No matter how many ways I try to write this, it sounds crazy. There is no palatable way to put into words what I see week after week and month after month in American politics.  And yet, 45% of you will say that you knew it all along and 45% of you will say that it’s absurd and that I’m one of those conspiracy theorists and you’ll disregard the rest of this post and possibly write me off forever as a nutcase. So I suppose that I’m directing this observation towards the remaining 10% who hadn’t given it much thought before.

Does it seem ODD to anyone else that the GOP act like they despise and disagree with virtually everything that President Obama says, does, thinks or plans, in light of the fact that:

Under Obama, the United States has become the biggest oil producer in the world. Indeed, domestic oil production grew to the highest levels here in the US since record keeping began in 1900!. In fact, we now have so much oil, that we can’t even find a place to store it.  And despite the fact that the US government is well aware of the climate crisis which we had a mighty hand in creating and worsening, Obama proceeds to not only open up new parts of the Arctic for dangerous and unnecessary oil drilling, but he’s also trying to open up the Atlantic Ocean for oil exploration. AND, he’s found a way to circumvent the law prohibiting American petroleum exports via a very dodgy and completely secretive “reclassification” of oil through an obscure division within the Department of Commerce called the Bureau of Industry and Security.

But let’s leave the oil soaked shenanigans behind for a moment and look at other potentially telling issues in the Obama Administration. Even the conservative, Daily Caller is “calling it.”  Obama is a total friend to big business, not an enemy, I highly suspect that the time honored tradition of whipping up people with seemingly partisan politics and deep issue-based divisiveness are completely and utterly trumped up for our “benefit.” We are being played, America. The differences that appear to divide us aren’t really there at all. And when people sort of wake up from their collective coma and look around, asking people to put aside their differences, someone inevitably kicks up a “hot button” issue like abortion (which is not going to get reversed, but the GOP has to keep making it look like they’re trying to get their side fired up) or marriage equality (shin kick to liberals who bristle at such prejudice) and BOOM – suddenly a big brawl breaks out across America’s airways, in our newspapers and on the internet.

And the biggest corporate handouts of all were being hatched under our national radar, until they were exposed. They are so bad, In fact, that only a Democrat could provide “cover” for this awful bunch of trade regulations, which will forever change and damage our nation to its very core. I am referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership which is being pushed, or, more appropriately  SHOVED towards passage in the most secretive, least democratic way ever. Let me put it this way…if the Koch brothers could somehow both be President of the United States, and they had Rex Tillerson as Vice President, and then they filled every Cabinet level position with the head of the biggest corporations on Earth, and replaced every Supreme Court Justice with programmable robots, they STILL couldn’t think up such a stinker.

This “mother of all trade deals” is being negotiated behind closed doors, with the Obama Administration not even allowing members of Congress to TAKE NOTES, when they are allowed to see the trade documents, and they aren’t allowed to bring any of their own staff into the private and strictly controlled meetings, either. Thankfully, a few sections of this colossal gift to multinational corporations have been leaked, via Wikileaks, which has shown the deal is quite possibly worse than observers ever imagined. TPP would:

• Increase, and indeed, require the exporting of American jobs overseas to lower-wage countries, thus increasing income inequality here in the US;
• Radically increase the cost of medication, disallowing generics, while decreasing quality control;
• Allow and empower multinational corporations to attack and control our federal, state and local rules and policymaking and enable foreign corporations to take America to an international tribunal (supra legal court, outside the US) if laws do not conform to TPP rules. In this way, the average American would likely pay reparations for laws that do not allow foreign corporations to legally profit, according to TPP, here in the US;
• Roll back and eventually dismantle any and all rules trying to regulate Wall Street and the banking industry;
• Make it illegal to advocate for anything which give preferential treatment to local or national products or services, such as things like, “Buy American;”
• Seriously erode any attempts at environmental safeguards, climate change rule making and basic environmental protections to keep our water clean or our air unpolluted (because they would be considered “anti-TPP”) and wipe out the ability to regulate multinational corporations who extract, mine or produce energy on our land;
• Guarantee that we must import food products from abroad which are then protected from having to say where they originate and also allowing virtually any types of sanitation and agricultural practices to have taken place without our ability to ever see where anything is sourced;

If you don’t want to read any further about TPP, just think about this: between 500 and 600 multinational corporations wrote the  Trans-Pacific Partnership documents (such as ExxonMobil, Halliburton, Monsanto, Amgen, Dow, etc.) and they have full access to the 29 chapters. Only 3 of those chapters have been leaked to the public (via Wikileaks). US Congressman themselves have been given extremely limited access to the trade deal documents, and the American public would have zero access to any of it if they hadn’t been leaked.

Does that set off any alarm bells for YOU? It should. TPP will impact every single American’s daily life. Forever. And even Obama’s fellow Democrats are increasingly alarmed and opposed to it, along with a growing number of Republicans. The problem is, of course, that they are under a “gag order” not to disclose the details. Diabolical, huh?

And if a Republican President had introduced and pushed this hard for such an extreme trade deal, essentially giving multinational corporations control over all aspects of American policy, you can bet that a clear HALF of the population (liberals/Democrats) would be up in arms. But since it’s a Democrat proposing what, in classic terms, is a very conservative plan, a lot of what has been going on has flown entirely under the radar for a lot of us. Why? Because liberals would naturally be more trusting that a President who is a Democrat would never sell America out to such corporate interests.

So, who, ultimately, is “behind the curtain?” I have no idea. That’s above my pay grade. I’ll leave that to those crazy conspiracy theorists.