Fast Track = "Too Big to Fail"?
Is this the right analogy?
It seems like there are many issues with TPP that would be better to examine in a separate trade bill, where legislators in either country country could challenge the issue on its particular merits. Is this deal going to hurt our rice farmers? Let's negotiate something fair.
The main reason to smuggle everything into the huge mega-package of TPP, and then give the President Fast Track powers to approve it, is to smuggle in whatever provisions the various high level players want and insist on getting it all approved together - so any qualms look like a quibbling hold up of the process. (The sort of thing that makes impatient people roll their eyes and groan: "Not again!"
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By rolling all these countries and all these deals into one mega trade deal, the TPP has been deliberately designed to be Too Big to Fail.
Moreover, the staff working on it all have a vested interest in getting the bill passed, so they may spin things in particular ways *just* to get the bill passed. Their *job* is to put lipstick on the pig.
Having seen what Too Big to Fail banks and brokerages did to this country, isn't it strange that Obama would want to preside over a global Too Big to Fail deal as the signature of his Presidency?
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in which the devil is in the details, and that places Congress people and Senators in a position analogous to the position of regulators tasked with the job of reigning in "Too Big To Fail" banks and corporations.
Senators and Congressmen are intentionally placed in a dilemma in which, after ceding their constitutional authority to amend, they are pressured to pass a bill despite bad provisions which could never pass on their own, because to reject the bill outright would be portrayed as rejecting "the best the negotiators could get", portraying those voting "No" as "purists" who "want ponies".
Turning a process developed in the last century to negotiate mutual reduction of tariffs, into a process to sneak massive changes in environmental, labor, financial, health and safety, and intellectual property law through Congress in a bundled, "Too Big To Fail", no-amendment process, is an abusre, and an attack on democratic process.
