Democracy now has two related videos.  Will Hillary Clinton Flip-Flop Again on TPP After Election Day? We Ask Her Adviser Joseph Stiglitz,  and Why Did Clinton Just Tap a Pro-TPP, Pro-KXL, Pro-Fracking Politician to Head Her Transition Team?

I am going to present them to you in the order in which they were recorded.

It was so difficult to watch an economist that I had respected prostitute himself in this way, that I just could not finish watching his degradation any further. Maybe you have the fortitude to watch it all.

Watching Joe Stiglitz embarrass himself in the above video was doubly hard because I had seen the video below first. Watching a demonstration of the naivete or the strong desire to convince himself of the unconvinceable is enough to make you want to mourn for Stiglitz. Perhaps viewing the videos in this order will make what Stiglitz had to say just a tad less embarrassing.

Here is another whopper from Hillary Clinton in the debate. This is from the CNN transcript of the debate:

CLINTON: Well, actually, I have been very consistent. Over the course of my entire life, I have always fought for the same values and principles, but, like most human beings – including those of us who run for office – I do absorb new information. I do look at what’s happening in the world.

You know, take the trade deal [TPP}. I did say, when I was secretary of state, three years ago, that I hoped it would be the gold standard. It was just finally negotiated last week, and in looking at it, it didn’t meet my standards. My standards for more new, good jobs for Americans, for raising wages for Americans.

And I want to make sure that I can look into the eyes of any middle-class American and say, “this will help raise your wages.” And I concluded I could not.

When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, surely she knew that the composition of the American negotiating team and the people dominating our stances were all corporate lobbyists or corporate executives. She knew there were no representatives of the people putting in their suggestions. If she didn’t know, how come she didn’t when the rest of the world knew?

So how did she ever think that this deal would ever be a gold standard of anything but a huge transfer of wealth from the world’s middle class to the world’s rich oligarchs?

She is one damn good BS artist, and the people who want a woman President don’t seem to care or to know.

Surely Hillary Clinton can’t think that Elizabeth Warren doesn’t know how much Hillary is lying. Does Hillary think she can get away with this stuff at least until the election? Well, we certainly know that she is a women who has the courage to go for broke despite the odds. If it weren’t for the scads of money that she and Bill are going to make off of her Presidency, you’d have to feel a little bit sorry for someone who was so desperate to seize power.

Ring of Fire Radio has the commentary Comcast Orders MSNBC To Remove Anti-TPP Hosts.

When it comes to coverage of the Trans Pacific Partnership, no one in the corporate media covered the issue more than Ed Schultz on MSNBC’s The Ed Show. When it was announced last week that they were pulling the plug on his program, they effectively killed the only national voice that was talking about the disaster of a trade deal on cable news.

But what is the real reason for MSNBC dumping Ed? When you dig down, it’s dirtier than you would think.

I had no idea of the real reason why these changes have been made. I just thought that Progressives didn’t have the stomach for media aimed at them that was a mirror image of the stuff aimed at the regressives.

The mention of Bill Clinton’s support for media conglomeration was something that I had forgotten about. I thought it was all Reagan’s fault for doing away with the fairness doctrine.

Now you have a deeper understanding of the attack these companies have been making on net neutrality. The internet is the last bastion that has held out against the silencing of Progressive voices. I wonder when I will get shut down.

Elizabeth Warren has this, Elizabeth Warren speech at American Prospect on income inequality and TPP, posted on her Facebook timeline.

If you are a staunch supporter of Elizabeth Warren, you may have heard these ideas before. I think there are still a lot of people who haven’t heard the full story, and here it is in a nice, compact 22 minutes. You can spread the message to people you know who might still not have gotten it. What more powerful service could you do for your country?

Naked Capitalism has the article Good News on TPP, as Senate Passes Fast Track Bill with Human Trafficking Poison Pill.

What is so fascinating about this article is the number of twists and turns that it takes. Good guys become bad guys and bad guys become good guys at the blink of an eye. The poison pill goes in, the antidote to the poison is agreed to, and then it fails to get administered.

The links to peripheral issues are enough to keep you busy for a week.

Naked Capitalism has the article Senate Democrats Work with Republicans Throw Medicare Under the Bus as Part of TPP Fast Track Sausage-Making by Lambert Strether.

So, Congress is preparing to loot Medicare not just for this one program, TAA, but as standard operating procedure. I think that qualifies as “throwing Medicare under the bus.”

Strether took to the idea idea with the same skepticism that I showed in my previous post, U.S. Senate: Reject Medicare cuts and reject Fast Track. He also came to the same conclusion that I did. His article includes far more detail than mine, though.

I made two observations about this. The first is the following:

The reason why the politicians like the “pay for” paradigm is that it is a way to try to get people to stop complaining. I have always said that when you ask Congress to close tax-loopholes, their response has always been, “Ok, if you want us to close tax-loopholes, we’ll gladly cut the ones that you use.” They hope that the lesson people will finally learn is that you’d better not ask Congress to close tax-loopholes.

If the politicians have to make cuts in government programs, they first make cuts in the most popular programs that help the most people. They want you to feel the pain, so you will stop pestering them.

Then I followed it up the this observation.

The reason why the politicians like the “pay for” paradigm is that it is a way to try to get people to stop complaining. I have always said that when you ask Congress to close tax-loopholes, their response has always been, “Ok, if you want us to close tax-loopholes, we’ll gladly cut the ones that you use.” They hope that the lesson people will finally learn is that you’d better not ask Congress to close tax-loopholes.

If the politicians have to make cuts in government programs, they first make cuts in the most popular programs that help the most people. They want you to feel the pain, so you will stop pestering them.

Elizabeth Warren has a blog post I have serious concerns about ISDS. She included a list of actual cases brought under previous trade policies to show that her concern is not merely hypothetical.

ISDS isn’t a one-time, hypothetical problem – we’ve seen it in past trade agreements. Just in the past few years:

• A French company sued Egypt after Egypt raised its minimum wage.
• A Swedish company sued Germany because Germany wanted to phase out nuclear power for safety reasons.
• A Dutch company sued the Czech Republic because the Czech Republic didn’t bail out a bank that the Dutch company partially owned.
• Philip Morris is using ISDS right now to try to stop countries like Australia and Uruguay from implementing new rules that are intended to cut smoking rates – because the new laws might eat into the tobacco giant’s profits.

The Obama Administration has said that they have fixed all the problems, and nothing like that will happen here. They just won’t show you how.

The Obama administration will not show you how by simply showing you the clauses in the TPP that fix these problems. Even worse, they make no attempt to explain how they have fixed it even if they won’t show you the agreement itself. You have to wonder why President Obama is making it so difficult to believe what he says. Perhaps he feeling such intense pressure to negotiate the deal, that he hasn’t got the strength to resist. He may be hoping the American public will be incensed enough to stop it.

Thinking about my previous post, Joe Firestone: Another Danger of the TPP: It Sacrifices Monetary Sovereignity and taking into account Murphy’s Law, I started to wonder if signing the TPP could bring on Armageddon.

I decided to look up the major foreign holders of US Treasury securities.

Here is the Murphy’s Law scenario. Suppose we decide to devalue the dollar to bring our wage rates more in line with the countries where all our jobs are being outsourced. Supposing some of those countries decided to sue us before one of the tribunals established by the TPP. Their claim is that by devaluing our dollar, we will be harming their profits and the value of their holdings of our currency. It seems pretty obvious that their claim is true, and our sole purpose for taking that action is to take back some of those jobs and lower the value of our foreign debt.

So what could they sue us for? Japan holds $1.2 trillion of our foreign debt and will be one of the major signatories of the TPP. China holds another $1.2 trillion of our foreign debt. China will not be a signatory of TPP, but I bet they could buy lots of companies in countries that will be signatories. That would give them standing before one of the tribunals.

Rather than demanding immediate payment of $2.4 trillion, they could just hold us hostage and control our major policies.

I have come to a new understanding of Murphy’s Law. It is not just by chance that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. It is that if you give an adversary a brand new weapon that they could use against you, then they will use it. Do you want to hold your breath hoping they won’t? You could turn blue in the face just from that.

There are two places to go to read this story. Naked Capitalism has the headline Joe Firestone: Another Danger of the TPP: It Sacrifices Monetary Sovereignity. New Economic Perspectives has the headline How Can Our Senators and Representatives Vote for Giving Away Our Monetary Sovereignty?

Let’s see if giving you the first and last paragraphs can give you a clue as to the magnitude of this blunder.

Right now the US fulfills the three essential conditions for monetary sovereignty: 1) it issues its own non-convertible currency, 2) which it allows to float on international currency markets; and 3) it owes no debts in any currency other than dollars. Because it is monetarily sovereign, and can always meet its obligations the US can never be forced into insolvency.
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Which brings us back to our erstwhile Representatives and Senators in Washington. How they can even consider Fast Track Authority for the President without extensively considering and debating the sovereignty-infringing aspects of the TPP is beyond me. Its potential infringement on Monetary Sovereignty is only one of these. There are many others, as well. And it is hard to understand how people who swear fealty to the United States can justify their apparent complete lack of concern for these issues when they make trade agreements.

In one fell swoop, a decision in a single case could force a $350 billion dollar debt on our country and the complainant could insist on payment in Chinese yuan.

If, after seeing the financial collapse of 2008/2009, you realize the magnitude of Bill Clinton’s blunder in doing away with the Glass-Steagal Act, you should contemplate how the TPP could be a blunder of far larger magnitude. What is surprising is that it has taken this long for someone like Joe Firestone to expose the full implications of the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) tribunals that are set up by the TPP.

All the phoney issues the Republicans raise about our debt to ourselves in our own  currency could be made to come true by changing that debt to be in a foreign currency of the lender’s choice after we have incurred a debt we didn’t even know we had incurred.