Life in Ameritopia

Senator Ted Cruz was interviewed by Jeff Kuhner during his radio program on Friday, June 12th, 2015; the day of the vote in which the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) – part of the prescribed legislative pathway to passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – was smacked down in the House by Nancy Pelosi's Democrats working along side 34 Republicans against King Barry and the Progressive RINO Establishment: led by House Majority Speaker John Boehner, who will try again to pass it this Tuesday.



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Sen. Cruz is a brilliant man with an impressive resume. He is someone for whom I have considerable admiration and respect. As a research writer, his position in favor of TPA was naturally of interest to me – along with other concerned Americans – as it realistically transfers further power to King Barry.

 What I found most interesting about the Jeff Kuhner interview with Sen. Ted Cruz was not what Sen. Cruz said in response to the questions posed by Mr. Kuhner, but what Sen. Cruz left unmentioned.
 Sen. Cruz has an admirable vocabulary and is practiced in debate tactics; a champion going back to his college years. He utilized constitutional language to justify support for TPA, citing due constitutional process (a topic he understands, and is correct in content) by elaboration with clever fulsomeness. 

 The arguments opposing TPA and TPP are not built upon parsed statutes of constitutional law; what the working people – whether Democrat or Republican Party affiliation – of America understand is King Barry loathes and detests our country: they have no desire to cede more power to a president intent on destroying the most exceptional nation state to exist over the course of human history. Objections to TPA are also based on the history of America's previous Free Trade Agreements (FTA) and reality. Does Sen. Cruz not recognize that today, We, the People, are living in Ameritopia? Is it not obvious?



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Elephants in the Room



One elephant in the room Sen. Cruz ignored is the flagrant crony capitalism often steering the direction of FTAs specifically and – as is often the case – US foreign policy. Is it not a bit disingenuous to ignore blatant government corruption and the nexus of government/business crony capitalism: a manifestation of corporatist intentions to manipulate government policies – not only trade, but policies generally (tax, environmental, labor, etc.) – to their advantage with verifiable, economically destructive outcomes?

 Another incongruity is his absurd contention that – although we have a lawless president – King Barry won't be able to get away with it this time because Congress has 60 days to read the final version of the TPP before an up or down vote...without any capacity to amend. Yet again, the devil is in the details: once King Barry has the TPA leverage he desperately seeks, passage of the TPP as negotiated is all but guaranteed. When has King Barry illustrated support for free capital markets during his reign in office? 

 Sen. Cruz maintains he would not allow that to happen, yet his track record of stopping anything thus far doesn't exactly fuse rational working stiffs with oodles of confidence in his ability to do so...yet.

 No one is debating why FTAs are necessary; the problem We, the People, seek to solve is why they are routinely disastrous for American workers? Sen. Cruz makes good points near the end of his interview with Mr. Kuhner re: taxes and the regulatory state being responsible for unemployment. While relevant, they don't present a total explanation of job losses overseas or America's soaring trade deficits.



Promising Everything and More

The Progressive RINO Establishment leadership and lieutenants have been cooing confident promises of everything and more; what ever was necessary to persuade the skeptical to get on board with their knowing misrepresentations of what lay ahead for American workers with passage of TPA and TPP. Curtis Ellis exploded some of these myths in his report at The Hill (6/09/2015):



President Obama's GOP salesmen are telling fellow House members that fast-track trade promotion authority (TPA) will "constrain the president" to do what Congress wants when he negotiates the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Sounds reassuring, but there's one problem: It's just not true. Pointing to the negotiating objectives the Senate-approved bill lays out, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) says that "TPA makes the president follow dozens of strict objectives in his negotiations so that your priorities come first — not his." 
First, let's be clear: The Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have been underway for six years. According to the U.S. trade representative, they are in the "end game" and will be wrapped up once TPA is approved. Scalise and company are a little late setting objectives for negotiations that have already taken place. More importantly, if you look at the language of the TPA bill, you see the claim that TPA "makes the president follow dozens of strict objectives" is transparently false.

Life in Ameritopia



History is rife with verifiable examples of foreign countries engaged in unfair trading practices in plain violation of FTAs, yet the US Government continues its "go along to get along" policies as if concrete corrective measures were seldom part of FTA strategic thought processes. It would seem they are not.

 The players behind the scenes negotiating US trade "deals" – large multinational corporations paying political class lobbies being the primary forces of influence – work in their own interests of bottom line profitability, not that of U.S. workers whom subsidize many of the same corporations with tax dollars.

 Some must wonder if Sen. Cruz is walking a razor's edge with his wordsmith abilities; if the TPA and TPP are being lobbied in a hardcore manner for passage by those with global corporate interests and with whom Sen. Cruz may have been visiting of late in efforts to gain financial support for his nascent presidential campaign? Emily Flitter at Rueters (via Business Insider) reported on 5/14/2015:


One Boston-based lawyer who advises clients, "mostly multi-millionaires and just one billionaire," on political donations, said each one of his clients had met with Cruz and half of them had come away praising the senator as smart and compelling in a one-on-one setting. [...] But his clients are not alone. Others who have met Cruz in private settings say he comes across as a brainy politician whose most hardline statements seem like popularity-seeking varnish that will eventually be scraped away. "When I saw him he was completely sober — he was having serious policy discussions," said one hedge fund CFO, who declined to be named. He said he was not normally inclined to get involved in politics and had to be dragged to a house party in Greenwich at which Cruz had appeared alongside John Boehner, the top Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Sen. Cruz may have merely exercised poor judgment and made a bad choice, but it was a choice that may haunt him for appearing to be “too clever by half.” Americans have had it up to the eyeballs with big government and corporate behemoths; they are sick and tired of Leviathan's heel grinding them into the dust, limiting economic opportunity to advance regardless of how hard they work. US trade deficits are a recurring theme, as is the loss of America's manufacturing base: jobs moved to foreign countries in the name of “free trade” while American workers take it on the chin. Senator Jeff Sessions accurately identifies the problem:

Our country has not been engaged in reciprocal free trade but, as the Chairman Emeritus of Nucor Steel explained, “the enablement of foreign mercantilism” and “unilateral trade disarmament.” We have allowed state-dominated and mercantilist trading partners to maintain their varied and elaborate non-tariff barriers, exporting their unemployment to our shores.

The country in which we live today is not the “pioneering spirit of free associations and entrepreneurial creativity born in personal liberty” America of the Founders and Framers: it is Ameritopia. © Copyright Sandy Stringfellow/2015

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