Why Democrats need to STOP THE TPP

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-democrats-need-sink-tpp?akid=14426.294211.mXoIum&rd=1&src=newsletter1059940&t=16

Why the Democrats Need to Sink the TPP

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, coming before the party’s platform committee last Friday, is a nightmare for Hillary Clinton.

imagine the debate that would ensue at the convention. TPP opponents will cast the document as a vestige of the party’s Wall-Street-influenced ancien regime, which crafted the deals that enriched major investors and consigned the nation’s industrial workforce to history’s ash heap. Whatever the deal’s defenders may say—it won’t be as bad as earlier ones? We’re against it but we can’t forsake the president?—will hardly help Clinton and the Democrats in Ohio and Pennsylvania this fall.

There’s a way the party can avoid this impending debacle. In agreeing to back a financial transaction tax, the drafting committee wrote, “We support a financial transaction tax to curb excessive speculation and high-frequency trading, which has threatened financial markets. We acknowledge that there is room within our party for a diversity of views on a broader financial transaction tax.” When the full platform committee convened on Friday and Saturday, similar language, opposing the deal but acknowledging a diversity of views, could surely have been drafted for the TPP.

Ultimately, whether the party reaches this kind of accord or plunges into a debilitating debate at its convention is up to the president. Obama clearly views the TPP, if ratified, as part of his legacy. But his broader legacy stands or falls on the outcome of November’s election, which, should Trump prevail, would ensure a reversal of all of Obama’s good work on health care, immigration and worker rights. To let this debate go forward, Mr. President, is one helluva roll of the dice.