I have had nothing but pop sickles and codeine to eat for the last 24 hours. Knee surgery is a motherfucker. They were not gentle with my neck when they put in my breathing tube. It feels like someone had me in a headlock and was just wrenching the shit out of it for thirty minutes.

And it is bizarre to me that the President would pick this particular neo-liberal hill to die on. These free trade pacts aren’t really that popular anymore since we have seen what NAFTA and some of the other treaties signed during the nineties has wrought.

We should be tariff-ing the shit out of foreign goods instead of subsiding the governments of Mexico, China, India, and a host of other countries with this incomprehensible 500 billion dollar annual trade deficit we’ve built ourselves. I know I for one am willing to pay extra for something knowing that one of my fellow countrymen helped create on an assembly line or through some sort of machining operation.

It is something to see that almost all of the other developed industrialized nations using the same Hamiltonian protectionist model for trade that we used to up until the 80’s, because they know “free trade” is really not free for the average worker who in America has seen almost the entirety of their manufacturing base disappear over the last thirty years.

We seem to have the only government that actually believes in this shit, and is backed up by the only real benefactors of it which is the extremely cynical, myopic, and greedy corporate base in this country.