Fast Track Stymied for Now

[Minimalist]

Good.  Whenever the Upper .1% want something it is for their benefit...not ours.

Glad to see Obama rebuked by his own party on this. 

http://apnews.excite.com/article/2015051...cae55.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate leaders said Tuesday that Democrats have enough votes to block action on President Barack Obama's trade initiatives unless the parties can work out disagreements on how to package various bills.

Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a strong opponent of Obama's trade agenda, said Democrats have more than enough votes to block action for now. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, agreed.

[Anomalocaris]

This trading deal, while innocuous looking, is quite provocative because it specifically attempts to exclude and isolate china.    Given the total fiasco that resulted from the parallel American effort to thwart Chinese challenge to US dominated world bank, I suspect this one would not end well if it passed.   It seems to me the Chinese are much better than we are in coolly identifying the strengths, weaknesses, and interests of different parties in the world, and would more often than not best us if we go head to head in a contest of making countries around the world pick one over the other.

Obama's Chinese policy is quite possibly his biggest long term foreign policy failure, even bigger than the total collapse of American position in the middleeast. Both were marked by completely unnecessary self-inflicted, and very damaging wounds on our part. 

Both of those were made possible by an general American suceptibility to what feels ideologically right, and an obliviousness to how complex real balance of power and balance of interests really is.