President Obama will travel halfway around the world next week to sign a deal opposed by the overwhelming majority of Americans, the top candidates to succeed him in the Oval Office and most members of the president’s own party.
Though Congress has yet to approve the pact, that’s not stopping Obama from signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, aka Obamatrade.
This sweeping international regulatory regime involves 12 nations on four continents. It would subordinate U.S. sovereignty in an economic union governed by unaccountable foreign bureaucrats.
Obamatrade is the president’s top priority and his last major legislative initiative before he leaves office.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership will allow Obama to cement his legacy, locking in his progressive agenda on immigration, energy caps and the international redistribution of American wealth.
It remains to be seen when Obamatrade supporters Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will reward the president with this lovely parting gift.
Donald Trump has opposed Obamatrade all along, calling it for what it is – a disaster for American workers and businesses. But it is supported by the open-borders globalist elite that controls both major parties, all major media, Wall Street and academia.
In its quest for congressional approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the administration is pushing a new study from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a pro-free trade Washington think tank.
Curiously, the study says Obamatrade will cost some 53,000 American manufacturing jobs a year for 10 years. It explicitly says some 537,000 American jobs will move to places like Vietnam, Japan and Malaysia, and Americans will be forced into lower-paying jobs.
Of course, that’s not what the administration’s spin doctors are highlighting. They point to the claim that Obamatrade will “raise national income” by $131 billion dollars.
But people are wise to this flim-flam.
The question is: Who sees that $131 billion in “national income”?
The 50,000 Americans who lose their better-paying jobs as machinists, assembly line workers or craftsmen don’t care if a hundred investment bankers are making more deals, or 50 factory farms are exporting more pork bellies. Those 50,000 Americans are still out of a job, and they know they are not about to get one on Wall Street or at a hog feeding operation in Iowa or North Carolina.
But the think-tank bean counters don’t see, or don’t care about, 50,000 individual flesh-and-blood human beings, with families, children, dreams and unique talents endowed by the Almighty. No, they see interchangeable “economic units” that can be reprogrammed at will to work on the next shovel-ready project.
The study’s computer model predicts we will export more hogs even as we import more manufactured goods from Asia. Therefore, the reasoning goes, the agricultural sector will make up for losses in the manufacturing sector in terms of “national income.” In this abstract wonderland, it’s not that machinists become butchers. Rather, they actually become pigs, like the sailors in Homer’s Odyssey. As a unit of output, an American worker supporting a family is equivalent to an hog carcass for export.
Astonishingly, the study candidly admits Americans whose jobs disappear under Obamatrade will end up taking a pay cut in their next job.
The authors prescribe government compensation for these “adjustment costs” as a “compelling ethical and political objective.” Obama is on board, offering “wage insurance,” a euphemism for welfare checks for low-paid workers.
In the name of economic efficiency, Josef Stalin liquidated the self-sufficient peasants known as kulaks to collectivize Soviet agriculture.
Today, in their worship of economic efficiency, the globalist technocrats would liquidate the self-sufficient American blue-collar worker.
Stalin used bullets and the gulag to eliminate his class enemies. Today’s executioners rely on Obamatrade, alcohol, drugs and suicide to do the job.
Media wishing to interview Curtis Ellis, please contact [email protected].
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