Strange new lines are starting to be drawn between what used to be thought of as clear cut right and left on economic issues.
Look at Donald Trump's comments today on the TPP (and no, I'm not going to link to Breitbart):
GOP frontrunner Donald Trump lambasted the permanent political class for supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News ahead of the next debate.
“The deal is insanity,” he said. “That deal should not be supported and it should not be allowed to happen.”...
Rubio, Trump’s chief rival from the Washington establishment, has publicly backed the TPP deal multiple times throughout the year—in the Wall Street Journal and in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, where he called it a “pillar” of his desired presidency.
Though, like Hillary Clinton, Rubio is now backing away from the deal of which he was a key supporter before the public started to learn what was in it:
But now Rubio’s team says he’s undecided about the unpopular deal.
However, Rubio also provided the critical 60th vote for Obamatrade’s Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), which greases the skids for an congressional approval of the trade deal. TPA makes it impossible to amend the deal–or any other trade deal brought before Congress–and eliminates the ability for a Senate filibuster, essentially sealing final passage of TPP before the deal’s text even became public last week.
Interestingly, the grassroots right is now hammering Rubio for having been such a pawn of lobbyists in support of the deal:
Questions have arisen about whether Rubio read the text of the TPP deal–which was available in the basement of the U.S. Capitol for lawmakers to read in person –before he voted for the TPA which would fast-track it. Rubio’s team refuses to answer which days he supposedly spent in the classified reading room reading the text. It would have required multiple days in the room to read the deal before he voted on it.
Trump socked him nicely over being a pawn of "special interests":
“The only people that are supporting it politically are people that are controlled by the lobbyists for certain companies that want this to happen because it’s to their advantage, not to the country’s advantage. So the lobbyists and the special interests are supporting it, and certain politicians are supporting it because they’re totally controlled by the lobbyists and the special interests.”
Trump said he would reject the TPP and negotiate trade deals with individual countries instead, particularly on "currency manipulation" which "other countries—particularly China and Japan—use to take away our businesses and our jobs."
All this brought to mind Robert Reich's insightful comments from a couple of weeks ago:
The redistributions [via taxes and a social safety net to fight income inequality] that anyone is arguing for pale in comparison to the upward predistribution from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy. This transfer happens because of monopolistic practices, market power, extended copyrights and patents and bankruptcy rules that make it easy for wealthy businessmen to evade their debts and protect their fortunes, but make it almost impossible for homeowners caught in a downdraft to reorganize their mortgage debt or for graduates to reorganize their student debt...
I have spent the last year talking to everyone from small farmers who are organizing against big factory farms and monopolistic food processors, to small business-owners and regional bankers who are organizing against giant retailers, Amazon and Wall Street banks, to people engaged in the Fight for 15, the campaign for a $15 minimum wage.
All of these groups are organizing in the same direction in terms of countervailing power. When I wrote the book, I hadn't anticipated Bernie Sanders or even Donald Trump, but I do predict in the book that the biggest division in the future politically will be between antiestablishment and establishment forces, not between Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives. And that's already beginning to play out.
Keep that in mind the next time you see Robert Reich, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump on one side of an issue, and Marco Rubio, the non-Tea Party GOP, and President Obama on the other.