Question: For those here who feel Obama’s support of the TPP will end up ..

[busterbrown]

as being NAFTA on Steroids.. Why the hell would our POTUS end his Presidency by severely hurting his legacy.. ..Jesus,.Middle Class Tax Breaks, Support of Tax increases to the rich, Tremendous results of his war on terror, Peace Treaty with Iran, LGBT Support, Immigration Reform ( curtailing deportation) Preventing Alaskan Pipeline..

Fuck it, just read this...
http://pleasecutthecrap.com/obama-accomplishments/

Tell me again why would he just flush all this right down the toilet?

In the meantime here is another take on the TPP..

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/13/8208017/obama-trans-pacific-partnership

[Autumn]

1. NAFTA didn't hurt Bills legacy or his earning power

I don't imagine the TPP will hurt Obamas legacy or his earning power.

[busterbrown]

5. It sure did hurt Clinton.. Every time he’s doing one of his good will..

tours. I can’t get by his support of NAFTA.. I know many others who feel the same..

[Autumn]

7. You gonna be okay with Obama pushing through the TPP?

Because that's NAFTA on steroids. Doesn't harm their earning power, their kids are set for life and their legacy is just that, legacy good and bad.

[busterbrown]

11. I don’t know..but I’m not jumping to conclusion like so many here.. N/T..

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/13/8208017/obama-trans-pacific-partnership

[swilton]

15. Earning power

can purchase a lot of academics to write favorable legacy enhancing analyses and biographies.

[Autumn]

18. Indeed it can, and it has and it will continue to do so.

After all it's money.

[delrem]

10. You know what Clinton is worth today, in cold hard cash?

What do your feelings re. NAFTA have to do with that? Answer: nothing. Nothing whatsoever, because that cash doesn't owe to your feelings. It owes to Bill Clinton's corporate masters.

[1StrongBlackMan]

12. Hell NAFTA was/is so bad ...

it's hurting his wife, who had nothing to do with it, other than being married to the guy that promoted and signed it.

[NoJusticeNoPeace]

2. On this ONE subject, I think he is wrong.

Maybe drones too, but other than that hard to find a bigger supporter or defender of his.

Here is what I think he knows that he cant tell us.

He has admitted I think yesterday on tweety's show that manufacturing jobs are permanently gone from America.

that we have to adapt to this new "world order", though I am sure he didnt use that phrase

And to do that we have to accept our new, somewhat compromised position in world economics, and TPP keeps us from total annihilation.

The reason I have issue with it other than all the obvious reasons, if true, about how foreign corps can tell us how to regulate and so on, is that we do NOT have to give in to a world economic deal if we would be willing to reinstate tariffs and force a situation where most of what we buy, we make.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

3. Why would any President?

You left out a few pieces of his legacy, btw. Lower workforce participation, increased poverty levels, an economic 'recovery' in which 93% of the rebound went to the richest of the rich, ever widening gap between the rich and poor, failure to prosecute war criminals and torturers, failure to prosecute any of the execs who caused the Bush depression or break up any of the TBTF financial institutions, massive domestic spying, federal intelligence sharing to break up peaceful protests, vast increases in fracking and expansion of oil fields, vast expansion of undeclared global drone strikes killing civilians, etc, etc, etc.

The President is in the 1% and he and his family will be the rest of their lives. Think he wants to be ostracized by all of the other 1%ers?

[busterbrown]

9. Everything you mention is correct..However

it was all in place by 2008..I couldn’t disagree with you more on his need to be part of the 1% That just sounds stupid.. Sorry!

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

14. If you think that part's stupid then ignore it.

But if you agree that the rest is correct, then you have to admit his 'legacy' is a mixed bag, so there's no particular reason to assume that doing one more negative thing is going to 'flush' his legacy. And remember that he's surrounded himself with economics types from the previous Republican administration for most of the time he's been in office. You can bet they've been feeding him RW economic advice all along, so it's also simply possible he believes the nonsense he's being told by his advisors. The same people who designed a 'recovery' that almost exclusively benefited the wealthy are no doubt also telling him this trade deal will benefit the rest of us as well.

The 'team of rivals' thing sounds nice, but when the rivals all have a right wing pro-corporate agenda, that's what they're going to push.

[busterbrown]

19. Man he was dealing w/an almost impossible position when he took office..

He took things very slowly, but he did surround himself with Bankers... Again just imagine if he brought in Bernie Sanders and E. Warren at the beginning and they began their triads..Country would be feeding off the thought of Kenyan Socialism... And the fact is that he did bring Warren in which is and will be
Wall Streets worst dream.. If he is such Wall Street guy, he would never of supported Warren on anything..

[1StrongBlackMan]

20. This is a fallacious agreement ...

You left out a few pieces of his legacy, btw. Lower workforce participation, increased poverty levels,

Because of demographics, i.e., an aging and growing population ... A President has no control over, either.

an economic 'recovery' in which 93% of the rebound went to the richest of the rich, ever widening gap between the rich and poor

Because of a change in the sources of income/wealth. A President has no control of this, either.

failure to prosecute war criminals and torturers

I've argued before, and DU didn't like it ... Do you realize the Pandora's box that would be ripped open, if this Administration were to prosecute a prior administration for what amounts to political decisions. I know ... I know ... let's all suspend the reality of the, likely, results in order to talk about the "principles", that we have the luxury of not having to live through the fall-out.

failure to prosecute any of the execs who caused the Bush depression or break up any of the TBTF financial institutions

Prosecute the EXECUTIVES for what? Or, is prosecuting the executives (without the requisite evidence of wrong-doing) okay with you ... so long as there are prosecutions? Bad outcomes, even bad outcomes based solely on greed, does not equal criminality. (the sole Federal Judge that called for prosecutions, argued doing so based "willful blindness", a legal theory, he, himself, has rejected in his court.)

And the how, exactly, would the President break up the TBTF banks ... short of nationalization.

massive domestic spying

Which he addressed ... to the extent that he could.

I could go on, at the risk of being called (again) an "Obamabot" or any of the other lovely descriptors applied to folks that apply critical thinking along with an inability to divorce one's self from real life experience, in order to form an opinion.

But I will address this:

The President is in the 1% and he and his family will be the rest of their lives. Think he wants to be ostracized by all of the other 1%ers?

Really? He may have the income of the 1% (like a number of DU heros); but he, nor his family, will never be of the 1% (whatever the hell that has come to mean). Do I have to explain why?

[pscot]

31. Me? Shooting dice?

With who? (See joke #23 in Cap'n Billy's Whiz Bang)

[1StrongBlackMan]

32. ???

[pscot]

36. Riffing on the punch line

of a joke that was stale a hundred years ago. I apologize for the obscurity.

[arcane1]

4. The "Legacy" is only what the media says it is. See: Reagan

Plus, Clinton did the same thing with NAFTA.

[delrem]

6. Why did Bill Clinton oversee the repeal of Glass-Steagall?

And should we be amused at the speculation that the question encourages, or should we just be pissed off that he did it?

[NanceGreggs]

8. But all of those accomplishments ...

... were just an evil trick to fool us all.

He apparently wanted to lull the citizenry into a false sense of security so that when he destroyed the nation, it would come as a big "gotcha".

"Tell me again why would he just flush all this right down the toilet?"

His motives for doing so are obvious and plentiful - even though no one has yet to come up with a single one.

He is pure evil, this Kenyan-born secret Muslin, bent on the destruction of an entire nation, eager to destroy his own legacy and go down in history as the most vilified president in US history.

THAT was his plan all along. I can't believe you missed the bleedin' obvious.




>>> for those who actually require it.

[busterbrown]

13. Thank You n/t

[busterbrown]

16. Boy .. Chris M is doing the best he can to explain it all..

and doing a great job.. Starting with the idea that this deal is being done in secrete. Bullshit..90 day review period and there is current access as it is being written..

And I’m not a big Tweety Fan... Best I’ve seen him in along time..

[winter is coming]

17. He may be less invested in his "legacy" than you are. n/t

[busterbrown]

21. meaning?

Obama’s legacy is not my concern.. But it is sure as hell his..Ya don’t think?

[winter is coming]

22. I don't know. As others have said, look at Reagan.

Or he may believe that history will agree with him that the TPP was a good thing, but I don't think the Democratic senators who are opposed to the TPP are making stuff up.

[busterbrown]

23. If u can.. watch the rerun of Tweety tonight.

Not a Mathew’s fan.. but he’s good on this one..
Let me know what u think.. Hey I’m just asking not telling..

[winter is coming]

25. If you're referring to his "Let Me Finish" segment, I saw it and thought it was poorly constructed.

First, there was a "trade good" message I found overly simplistic. Rejecting TPP (or wanting to take a closer look at it) isn't the same thing as advocating economic isolation, and believing that trade agreements in general might be beneficial doesn't obligate us to buy a pig in a poke.

His examples of how trade competition has given us better products were poor. I remember when Japanese cars first became popular and it was the fuel efficiency, not the lower incidence of repairs, that helped them sell. I can't speak about the quality of domestic cars since 2000, although I think it's actually gone up, but back in the 80s and 90s domestic cars did not completely die on you after 2 or 3 years. What happened, if you kept a domestic car for a long time, was that you'd go through a cycle, every 4 to 6 years, of needing to replace a lot of stuff. Even with that, Japanese cars were selling at such a premium that you could buy a domestic car and still end up spending less money, even accounting for the more frequent repairs. So, on the whole, not that big a win for the consumer.

And his example about clothing being better: no. Not even remotely. Perhaps he buys custom-made suits, but the clothing I see in departments stores has cheaper-quality fabric and much shoddier construction than it did ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago. The quality of the off-the-rack clothing, both its fabric content and its construction, is steadily declining because corporations keep chasing the pennies.

The "competition" we've gotten from global trade has largely been price, not quality, competition. The end result is that most of the merchandise out there today is crap, and a lot of manufacturing jobs have gone away. I don't see that as a compelling argument for global trade.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

27. tangential in terms of the OP, but

100% agreement on the quality vs cost. Globalization has gotten us a lot of dirt cheap, poorly made imports. And ones frequently found to have various toxins in them because the countries in which they were made had lax to nonexistent regulations. If I want to buy quality, I almost always have to buy American, barring a few items from places like Germany that are just as pricey, and have equal or even better regulations than the US.

Globalization of trade is about one thing only - extracting more money for capital. It's not about 'making things better' for poor countries, it's not about 'creating jobs' in wealthier countries.

[appalachiablue]

33. +10

[1StrongBlackMan]

35. Actually, I don't think President Obama is invested in his legacy, at all ...

He is, however, (and, I believe) invested in doing what he believes is best for the American people.

[Thinkingabout]

24. I am reserving my opinion until the final version is available also.

I like your thinking why would Obama want to leave a bad trade agreement for his legacy. He says it is better, until I see differently then I still look to ha a trade agreement which corrects some of the problems of prior agreements. I am beginning to think if TPP is reached to correct past problems then many will not have anything to bitch about or they like NAFTA a lot.

[mike_c]

26. why ask us this question?

No one here knows the answer. Only Obama can answer your question. Why is he doing that, indeed?

[Kelvin Mace]

28. Because if he expects to have a lucrative

Post-presidential career, he has to make it easy for Wall Street. Look at how much money getting rid of the Glass-Stegall Act made for Bill Clinton. He went from in debt to a net worth of $55 million and rising.

[busterbrown]

29. lots of bullshit on this thread...

Obama’s main goal in life is to join the democratic 1% when his term is up..

No one stated this.. but inferred..

[blkmusclmachine]

30. http://conservativewatchnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Obama-laughing_THUMB.jpg

[rury]

34. Thanks and kudos for this OP!

President Obama knows what he is doing and believes the TPP is the right course of action.
And I trust him.