The Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP) is a trade deal that is being negotiated in secret between the U.S. and 11 other Pacific bordering nations. The secrecy is necessary because TPP's objective is to be NAFTA on steroids, whereas twenty years of NAFTA cost "one millon U.S. jobs lost, mass displacement and instability in Mexico, record income inequality, [and] scores of corporate attacks on environmental and health laws" according to Public Citizen. The highly instructive videos below are in chronological order, Dec 15 first and then Jan 16.

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Originals here and here

Wikileaks TPP Revelations Prove US in "Left Field" With Trade Deal

Kevin Zeese: U.S. Trade Representative wants to keep the public in the dark because TPP will threaten food safety and raise drug prices, and many Asian countries involved in negotiations are also turned off by the deal - December 15, 13

Leaked TPP Document Reveals No Regard for Environment in Trade Agreement

President Obama's fast track process for TPP gets dealt another blow by leaked environment chapter - January 16, 14

Bio                                                                                                           .

Kevin Zeese is co-director of It's Our Economy, an organization that advocates for democratizing the economy. He's also an attorney who is one of the original organizers of the National Occupation of Washington, DC. He has been active in independent and third party political campaigns including for state legislative offices in Maryland, governor of California and U.S. president, where he served as press secretary and spokesperson for Ralph Nader in 2004. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006 and was the only person ever nominated by the Green Party, Libertarian Party and Populist Party. His twitter is @KBZeese.

Bill Black (my favorite economist and white-collar criminologist): "President Obama has continued and made worse the effort of President Bush to betray our nation, our democracy, and our people through the secret draft Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement — a plan which would destroy jobs, free bankers from oversight, block access to medicine, and more."

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AlterNet / By William K. Black

Plutocrats Plan to Dominate the Planet: But the People of Chile Are Fighting for All of Us

Chileans can push for opposition to a secretive, multi-national trade agreement that throws open the floodgates to global corporate domination.

November 15, 2013 | The effort by corporate CEOs to dominate the global economy and global government is reaching the end-game stage.

Corporate CEOs view government and democracy as their gravest threats and are constantly seeking to discredit and hamstring both.  CEOs are particularly eager to discredit, destroy, or capture regulation and they have enlisted enormous support in both major U.S. parties and many of the world’s dominant parties for these efforts.  President Obama has continued and made worse the effort of President Bush to betray our nation, our democracy, and our people through the secret draft Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement — a plan which would destroy jobs, free bankers from oversight, block access to medicine, and more. This massive new trade agreement between the U.S. and countries including Chile would cover 40 percent of the global economy.

While there is no realistic chance of convincing Obama to repudiate the TPP, there is a chance that the people of Chile will save our democracy and our national sovereignty. Chile’s national election will occur on November 17, 2013 and it is widely expected to return former President Michelle Bachelet to power. If that happens, this politician who also happens to be a pediatrician who has treated Chagas disease (more on that shortly) could help deliver a body blow to this noxious plan.

A bit of background: The U.S. has taken a disgraceful position in the TPP negotiations in which it sides with corporate interests rather than the victims of a terrible parasitical infection called Chagas disease that is epidemic in much of Latin America and a serious problem in the U.S. as well.  Chagas is wreaking havoc in Chile, which is one of the countries negotiating TPP. The failure of Chile under its current conservative party’s control (and the failure of Peru and Mexico) to stand up to the U.S. and expose and block its effort to stand in the way of vital treatment for victims of Chagas disease represents a national disgrace by the heads of state of the U.S., Chile, Peru, and Mexico.

Progressives should urge Bachelet, should she be elected President, to make the full drafts of TPP public immediately.  She should also demand that the draft TPP be scrapped and fundamentally changed to build democracy and national sovereignty and to control the multinational corporations rather than allow them and their plutocrat panels to dominate and denigrate democracy and national sovereignty.     

The CEOs' audacious assault on national sovereignty, the rule of law, and democracy through TPP will effectively remove the possibility of defeating them through democratic means. The CEOs have had to mount their assualt secretly, for the peoples of the world would reject the their demands by an overwhelming margin if they knew what they were up to. But for groups like Public Citizen and WikiLeaks, we would have woken up to a fait accompli and had no democratic recourse.

WikiLeaks revealed part of the draft, secret TPP text on November 13, 2013.  It deals with Intellectual Property (IP).  WikiLeaks explained the TPP process.

“Since the beginning of the TPP negotiations, the process of drafting and negotiating the treaty's chapters has been shrouded in an unprecedented level of secrecy. Access to drafts of the TPP chapters is shielded from the general public. Members of the US Congress are only able to view selected portions of treaty-related documents in highly restrictive conditions and under strict supervision. It has been previously revealed that only three individuals in each TPP nation have access to the full text of the agreement, while 600 'trade advisers' - lobbyists guarding the interests of large US corporations such as Chevron, Halliburton, Monsanto and Walmart - are granted privileged access to crucial sections of the treaty text.”

The TPP negotiations are currently at a critical stage. The Obama administration is preparing to fast-track the TPP treaty in a manner that will prevent the US Congress from discussing or amending any parts of the treaty. Numerous TPP heads of state and senior government figures, including President Obama, have declared their intention to sign and ratify the TPP before the end of 2013.”

So far I've only discussed one obscene example of the Obama administration’s positions on TPP, but broader analyses of why TPP betrays our democracy and national sovereignty have been done well by others, particularly Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach.  I applaud her efforts and thank her for providing me with source materials.

The partial draft of the TPP agreement on IP and health contains this provision.

 “Article QQ.A.5: {Understandings Regarding Certain Public Health Measures7}

The Parties have reached the following understandings regarding this Chapter:

The obligations of this Chapter do not and should not prevent a Party from taking measures to protect public health by promoting access to medicines for all, in particular concerning cases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, [US oppose: chagas] and other epidemics as well as circumstances of extreme urgency or national emergency. Accordingly, while reiterating their commitment to this Chapter, the Parties affirm that this Chapter can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of each Party's right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all.”

The “US oppose[s]” adding “Chagas” to this list of exceptions. In reality, vigorous efforts to reduce Chagas (there is no vaccine) should be a high priority for the U.S. and Latin America (Mexico, Chile, and Peru are also parties to the TPP negotiations).  The U.S., however, is insisting on excluding Chagas disease from the list of “epidemics” for which a nation may “protect public health by promoting access to medicines for all.”  This kind of “understanding” clause is designed to provide guidance on the correct interpretation of TPP.  It appears that the current state of the TPP draft is that the other nations included Chagas but it was excluded from this clause due to the sole opposition of the U.S.  The provision of “access to medicines for all” is particularly vital in the case of Chagas disease because early drug treatments of infected newborns are extremely effective in eliminating the disease in newborns who were infected maternally.

The combination of indifference to the victims of Chagas disease and depravity of trying to prevent governments making available low or no-cost medicines to the victims – an action that will lead to many more victims (including tens of thousands of American victims) is so obscene that it brings to mind what lawyers consider the most perfect and deserved legal insult.

Richard Kluger quotes this passage from Plessy (the Supreme Court decision that upheld racial segregation as consistent with “equal protection of the laws”) in his book Simple Justice (1976):

“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

Kluger then comments:

“Of all the words ever written in assessment of the Plessy opinion, none have been more withering than those ... [of] Yale law professor Charles L. Black, Jr., who [said that in] ... the two sentences... ‘The curves of callousness and stupidity intersect at their respective maxima.’”

The Obama administration’s effort to block governments from providing medicine to the victims of Chagas disease represents the intersection of callousness and stupidity at their respective maxima.  The heads of state of Chile, Mexico, and Peru have disgraced their office by failing to denounce the U.S. position on Chagas, to make public the TPP documents, and to withdraw from the treaty negotiations.

Obama has caused the TPP to violate every standard he has endorsed as president, including secret lobbying.  There is no limit on the political contributions that corporations can make to influence TPP policy or disclosure of their lobbying positions.  The TPP is bankrolled” by the world’s most powerful corporate interests.  TPP policies are not made by the American people, but they are also not made by our elected representatives in Congress. Obama’s “fast track” process for adopting TPP is designed to eliminate normal congressional powers.  Obama knows TPP is indefensible and that Americans would vote against it.  He is desperate to avoid any open, democratic debate between the people of America and the corporations, most of them foreign, that TPP seeks to make our unelected, all-powerful rulers.

This is why President Bachelet could do the world a priceless service by immediately making public the entire travesty that is TPP.

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William Black is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He spent years working on regulatory policy and fraud prevention as executive director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement, among other positions.

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is the latest and potentially the most crushing reverse-Robin-Hood plot of the giant corporations that own the U.S. government and those of most of the rest of the western world. This is required watching if you want to stay abreast of this secret conspiracy against America's poor and middle class.

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.Original Here

Yves Smith and Dean Baker on Secrets in Trade from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Yves Smith and Dean Baker on Secrets in Trade
from BillMoyers.com

A US-led trade deal is currently being negotiated that could increase the price of prescription drugs, weaken financial regulations and even allow partner countries to challenge American laws. But few know its substance.

The pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is deliberately shrouded in secrecy, a trade deal powerful people, including President Obama, don’t want you to know about. Over 130 Members of Congress have asked the White House for more transparency about the negotiations and were essentially told to go fly a kite. While most of us are in the dark about the contents of the deal, which Obama aims to seal by year end, corporate lobbyists are in the know about what it contains.

And some vigilant independent watchdogs are tracking the negotiations with sources they trust, including Dean Baker and Yves Smith, who join Moyers & Company this week. Both have written extensively about the TPP and tell Bill the pact actually has very little to do with free trade.

Instead, says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “This really is a deal that’s being negotiated by corporations for corporations and any benefit it provides to the bulk of the population of this country will be purely incidental.” Yves Smith, an investment banking expert who runs the Naked Capitalism blog adds: “There would be no reason to keep it so secret if it was in the interest of the public.”

Posted below is an email appeal received just today from one of the few totally uncorrputed members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Alan Grayson. It exposes the most grotesgue plan ever initiated by the global corporations to enslave we-the-99%. Please read it and then sign the petition. (A donation would be welcome but is not necessary.)

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Dear David:

The United States Trade Representative has invited public comments on the "Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership." (God, even the title makes you ill, doesn't it?) The "Partnership" actually is a partnership between multinational corporations and their sellout tools in government. It features "investor-state" dispute resolution, which permits huge corporations to file lawsuits to prevent government actions that they just don't like, such as health and safety regulations.

Tell our government what you think about this huge power-grab by multinational corporations. Submit your comment here. 

This is not just a theoretical possibility. "These provisions elevate corporations to the level of nation states and allow them to sue governments over nearly any law or policy which reduces their future profits," the Sierra Club warns. The government of Canada has been sued under a similar clause in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for refusing to export Canada's water. Canada also has been sued for keeping a pollutant out of its gasoline supply, and for taxing windfall profits by oil companies.

Why are we even thinking about handing over our sovereign rights to huge corporations who care nothing about us? Make your voice heard, by clicking here.

Who needs these "free trade" sell-outs, anyway? Since NAFTA went into effect in 1994, the United States has lost almost four million manufacturing jobs. Moreover, huge U.S. subsidies for corn have made it impossible for millions of Mexican families to survive on the farm. NAFTA accomplished something that hardly seems possible - impoverishing both American workers and Mexican ones. Can't we learn from our mistakes? And why are our leaders treating us like sheep being led to the slaughter?

Stop this subversive betrayal right now. Click here, and click now, to put in your two cents.

The First Amendment gives us the right to "petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Anyone who has been paying attention to these Judas-kiss trade "deals" is feeling mighty, mighty "aggrieved." So do something about it: click here to try to put an end to this nonsense.

The window for comments closes on Friday. So give them a piece of your mind today.

Courage,

Rep. Alan Grayson
[D-Fl, 9th district]

Any American who wants to understand the trajectory of the American economy (ever more downward), why this is happening, and what will ultimately be required to reverse the relentless lowering of American salaries and offshoring of American jobs should listen to economist Richard Wolff passionately lay it out in easily understandable terms. It's not pretty.

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 theREALnews                                                                               Permalink

Obama Preaches Stimulus to Europe and Practices Austerity at Home

Richard Wolff: Low wages, cheap money, and cheap equipment are driving higher profits and the politics of austerity - April 21, 13

Bio

Richard D. Wolff is a Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. And he is currently a Visiting Professor of the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University in New York. Since 2008, he has been writing and speaking chiefly on the global capitalist crisis. His latest book is Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism.

Tomorrow the Congress and the President will decide who or what will be sacrificed to the gods of sequestration. Will it be Social Security, Medicare, Medicade, education and food stamps -- or will the giant corporations, many of which have managed to pay no taxes at all, be dunned to pay enough taxes to cover any short fall. Surely 99% of all Americans would vote for the latter ...but most of the Congress has been paid off by the 1% and Obama is under easily imaginable pressure.

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Sanders on Sequestration

THE TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP, BEING NEGOTIATED IN SECRET, MAY "MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR COUNTRIES TO HOLD CORPORATIONS ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR CONDUCT -- AND WOULD IN FACT HOLD GOVERNMENTS LIABLE FOR ANY 'DAMAGE' INCURRED BY CORPORATIONS DUE TO THE INSTITUTION OF REGULATIONS." WE ARE SO SCREWED!

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The TPP: A Quiet Coup for the Investor Class

By Hilary Matfess, September 25, 2012

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It would be a relief to report with any certainty that the negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a massive proposed free-trade zone spanning the Pacific Ocean and all four hemispheres—are definitely empowering corporations to the detriment of workers, the environment, and sovereignty throughout the region. Unfortunately, the secretive and opaque character of the negotiations has made it difficult to report much of anything about them. 

What can be confidently reported about the TPP is that, in terms of trade flows, it would be the largest free-trade agreement yet entered into by the United States—and, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, that the ministers negotiating the agreement “have expressed an intent to comprehensively reduce barriers in goods, services, and agricultural trade as well as rules and disciplines on a wide range of topics” to unprecedented levels. Yet despite these grandiose ambitions, details of the negotiations and drafts of the text have been purposefully withheld from Congress and American citizens.

The secrecy surrounding the negotiations is breathtaking. In July, 134 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk requesting that the appropriate congressional committees be consulted and that a draft of the text be released. The members reminded Kirk that draft texts were circulated and congressional committees consulted throughout the NAFTA negotiations in the early 1990s. Their letter received no response. A month later, House members petitioned Kirk to allow a congressional delegation to observe the negotiations—as in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the launch of the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization, and numerous NAFTA rounds. Despite its persistence, Congress has not been granted any significant oversight or insight regarding the negotiations.   

While Congress, the press, and the public have had to make do with leaked chapters of negotiations, Just Foreign Policy reports that 600 corporate lobbyists were granted access to the negotiated text. American democracy is in a sorry state when corporations are granted more access to even the text of sweeping government agreements than the public and its elected officials. Although corporate influence on U.S. trade policy is hardly a new phenomenon, the simultaneous waning of congressional oversight is all the more unsettling.

In May, Democratic Reps. Barney Frank and Sander Levin wrote to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to express their concern about the TPP’s provisions entrenching capital mobility. Their letter requested “an official written statement of the U.S. policy” concerning the ability of parties to the agreement to deploy capital controls in the face of a financial crisis. If the leaked drafts accurately reflect the direction of the negotiations, countries that instituted capital controls could be taken to court by private corporations and could be held liable for damages. Hundreds of economists signed letters in January and February 2011 opposing these provisions, yet the investment chapter leaked in June suggests that neither their concerns nor Frank’s and Levin’s were taken into consideration.

Other troubling trends have emerged in the leaked chapters. According to Citizen.org, the negotiations thus far have given corporations the right to avoid government review when acquiring land, natural resources, or factories. They have also banned corporate performance requirements, guaranteed compensation for the loss of “‘expected future profits’ from health, labor, [or] environmental” regulations, and included stunning provisions concerning the right to “move capital without limits.” If these are indeed terms of the TPP, then the agreement would make it nearly impossible for countries to hold corporations accountable for their conduct—and would in fact hold governments liable for any “damage” incurred by corporations due to the institution of regulations. 

Many progressives had hoped that President Barack Obama would shift U.S. trade policy away from staunch free-marketeering. But according to Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, the leaked chapters of the TPP “sent shock waves through Congress because it showed that U.S. negotiators had totally abandoned Obama’s campaign pledges to replace the old NAFTA trade model and in fact were doubling down and expanding the very Bush-style deal that Obama campaigned against in 2008 to win key swing states.”

The struggle over the Trans-Pacific Partnership reveals a disturbing trend in American politics. The much discussed Citizens United ruling granting corporations personhood has given way to a trade negotiation process in which corporations are granted more rights than American citizens, their elected representatives, or foreign governments impacted by the deal. That trade negotiations with such an immense potential impact on numerous sectors of the American economy have been conducted in secret is troubling enough. To consider that those negotiating the treaty have willfully ignored experts and elected representatives in favor of corporate interests calls into question the sustainability of American democracy. 

Absolutely the best description I've ever read of what has happened to our country in the past 30 years. Until everybody understands this, there can be no escaping even worse catastrophes to come...

OpEdNews

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/How-s-That-Recessioney-Oi-by-David-Michael-Gree-100630-420.html

June 30, 2010

How's That Recessioney, Oily Thing Working Out For Ya?

By David Michael Green

Let's be honest: We live in stunningly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously absurd political times.

Here's the story in a nutshell: A far-right predatory overclass has spent the last thirty years undoing the hard-fought gains of the mid-twentieth century, which had produced a robust middle class and vastly more economic and social justice in America than the country had ever known before. These regressives used every kind of deceit imaginable to persuade unsophisticated voters to choose candidates whose real agenda was to assist their plutocratic puppetmasters in fleecing the very same people who voted for them.

Such candidates ran on issues like the death penalty, immigration, bogus wars, gay marriage and abortion. But what they really were about as legislators was exporting jobs to where workers are dirt cheap and politically neutered, crashing organized labor, shifting the tax burden onto the mass public, deregulating industry to allow unhindered profit-taking on the upside and socialized public responsibility for risk on the downside, and locking in a Supreme Court majority that would never blanch at even the most outrageous rulings enhancing corporate power in American society.

If the product of this slow and silent coup wasn't so bloody and so ruinous to so many lives, you'd really have to hand it to these guys for their political acumen and patience. It took a while, and it required the building of a broad and robust infrastructure, spanning from mainstream media to talk radio and TV to think-tanks to Congress, the presidency and the judiciary, to the GOP and now to the Democratic Party as well, but they have pretty much completely succeeded in grabbing all the levers of power in our society. They dominate its discourse entirely, and they have been almost completely successful to date in securing all the elements of their legislative, regulatory and jurisprudential agenda, at least to this point (how far they ultimately intend to go isn't clear the US as Honduras, perhaps? but it's unlikely to be pretty). Perhaps the only major exception to that rule was their 2005 failure to privatize the vast pool of public money sitting in the Social Security coffers, which they lust over lasciviously, like teenage boys inhaling online porn by the bucketful.

The product of these efforts has been precisely what one would expect. Corporations and economic elites have grown fantastically more wealthy than they already were thirty years ago. Their tax liabilities are now negligible and sometimes less than zero. Massive national debt, the product in part of those tax gifts to the rich, plus huge bills for interest on that debt (this alone is one of the largest items in the federal budget each year), is now owned by the mass public, who got nickels and dimes worth of tax cuts, in exchange for which they will now have to literally work years of their lives to pay down the taxes the rich escaped. Working people across the country get less and pay more for everything today. College is becoming increasingly out of the financial reach of average Americans. The minimum wage, which actually often isn't the minimum, is far from a sustainable salary for one person, let alone a family. As of 2004, the richest one percent of Americans possessed sixty percent of all wealth in the country, while the bottom forty percent accounted for a whopping two-tenths of a percent. Between 1979 and 2004, after-tax income for the top one percent of Americans rose by 176 percent, while for those in the bottom 20 percent that figure rose only six percent. And those figures are for six years ago, during what by current standards was flush times for working people. Now jobs are disappearing, with the inevitable effect of driving wages down further, not to mention all the obvious effects on prosperity, security, health, mental health and sheer longevity.

Meanwhile, just the approach to regulation alone has produced three monstrous attacks on American society as a direct result. First the recession-starting-to-become-a-depression and all its devastation, then the recent mining disaster, and now BP's WMD attack on the Gulf Coast states. What all of these have in common is a government regulatory apparatus that over time transitioned from a public service mission into deference to those supposed to be regulated, and then from deference for the corporate sphere into constituting a straight-out satellite office of the corporations themselves, literally having business supposed "regulatees' fill out their own monitoring forms in pencil, to be inked in later by the planted shills in government. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been wiped out by these actions and the public is paying for its own thrashing through bail-out funds. I'm sorry, but in what sense is this not treason?

Okay, so far so bad. Nothing particularly Alice-In-Wonderlandy or especially novel about rampant greed, is there? But what's really bizarre to the point of being becoming a fully hallucinogenic experience that really should come under the supervision of the Controlled Substances Act is the effect that this has had on politics. Could there ever be a moment when right-wing "economics' have been so thoroughly and manifestly repudiated? Could there ever be more overt examples of corporate greed gone nuclear? Could the repercussions of these policy decisions ever more clearly have wrecked the lives of economically insecure ordinary Americans?

No, no and no. All this is as obvious and predictable as sunrise. And yet... Here we find ourselves in this remarkable and remarkably absurd position where the folks who not only created this monster, who not only have worked assiduously to prevent any solutions to the destruction they've wrought, and who now also promise even more of the same these very folks are poised to win resounding electoral victories in November. And the folks who will be voting for them will once again become victims of their predations. And the folks in Congress and the White House they'll be voting against supposed socialist-fascists (whatever strange Janus-faced zoological beast that would look like if it actually existed) are in fact just about the most pro-plutocrat government imaginable. But they're going to get stomped by voters for being socialists.

How on earth did this happen?

Well, to start with, it happened because it was intended to happen. As described above, this is the product of a broad, concerted and patient effort by the radical right to capture and control American government, and it has worked remarkably well, especially when one considers the sheer amount of deceit required to pull it off. It's like trying to sell a cocktail of Dirt Drink mixed with Sawdust Soda to a man dying of thirst. But it can be done, and we know that because the process is now all but complete. When even John McCain refers to Congress "the best government that money can buy" you know you're really hurting, pal. As for that Trotskyite socialist in the White House, well he's staffed his economic team directly out of Goldman Sachs' boardroom, he bails out mega-banks one hundred cents on the dollar without even requiring that they loan money, he wrote a health care bill that forces thirty or forty million Americans to buy a product from bloated thieving insurance companies whether they want it or not, and he has dramatically increased spending on an already astonishingly distended military, while remaining essentially silent about (meager but essential) unemployment benefits right now in the process of terminating for millions of Americans. Yeah, baby that socialist. "Workers of the world unite" is definitely what they rap about at White House cabinet meetings. Geithner, Summers, Gates all those revolutionary syndicalists can't talk it up enough. Then they sing "The Internationale".

Clearly, the political branches of the US government have been fully captured by monied elites. Perhaps scariest of all, however, is the newly emboldened ultra-radical majority on the Supreme Court (that description is not reckless hyperbole used for effect look at what they've done in cases like Bush v. Gore, Ledbetter and Citizens United, and watch what they do in the coming years it will be astonishing in its scope, radicalism and hypocrisy). After decades of histrionic lies about supposed objections to judicial activism (what they really hated was the impudent offense of an elite court handing down liberal decisions and siding with mere mortals in American society, period), they have now kicked out the jambs to expand the practical definition of the "activism' term beyond all recognition. Lori Blatt, former attorney in the Solicitor General's Office, put it best: "They are fearless. This is a business court. Now it's the era of the corporation and the interests of business." No case underscored this tendency better than Citizens United, of course, where the regressive majority was so blatantly activist that they literally told the stunned litigants to go home, come back in a month and reargue the case around a far, far bigger question than was at stake for the parties involved, and then sweepingly cast aside long existing law in order to blow blitzkrieg-size breaches in the barriers that had previously controlled corporate influence of elections. The only case that can rival this one for utterly transparent activism seeking a regressive outcome is Bush v. Gore, in which the right-wing bloc simultaneously violated three of their own cardinal tenets judicial restraint, states' rights, and hostility to civil rights principles in order to require vote counting be stopped (say what?!) and to crown the mentally deficient dauphin as king. It could hardly be clearer that the Roberts Court ominously completes the troika of the right-wing governmental coup.

But there are other reasons we're in this state, as well. Think about Barack Obama and the Democrats for a second, and then try applying Ms. Blatt's phrase, "They are fearless", to those folks. Now pick yourself up the floor. Change the underwear you just soiled from laughing so hard. Wring out the hanky you just soaked from sobbing so relentlessly. Part of why we're in this mess is that Democrats wouldn't know what guts looked like if they were all board-certified gastrointestinal surgeons. But, of course, to complain that "the people's party" lacks sufficient courage of their convictions assumes that they have any. The good news is that they do, as a matter of fact. The bad news, however, is that those convictions can be reduced neatly down to two: serving themselves and serving the nice folks who donate money to get them elected. It's a bit of a problem when the gang who are meant to protect us from the crimes of the GOP are nearly indistinguishable from Cheney's thugs, apart from stylistically. Democrats are happy to give you a little kiss on the cheek before they screw you. Republicans prefer to just get on with the assault.

Then there's the media in this country which is, of course, beyond hopeless. Watching Rachel Maddow the other month throwing a few medium-speed hardballs at Rand Paul only served to remind me just how rare it is for any of these pathetic hacks to actually do their job, as opposed to doing the cash-driven bidding of those in power, especially tough-guy Republicans who must get plenty of laughs out of how easy it is to bully the Washington press whores er, sorry, I mean press corps. There's nothing quite so self-made as the disasters of Election 2000 and the Iraq invasion of 2003, and the absence of any sort of serious media scepticism in those cases simply illustrates how utterly worthless the press truly are. Except, of course, as excellent public relations specialists for plutocrats. These days it seems like the only outlet doing anything approaching serious journalism is Rolling Stone. As to what it says about American society and journalism that you have to wade through cover photos of Lady Gaga's full-on unclad posterior to find out the lies our government is telling us, well, I'll leave that to you.

But clearly the neutering of the obedient profit-motivated media has worked spectacularly. One of the key fronts in this class warfare conducted by the wealthy in America has been with respect to framing. For three decades now, all we've heard is how government is a screw-up and how heroically efficient are the captains of industry in the private sector. The way regressives trash our own government in a democracy would certainly have seemed traitorous in another day. Just imagine if you said the same things about the military, which seems to miraculously escape the right's attention as the biggest and most famously wasteful government bureaucracy of all. Moreover, looking back over Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, not just a small bit of the curtain has been pulled back from the notion of the military's supposed infallibility. It's been two-thirds of a century since the United States won a big war against a serious adversary, and even then the Russians did the heavy lifting, at least in Europe. Somehow we never hear much about big, incompetent government in that context, though.

But, hey, forgive my little flight into logical analysis there. We really cannot have that in these times. For a minute there, I forgot to forget. It won't happen again, Mr. O'Brien, I assure you. From now on, up is down, black is white, war is peace, government is bad and corporations are purveyors of Happy Meals (happy, that is, unless you happen to be a cow, like having small businesses around, have a problem with obesity, don't want your planet to catch fire, or object to the creation of massive great lakes full of animal waste). Yep, big business is good! That's why we need to apologize to BP for our government "shaking them down" and forcing them to be slightly-barely-kinda-nominally-sorta responsible for their ecological and economic epic disaster in the Gulf. Get it?

But the other sad truth is that, at the bottom of this roll call of nefarious predators under every Cheney and Obama and Brian Williams and Lloyd Blankfein doing (his green) god's work, is a great big stinking pile of yahoos better known as "Us". We'll vote Republican this fall because we utterly lack the intellectual curiosity to investigate other options. We'll vote Republican because we're greedy and lazy and willing to step on anyone's throat to get our little slice of prosperity back. We'll vote Republican as if we weren't only two years ago just absolutely counting down every second until the previous government packed up and left town. You know, the er, uh, Republicans.

But I have just one question for my fellow Americans before they step into that voting booth. The truth is that what ails us now is exactly what y'all have been voting for over the last three decades. The truth is that if you vote Republican in November it will all only get worse. The truth is that you're living the regressive dream just now, right as we speak.

We've let corporations run wild. We've decimated the government whose function it was to regulate them in the public's interest. We've shifted a very large pile of your money into the hands of the richest one percent of us, and given you and your kids loads of government debt to pay off in exchange. We've shipped your job off to China or India. We've completely immunized all branches of your government from any form of influence other than from rapacious plutocrats.

So my question is, fellow Americans, now that we've all had a nice heaping helping of what regressive politics means for us real people down here below the stratosphere, "How's that recessioney, oily thing working out for ya?"

Eh?

Author's Bio: David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. His website is www.regressiveantidote.net.

THE PEN: Hold BP, Halliburton and TransOcean Fully Responsible For The Gulf Oil Catastrophe

Blogger's Note: The name "The Pen" stands for "The People's E-mail Network," and I suppose it might also be intended to be evocative of the aphorism, "The pen is mightier than the sword."  In any event, the person responsible for The Pen has obviously been spending not only a lot his time, but also a heck of a lot his own money by offering things like free theme baseball caps and bumper stickers.  So please visit the two easy-to-operate action pages below and, per chance, order your free "350 PPM Or Catastrophe" cap.  Finally, I highly recommend that you subscribe to The Pen's email list.  (Don't worry, you will only receive action items like this one about once a month.)

The President offered the excuse the other day that the reason why
there was inadequate environmental vetting for what has become the
Deepwater Horizon oil disaster was that a provision of law had passed
which only permitted 30 days for such a review, making it a practical
impossibility. Of course, that is precisely why corporate lobbyists
for the oil industry inserted into law this crippling of any attempted
regulatory oversight in the first place.

So too with the liability limitation of $75 million on corporate
responsibility for wreaking havoc on our environment. Again, this was
just another corporate irresponsibility safety valve, so they would
not have to even concern themselves about putting all the rest of us
in grave danger. And so they did. It is even being reported that
Transocean made a whopping $270 million profit on the destruction of
their over-insured drilling rig.

Each and every one of these corporate "get out of jail and liability
free" cards must be immediately rescinded, starting with passage of
the "Big Oil Bailout Prevention Liability Act of 2010", S. 3305.
Republican Senators like Murkowski (from Alaska, home of Exxon
Valdez) actually had the gall to argue that "smaller" oil companies
should not be held liable at all for destroying our planet.

Hold Oil Companies Accountable action page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1046.php

The action page link above will send your personal message to all
your members of Congress and President Obama too, by blast fax.
You do not need to have your own fax machine. Just submit the
action page and our server will automatically send all your faxes
for you to be delivered electronically.

And after you submit the action page, please consider joining the
messaging movement for saving our climate future, by picking up one
of the new "350 ppm or catastrophe" caps, embroidered in beautiful
sea colors, with a red arrow pointing the way we need to go with our
carbon dioxide pollution, which is way down. The most knowledgeable
REAL scientists tell us unless we get carbon dioxide concentrations
in our atmosphere down to 350 ppm, we can kiss our climate goodbye.
You can also get one of these caps directly from this page.

350 PPM Or Catastrophe Caps:
http://www.peaceteam.net/message_items.php

The fact is that the oil catastrophe in the Gulf is just the first of
many planetary scale cataclysms coming within decades, unless we have
fundamental and profound energy policy change starting NOW. Just as
we now watch scientists and engineers helpless to stem the tide of the
Deepwater Horizon oil blow out, it will likewise be even more so if and
when the melting of the polar ice caps becomes irreversible.

You might think, as the sickening waves of gloppy crude start
smothering beaches and wetlands from Louisiana to the Florida keys,
that some of the "Drill, baby, drill" crowd might be doing some
serious soul searching about the end path of current energy policy.
But mostly they are just hollering for the federal government to come
rushing in to bail them out. But who's going to bail out the state of
Florida when half of it is under water from rising sea levels?

Well, the federal government has done plenty, for many decades,
through the grandstanding corporate owned shills that they keep
electing to Congress, to pass precisely the laws that made such a
disaster so inevitable ... again. In point of fact, the 75 million
dollar liability limit was inserted into the original so-called
"reform" bill in the aftermath of the original Exxon Valdez disaster,
just as every other reform bill as far back as the eye can see has
been made toothless because of pressure from corporate special
interests. And so now we see the result of a failure to impose
decisive and real reform, an even bigger calamity.

Recently, the credit card reform bill, the health care reform bill,
and soon to be the finance reform bill and the energy reform bill,
have all been worthless and cruel jokes on the hopes of the American
people for real change. Each and every one of these bills have been
made ultimately ineffective by design and intent, driven by the
corporate dictators that members of Congress now serve exclusively.

And NOTHING is going to change, not a damn thing, we are just going
to keep reliving bigger and bigger disasters, UNTIL enough of you
folks open your mouths, stop giving the corporate cronies in your own
party a pass for partisan reasons, and start demanding legislation in
the interest of the people and ONLY the people from now on.

And here is the Facebook link for the Hold The Oil Companies
Accountable action page further above.

[Facebook] Action Page:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_voices/action.php?qnum=pnum1046

And this is the Twitter reply for this same action

@cxs #p1046

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.usalone.com/in.htm

Here's a Blog I Haven't Been Following but Certainly Will Be Henceforth!

Saturday, February 6, 2010

The OTHER Reason that the U.S. is Not Regulating Wall Street

Sure, American politicians have been bought and paid for by the Wall Street giants. See this, this and this.

And everyone knows that the White House and Congress - while talking about cracking down on Wall Street with strict regulation - have actually watered down some of the most important protections that were in place.

For example, Senator Cantwell says that the new derivatives legislation is weaker than the old regulation. And leading credit default swap expert Satyajit Das says that the new credit default swap regulations not only won't help stabilize the economy, they might actually help to destabilize it.

But the U.S. is not being sold out in a vacuum.

On March 1, 1999, countries accounting for more than 90 per cent of the global financial services market signed onto the World Trade Organization's Financial Services Agreement (FSA). By signing the FSA, they committed to deregulate their financial markets.

For example, by signing the FSA, the U.S. agreed not to break up too big to fails. The U.S. also promised to repeal Glass-Steagall, and did so 8 months after signing the FSA.

Indeed, in signing the FSA and other WTO agreements, the U.S. has legally bound itself as follows:

• No new regulation: The United States agreed to a “standstill provision” that requires that we not create new regulations (or reverse liberalization) for the list of financial services bound to comply with WTO rules. Given that the United States has made broad WTO financial services commitments – and thus is forbidden by this provision from imposing new regulations in these many areas – this provision seriously limits the policy [options] available to address the current crisis.

• Removal of regulation: The United States even agreed to try to even eliminate domestic financial service regulatory policies that meet GATS [i.e. General Agreement on Trade in Services] rules, but that may still “adversely affect the ability of financial service suppliers of any other (WTO) Member to operate, compete, or enter” the market.

• No bans on new financial service “products”: The United States is also bound to ensure that foreign financial service suppliers are permitted “to offer in its territory any new financial service,” a direct conflict with the various proposals to limit various risky investment instruments, such as certain types of derivatives.

• Certain forms of regulation banned outright: The United States agreed that it would not set limits on the size, corporate form or other characteristics of foreign firms in the broad array of financial services it signed up to WTO strictures ...

• Treating foreign and domestic firms alike is not sufficient: The GATS market-access limits on U.S. domestic regulation apply in absolute terms; that is to say, even if a policy applies to domestic and foreign firms alike, if it goes beyond what WTO rules permit, it is forbidden. And, forms of regulation not outright banned by the market-access requirements must not inadvertently “modify the conditions of competition in favor of services or service suppliers” of the United States, even if they apply identically to foreign and domestic firms.

In other words, the problem isn't just that Congress and the White House have sold out to the Wall Street giants.

The problem is also that the U.S. has signed WTO agreements that have given the keys to the too big to fails, and have neutered their regulators. Even if some politicians tried to stand up to Wall Street - or even if we "throw out all of the bums" currently in political roles - the U.S. would still be locked into the WTO's scheme for helping the financial giants to grow ever bigger and to take ever-bigger and ever-riskier gambles.

Indeed, the financial giants are pushing hard for further deregulation, demanding that the WTO's "Doha round" of agreements be signed.

On the other hand, if the American people stood up for our sovereignty and demanded that the financial giants be reined in, it would be easy to fix the WTO agreements which the U.S. has already signed. Public Citizen notes, "as a legal matter, these problems are easy to remedy ..."

Will the American people stand up and demand that the WTO deregulatory scheme be rolled back?

Or will we continue to let the financial giants destroy our country through buying and selling politicians (with the help of the Supreme Court) and forcing us into more and more draconian WTO treaties which destroy our sovereignty altogether?

Many people assume that they just have to hang in there until things improve. But the powers-that-be are grabbing more and more power and - unless we stand up to them - they will take it all.

As highly-regarded economist (Michael Hudson, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, and who is a former Wall Street economist at Chase Manhattan Bank who helped establish the world’s first sovereign debt fund) said:

"You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite."

And Foreign Policy magazine ran an article entitled "The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism", arguing that the power of nations is declining, and being replaced by corporations, wealthy individuals, the sovereign wealth funds of monarchs, and city-regions.

We either stand up, or we slip back into a darker age.

Blogger's Note: If you go to the original, you will find a number of thoughtful comments below the article, and you will have an opportunity to subscribe to Washington's Blog.