Elizabeth Warren takes on Obama and the TPP

If it were up to me, Elizabeth Warren would be the next president of the United States. She is a remarkable woman—United States senator, former Harvard law professor and an expert in financial regulations. She has served a number of high level financial positions in Washington and was instrumental in establishing the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

She is now challenging President Obama on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive trade agreement the U.S. is negotiating with 11 other countries, including Canada. She is critical of the deal being negotiated in secret and its potential consequences for American workers, claiming the process is rigged and will lead to a rigged outcome. She has opposed efforts in Congress to give Obama permission to fast-track negotiations and demanded the agreement be revealed to the public.

The TPP may be a good deal for the masses, but that isn't for people like me to know. With the negotiations taking place in secret, we citizens have only a limited idea what our leaders are committing us to. The American negotiators have hundreds of advisers—overwhelmingly business interests—but they are limited in how much of the draft they can see and are forbidden by law from discussing what they know in public.

Obama's argument against Warren appears to be "trust me," a presumptuous attitude for an American president to assume after the Iraq war and the Snowden revelations. "Trade" agreements seem to end up a great deal more favourable to corporate interests than to the interests of the rest of us, and Ms. Warren has been far more willing to stand up to the corporate sector than Obama.

And that, unfortunately, is why she will never be president. The Democratic Party is highly unlikely to nominate anyone who has a reputation for confronting corporate interests, and even if she was nominated she probably couldn't win. I expect the day is long past when someone can become president of the United States without the approval and therefore the largesse of the corporate sector. Nonetheless, she makes a powerful champion for democratic process and for ordinary Americans ...  and for the rest of us subject to the TPP and its ilk.