As a result of the 2010 and 2014 midterm “sit out” votes cast by angry Democratic voters, one thing was made explicitly clear: Democratic leaders seem incapable of learning from their mistakes. No matter how unequivocally progressive members have expressed opposition to the conservative policies championed by Obama, and no matter how many elections Democratic candidates have lost, DNC leaders simply respond by blustering for the cameras and then caving in to the White House and the Republicans.
More importantly, by siding with Paul Ryan and the Republicans, they have ignored the will of the members of over 2,000 organizations – including the 8 million members of MoveOn.org. And yet, somehow they think supporting the TAA will offset the impact of their betrayal.
Before the Senate handed Obama the rigged deal he wanted, Ben Wikler Washington director of MoveOn.org said this: “This is a basic, threshold question for Democrats: Will they stand with Elizabeth Warren and the public? Or will they vote against the people that, at least in the past, elected them to office?”
http://www.citizenstrade.org/...
And of course, the answer was predictable. From TPM:
Pelosi, House Dems Back Obama's Trade Agenda After Nearly Killing It CHARLES BABINGTONPublishedJune 24, 2015, 12:42 PM EDTAnd just in case you missed the Guardian article detailing how much our Democratic Senators received for selling us out:A final potential hurdle in the House crumbled when Democratic leaders said most colleagues would support a job retraining program that Obama wants. Some anti-free-trade Democrats had urged defeat of a program meant to help workers displaced by trade agreements. Some saw the possible demise of the usually Democratic favorite as a possible way to pressure Obama not to sign fast track into law.
Obama has said he expects to enact the fast-trade measure and the retraining bill simultaneously. But with fast track headed to Obama, House Democrats acknowledged that there was no realistic way to force the president's hand.
The average Democrat received $9,689.23 from those same donors.So, in the end, Obama’s campaign donors – the CEOs who caused the 2007 global financial collapse, the criminals the president protected from prosecution – bought what they wanted, and middle class Americans got the shaft (does that sound familiar?)The amounts given rise dramatically when looking at how much each senator running for re-election received.
Two days before the fast-track vote, Obama was a few votes shy of having the filibuster-proof majority he needed. Ron Wyden and seven other Senate Democrats announced they were on the fence on 12 May, distinguishing themselves from the Senate’s 54 Republicans and handful of Democrats as the votes to sway.
In just 24 hours, Wyden and five of those Democratic holdouts – Michael Bennet of Colorado, Dianne Feinstein of California, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Patty Murray of Washington, and Bill Nelson of Florida – caved and voted for fast-track.
Bennet, Murray, and Wyden – all running for re-election in 2016 – received $105,900 between the three of them. Bennet, who comes from the more purple state of Colorado, got $53,700 in corporate campaign donations between January and March 2015, according to Channing’s research.
But, you, on the other hand: if you lose your job – and past experience has taught us that hundreds of thousands of you will – at least, you might get a chance to return to school to qualify for imaginary low-tech careers that will pay far less than the position you currently hold (usually 80% at best).
But don’t get excited, yet: the same types of retraining programs were implemented in the past and all of them failed miserably. And following NAFTA, hundreds of thousands of American workers clung to the hope that the NAFTA TAA program would help relieve their suffering:
From the NY Times:
In Texas alone, Public Citizen said, there have been almost 2,500 companies whose workers or union affiliates have filed petitions with the department for training or temporary assistance under its Trade Adjustment Assistance program.From the NY Times:
U.S. Study Says Job Retraining Is Not Effective By PETER T. KILBORN, Published: October 15, 1993Unfortunately, the same thing happened with the NAFTA TAA:WASHINGTON, Oct. 14— An internal Labor Department report says the Government job training program for workers hurt by foreign trade is largely ineffective and used primarily as an income crutch for the unemployed.
The $200 million program, one of the biggest and most generous for unemployed Americans, was enacted 19 years ago in an effort to help laid-off manufacturing workers who could show that imports cost them their jobs. They were to be retrained in computer operation, nursing, accounting and trades like welding and air conditioning repair.
The Labor Department audit, based on an examination of 1,198 workers in nine states in 1991, found that only one in five of the retrained workers were steered into jobs paying at least 80 percent as much as their old jobs.
GAO found that: (1) Labor has shortened its certification process for the NAFTA Transitional Adjustment Assistance (TAA) Program, resulting in 94 percent of NAFTA-TAA determinations being made in 40 days or less; (2) the states' added role in the NAFTA-TAA certification process has ensured rapid response services for dislocated workers; (3) although Labor has broadened the NAFTA-TAA eligibility requirements to include secondary workers, limited guidance, unclear authority, and a slow and cumbersome funding mechanism make it difficult for such workers to access benefits; (4) while Labor has more closely tied cash benefits to training by eliminating waivers and requiring workers to enroll in training, these restrictions have resulted in some workers receiving incomplete assessments and remedial assistance, and a limited mix of services; (5) Labor has not adequately addressed the lack of ongoing support, follow-up, and performance monitoring for NAFTA-TAA; and (6) while Labor has encouraged closer coordination between federal dislocated worker programs, it has not formally required states to track NAFTA-TAA participants.No one supported the programs because they were ineffective.
Many of us who lived through that period remember watching nightly news broadcasts conducted from helicopters: the segments contained reels of footage showing the thousands of US factories that were closed, and we remember the crisis it created for American workers, and it was heartbreaking. NAFTA alone caused the loss of 355,338 US factories. In total, free trade agreements have caused the loss of over 500,000 US factories.
From Lori Wallach, Public Citizen:
My New Year's celebrations this year were haunted by memories of January 1, 1994 -- the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. I remember crying that day, thinking about the proud men and women in union halls across America, the Mexican campesinos and the inspiring Canadian activists I had met during the fight against NAFTA, and hoping desperately that our dire predictions would be proved wrong.So now, Democratic leaders, and President Obama are arrogant enough to believe that the rout that happened during the 2014 midterm elections is not going to happen again because the effects of this trade agreement won’t be noticed until after Obama has left office.They were not. In short order, the damage started. And, we started to document it.
For NAFTA's unhappy 20th anniversary, Public Citizen has published a report that details the wreckage. Not only did promises made by NAFTA's proponents not materialize, but many results are exactly the opposite.
Such outcomes include a staggering $181 billion U.S. trade deficit with NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada and the related loss of 1 million net U.S. jobs under NAFTA, growing income inequality, displacement of more than one million Mexican campesino farmers and a doubling of desperate immigration from Mexico, and more than $360 million paid to corporations after "investor-state" tribunal attacks on, and rollbacks of, domestic public interest policies.
The study makes for a blood-boiling read. For instance, we track the specific promises made by U.S. corporations like GE, Chrysler and Caterpillar to create specific numbers of American jobs if NAFTA was approved, and reveal government data showing that instead, they fired U.S. workers and moved operations to Mexico.
But, millions of us know better.
And in 2016, we will not forget.