Republican Obama

What is left of our Barack Obama? I am paraphrasing the great Charles Trenet, singing about a lost love. After the Democrats’ decisive defeat in Congress on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a “free trade” agreement advocated by a president who is supposed to be the friend of the people, one could also ask what has happened to the left’s passionate love for this resident of the White House, once considered the messiah.

The Senate’s vote on June 23, which sealed the enactment of the “fast-track” (a legislative tool that will accelerate the outcome of the secret negotiations about the free trade agreement between the United States and 11 other countries, including Canada) was the last nail in the coffin of the myth of a progressive Obama: Obama, who wanted to change the relations between a political-financial oligarchy and the working class, which was hit by NAFTA in 1993 and the “permanent standardization” of trade between China and America in 2000. Today, those who suffer from the outsourcing of industrial employment to countries where labor is cheaper curse Nov. 4, 2008, the day a big majority voted for their presumed savior. And they can ask why the leader of the Democrats is asking his Republican “enemies” for help to pass a law guaranteeing the continuous decline of the small people who do not benefit from globalization.

What is the TPP? Essentially it is an investment agreement that, like NAFTA in Mexico, protects American companies against expropriation from foreign governments, which, in the case of a dispute, recognizes the seigniorial “rights” of a very liberal Uncle Sam that is looking for badly paid workers and safeguards against prosecution when his factories pollute the air, water and ground. Some Vietnamese could laugh bitterly about this as they were burned or poisoned by napalm and Agent Orange during their two- decade-long war against the United States. Their “communist” liberation government opens the doors wide to the crudest exploitation of their work and their revolutionary heritage by the unrestrained capitalists.

A Deception

Of course, TPP supporters praise the “opening up of foreign markets” in order to better export American products. As usual, it is a deception. The proud and protectionist Japan will never sell more than a small symbolic part of its internal market to America. Instead, Japanese manufacturers, along with their American counterparts, will profit from low salaries in Malaysia and Indochina, where workers are definitely not able to afford Chevrolets or Toyotas produced in America. When Obama threatened Congress that voting against the TPP would allow “China to establish regulations advantageous to workers and Chinese companies”* at the expense of America, he in fact defended his friends on Wall Street and his friends from the “Business Roundtable” who felt threatened by the slight increase in the salaries of Chinese manufacturers from an average hourly rate of $1.74 in 2009 to $3.07 in 2013. Quick! We need to relocate to Vietnam, where the salaries are only a third of that!

Our president has always aligned himself with the most conservative ideas regarding the economy, as they go hand in hand with raising funds among bankers, lawyers and brokers who profit from the “free exchange” and from deregulation. This did not stop Obama from proclaiming that NAFTA had cost “1 million jobs … 50,000 of which are here, in Ohio”* while running against Hillary Clinton in the Ohio primaries in 2008. And the prophet of change preached: “I did not just start criticizing unjust agreements like NAFTA because I am running for president … I do not think that NAFTA will be good for America – I never believed it would.”*

Come again? What? During the debate about the “fast-track” on June 18, the Democrats in the House of Representatives cried out at the betrayal by their leader who has overtly become Republican. Too late: The results of the vote on the bill were 218 “yes” (of which 190 were Republican) against 208 “no” (of which 158 were Democrat). “The President has done an excellent job,” according to Mitch McConnell, the head of the Republican majority in the Senate.

“What is left of our love?” Maybe this: “The oaths in the forest, the flowers we found in books, whose perfume intoxicated us.”

*Editor’s note: Correctly translated, these quotes could not be verified.