Bill Black — Obama & TPP: Every One That Doeth Evil Hateth the Light

President Obama wants the world to know that he takes it personally that the Democratic Party’s base opposes his latest effort to sell out the people of the world to the worst corporations through the infamous Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal. Obama blurted out at a press conference a number of conservative Republican memes as his sole basis for pushing TPP. He then launched personal attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren and labor leaders (without naming them). Obama, who is famous for keeping his cool when criticized by the GOP, is thin-skinned when criticized by Democrats. Obama never raged at the Republicans’ “death panel” attacks on him, but he raged at Warren as supposedly making an equivalently openly dishonest attack on TPP’s secret drafting process.

One of the most reprehensible aspects of TPP is that it is (still) being drafted in secret – that it from us, the people – but with corporate lobbyists literally drafting their wish list. Obama made the critical mistake of personally attacking Warren, which is roughly equivalent to a small town mayor launching a personal attack on Jon Stewart. You know the results will be that Stewart will wipe the floor with the mayor....

Serious smackdown. Bill gives Barack a "black eye."

Obama is the one who infamously told the bankers he was protecting them from the American people’s demands for the restoration of the rule of law so that the banksters would be held accountable for leading the fraud epidemics that drove the financial crisis and the Great Depression. Obama, being Obama, phrased that in the form of a vile slander of the American people, claiming that they wanted to use “pitchforks” rather than prosecutions.

Ouch.

TPP is the opposite of “free trade.” In the jargon of its economic supporters, it is a moldering midden hiding the secretly drafted “rent seeking” provisions designed to help CEOs enrich themselves at the expense of the people of the world. Adam Smith, who supported freer trade, warned over two centuries ago that when CEOs meet secretly it promptly turns into a conspiracy against the public interest and warned that CEOs use their power to aid their own interests at the expense of shareholders and the public. Smith’s warned that it “ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Similarly, the even more conservative Frédéric Bastiat famously warned:

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

TPP is the legal system designed to authorize plunder with impunity....

The roundhouse punch.

Obama did not simply allow lobbyists to largely draft TPP in secret – he classified their drafts – treating them as national security secrets. This would be downright funny if it were not so wicked....

Because "national security."

OMG, the religious right was right. Obama is Satan!

TPP is a deal that Obama, the failed economists, and the CEOs knew could not survive the light. They were aware of the truth of Justice Brandeis’ famous observation that “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” TPP was drafted in secret to avoid that disinfectant. People who are doing straight up deals in the public interest would never allow lobbyists to draft the deal and would have welcomed criticisms of their drafts. The secret drafting of TPP largely by the CEOs’ lobbyists was designed to maximize the ability of CEOs to plunder...

Read the whole screed. It's Bill in all his awesomeness.

New Economic Perspectives
Obama & TPP: Every One That Doeth Evil Hateth the LightWilliam K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Dessert.

The actual purpose of his column, however, was to smear any member of Congress (and he singled out Senator Elizabeth Warren as his example) who opposes TPP as not simply economically ignorant, “failing” a “no brainer” exam, but also engaged in “mendacity.” Given that mendacity is Mankiw’s primary area of expertise – and that President Obama soon joined Mankiw in claiming that Warren was lying in her criticisms of TPP – I thought someone should respond to Mankiw

Smackdown follows.

Bill fails Mankiew in Economics 101. As a former philosophy prof. I give him and F in Ethics 101.

Mankiw: "“it would be irrational for savings and loans [CEOs] not to loot.”

So it's OK.

Mankiw Mendacity and Morality and his League of Failed Economists