2014 February | Let's Fix This Country

Attempts Afoot to Get Money Out of Politics

In early February a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives that seeks to drive big money donors — and the influence that they buy — out of politics with a scheme of small dollar contributions amplified by matching funds. As a measure of just how out of balance campaign funding has become, the top 32 donors to Super PACs in 2012 equaled the gifts of over 3.7 million Americans by their spending as much money as every small donation to Obama and Romney combined. The hope is to upend the oligarchy of a Congress dependent for re-election on monied interests and to return especially the House to James Madison’s vision in Federalist 52 of a representative democracy “dependent on the people alone”.

Named the Government by the People Act and authored by Democratic Representative John Sarbanes of Maryland, it has a sizable list of some 130 sponsors and claims the support of over 30 organizations including Dêmos, Common Cause, U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), Sierra Club, and the Brennan Center for Justice.

For candidates who agree to participate:

The bill would create a fund from which to match contributions of up to $150 at a 6-to-1 ratio.

The fund would have to come from eliminating unspecified tax loopholes.

To be eligible for matching funds, candidates would have to agree to a limit on large donations and would have to show constituent support by attracting on their own a starter base of 1,000 contributors totaling at least $50,000.

Taxpayers would be given a $25 refundable tax credit to encourage them to contribute.

In the final 60 days before an election, matching funds would rise to a 10-to-1 ratio for candidates in high-profile races to fend off the likely onslaught of outside money.

In the 2009-10 session of Congress, Senators Dick Durbin (D-Il) and Arlen Specter (D-Pa) sponsored the Fair Elections Now Act. A companion bill was introduced in the House. These bills had terms similar to the Government by the People Act but neither made it out of committee. But Durbin has resurrected Fair Elections Now as the Senate counterpart to Government by the People. The two are joined at this website.

One might think that politicians would avidly wish to be rid of the burden of having to spend at least half of their time raising money for re-election by talking to wealthy donors who expect them to vote as told on particular legislation. Under a small contribution structure, that headache and the embarrassment of continuously and personally having to ask for money would be replaced by the more hands-off process of campaigning for donations mostly over the Internet. Three states have small dollar programs — Arizona, Connecticut and Maine. Proof enough of their appeal is that in Connecticut, 78% of elected representatives signed on to the small dollar alternative the moment it passed in the state legislature.

Nevertheless, all the backers of the Government by the People Act are House Democrats and organizations labeled “progressive”.

There’s a not so hidden agenda for why many members of Congress want the present system of money raising to continue. They view Capitol Hill as merely a farm league for K Street — lobbyist row — as Congressman Jim Cooper (D-Tn) notably said. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard professor and lawyer, tells us in this TED talk heard by over a million people that 50% of those in the Senate and 42% of those in the House who became alumni between 1998 and 2004 took lobbying jobs. Were its members to go the small dollar contribution route, the lobbyists for the big money interests of industry would lose their clout and begin to disappear because the members of Congress would no longer rely on their clients’ money. Thus reduced in effectiveness, lobbying would no longer pay anywhere near as well. Those lush jobs — jobs that that members are counting on after Congress — would no longer await.

Lessig tells the story of Al Gore sending an aide to Congress to float the idea of deregulating part of the telecommunications industry. Said one Congress member to the aide, “Hell no. If we deregulate these guys, how are we going to raise money from them”. That explains why so many laws have sunset clauses. Their looming expiration equips members of Congress to raise money all over again from affected donors to get the laws renewed.

Given such daunting prospects, how do Sarbanes and Durbin hope to get the statute passed? Unless the groups we listed raise massive public support, forcing Congress members to vote for it else admit they are captives of big money, the bill will never get out of committee in the Republican-controlled House. The organizations we listed above as supporters are key to drumming up a grass roots outcry for the passage of such a bill. Perhaps it is too soon to judge, but a tour of their websites shows that they seem more preoccupied with their own business as usual. At this writing, none of them carry promotion of the Sarbanes bill on their home page, and use of their search mechanism was needed to find what was usually only a short press release that did not even explain the mechanics of how the small contribution program would work.

the long road

Many believe a constitutional amendment that restricts the financing of political campaigns to people, and which limits how much an individual can contribute, is the only way to stop money from determining the outcome of elections. That path presents its own formidable obstacles. Two thirds of the House and Senate and three-quarters of the state legislatures must sign off for an amendment to pass. The Founders wanted to make it difficult to tamper with their work. Nevertheless, the nation was able to amend the Constitution 17 times (if one doesn’t count the first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights, that were tacked on en bloc two years after the original document was adopted). In recent times, repairing the often inadequate Constitution has stalled. There’s only been one amendment in over 40 years, and that a modest one limiting congressional pay increases. With polarization, the steep two-thirds barrier that the Constitution’s authors prescribed has made getting Congress to pass an amendment an impossibility.

And so, we are left pondering the question of just how will we be able to rescue the country from our kept Congress and return it to the people.

Feb 24 2014 | Posted in Law | Read More »

Middle East Turmoil: An American Foreign Policy Failure?

Our self-proclaimed experts tell us that U.S. policy in the Middle East is in tatters and President Obama is largely to blame.

Syria is aflame, over 100,000 thought to be dead after three years of civil war. Half a dozen Syrian militia groups now
battle each other and al Qaeda for control. Over a million refugees have poured into Turkey and Jordan, the latter a small country that could collapse under the weight. Turkey is in a turmoil of its own devising, with weeks of demonstrations in Taksim Square in Istanbul followed by its leader Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his administration coming under investigation for corruption.

Saudi Arabia backs the Sunni opposition in Syria — al Qaeda among them — whereas Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, threatened by losing its Iran-through-Syria weapons supply line, is fighting cross border in Syria in support of the regime of Shiite-Alawite Bashar al Assad and against the Sunni opposition.

Bombings in Beirut against Hezbollah’s participation and an assassination in retaliation threaten resumption of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war. Hezbollah’s threat to next door Israel is at least quiescent as a result, but Israel shows little sign of progress toward a two-state solution, throwing up preconditions to thwart negotiations while appropriating still more West Bank land for settlements, risking another intifada.

Iraq has become a client state of Iran, allowing its weapons to traverse Iraqi air space into Syria. Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s blockade of Iraq’s Sunni population from representation in the government has led to a throwback to 2006’s daily bombings and the resurrection of al Qaeda in Iraq, which took control of the key cities Fallujah and Ramadi in Anbar Province that the U.S. marines had won in the costliest engagements of the Iraq war.

In Egypt, the Arab Spring has ended in the tyranny of the military, with the Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammad Morsi deposed and locked in a cage at trial, 20 reporters from Al Jazera under arrest, bombings in Cairo and dozens killed in ongoing demonstrations — all against a backdrop of a collapsed economy and rampant unemployment.

Libya, rescued from its dictator by French and English forces from NATO with the U.S. in a support role, is in chaos, controlled by warring militias, al Qaeda assumed among them. Yemen is little different, its north controlled by al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula.

What irony, therefore, that Tunisia, which ignited the Arab Spring, is at peace having just adopted a constitution forged by compromise between differing groups.

how we got here

The neo-conservative crusade at the beginning of the new century sought to convert the Middle East to democracy. The belief was that one successfully converted country would seed a contagion that would cause uprisings in the rest. Led by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Lewis “Scooter” Libby — all working for or connected to the Defense Department — the neocons lobbied hard for taking on Iraq as the test case. All are Jewish and Iraq had lobbed Scud missiles into Israel during the 1991 Gulf War and had made further threats. They found in George W. Bush a ready participant who, for reasons unclear, pressed for attacking Iraq immediately after 9/11, even to the point (with Cheney whispering in his ear) of fabricating a connection between al Qaeda, Iraq and the attacks on America.

Iraq was of course a ruinously costly misadventure — a dictator toppled but with well over a hundred thousand dead and over 2 million refugees — yet when the Arab country uprisings occurred three years ago, the neocons came out of hiding to take credit. Our point in raising this is that they claimed it had planted the seed that took flower as the Arab Spring, never mind an unexplained dormancy of seven years.

Given how that has turned out, you would expect the neocons to be in retreat again, now that these nations have slid into chaos rather than democracy. Instead, they spoke out against Obama, blaming the fall of Fallujah and Ramadi on his not trying hard enough to keep American troops in Iraq. So do Senate hawks John McCain and Lindsey Graham blame Obama for the same reason. The neocon group counts on our having forgotten that it was their war of choice that unleashed the Sunni-Shiite schism that led to today’s continued bombings and the battle for those cities, and that it was George W Bush who agreed to the withdrawal timetable.

Critics who say that we have no Mideast foreign policy may be right, but their perspective seems to assume that these countries should acknowledge United States supremacy over their affairs. Once we had the convenience of dealing with a few dictators who had a boot on the chest of their countries and found it worth their while to keep the U.S. as something of an ally.

But then we removed Hussein, the Arab Spring toppled Ben Ali, Mubarak and Qaddafi, and Assad’s control is threatened by an unending civil war. Wasn’t regime change by overthrow exactly what the West had always wished for as the cure for the backward Middle East. Alas, what we got — predictably for those who know history — was the resumption of the centuries old Sunni-Shiite death spiral that redraws the maps by sect rather than by the arbitrary national boundaries drawn mindlessly by the British following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War

Hussein excepted, the implosion of the Arab world is entirely their own doing, so why is it thought an American foreign policy failure that we no longer have the same influence as before? The splintering of these countries into fragments poses the difficulty of sorting out which faction to deal with.

critics left and right

The critics’ lamentations about lost power come across as nostalgia for the simpler days of dictatorships and are found among those on both the left and right. As example, Bob Dreyfuss, a contributing editor at the liberal magazine The Nation accused the Obama administration of “a series of foreign policy flubs, stumbles and mini-disasters”, sprinkling his long critique with subheads such as “Saudi and Israeli Punching Bag”, “Debacle in Syria” and “Laughingstock in Egypt”. In Egypt, Obama suspended delivery of weapons to the military rulers but continued aid for counterterrorism. For Dreyfuss, what makes us a joke is that we no longer have influence with the military rulers. But isn’t that because we have been outbid by Saudi Arabia’s $12 billion infusion that dwarfs our own? Does Dreyfuss think that Obama is free to write checks? And the punches that Saudi Arabia is throwing at the United States are for our not taking military action in Syria on behalf of their fellow-Sunni insurgents? They apparently think it is for the U.S. to do the fighting, not themselves. What is the desert kingdom doing with the world’s 3rd largest fleet of F-15s?

Speaking of “Scooter” Libby, on the right he and Hillel Fradkin, both at the Hudson Institute, writing in The Wall Street Journal, engage in an extended riff on Sisyphus, the mythical figure in Greek mythology condemned to push a rock halfway uphill only for it to roll down again, likening him to Obama’s “halfway presidency”. “National leaders are expected to find a new, better way of coping with challenges” is their vague prescription. Obama presents a “startling image of American futility and lack of vision”, which they immediately compare to (who else but) Ronald Reagan’s success with the Soviet Union. The premise of dealing with a single, still orderly country compared to coping with the turmoil of the Middle East today seems singularly inapt. They, too, speak of the Saudis “losing faith in the U.S.”, as if their blessing defines us.

Obama’s temerity to say “with the Afghan war ending” is somehow called by these two “rhetorical sleight of hand” and is enough for them to say, “What a contrast with Kennedy’s ‘bear any burden’ Cold War call to arms and Reagan’s flat-out challenge to the Soviets”, except that theirs was actual rhetoric, neither of those presidents being in a shooting war, unlike Obama who is responsible for the lives of our troops in Afghanistan.

undercutting the iran deal

Obama has repeatedly said that he will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, but is following to the limit a policy of diplomacy to avoid having to act on that militarily. It may be hopelessly naïve to think that Iran can be persuaded to back away from its nuclear ambitions and “join the family of nations”, but it is easy to develop catastrophic scenarios for the region were the U.S. or Israel to attack. Yet, spurred on by the Israel lobby and Netanyahu — the head of yet another country that wants the U.S. to fight its battles — the Senate has come close to passing a bill that, in the midst of delicate negotiations, would tighten sanctions on Iran. Even Democrats went against Obama to pander to the Jewish vote, despite the move certain to end any hope of a lasting halt to weapons grade uranium enrichment, leaving only war as an option if Iran proceeds.

Finally, where Obama can truly be blamed is his policy — or its lack — for Syria. He is mocked for his ever receding “red lines”, of course (but he did not say Assad “must go”, which reads as a threat. He said, “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside” (Aug 2011)” and, Assad “needs to go” (May 2013), but such subtle differences are lost on the commentariat). His failure to step into the fray and deliver weapons to the Syrian opposition early on, when there was a greater possibility of identifying and strengthening a preferred militia group, was a lost opportunity. Now, with al Qaeda having poured in, the worry is that weapons will find their way into the wrong hands, much as happened with the mujahedin in Afghanistan, who turned on the U.S. after our weapons helped them expel the Russians.

And now Assad has missed by a huge margin a deadline to remove chemical weapons which cannot be explained away by the deadline being too tight. A Washington Post editorial reacted with “Mr. Assad is playing games. This cannot be tolerated”, but that “Mr. Obama has been noticeably adverse to direct U.S. military action in Syria”. Well yes, he has, as any president should be, but those editors’ short memory forgets that it was just last August when the Navy brought three cruisers to the end of the Mediterranean ready to launch cruise missiles at Damascus and Obama went to Congress to win approval to launch. Instead he found himself hemmed in by the lack of a U.N. mandate — which both Bush’s had for their Iraq invasions — and by a Congress, backed 63% by a war-weary public, newly insisting that its constitutional role in deciding when to go to war be restored. Obama would have had to go it alone — one man declaring war backed by no one. When Putin extracted a pledge by Assad to remove Syria’s entire stock of chemical weapons, Obama was “rescued in humiliating fashion”, although it was the better solution. Commentators bewailed the Decline of American Power.

But with Assad going back on his pledge and Moscow giving him cover by saying he is “acting in good faith”, Obama is coming up on a final test of his resolve to use force. Perhaps this time Congress will relent.

Feb 20 2014 | Posted in World | Read More »

Immigration Breakdown: Republican Right Calls a Halt

No sooner had the votes been counted in the 2012 election than immigration reform became a top priority. After doing nothing to fulfill a 2008 campaign pledge, after instead
deporting more undocumented immigrants than any president before him, Barack Obama owed reform to the Latino population, 71% of whom voted for him.

For that same reason, Republicans realized that they had better spearhead reform, because if they failed to attract the growing Hispanic voting bloc, the party’s gradual extinction was a possibility. Mitt Romney’s vow to repeal the DREAM Act, if enacted, and his encouraging “self-deportation” of illegals had been a potent insult to those Latinos here legitimately and able to vote, and their support dropped to 27% from the 40% won by George W Bush. Clearly, something had to be done.

on second thought

Fast forward to now. Speaker John Boehner announced in early February that something had turned to nothing. No action will be taken about immigration by the House for this entire year. The urgent need to resolve the issue that came to light in November 2012 is deemed to no longer matter politically and politics is all that matters. Newly emboldened by Obamacare, Republicans believe themselves less in need of the Hispanic vote. The multiple failures and faults of the healthcare law offer so rich a vein to tap in election campaigning that there is growing confidence by the GOP that they can even gain control of the Senate.

Boehner reversed field from just a week earlier when he said, “This problem’s been around for at least the last 15 years so I think it’s time to deal with it”. After weeks of debate, House Republicans had come up with a one-page draft that spelled out the terms for legislation that the Speaker viewed as “a fair, principled way for us to solve this issue”.

What caused the back flip? An onslaught from the rightmost elements of the Party — groups such as the Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks, the Heritage Foundation — that view the proposed terms of reform as “amnesty” and from a practical standpoint find reform as too divisive an issue within their own ranks to broach in an election year. Cowed once again — think back to his caving in to the extreme elements of the Party over the government shutdown — Boehner sounded retreat.

obama’s fault

For public consumption the reason is that President Obama is to blame. Republicans contend that he cannot be trusted to enforce an immigration law — a meme adopted dutifully by every interviewed Republican and immediately amplified by Fox News (“New questions are being raised whether the president can be trusted…”). This, let’s remember, is speculation about how the President would treat an imaginary law that has not yet been written and that won’t be written because it cannot possibly pass the House for reasons just cited.

As evidence that Obama would not enforce, Republicans point to how the President has freely manipulated the healthcare law. He first issued over 1,100 waivers to self-insured businesses and groups plus 34 unions to allow them to temporarily retain their annual cap on payouts for ill employees. (Boehner on the floor of the House said “the president has given his friends in the labor unions some 1,100 waivers to this law”). Several relaxations of deadlines would follow, but the big re-working of the law was Obama’s postponing for a year the requirement that all companies with over 50 employees pay for their employees’ health insurance.

We could point out that all of the freewheeling adjustments the president has made have been to iron out problems to make the law work. We could say that the Republican allegation is irrational for being the opposite: that their distrust assumes Obama would tamper with an immigration law to make it not work. Just three months ago, reported The Wall Street Journal the president…

“brainstormed at the White House… with religious leaders over how to persuade House Republicans to move on the issue…met with business executives to urge them to speak out for action…is planning other immigration events on the road, with a mix of national and local outreach, both behind the scenes and publicly”.

…and just two weeks ago in the State of the Union address said “let’s get immigration done this year, let’s get it done. It’s time”. Obama unfortunately helped the Republican farce look like fact when just four days later he tampered with the healthcare law yet again, postponing for a second year the employer mandate for smaller American businesses and reducing the requirement for large corporations.

term sheet

The draft proposal that drew the ire of conservative groups would offer legal status to undocumented immigrants — but not citizenship. They must admit that they entered the U.S. illegally, must pay fines and taxes, pass a criminal background check, and demonstrate a level of proficiency in English. The children they brought in would be eligible to apply for citizenship.

But the far right in Congress such as Texas Senator Ted Cruz call this “amnesty”, a reductio ad bumper-sticker that belies the lengthy and demanding process of applying for legal status and a corruption of the word. Amnesty, the dictionary tells us, simply means a summary pardon for past offenses.

If legal status is unacceptable to the Tea Party and other rightist elements, then what? If forced to admit, would they say their plan is enforcement of E-Verify to block the undocumented from employment, leading to Romney’s self-deportation? Do they envision a long march of 11 million back across the border?

Moreover, according to the draft proposal, the pathway to legal status would be blocked until the federal government can prove that the Mexican border is sealed off. That is the precondition demanded by Republicans, a requirement that causes many in favor of reform to aim their distrust at Republican intentions to enforce the law. Will they claim that the 1,900 mile border is never quite sealed even when influx is reduced to a trickle? Will this be a case of repeatedly advancing half the distance to the goal, meaning that the government never quite gets there, insuring that the so-called “amnesty” sequence never begins?

let it fester

The reason that the problem of illegal immigrants has grown huge — some 11 million estimated to be in the U.S. — is largely because of the failure of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, to face the issue year after year. The last immigration bill dates to the Reagan administration, 28 years ago, when some three million gained legal status after passage of a law with conditions much like the present proposal. Which makes the point that what Republicans did then they refuse to do now.

The result of this irresponsible inattention has allowed families to come here, find jobs, have children and generally settle into communities all over the national map. For those here a long time, a legal problem has metamorphosed into a moral transgression by those who indicate a preference to deport. That is lost on senators such as Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, who says “Republicans must end the lawlessness, not surrender to it”. What is literally law-less is the lack of a law that deals with the matter. Yet there is one; it was passed by the Senate last June. The imperious Mr. Boehner months ago huffily said that the House wouldn’t even consider the Senate version. The House would write its worn. And now — for political reasons that pay no heed to societal needs — he declares that another year will go by with Congress having done nothing.

This impasse has led New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer to call the Republican bluff, proposing that the House overcome its distrust of Obama by passing a bill set to take effect only after the president’s term ends. That, of course, was dismissed out of hand by Mr. Boehner. So others are now contemplating invoking the rarely used “discharge petition” whereby a bill can be forced to the floor, overriding the Speaker’s dictates.

Oh, and by the way, the Speaker has unilaterally declared that nothing will be done by his branch of the legislature about tax reform, either. Another year of doing nothing to fix the nation’s problems.

Feb 16 2014 | Posted in Policy | Read More »

Obama Pokes a Stick at the Russian Bear

The Russia of Vladimir Putin grows increasingly repressive. Arrests of protesters and journalists, laws banning homosexual “propaganda”, prisons — according to to members of
Pussy Riot visiting America — where inmates are worked 16 to 20 hours a day and sometimes locked outdoors in Roar: March 2: This piece says Obama’s snub of Russia’s big moment at Sochi “will come back in some form” from the “vengeful” Putin. Right off, we see Russian troops moving into Ukraine ignoring feckless U.S. “warnings”.

rain and cold for tortuous eight hour stints.

It is also a major country with thousands of nuclear warheads and a belligerent leader who shows no signs of leaving. After his eight year presidency was interrupted by the bother of constitutionally mandated term limits, he returned four years later to an expanded six year term in a protested election and, if reelected to a second term, could be the head of the Russian state until 2024 — or later, should Russian law succumb to his power.

In other words, he could be with us for a long time. And he will be making every move to restore Russia to power, with increasing nationalization of much of the country’s industry — especially energy — to make that happen.

With the staggering amounts he caused Russia to spend on the Sochi Olympics, Putin is making the statement — as the media has repeated in chorus — that “Russia is back”, back from the years of near anarchy and hardship after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In not paying a visit to Sochi out of respect to Russia &#0151 it could have been quick and unannounced except to the Russian leadership to foil any terrorist opportunities — President Obama has shown inexcusably bad judgment. He has made it doubly worse by choosing this unsuitable moment to make a statement against Russian anti-gay laws by sending as the U.S. delegation a group consisting of openly gay former athletes such as Billie Jean King and Brian Boitano. And instead of at least Vice-President Joe Biden, Obama sent as head of the delegation someone not even a member of his government, the former Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. Members of the LGBT community now reading this are probably fuming, but should realize that far more is at stake than scolding Russia for its backward views. We have to live in this dangerous world and cannot afford to alienate regimes we may not particularly like but which are strong players on the world’s chessboard. Russia can help or hinder with Iran, exerts strong influence in Syria, and is already showing signs that Obama’s irresponsibly hostile attitude toward Russia is partly causing Putin to put out alliance feelers to China. A more threatening power bloc we cannot imagine.

It is widely known that Obama doesn’t like Putin, and the dislike is mutual. But Obama is representing the interests of the United States and his personal dislikes are of no interest. It is far more skillful to bewilder an opponent with a mix of friendly gestures where appropriate so as to make challenges more effective at other moments. The president seems surprisingly inept at such diplomatic arts, a shortcoming we cannot afford.

We have to assume that Putin, who cannot even manage a smile when his athletes excel, is a vengeful sort, and Obama’s snub of Sochi will come back in some form to our country’s detriment.

Feb 14 2014 | Posted in World | Read More »

Corporations Press for Power Grab in Pacific Trade Pact

You weren’t supposed to know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Behind closed doors the United States and eleven Pacific rim nations have been negotiating a trade pact designed to hand multinational corporations powers greater than their own governments’. It is referred to as “NAFTA on steroids” by those opposed, expected to hand still more jobs to other countries. Yet President Obama has lobbied the Senate for “fast track” treatment to ram it through — an up-or-down show of hands with no debate and no amendments. Awakened to the fast one the president is trying to pull, Democratic Senate chieftain Harry Reid has refused.

Stealth has been essential to keep the public from knowing not just about risks to American jobs that the most wide-reaching trade pact in history would cause, but about the new powers it confers on corporations, which we take up below. We can only suspect that the media have obliged with silence so as not to anger their corporate advertisers. How else to explain what Media Matters has reported. It’s a watchdog group with a progressive slant but we’ll assume its statistics are agnostic. They reviewed six months of network news (ABC, CBS, NBC) and found not a word of mention of the trade agreement. TPP was mentioned on PBS’ “Newshour”, but only by a guest in a sentence about relations with Pacific countries. That’s it.

not just trade

Set in motion by George W. Bush in 2008, and now embraced by President Obama, the Trans-Pacific Partnership goes well beyond trade; only 5 of its 29 covenants are concerned with typical trade rules such as tariffs and quotas. The rest, a couple of chapters of which have been exposed by Wikileaks, reveal why negotiations have been conducted all these years at a level of such secrecy that participating nations are pledged not to reveal their contents until four years after the final deal is struck or talks are abandoned.

But 600 representatives of corporations are privy to those contents. Asked to act as U.S. trade advisers, they have access to a secure online site where they may review the documents whenever they choose. They make up 84% of the advisory conclave. Unions, whose workers stand to be greatly affected, have a less than 5% representation. Which explains how some astonishing provisions have found their way into the other 24 covenants, reportedly going well beyond the accommodations to corporations of the last big trade deal, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Protections for Relocating Corporations: Signatory nations would give special privileges to companies setting up in their country. By making American corporations more comfortable when they move abroad, these protections encourage still greater offshoring of America jobs. And reciprocally, these privileges are what our government will be guaranteeing to any foreign multinational that sets up shop here — for example, compensation for the cost of a regulation enacted after they arrive — competitive advantages not available to U.S. companies.

Regulation Relief: To enforce provisions of the treaty, corporations will be able to sue governments directly, sidestepping a nation’s court system and its laws by bringing cases before special World Bank and United Nations tribunals, with the host nation bound by the compact to compensate the corporation in the event of adverse rulings. Companies can be expected to challenge a country when its laws conflict with the trade agreement. Under what are called “investor state” rights, they can even claim compensation for the alleged loss of “expected future profit”. Multinational companies will finally have found the grail: power greater than that of the sovereign states in which they do business.

Foreign companies could sue for exemption from a country’s laws. They could complain that a nation’s food inspection laws exceed those of their home country, for example. Or that product safety regulations go beyond the trade pact and that import of their goods should not be blocked. One need only think of the range of problems the U.S. has had with Chinese imports — toys with lead paint, toothpaste with diethylene glycol, wallboard that has made people ill.

Low wage foreign companies would be free to undermine our minimum wage laws. They would be exempt from any environmental regulations that exceed whatever is universally agreed to by the member countries — which is sure to set a very low bar. A foreign mining company could probably blow past regulations that ban our companies from mining in an area with risks to the water supply.

Bye-bye to Buy American: All government contracts would be open for bidding by foreign companies. Job creation policies that require a contractor to use American labor and manufactures would be outlawed. We would see the American tax dollars that pay for such contracts go to foreign corporations.

Financial License: The TPP’s financial rules seem unmindful of the financial collapse of 2008-2009. They ban restrictions on the very derivatives and credit default swaps that contributed so greatly to a calamitous recession whose effects are still being felt. The banking corporations advising the TPP have kept the casino open internationally, and we will see foreign banks in the U.S. challenging the already heavily eroded financial reform law known as Dodd-Frank.

The trade pact would allow the the TPP organization to step in and throttle lending in a country with an overheated economy. And its protocols even ban a nation’s right to clamp down on the flow of money in and out of a country, a key weapon to control inflation from an excess influx of money and, in the other direction, an excess outflow triggered by a run on banks — a small scale augury of which recently beset Cyprus.

Internet Controls: The Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) has found new life in the TPP. The furor aroused by that legislation in the U.S. — where the government attempted to control the Internet — caused it to be scuttled, but now this gathering of countries has decided that they have jurisdiction over the Internet. This reflects U.S. media companies exerting their demands at TPP sessions to protect copyright, and that section of the trade deal — exposed by Wikileaks — shows severe fines for even minor copying.

Keeping Medicine Costly: Those same intellectual property rules have been advanced by the big pharmaceutical companies sitting at the TPP table, who want the power to challenge government healthcare drug pricing and to block low cost generics by extending patents to 20 years. Keeping drug costs high would deliver a serious blow to fighting malaria, HIV/AIDS and other diseases in poor countries.

Open door: The TPP offers open admission. So it is not just a trade association for emerging economies such as Vietnam or Malaysia. Any country on the Pacific rim — there are 38 with Pacific shorelines — may join the talks, as have Mexico and Canada and, just announced, Japan. Or join in the future, which could mean Russia and China. We could thus someday see Chinese companies decamping to the U.S. and suing for the special advantages the U.S. has granted them by signing the TPP.

Lori Wallach at Public Citizen asks what would the U.S. gain from the trade deal. To begin with, we already have agreements with six of the countries comprising 90% of the total GDP of all the partners, so what is the agreement needed? She points out:

“The remaining four countries — Malaysia, New Zealand, Vietnam and Brunei — offer comparably little
in new markets for U.S. exports. In Vietnam, annual income per person is just $1,374. New Zealand
has a population of only about 4.4 million people — smaller than the metro area of Washington, D.C.
Brunei has just 425,000 people — smaller than Huntsville, Ala. Taken together, the four TPP countries
with which the United States does not yet have a trade agreement have a combined GDP equivalent to
Pennsylvania.”.

And she cites NAFTA’s effect, the pact sold to America by Bill Clinton as a job creator that bound Mexico, the United States, and Canada in a trade compact.

“The year before NAFTA took effect, the U.S. trade deficit with Canada stood at $28.5 billion, while the U.S. enjoyed a $2.4 billion surplus with Mexico. By 2011, the U.S. had a combined NAFTA deficit of $185.4 billion”.

That’s a swing that would have to mean massive job loss. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that NAFTA cost the United States a million jobs.

now you understand the secrecy

Congress has been shut out of the proceedings altogether in violation of its constitutional power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations”. When Ron Wyden sought access to the texts of the draft agreement, he was denied by the Obama administration, even though Wyden is chairman of the Senate committee that has jurisdiction over trade negotiations. Only when he threatened with legislation to force access to the text by all Congress members were Wyden and his subcommittee staff allowed to view the documents, but only at the United States Trade Representative’s office with no copies taken away.

all for it

So how to fathom Obama’s support for TPP, support that is known but barely spoken for fear of sparking a public outcry? It is part of his shift to Asia, but should that be at all costs? Is it just ego — wanting to have another big achievement to his name without regard for the consequences. Labor is of course against it, which would make for a betrayal of the voters who supported both his elections. They remember NAFTA.

Obama has asked Congress for Trade Promotion Authority — known as “fast-track” — which requires an up or down vote with no filibuster and no amendments, knowing that the pact would never survive debate and that other nations would refuse changes. Congress has resisted — 130 House members signed a letter last year objecting to being shut out of the process and in mid-November of this year the New York Times reported that nearly half of House members signed letters or indicated their objection to fast-track. Pressure by the Obama administration and business leaders such as the Business Roundtable for Congress to vote acceptance this year narrowly missed. The pact contains provisions of foreign sway over U.S. laws and practices that Republicans abhor and still further loss of jobs that infuriates Democrats. But whether the delay will translate into enough time for Congress to wake up to how much is unacceptable in the trade deal is the question.

Editorial pages are all for it. With mild misgivings, a Times editorial says it could “help all of our economies and strengthen relations between the United States and several important Asian allies”. The Wall Street Journal is of course for it, faulting Obama for not having “reached out to Republicans who will have to provide most of the free-trade votes”. How Bloomberg/BusinessWeek thinks “the TPP would create tens of thousands of jobs in the U.S.” by expanding trade with a passel of subsistence wage countries is baffling. All extol the trade pact for eliminating tariffs and spurring global economic growth. They seem willfully unaware of all those chapters that are not about trade. And will this be another hugely important policy that Congress passes without reading?

Feb 6 2014 | Posted in World | Read More »

Not Enough to Worry About?

Each year the World Economic Forum thinks of all the terrible things that could happen during the coming year and grades them on two scales: How likely a given scenario is to occur and how great a global impact it would have over up to 10 years if it did occur.

The composite predictions had some surprises, chief among them that some event in 2014 relating to “Climate change” was judged among the few most likely to happen and would deliver the greatest worldwide risk. More likely still, but with lesser consequences: “Unemployment and underemployment”. Less likely, but with greater impact than climate change: “Fiscal crises”.

Dead center — only 50% likely and with an impact 50% of the rest: “Food crises”.

At the opposite extreme are those events thought least likely to occur and with slightest impact. The near winner you’ll be happy to learn: “Decline of importance of U.S. dollar”.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek mapped the results in a quadrant diagram, which you can pore over if you click…

Feb 4 2014 | Posted in Energy & Climate | Read More »