January 22, 2014

"Like Gravity" Fast-Track Trade Sinks Jobs and Wages

"Like Gravity" Fast-Track Trade Sinks Jobs and Wages

Wednesday, 22 January 2014 09:09
By Mary Bottari, PR Watch | Report


Rep. Dave Camp (R- MI) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) have introduced “Fast Track” legislation in Congress. It’s been 15 years since a U.S. president sought Fast Track authority, which strips Congress of its Constitutional authority to have a meaningful role in U.S. trade policy. If the Fast Track bill passes, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal involving 11 Pacific Rim countries could be completed and signed before it is sent to Congress for a vote. Then the far-reaching trade deal will be railroaded through with no amendments and only 20 hours of debate.

The original Fast Track was cooked up by Nixon, served up again by Clinton to pass the NAFTA and WTO agreements, and stirred up again in 2000 to jam China free trade through Congress. That all worked out well, didn’t it? The United States lost 5.7 million manufacturing jobs in the NAFTA/WTO era, and our trade deficit with China is now one of the largest in history.

Today, President Obama is seeking Fast Track to get the TPP and the 27-nation Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) through Congress. His road is a rocky one. His trade team could not convince a single Democrat to author the bill in the House, and with hundreds of groups across the political spectrum -- from progressive environmental and consumer groups to the conservative Farm Bureau and Tea Party patriots -- lined up against it, it’s possible Fast Track can be defeated.

.....(snip).....

Corporate Courts Facilitate Attacks on Consumer, Health, and Environmental Protections

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) turned the conversation at the Fast Track hearing in a completely new direction by asking David Cote if he thought trade agreements should be used to attack consumer and environmental laws democratically enacted around the globe. Brown referenced the so-called “investor-state” provisions that have been included in U.S. trade agreements that allow corporations to directly sue governments for cash damages outside of domestic court systems and in friendly trade tribunals if they believe consumer, health, or environmental regulations harm their products.

Brown pointed to a new case in Australia, where U.S. firm Phillip Morris is suing Australia over a new plain packaging rule for cigarettes designed to reduce cigarette smoking among teens and other new users. Phillip Morris battled the rule in Australian courts and lost, so is taking it to a corporate-friendly trade tribunal. The rulings of these tribunals are binding, and there is no appeal. .........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/21371-like-gravity-fast-track-trade-sinks-jobs-and-wages

January 22, 2014

Professor Richard Wolff's Economic Update: Global Inequality (audio link)

Listen: http://rdwolff.com/content/economic-update-global-inequality


by Richard Wolff.
Published on January 19, 2014

Updates on Colorado's new marijuana shops, how context exposes "recovery" claims, cause and cure for US obesity epidemic, and France's 75% tax rate on annual incomes over $1.3 million. Major discussions of history and dimensions of global inequality and movements for guaranteed annual incomes in Switzerland and beyond. Responses to questions on credit unions versus private banks and on the uniqueness of the economic crisis in western Europe.

January 22, 2014

How Obama and the Democrats failed to defend the universal right to healthcare

from In These Times:


A Private-Sector Model: Really?
How Obama and the Democrats failed to defend the universal right to healthcare.

BY James Thindwa


Outside observers watching the brouhaha over the Affordable Care Act’s website malfunction might well have assumed that the GOP, not the Democratic Party, is the governing party. After all, GOP zealots turned the long-overdue launch of national healthcare—a momentous achievement for the country—into a phony crisis about a website malfunction. What’s more, the national media obliged by allotting more time to fulminations about the website than interrogating the ideologues who oppose healthcare equity. While a few progressive commentators pushed back, the governing party went into retreat.

The GOP fury over the website’s issues was rooted not in any newfound interest in the ACA’s success, but in a long-held opposition to healthcare as a “right.” In a telling moment in the 2008 presidential debates, Obama asserted a right to healthcare, and McCain rejected it. The problem is that Democrats have handled this malevolence as normal political discourse, rather than the outlier worldview it is. Republicans are the only major political party in the industrialized world still fighting national healthcare. The failure of Democrats to turn this retrograde worldview into a national scandal explains why the GOP maintains an undeserved death grip on the healthcare conversation.

But Democrats have not only failed to confront Republicans. They have also reinforced conservative mantras that undermine their professed agenda by mimicking the anti-government evangelism and uncritical exaltation of markets, most memorably in Bill Clinton’s famous 1996 declaration that “the era of big government is over.” Democrats also ceded political space to GOP fanatics during the Affordable Care Act’s conception in 2009. Instead of contesting Tea Party fearmongering around Obamacare, Democrats offered concessions—first by excluding single-payer healthcare from consideration, then jettisoning the public option. The president’s (and the ACA’s) declining popularity underscores growing public doubts about Democrats’ willingness to stand and fight.

Rather than reassert the purpose of his health plan in the face of post-launch criticism, Obama apologized—repeatedly. His team promised that the improved ACA website would operate with “private-sector velocity and effectiveness.” Apparently they couldn’t find any examples of government “velocity and effectiveness.” They clearly didn’t consider the U.S. air traffic control system, which wondrously handles 64 million takeoffs and landings each year (Air Force One included) and oversees the safest skies in the world. Nor the Social Security Administration, which has never missed a payment to its 57,469,232 beneficiaries. By contrast, in the private sector last year, a security breach at Target Corp compromised the credit card data of 70 million customers, and a battery malfunction grounded all Dreamliner jets—built by that icon of capitalism, Boeing—but no one blamed free enterprise. ...........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16129/a_private_sector_model_really

January 22, 2014

“The capitalist workplace is one of the most profoundly undemocratic institutions on the face ....."

from The Progressive:


An Economist's Solution to Fixing America: Bring Democracy to Work


“I’ve got to pinch myself; I’m having the time of my life,” Professor Richard Wolff proclaimed to a standing-room-only crowd last week.

At that Jan. 17 event, co-presented by Pacifica’s KPFK and LAProgressive.com, rows of seats had to be added, in addition to opening up the room’s folding patio doors to accommodate the overflow crowd of roughly 550 people, all of whom came to hear the anti-capitalist economist speak.

“The capitalist workplace is one of the most profoundly undemocratic institutions on the face of the Earth." --Richard Wolff

Like the estimated 650 listeners who showed up for Wolff at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church on Jan. 15, another crowd at the Musicians' Hall in Hollywood eagerly flocked to hear the unapologetic “Marxian economist,” who for most of his life had toiled in the obscurity of academia and far-left circles.

Most of his life until now, that is.

“It’s not me; it’s the message which has remained the same,” Wolff said. Despite his modesty, Wolff’s dogged critiques of capitalism have propelled him to national acclaim in recent years, with repeat appearances on Bill Moyers’ and Charlie Rose’s TV shows, plus much more work on radio, in print and on the Internet. Wolff has found an increasingly receptive audience ever since the financial meltdown of 2008 made the contradictions of American capitalism -- particularly the decision to subsidize corporate losses and privatize corporate gains -- blatantly obvious. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://progressive.org/economist-fix-america-by-bringing-democracy-to-work

January 22, 2014

Poor, poor L. Brooks Patterson claims he's the victim of an ambush

Cue the orchestra.......


(Free Press) Battling back from a storm of negative publicity from an article in the New Yorker magazine, Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson said Tuesday he felt “ambushed and betrayed” by the article’s author whom he let tag along with him for three days last fall.

Patterson’s comments in the article included derisive and even profane ridicule of Detroit and Detroiters for his view of the city’s crime, corruption, mismanagement and residents who receive public assistance.

Calls for an apology mounted Tuesday from civil rights activists and Detroit political leaders, but Patterson insisted that “I’m not apologizing because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

He told the Free Press that he was quoted out of context and misled about the writer’s intentions. He said he regretted that the article came out at “this key time” in the region’s efforts to resolve Detroit’s bankruptcy. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.freep.com/article/20140121/NEWS03/301210093/L-Brooks-Patterson-Detroit-The-New-Yorker

January 22, 2014

Wait. Texas Is Spending How Much Money to Violate the Constitution?

from Slate:


Wait. Texas Is Spending How Much Money to Violate the Constitution?
By Phil Plait


As usual, when I write about this topic, let me start off by being very clear: Young Earth creationism—the idea that God created the Earth 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, borne of a literal interpretation of the Bible—is wrong. It is provably wrong, and in fact it is a violation of the United States Constitution’s First Amendment to teach it in public school.

So why is Texas (and with new schools opening, also Arkansas and Indiana) spending a whopping $82 million of taxpayers’ money every year to teach it?

This revelation comes from Zack Kopplin, who wrote a devastating article here in Slate about his investigation of Responsive Education Solutions, a group of publicly supported charter schools that currently has more than 65 campuses with 17,000 students enrolled. Kopplin obtained a copy of Responsive Ed’s workbook for biology that is used throughout their charter system, and what’s inside is disturbing, to say the very least.

The workbook, called a “Knowledge Unit”, is loaded with creationist propaganda, both subtle and overt. A large fraction of the curriculum in it is devoted to creating doubt about evolution (and other scientific fields) and to promoting a completely false controversy about the scientific facts of biological evolution. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/21/texas_charter_schools_curriculum_teaches_creationism.html

January 22, 2014

Corporate America Poisons West Virginia

from In These Times:


Corporate America Poisons West Virginia
How right-wing deregulation led to toxic water for 300,000 people.

BY Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers President


In West Virginia after a cavalier chemical company poisoned the drinking water of 300,000 people, the corporate-hugging, right-wing extremist group Americans for the Prosperous congratulated itself for doling out bottled water one day.

“What better way to help people than to give them water?” said Wendy McCuskey, a member of Americans for the Prosperous (aka Americans for Prosperity).

Well, maybe one better way would be regulating corporations to prevent them from poisoning water in the first place. But Americans for the Prosperous, and the group’s entitled billionaire sponsors, reject regulation. Instead, they believe the wealthy are entitled to operate recklessly and crash Wall Street now and again, operate haphazardly and poison a river or two, sicken and inconvenience non-rich Americans and force local taxpayers to cover the costs of emergency response and cleanup. That’s the way the entitled rich believe it should be. That is the Americans for the Prosperous way.

The company that poisoned the Elk River had escaped government inspection of its aging chemical storage tanks in a regulation-lax state for nearly a quarter century, since the time when the tanks, owned by a different firm, held gasoline. The company is called Freedom Industries—as in free from regulation, free to ooze 7,500 gallons of licorice-smelling, coal processing 4-methylcyclohexane methanol into a West Virginia drinking water supply; free to neglect mentioning the contamination until confronted by state officials; free to allow deterioration of the dike intended to prevent such a spill from splashing into the river; free to file for bankruptcy a week after polluting the river, thus shifting costs onto creditors and those injured. In other words, entitled to make money in any way it pleased and expect taxpayers to suffer the consequences. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16145/free_from_regulation_corporate_america_poisons_west_virginia/

January 22, 2014

85 Peoples’ Wealth=Half The World

http://www.workinglife.org/2014/01/20/85-peoples-wealthhalf-the-world/#sthash.eHoQHYzn.dpuf


from the Working Life blog:


85 Peoples’ Wealth=Half The World
Posted on 20 January 2014


Not a new idea but worth spotlighting on MLK Day that class warfare is forging ahead. Oxfam, in anticipation of the gathering of the Masters of the Universe at Davos, tells us this nugget: the richest 85 people have the same wealth as 3.5 billion people, half the population of the world.

More:

In the past year, 210 people have become billionaires, joining a select group of 1,426 individuals with a combined net worth of $5.4 trillion.Corporate profits, chief executive officer (CEO) salaries, and stock exchanges are breaking new records daily, with no signs of slowing down. At the time of writing, the Dow Jones industrial average reached the highest mark in its 117-year history.

The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half.

And:

• Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.
• The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.
• The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.
• Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.
• The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.
• In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer

I appreciate Oxfam’s work but the truth is that it’s kind of irrelevant to be appealing to the Davos types. It’s a flaw to think that those who benefit from the privilege of this huge robbery will do much, other than tinkering around the edges, to reverse course–because that would mean declaring that the entire system, their system, has utterly failed.

January 22, 2014

Dark Affinities: Liberal and Neoliberal

Dark Affinities: Liberal and Neoliberal

Monday, 20 January 2014 10:37
By Joseph Natoli, Truthout | Op-Ed

Each society determines which thoughts and feelings shall be permitted to arrive at the level of awareness and which have to remain unconscious. Just as there is a social character, there is also a "social unconscious."
- Eric Fromm

Newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio's "tale of two cities," referring to the wealth divide in New York, sounds nicely Dickensian, but the "boots on the ground" reality is not divided so clearly. Roughly speaking, the bottom 40 percent of Americans are what Dickens' Noddy Boffin called "scrunched" while a top 20 percent, if we follow the counsel here of "Scrunch or be scrunched," are doing the scrunching. A middle 40 percent, are, as Gradgrind facts show, decidedly more of the scrunched class than the scrunching class, although their confusions, misrecognitions and dreams of former well-being render them as liable to identify with the scrunchers as with their fellow scrunched.

So, we have some 80 percent of the American population in need of legislative action that 20 percent of the population either does not require or requires precisely the opposite. The numbers are on the side of Have Less Each Day and Have Nothing at All and not on the side of the Have Mores. However, the top 20 percent are holding positions of power, while the 80 percent are fractured, disillusioned, disinterested, confused and pliable. So our expectations of victory by overwhelming numbers fade.

The situation is yet darker and more complex as to why we cannot right an upside-down ship of state. I want to introduce what I call a "melding" on the level of the American social unconscious of Left and Right that also must be considered when we wonder why our democracy has turned to plutocracy, why that fact is not recognized and why the Many cannot put a stop to an aggrandizement of the Few at the expense of the Many. Only when we delve into affinities between Liberal and Neoliberal on this level of social unconscious can we comprehend the puzzling, inexplicable American politics since Reagan.

Legislatively, we are close to a flat tax or a "fair" tax, the former a tax where $50,000 is taxed at the same rate as $400,000, and the latter a sales tax replacing any income tax. We are closer to undermining entitlements than bolstering them. We are closer to eliminating unemployment compensation and the Earned Income Tax credit than to holding on to them. Obviously rational attempts to constrain the Wild West free play of the American financial sector such as the the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act including the Volcker Rule section of that act somehow get entwined in American paranoia regarding governmental forces taking away "personal freedom." Clear scientific evidence that humans are disastrously mucking up the environment do not produce real anxieties and appropriate defensive action, but rather are waylaid by dark anxieties regarding the effect the national debt will have on future generations. Although the Affordable Care Act aids some of those on the majority side, the majority of the country takes the stand of the minority. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21139-dark-affinities-liberal-and-neo-liberal

January 22, 2014

Love It or Hate It, Obamacare's Spurring Interest in the Pathology of Health Care

Love It or Hate It, Obamacare's Spurring Interest in the Pathology of Health Care

Tuesday, 21 January 2014 09:38
By Philip Caper, Bangor Daily News | Op-Ed


Love it or hate it, even if ObamaCare never fully achieves its intended benefits, it has already had some unintended ones.

First, it has destabilized our deeply dysfunctional health-care system. By doing so, the law has created a real opportunity to fundamentally restructure the way we finance and deliver health care.

Second, the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act has shined a spotlight on how unnecessarily complicated our fragmented health insurance system is, and how great is the need to fundamentally reform it. That in turn has reignited public interest in further reform, and strengthened a growing popular movement.

For example, this past October well over 100 people turned out in Portland on the second night of the World Series to view a movie and discussion about health-care reform. Here in the heart of Red Sox Nation, that is notable. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/21351-love-it-or-hate-it-obamacares-spurring-interest-in-the-pathology-of-health-care