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PRESS RELEASE
Obama Pushes Free Trade Deal as if His Future Depends Upon it—it Does

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EIRNS—Barack Obama, in close alliance with the House Republicans, is going all-out to try to arm-twist and threaten his way to passage of Fast-Track Trade Authority today. His primary obstacle is intense Democratic Party opposition; so far only 21 House Democrats have declared their support for his position.

At stake is a lot more than the travesty represented by the free trade bill itself. As the Congressional leadership against the bill has pointed out repeatedly, the Fast Track Authority will lead to the likely passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership bill, which, like NAFTA before it, will represent another major attack on the U.S. labour force. Although the TPP has been shrouded in secrecy, it is reportedly by knowledgeable sources to be a full-scale attack on U.S. law as well, permitting companies to bypass legislation which they find a “hindrance” to their free trade practices.

Even more significant is the fact that the TPP is explicitly intended, by the Obama Administration, as part of a comprehensive attack on China—despite China’s consistent attempt to achieve economic cooperative relations with the United States. The bill is being sold as an anti-China weapon.

Domestically, pushing through the TPP is part of Obama’s drive for a de facto drive for dictatorship, already far advanced through his violations of the Constitution on the question of illegal undeclared wars, murdering U.S. citizens, unlawful surveillance, and the like. The Fast Track Authority is the first “issue” on which the Democrats have virtually unanimously resisted the President. As such, its success would be a giant political step toward enabling the necessary impeachment of a President who does not merely seek to destroy the U.S. economy and China, but who is leading the world toward World War III.