With both US Presidential candidates – the Democratic Party’s Hilary Clinton the Republican Party’s Donald Trump – firming in their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has stepped-up pressure on the Obama Administration to ratify the pact during the ‘lame duck’ session of Congress after November’s Presidential Election. From The Australian:
Australia is pushing at every level to get the US Congress to ratify the trans-Pacific trade agreement before Barack Obama passes into his “lame duck” leadership and the deal is killed off by either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump after the election…
Mr Turnbull, Julie Bishop and the Australian Ambassador to Washington, Joe Hockey, have all expressed concern publicly that the Congress will stall the US ratification of the agreement with Asia-Pacific nations and that both US Presidential candidates have said they will not ratify it…
The Prime Minister has been arguing at the United Nations General Assembly week that free trade has lifted billions our of poverty and protectionist tendencies must be opposed.
“We know where protectionism takes you — the United States experimented with it after the Great Depression and made the Depression so much worse. So it is very important to resist those calls,” he said.
Leaving aside the “free trade” arguments, which are bunk, I cannot think of anything more undemocratic than ratifying the TPP during the lame duck session of Congress.
Citizens of the US will have just elected a new president that ran on a platform of opposing the TPP, and yet Congress could act in contempt of the people and ratify the deal anyway.
According to The Hill, the way it will happen is that out-going members of Congress will likely “sell their votes” in favour of the TPP in a bid to gain lucrative private sector employment post-politics – a form of tacit corruption:
…the average number of representatives who left after the last three elections was about 80.
Most of these people will be looking for a job, preferably one that can pay them more than $1 million a year…
So there you have it: It is all about corruption, and this is about as unadulterated as corruption gets in our hallowed democracy, other than literal cash under a literal table. These are the people whom Obama needs to pass this agreement, and the window between Nov. 9 and Jan. 3 is the only time that they are available to sell their votes to future employers without any personal political consequences whatsoever. The only time that the electorate can be rendered so completely irrelevant, if Obama can pull this off.
So much for representative democracy!
