Senate Dems Shoot Down Obama’s TPP Fast Track Authority

The dam has broken. Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was left to sputter this Tuesday afternoon that “the Democratic Senate has just shut down the opportunity to debate the top economic priority of the Democratic President…[because]…every Senator but one of the President’s own party voted against the President’s 1 domestic priority.”

That, after President Obama and his Republican allies fell eight votes short of the 60 votes needed to open debate on handing Obama “Fast Track” authority to impose the British Empire’s would-be final stage in globalized looting, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and its matching European accord.

Passage in the House of Representatives was known to be dubious; until not long ago, the Senate was considered “on board.” The rising tide of hatred against Wall Street and its Obama stooge has now overturned this consensus, too.

People around the world are chuckling over scenes such as a perturbed Republican McConnell expressing his agreement with Obama’s recent nasty attacks on his Democratic party free trade opponents; or, of members of the White House press corps grinning as an ABC News correspondent dismissed White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s protestations that the vote was only a “procedural SNAFU,” with such questions as: “Can you remind us again of what ‘SNAFU’ stands for?”

The blow to Obama’s already-shredded aura of power should make for a much more contentious TPP ministerial meeting come May 26—if that meeting proceeds as planned, at all. By contrast, no such problems have emerged around the preparations for the July BRICS summit in Ufa, Russia, where a very different program of trade and development cooperation is on the agenda.

Democratic opposition against this Wall Street trap escalated up to the moment of voting. Going into the day, California’s Sen. Barbara Boxer joined fellow Senators and labor leaders livid against Obama’s lies that Congressmen were free to read the treaty, recounting her adventures in trying to do just that.

Probable Presidential candidate Gov. Martin O’Malley sent out a mass e-mail, calling on his supporters to “Tell Congress to stop TPP,” when they voted today. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Rosa DeLauro came out slamming the President, in a joint op-ed in the Boston Globe on Monday, “Who Is Writing the TPP?”

International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) International President Tom Buffenbarger yesterday issued the following statement after the Senate failed to advance Fast Track legislation: “Today, working Americans sent a thunderous message to supporters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership: The days of sitting on the sidelines as disastrous free-trade deals are railroaded through Congress are over.” The IAM is lobbying on Capitol Hill both to reject the TPP and to restore Glass-Steagall—the decisive step now required of Congress.