reality all goes to the investor class. And again, I have a very good friend who is an English professor actively involved now in a faculty union effort at the University of Illinois in Chicago but who has made the point for years that the problem with a notion of justice and equality that is anchored fundamentally on narratives of standards of multiculturalism and diversity is that those notions would justify a population, or a society in which 1% of the population controls 95% of the resources but so long as half of the 1% are made up of women, 12% blacks, 12 -- 13% are Latinos and the appropriate numbers of gays and lesbians, it would be a just society, right?
R.K.: You know, let me throw one other thing out. I call my show the Bottom Up Radio show because I believe we are in a transition from a top-down to a bottom-up culture...
A.R.: Yes, I like that too, by the way.
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