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Trade Bill Fails In the House
schwit1 writes: President Obama suffered a major defeat to his Pacific Rim free trade initiative Friday as House Democrats helped derail a key presidential priority despite his last-minute, personal plea on Capitol Hill. "In a remarkable rejection of a president they have resolutely backed, House Democrats voted to kill assistance to workers displaced by global trade, a program their party created and has stood by for four decades. By doing so, they brought down legislation granting the president trade promotion authority — the power to negotiate trade deals that cannot be amended or filibustered by Congress — before it could even come to a final vote." This was after Silicon Valley heavyweights made a last minute push to pass the bill and the White House got personal with many Democratic lawmakers.
are the last vestige of the place congresscritters respect the will of their voters
in every other realm plutocrats own them
this will be "corrected"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How is that Utopia working out for all of you people that keep thinking more Government will solve all our problems?
That's sort of how the libertarian viewpoint evolves, I guess. Like Reagan started out as a democrat, presumably because he cared about people and favored social reforms. Then after living through the Communist purges in the McCarthy era, he realized that more government power means more chances for government abuse. Which is why he came to say, "Government is not the solution....government is the problem." As many people like to say, the NSA is a greater threat to US liberty than Al Qaeda.
Which doesn't mean you have to like Reagan. The debts he piled up were unconscionable. Realizing that government bureaucracy can be as bad as a Kafka nightmare is something you can do no matter what party you prefer.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
he nordic countries and canada have more government than us and far less corruption. the people are happier, more socially mobile, and pay far less for healthcare and education
The important difference there is that the people of the Nordic countries (at least Sweden and Finland, where I visited and lived) still have faith in their institutions. Americans haven't had faith in our institutions since Watergate. It's not just the Government either; in increasing numbers Americans don't trust business, academia, religion, or any other reasonably sized institution.
The reasons for this are varied -- you could write an entire thesis on the subject -- but at the end of the day it's the reality of the situation, and a Nordic style welfare state is a non-starter in the United States.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The Democrats voted against TAA (the fig-leaf program that pretends to help workers who lose their jobs to a new trade bill), which was contrary to their normal voting pattern, AS A TACTIC TO INDUCE A DELAY. "Fast Track" actually PASSED. Given that TAA and Fast Track passed together in the Senate, their failure to pass together in the House is a temporary shoe tossed into the gears of this monstrosity, BUT it can be overcome easily by the Senate simply mimicking what the House did.
This was political magic for a bunch of people; Democrats Senators will be able to tell their union supporters that they supported TAA (in the earlier Senate action), even as enough of them voted for Fast Track. Democrat House members will be able to say they stood against Fast Track, even though many supported it and the Senate may align their work with what the House did and thereby pass it. Many Republicans who opposed Fast Track were able to vote "yes" in order to placate their business backers even as the thing stalled. Many Republicans who oppose TAA but did not want to be the ones to kill it got to watch as the Dems did that, etc. Nearly every political group in DC got something they can use to deceive this or that voting block. Ultimately, the groups pushing this massive crap sandwich are going to demand it and get it, unless the public (from labor-concerned Dems, to sovereignty-concerned TEA Partiers) stand up and make it clear that votes out-weigh campaign cash.
After 200+ years, the congress critters have highly-optimized the political theater in Washington so their big money backers get what they want without the public getting too mad. They have gotten away with this garbage over and over again with things like NAFTA, the WTO, etc. People on the other side of the Atlantic have had the same thing done to them by their political elites.... The UK into the EU, followed by continual-but-never-filfilled promises of a public vote on that membership was such a trick that subsumed national rules into an international agreement. These things are all alike: they allow the wealthy and powerful to get what they want and the politicians to pretend to be powerless because: unaccountable international body and treaty. They never want the public to ask "WHO CREATED THAT BODY OR THAT TREATY?"