A funny thing happened on the way to Mau-mauing Barack Obama [View all]

[sheshe2]

By Liberal Librarian

So, Senator Elizabeth Warren and presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders have been on the warpath over the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its attendant fast track trade authority. In doing so, they have engendered much support among the usual—and some not-so-usual—sectors. Namely, the people who always thought Barack Obama was a sell-out to corporate special interests, evidenced by him not frog-marching Jamie Dimon and other banksters to stand for federal indictments over the 2008 meltdown.

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It’s the idea that Pres. Obama would cavalierly undo one of his signature achievements—setting up rules so that 2008 didn’t happen again, rules which he plucked an obscure academic named Elizabeth Warren to help implement—to coddle the same Wall Street is ludicrous on its face.

Of course, it’s not ludicrous if one thinks that “Obama was always going to betray us.” The sense of perpetual disappointment—both on the Left and the Right—drives much of the country’s political culture. This is due, in large part, because of the apparent lack of legitimacy of many government institutions, stoked by a right-wing drive to paint all government as useless, and a concomitant view on the left that the government is a subsidiary of corporate America.

But people who should know better are now feeding the fires of disillusion.

Sen. Warren’s main gripe is that “the public isn’t seeing the bill”. Oddly, as this interview with Greg Sargent illustrates, she keeps moving the goal posts. She, of course, can see the negotiating text in full. It then becomes: “Fast track won’t allow Congress to make changes to the deal”. The problem is that fast track can be revoked if the deal doesn’t meet its stated aims in Congress’ opinion. Then she goes through some more of Pres. Obama’s “hypotheticals”—all hypotheticals that require GOP control of the White House and Congress after 2016. Which would be a good reason to focus energy on winning 2016, rather than shivving the party’s sitting President in the back.

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