A Sanders Republican Looks a Trade and War in Ohio’s 4th
Keep your eye on the ball, Ohioans. Your “so-called” leaders, who robbed you of your jobs, decimated your communities, sent your young men and women to war, based on lies, and failed to recognize their value as citizen-soldiers upon their return are seeking a re-run, and a vote for Jim Jordan will assure their success. Ohio is not only a battlefield for Electoral votes, equally important, it is the staging ground for the ratification of the most undemocratic legislation in American history, (TPP) the Transpacific-Partnership. Jim Jordan will vote for it, because the Koch Brothers, who own him, will demand it.
This is what TPP does to Ohioans of the Fourth Congressional District:
- Incentivizes moving more of your jobs offshore to low wage counties
- Undermines your food safety laws
- Empowers the drug companies to raise your rates and restricts current drug access to people in underdeveloped nations
- Frees big banks of American regulations but keeps you on the hook for their failure
- Limits Buy America and local preferences ensuring, for example, that foreign steel will re-build America's bridges
- Sets up foreign tribunals to attack our health and environmental laws if they restrict Corporate profits and demand taxpayer compensation.
- Opens your markets to goods produced through child labor, human trafficking and anti-LGBT abuses as in Vietnam and Malaysia.
These abuses of your expectations as citizens and of your sacrifices to protect American Sovereignty forfeit the democratic and economic birthright of all Americans. This potential danger was recognized in the only public discussions of the legal implications of our trade agreements in 1992. The record of those NAFTA Proceedings were ignored by the Clinton Administration and later Bush Administration preventing your right to know how and why Americans were losing their jobs and communities to so-called free trade. And don't be fooled by the media characterization of TPP skeptics as backward and un-informed. The best minds in international trade, Wolf, Stiglitz, Summers, each recognizes how you have been ripped off and why a pause in the rush to ratify TPP is in order.
But TPP is about much more than trade: it is about continuing to send your kids and grandkids to war for the benefit of Wall Street and war profiteers. Your Governor has agreed to be the Republican face of President Obama's arrogant push for a trade pact that 70% of American say that they do not want. Governor Kasich's position was published in the Washington Post last week.
In one respect Kasich's statement is the most truthful statement about TPP yet, in that it clearly tells you that “at its core, this agreement is about making sure the United States continues to strengthen its essential alliances and is willing to sustain its standing as the global leader…” In plain language, this is about making war in the Far East. And to further the point, Kasich identifies himself and TPP with the failed leaders, Panetta, Gates, Rumsfeld, Powell, Albright whose policies have destroyed the Middle East and left us in monstrous debt.
But Kasich mis-speaks when he identifies President Reagan with TPP. Ronald Reagan appointed me to positions of responsibility three times beginning in 1974 through 1981(General Counsel of the Army) and 1983 (Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs). Ronald Reagan would never have committed your sons and daughters to war in the Middle East, he would never have signed NAFTA as written and he would never surrender American Sovereignty and your sons and daughters to foreign corporations and back-door defense commitments to the oligarchs of the Asian Pacific.
Jim Jordan is the lowest rung on the Obama, Kasich, Koch Brothers free trade totem pole. But his defeat will insure that TPP will not be signed in this or future Congresses. Janet Garrett stands with Bernie Sanders and against the bought and paid-for politicians who value Wall Street and corporate greed more than American Democracy and your families' welfare.
