President Trump just saved the republic, and in a stroke of a pen defeated the noxious top priority of the Obama and would-be Clinton presidencies.

Re: What the Death of the T.P.P. Means for America. By Adam Davidson

Beware of economists using a mournful death angle on a story about a so-called "trade" deal. In Davidson's cultivated sense of despair and self-pity, the TPP was a flawless beauty cut down before her prime. By seeming to eulogize a late, dear friend, Davidson hopes to excuse a feckless scheme to make profit the highest purpose of man. Every evil, every racket, every criminal scheme from chattel slavery to price gouging on medication to the wholesale destruction of the public trust would have been "trade" under a new supranational court system which no government, at no level, could long afford to defy. Hallmarks of this scheme's backers include Davidson's entire rhetorical repertoire from this piece, a tour de force in the usual lies and deceit the press offers on this topic. For instance:

Its opponents, who include those in the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, as well as Trump, argued variously that it would destroy jobs and the environment and strengthen China.

This isn't simply wrong. As artfully as Sec. Clinton's tacitly-understood lies that she would oppose the TPP, Davidson marches out his army of strawmen. Having followed the TPP, along with its accompanying flotilla of associated entangling foreign alliances and racketeering schemes for some time, I can say that yes, China had been much-mentioned. Not so much by opponents, mind you, who might be quick about pointing out that China's economic clout would and will allow them to dictate terms of commerce without being much bothered by the TPP. So much to China's satisfaction was the TPP scheme, they wanted to join. Pitching it as a master stroke in a Cold War against China, the Obama Administration would likely have been embarrassed by this, but as the audacity of scope of this grift reveals, they'd no shame at all. In fact, President Obama stressed time and time again that the TPP was the single highest priority of his administration. Undercutting his oft-claimed justification for that as somehow 'containing China' by pointing out it had nothing to do with China is just the sort of thing cats like Davidson here would never have had the poor taste to do.

Pro-trade members of the Obama Administration argued that the T.P.P. would “help increase Made-in-America exports, grow the American economy, support well-paying American jobs, and strengthen the American middle class.”

Get an everloving load of that framing! It's not a sham new justice system that replaces our courts with a ring-around-the-rosie clique of arbitrators-for-hire by the transnational corporations with the only right to bring suit, no! It's prosperity, food on the table, a family wage, joining your passed loved ones in the afterlife, and the unconditional love of a gorgeous golden retriever!

The T.P.P. would have created a Pacific trade zone not unlike the zone that NAFTA created in North America, but comprising a dozen countries....

Oh yeah. There are already trade deals in place with virtually all but the most loathsome countries. Trade passes as freely now as any time in human history. Why do we need an interlocking layering of super-sovereign "treaty" organizations, again? Because more is never enough?

Both proponents and detractors exaggerated the effects of the T.P.P., the impact of which was always going to be modest in measurable economic terms.

Unless of course you live in chattel slavery in Mala...

Re: What the Death of the T.P.P. Means for America. By Adam Davidson

Beware of economists using a mournful death angle on a story about a so-called "trade" deal. In Davidson's cultivated sense of despair and self-pity, the TPP was a flawless beauty cut down before her prime. By seeming to eulogize a late, dear friend, Davidson hopes to excuse a feckless scheme to make profit the highest purpose of man. Every evil, every racket, every criminal scheme from chattel slavery to price gouging on medication to the wholesale destruction of the public trust would have been "trade" under a new supranational court system which no government, at no level, could long afford to defy. Hallmarks of this scheme's backers include Davidson's entire rhetorical repertoire from this piece, a tour de force in the usual lies and deceit the press offers on this topic. For instance:

Its opponents, who include those in the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, as well as Trump, argued variously that it would destroy jobs and the environment and strengthen China.

This isn't simply wrong. As artfully as Sec. Clinton's tacitly-understood lies that she would oppose the TPP, Davidson marches out his army of strawmen. Having followed the TPP, along with its accompanying flotilla of associated entangling foreign alliances and racketeering schemes for some time, I can say that yes, China had been much-mentioned. Not so much by opponents, mind you, who might be quick about pointing out that China's economic clout would and will allow them to dictate terms of commerce without being much bothered by the TPP. So much to China's satisfaction was the TPP scheme, they wanted to join. Pitching it as a master stroke in a Cold War against China, the Obama Administration would likely have been embarrassed by this, but as the audacity of scope of this grift reveals, they'd no shame at all. In fact, President Obama stressed time and time again that the TPP was the single highest priority of his administration. Undercutting his oft-claimed justification for that as somehow 'containing China' by pointing out it had nothing to do with China is just the sort of thing cats like Davidson here would never have had the poor taste to do.

Pro-trade members of the Obama Administration argued that the T.P.P. would “help increase Made-in-America exports, grow the American economy, support well-paying American jobs, and strengthen the American middle class.”

Get an everloving load of that framing! It's not a sham new justice system that replaces our courts with a ring-around-the-rosie clique of arbitrators-for-hire by the transnational corporations with the only right to bring suit, no! It's prosperity, food on the table, a family wage, joining your passed loved ones in the afterlife, and the unconditional love of a gorgeous golden retriever!

The T.P.P. would have created a Pacific trade zone not unlike the zone that NAFTA created in North America, but comprising a dozen countries....

Oh yeah. There are already trade deals in place with virtually all but the most loathsome countries. Trade passes as freely now as any time in human history. Why do we need an interlocking layering of super-sovereign "treaty" organizations, again? Because more is never enough?

Both proponents and detractors exaggerated the effects of the T.P.P., the impact of which was always going to be modest in measurable economic terms.

Unless of course you live in chattel slavery in Malaysia, in which case you and your descendants will know nothing but the chain and the lash. Because slavery, under the TPP, is trade. And the abolition of slavery, anywhere, at any time, would constitute a restraint on trade. Worse, if a registered corporation had simply expected at some point to've made profits on slavery at some other point in future, any law, regulation, ruling, order or procedure that might've threatened those expected future profits would be subject to sanction at our newest, highest court, the TPP's investor-state dispute settlement system. Davidson's not going to get lost in the minutiae of such pissant details, though. He has a certain amount of manure to fling at his readers first.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a reputable but strongly pro-T.P.P. research organization, for instance, estimated that U.S. national income would grow by...

The Peterson Institute for International Economics, quoted as being "reputable." Davidson's a writer of easy virtue.

The trade agreement was central to long-term U.S. interests around the world.

And by "U.S. interests" we mean transnational corporations with neither love nor favor for the United States.

But, over all, it wouldn’t have had much direct impact on blue-collar workers.

Glad to know you're looking out for us, Adam.

There are a few real fights left, particularly over trade involving finance, entertainment, and pharmaceuticals, but, for American manufacturing companies and their workers, there just aren’t that many high trade barriers left.

What are we paying you for, then?

Multinational corporations do have a backup plan, now that the T.P.P. is dead.

No! After we went to all the effort to have a completely secret, from the ground up, supranational legal system ready to impose against the will of its democratic popular governments and to begin peddling its influence across a gigantic twelve-nation imperial satrap, it turns out we didn't need it after all?

One country that is a member of R.C.E.P. is China, and it will be the nation that will dominate what will soon become the world’s largest trade zone.

You think? Hope you got your check while they were still being handed out, Davidson.

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