New Economic Perspectives has the article Indicting the Trans – Pacific Partnership: Even One of These Counts Is Sufficient to Vote to Kill It!.

This article has 23 stanzas that can be sung to the tune of Dayenu, a favorite Passover song.

The conclusion of the article says:

Right now, those who want to pass Fast Track Authority and the TPP, in the face of the 23 reasons, recorded in the 23 stanzas, for killing these things, any one of which is reason enough to vote to kill them, apparently number the President of the United States, most of the corporate media, a majority of the Senate, though perhaps not a majority of its Democratic members, a large number of Representatives in the House, mostly Republican, but including some Democrats, who may or may not reach a majority of the House with the help of a full court press corporate and billionaire-funded media campaign that we will see intensify in the coming days and weeks. So, these are the forces arrayed against democracy and for tyranny. These are the forces in back of the attempt of the elite to engineer a bloodless coup, that they hope will replace national popular sovereignty with globalizing corporate rule.

Will we counter them in the coming days and weeks and block Fast Track Authority and the TPP? The fate of democracy depends on how we respond to this question and on whether our loud public outcry can counter them successfully, and persuade some in the House and the Senate that it is dangerous for them to oppose the popular will. Let us not fail this test!

The Republicans should impeach Obama if he signs the deal, and I wish there were someone to impeach the Congress if they vote for the TPP.

Maybe we shouldn’t scoff at my previous post Michele Bachmann says the Rapture is coming: ‘Rejoice’.

The Daily Kos has the article Michele Bachmann says the Rapture is coming: ‘Rejoice’. This article discusses the Talking Points Memo article Michele Bachmann: Thanks Obama For Bringing On The Apocalypse.

Here is a quote from The Talking Points Memo article.

Former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) expressed a mixture of condemnation and appreciation toward President Barack Obama for, in her words, bringing the world to end times.

“We need to cry out to a Holy God,” Bachmann said on Jan Markell’s “Understanding the Times” radio show over the weekend. “This is coming faster than anyone can see.”

You really have to hear the audio clip the article provides.

Listen to the clip, courtesy of Right Wing Watch:

The fact that there are people like this running around our government is really frightening. You can be sure that Michelle Bachmann is not the only one in our government that believes this.

What is more frightening is captured by this quote from The Daily Kos article:

It is flagrantly obvious that the people most convinced that Iran is an irrational theocratic state whose leaders see themselves as religious prophets destined to destroy their enemies and elevate their own religion into global dominance over all others are leaders who consider themselves to be—precisely that.

Even this quote needs further interpretation of how frightening this is. What most of the rest of us think about Iran and its government is more like some people in our own government, and the normal people don’t even recognize it. Not only do they not recognize it in our own people, but they don’t recognize that their understanding of Iran was planted in their minds by crazy people.

Salon magazine has the article “Pagan statism”: The frightening corporate/Christian alliance that invented “In God We Trust” and “One Nation Under God”

In 1949, some of the country’s top advertising executives launched a national marketing campaign. They weren’t selling a physical product. They were selling religion. Before long, the Religion in American Life campaign was placing close to 10,000 newspaper ads per year, coordinating national radio marketing, and putting up thousands of billboards, all intended “to accent the importance of all religious institutions as the basis of American life.” Major corporations bankrolled the effort.

We tend to imagine public expressions of faith as rising spontaneously from the American people, for good or for ill. When a politician says “God bless America,” she’s trying to sound like a populist, not like a corporate pawn. But as Princeton historian Kevin Kruse details in a new book, “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America,” our country’s religious slogans owe more to corporate campaigns than they do to grassroots work.

You probably already had a good guess as to the types of people who were and are the pushers. Did you know about the specifics described in the article, and presumably, the book?

As you may recognize, my headline is derived from something that Karl Marx wrote in an introduction to his paper A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.

You can read the full context, and try to figure out exactly what Marx was saying. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t what you always thought it was. It depends on your interpretation, and what you always thought about the statement.

Politicus USA has the article It Looks Like Bernie Sanders Is Going To Run For President.

If Sen. Sanders (I-VT) does run, it will be great news for Democrats and liberals on numerous fronts. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is not running. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley has no traction with Democratic voters. Sen. Sanders is largely unknown to many rank and file Democrats, but he is on television often enough that he has more of a base of support than any of the other non-Clinton Democrats who are considering running.

If he does run, I have the bumper sticker and button all ready for him.

The article discussed in my previous post, The great unraveling of globalization, has some interesting things to say about emerging markets.

“Growth in consumer spending in 2014 hit multiyear lows in many countries,” said Unilever CEO Paul Polman, analyzing his company’s results. “In South Africa, it is half to less than 2 percent, and in Brazil it had fallen to just 1 percent. There was no volume growth in these markets.”

There are myriad reasons why these markets have lagged, some of them unique to specific countries or regions. For instance, China’s one-child policy has produced a penurious generation of young adults who are the sole support for aging family members. And in parts of Southeast Asia and Africa the infrastructure in rural areas, where much of the population lives, is too primitive to support extensive retail activities. But equally problematic is that the growth of the middle class in China and most other developing economies has been slow. And these newly minted consumers face volatile, often expensive prices for housing, food and other staples.

Perhaps the race to the bottom to produce goods at the cheapest prices is also affecting consumers in the emerging markets.

The paradox is that what companies need to do to employees to get the most out of them for the least cost is to minimize wages and benefits.  What consumers need to spur their buying is large enough incomes and less risk in their economic environment.  The paradox is that the workers and the consumers are just two different roles of the same people.

The competition of the free market does not make it easy for an individual corporation to decide that it wants to pay high wages to spur consumption among its customers.  There is no way to assure that the workers whose wages are raised will spend all of that raise with the company that is giving the raise.

One way out of that paradox is for some entity to take a more global approach to a solution.  The global approach would have all companies raise wages to all workers which would cover all consumers.  The increased consumption would be spread across all companies so that the companies raising the wages would be assured of getting some of the benefit of not only their own wage increase, but the wage increases of their competitors.

Sort of reminds me of the situation of an addict, whether that be drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or food.  The addict cannot stop the self destructive behavior without some help from an external source.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what external sources are available and powerful enough to provide this economic intervention.