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The inside-the-beltway insiders (the redunancy is intentional) are
becoming more red faced and feverish. David Broder is called the
"Dean of Washington Pundits." This may be akin to being the King
of a particularly putrid swamp, but the issue is control and
influence. And Broder is losing it, in more ways than one.
Says the Dean today:
A particularly virulent strain of populism has made official Washington altogether too responsive to public opinion.
A pity that crony democracy is giving rise to a smidgeon of real
democracy. One would not think that all bad, unless you and your
cronies were previously comfortable doing crony-stuff.
Free trade is in
trouble from the pitchfork wielding peasantry that have not read
Aristotle or Edmund Burke (note to the pitchfork-wielders, they are
philosophers that you would have read had you gone to Dartmouth).
Not that Aristotle and Burke have anything to do with the multinational
mercantilism that has been rebranded as "free trade", but Broder thinks
he is smart because he has read them, and quotes from them.
The "fast-track" process, in which Congress casts only an
up-or-down vote on trade deals negotiated with other countries, has
been the key to a vast expansion in world trade. But the resulting
trade agreements have run into populist protests from labor and liberal
groups that blame them for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs.
The "upper-down vote" has been key to putting a legitimate face on
the trade deals negotiated by Cargill and Caterpillar before being
forced through Congress with no possibility of amendment or
changes. The "upper down vote" allows radical free traders to
shout "protectionist" if a Congressman has heartburn over a 700-page,
no amendment, trade package about to be voted upon, and released for
public view about 16 minutes and 34 seconds before the actual vote is
taken.
Broder then pulls out that circa-1994 all encompassing pro-free trade chant.
"America needs to remain open for business to the 95 percent of the world's consumers living outside the United States."
Currency manipulation, foreign country mercantilism, border
adjustable taxes, and all those strategic tools in the toolbox of other
governments used to be ignored with a mere repetition of the
free-trade-is-good creed. But a $2 billion per day trade deficit,
escalating volumes of poisonous food imports, and income inequality to
rival Czarist Russia have a way of refocusing the brain. Except
for Broder's brain, apparently.
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