OPINOINS BASED ON FACTS (OBOF)
THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
YEAR ONE
YEAR TWO
YEAR THREE
YEAR FOUR
YEAR FIVE
OBOF
YEAR FIVE INDEX
|
|
OBOF
TYMHM
|
Jan.
07, 2015
|
OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 1
|
Jan.
19, 2015
|
OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 2
|
Feb. 03, 2015
|
OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 3
|
Feb. 23, 2015
|
OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 4
|
Mar. 02, 2015
|
OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 5
|
Mar. 06, 2015
|
OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 6
|
Mar. 13, 2015
|
OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 7
|
Mar. 23, 2015
|
OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 8
|
Mar. 28,
2015
|
OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 9
|
Apr. 13,
2015
|
OBOF TYMHM Vol 15 - No 10
|
May 02,
2015
|
OBOF
TYMHM Vol 15 - No 11
|
May 09,
2015
|
Agenda
1.
A
trade watershed?
2.
The
Trans-Pacific Partnership clause everyone should oppose.
3. The trade-off Obama missed on trade.
4. Exorcising NAFTA’s ghosts.
5.
Showdown on the trade pact.
6. Senator Bernie
Sanders
Update on
Social Security.
7. Make the Rich Panic
Hi my Friends: I'm doing better, just one day late this
week. Maybe, I can get it out on Friday
next week.
Floyd.
A trade watershed?
The trouble with our trade debates is that people assume they’re
only about economics. Since World War II , U.S.
trade policy has also been a pillar of U.S. America encouraged trade with Europe and Japan — allowing more of their exports into the United States
“There was a confluence of security and economic considerations,”
says Harvard political scientist Jeffry Frieden. U.S. U.S. U.S.
It’s true, as Frieden notes, that this consensus weakened in the
1970s. Once Europe and Asia rebuilt,
their exports — of steel, shoes, televisions, cars — threatened U.S. United
States U.S.
All this provides context for the controversy over the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP), the trade negotiation among 12 countries (Australia , Brunei ,
Canada , Chile , Japan ,
Malaysia , Mexico , New
Zealand , Peru ,
Singapore , the United States and Vietnam United States
Negotiations cover many issues. Japan U.S.
tariffs on shoes range from 11 percent to 70 percent; Vietnam
Still, plausible economic gains from expanded trade seem modest. By 2025, the incomes of the 12 countries could
increase by 0.9 percent, according to a revised estimate by a study for the
Peterson Institute. In today’s dollars, that would be about $320 billion (the U.S. U.S.
Not so.
What this ignores is geopolitics. A Trans-Pacific Partnership
failure — because countries don’t agree or Congress kills the final result —
could produce a historic watershed. Present U.S. U.S.
“It would be taken as a signal that the United States wasn’t able to maintain the
consensus and commitment that we’ve had since [the mid-1930s] for trade
liberalization,” says University
of Maryland
Liberalization has generally served us well. Trade has delivered
geopolitical benefits in many, though not all, cases. After World War II, Europe traded together and avoided another war. Or consider Mexico United States Mexico ’s economy: something in U.S.
Of course, there are costs, most obviously job loss. One study
published by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that Chinese
imports eliminated
between 2 million and 2.4 million U.S. factory jobs from 1999 to 2011. That’s roughly 40 percent of the 5.6 million lost
manufacturing jobs in these years. Not everyone agrees. Harvard economist Robert Lawrence says continuous production
efficiencies explain most job loss.
Whoever’s right, there’s a larger truth: Swings in the U.S.
What endures is the marriage between economics and geopolitics. For the United
States , the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s overriding
purpose is not to contain China
We seek to reassure nations that we’re still a Pacific power and
that our proposal represents a useful framework to govern the region’s trade. A collapse would leave a vacuum that China China
So when opponents criticize the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they
need to answer a simple question: compared to what?
~~~
The Trans-Pacific Partnership clause everyone
should oppose.
By Elizabeth Warren
February 25
a Democrat represents
The United States
is in the final stages of negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP),
a massive free-trade agreement with Mexico ,
Canada , Japan , Singapore
One strong hint is buried in the fine print of the closely
guarded draft. The provision, an
increasingly common feature of trade agreements, is called “Investor-State
Dispute Settlement,” or ISDS. The name may sound mild, but don’t be fooled.
Agreeing to ISDS in this enormous new treaty would tilt the playing field in
the United States U.S.
ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws — and potentially to pick up huge
payouts from taxpayers — without ever stepping foot in a U.S. United States U.S. U.S.
If that seems shocking, buckle your seat belt. ISDS could lead to
gigantic fines, but it wouldn’t employ independent judges. Instead, highly paid corporate lawyers would
go back and forth between representing corporations one day and sitting in
judgment the next. Maybe that makes
sense in an arbitration between two corporations, but not in cases between
corporations and governments. If you’re
a lawyer looking to maintain or attract high-paying corporate clients, how
likely are you to rule against those corporations when it’s your turn in the
judge’s seat?
If the tilt toward giant corporations wasn’t clear enough,
consider who would get to use this special court: only international investors,
which are, by and large, big corporations. So if a Vietnamese company with U.S. operations wanted to challenge an increase
in the U.S. Vietnam
Why create these rigged, pseudo-courts at all? What’s so wrong with the U.S. United States
Those justifications don’t make sense anymore, if they ever did.
Countries in the TPP are hardly emerging economies with weak legal systems. Australia and Japan have well-developed,
well-respected legal systems, and multinational corporations navigate those
systems every day, but ISDS would preempt their courts too. And to the extent there are countries that are
riskier politically, market competition can solve the problem. Countries that
respect property rights and the rule of law — such as the United States
The use of ISDS is on the rise around the globe. From 1959 to
2002, there were fewer than 100 ISDS claims worldwide. But in 2012 alone, there were 58 cases. Recent cases
~~~
The trade-off Obama missed on trade.
Opinion writer
Dana Milbank writes about
political theater in the nation’s capital.
He joined the Post as a political reporter in
2000. View Archive
No, President Obama, Elizabeth Warren isn’t wrong.
Obama told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Tuesday
that the populist Democratic senator from Massachusetts
Warren is right: The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is an
abomination — not because of the deal itself, and not because free trade in
general is a bad idea. The TPP is an abomination because Obama had a chance to
protect American workers from the harm that would inevitably come from such a
pact, and he didn’t take it, or at least he hasn’t.
As bad, Obama’s anointed successor, Hillary Clinton, waffled on the trade pact this
week, offering only the banality that “any trade deal has to produce jobs and
raise wages” — which, of course, they all claim to do.
Clinton, and Obama, should champion the trade bill — but
only after congressional Republicans do what’s needed to protect low-wage
American workers from the dislocation that will occur: approving some serious new spending on worker
training and infrastructure to keep the United States in line with the rest of
the industrialized world.
Now, more than 20 years after NAFTA and 14 years after China
joined the World Trade Organization, there is no real question among economists
that expanding trade has been good for the world and has helped reduce poverty.
It has also unquestionably been good for
U.S.
The top 1 percent of U.S.
Thea Lee, a trade economist who is deputy chief of staff at the
AFL-CIO, argues that 40 percent to 60 percent of that growth in
income inequality is because of globalization, including free-trade deals. That
may be high, but even Peter Petri, a pro-trade finance professor at Brandeis
University whose research is often cited by business, estimates 10 percent
to 20 percent of the increase in income inequality can be attributed to
trade overall.
Trade agreements aren’t the primary culprit; at worst they
accelerate a trend from labor-intensive to capital-intensive industry that
would have happened anyway. “Trade
agreements are fine; they bring rules, and that’s progress,” Council on Foreign
Relations trade expert Edward Alden says. “But then the question is: What do you do to
make sure your people benefit after those rules are in place? And I think that’s where the United States
The United States spends just 0.1 percent
of gross domestic product on worker training and similar efforts, the CFR
finds, one-eighth of what Germany
spends and one-twenty-third of what Denmark America
At the same time, U.S. United States
That’s a huge problem, no matter where you stand on the TPP (and
more consequential than whatever labor, environmental and currency provisions
are in the trade deal itself). Brandeis
professor Petri, who calls the trade deal a “huge opportunity,” believes it
essential that the United
States
Obama had a rare opportunity to force major congressional action
on worker training and infrastructure, by tying it to the Pacific trade pact,
which Republicans broadly support. He
had leverage — and he failed to use it.
Now the noncommittal Clinton
~~~
Exorcising NAFTA’s ghosts.
By Thomas F. McLarty III May 3
The writer
was White House chief of staff and special envoy for the Americas in the Clinton
As President Obama makes the case for expansive new trade
agreements, he has had to contend with the vexing image of the last big trade
deal debated in the national spotlight, the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In the perception of some Americans, including a significant number of
Democrats, NAFTA has become a cautionary tale, invoked today as a
warning that similar deals will harm the U.S.
This is unfortunate on two counts. First, comparing the substance
of current negotiations to NAFTA, an agreement reached at the end of the Cold
War and the dawn of globalization, is like comparing the latest smartphone to
an early Macintosh desktop. The
12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement being hammered out by
the administration is more sophisticated, comprehensive and user-friendly than
NAFTA was in its day. It would also connect the United States
Second, NAFTA’s legacy is more positive and instructive than its
ardent critics recognize. Reducing NAFTA to a caricature obscures both its
achievements and some valuable lessons — good and bad. As part of the White House team that helped
NAFTA become a reality, I think its record over the past 20 years can
contribute to the current debate and to larger questions about trade and the United States
NAFTA, which was negotiated under President George H.W. Bush and
signed into law by President Bill Clinton, united the economies of Canada, Mexico and the United States Canada
is our largest export market and Mexico North America
has increased by 400 percent, passing $1.1 trillion per year. More U.S. exports go to
Mexico than to France, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain combined. We export
more to Canada than to the European Union.
The successes went well beyond the balance sheet, however. NAFTA boosted U.S. Mexico Mexico
Just as NAFTA cemented ties with our neighbors and showed that
the United States would not
turn inward after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Trans-Pacific Partnership
can be an essential bonding agent in our relations in Asia .
It is a crucial sign of our engagement with a region where China
The sharpest criticism of NAFTA is that it caused U.S. U.S. U.S. Chamber of Commerce, around 14 million U.S. jobs depend on trade with Canada and Mexico
The disruptive power of trade is a reality we can’t ignore. It
brings benefits and costs. Trade helps
keep inflation and consumer prices low. NAFTA boosted productivity through
competition. On jobs, the lessons of
NAFTA argue for a holistic approach to education and training assistance for
employees along with infrastructure and other investment. The profits of trade must flow not only to
shareholders but also to workers. Notably, agreements in NAFTA on labor and the
environment were handled in “side letters” drafted after negotiations. Now, they are being baked into the
deal-making.
The passage of NAFTA was a rare bipartisan triumph. Congress
approved the measure with a Republican majority and more than 100 Democratic
votes after exhaustive persuasion by Clinton United States
Trade agreements are a long-term wager on the future. That’s a good reason to exorcise the ghosts of
NAFTA. It did not invent the forces of
globalization; it shaped them in the interests of the United States
~~~
Showdown on the trade pact.
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S chances of successfully
negotiating a new trade deal between the United States and 11
Pacific Rim nations have improved dramatically with the announcement of a
bipartisan compromise bill that would enable him to submit the proposed pact,
known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), to Congress for a straight
up-or-down vote. Not surprisingly, this new “fast track” legislation has been
denounced by critics, most of them
Democrats, who say that it traduces Congress’s right to supervise
the negotiations.
These critics insist on this despite the fact that Republican
committee chairmen Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah ) and
Rep. Paul Ryan (Wisc.) wrote the bill in cooperation with both the White House
and ranking Democrat Ron Wyden (Ore.
It’s true, as the critics say, that the fast-track bill does not
compel the administration to negotiate an end to alleged currency manipulation
by its TPP partners. It’s also true that
countries can juice their exports by artificially cheapening their currencies,
and various countries have practiced this to the detriment of the United States
The worst alleged currency manipulator, China
A political battle royal now awaits, as Democratic
trade-agreement opponents line up against a rare alliance of the Republican
majority in Congress and President Obama. The foes of fast track deserve to lose on the
merits, but they might be interested to know that they also appear to be out of
step with public opinion. A recent Gallup poll shows that 58 percent of Americans “view
foreign trade as an opportunity for economic growth through
increased U.S.
~~~
Senator
Bernie Sanders
Update on
Social Security.
Floyd,
At a time of massive wealth inequality, when 99% of all new income generated in this country goes to the top 1%, and when over half of the American people have less than $10,000 in savings, the last thing we should do is cut Social Security. When the average Social Security benefit is $1,328 a month, and more than one-third of our senior citizens rely on Social Security for virtually all of their income, our job is to expand benefits, not cut them. Despite what some of my Republican colleagues have said, Social Security is not going broke. It has a $2.8 trillion surplus and can pay every benefit owed to every eligible American for the next 18 years. The best way to make Social Security solvent for the next 50 years is to scrap the cap on taxable earnings. Join me and my friends at Social Security Works in calling on Congress to scrap the cap and expand, not cut Social Security! Today, a Wall Street CEO who makes $18 million a year pays the same into Social Security as someone earning $118,500. That's absurd. If we simply applied the payroll tax on income above $250,000, not only could we extend Social Security's solvency until 2065, we could also increase benefits to meet the elderly's higher living expenses. Despite the logic behind that, some Republicans want to raise the Social Security retirement age to 69 and reduce benefits. I wonder what world these people are living in. To take benefits away from seniors now is simply a continuation of the war being waged by the Republican Party against the elderly, against the children, against the sick and against the poor, in order to benefit millionaires and billionaires. Yes, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents should work together. We should work to rebuild the disappearing middle class, create millions of jobs, reduce childhood poverty and make sure the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations pay their fair share in taxes. But we shouldn't make the lives of millions of Americans worse by cutting Social Security. Such a "compromise" may make sense to CEOs on Wall Street and wealthy campaign contributors; it does not make sense to me. Stand with me today and call on Congress to scrap the cap and use the increased revenues to expand, not cut Social Security. |
||||
~~~
Make the
Rich Panic
Author
Bio: Chris Hedges has written twelve books, including the New York
Times best seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he
co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. Some of his other books include
“Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy
and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and
the best selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a
finalist for the National Book Critics
Circle Africa
and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for
The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas
Can't seem to hold down a job.
Keeps moving around ha, ha.
Seriouly though, it is some background.
It does
not matter to the corporate rich who wins the presidential election. It does
not matter who is elected to Congress. The rich have the power. They throw money at
their favorites the way a gambler puts cash on his favorite horse. Money has replaced the vote. The wealthy can crush anyone who does not play
by their rules.
And the
political elites—slobbering over the spoils provided by their corporate masters
for selling us out—understand the game. Barack and Michelle Obama, as did the
Clintons, will acquire many millions of dollars once they leave the White
House. And your elected representative in the House or Senate, if not a
multimillionaire already, will be one as soon as he or she retires from
government and is handed seats on corporate boards or positions in lobbying
firms.
We do
not live in a democracy. We live in a
political system that has legalized bribery, exclusively serves corporate power
and is awash in propaganda and lies.
If you
want change you can believe in, destroy the system. And changing the system does not mean
collaborating with it as Bernie Sanders is doing by playing by the
cooked rules of the Democratic Party. Profound social and political
transformation is acknowledged in legislatures and courts but never initiated
there.
Radical
change always comes from below. As long
as our gaze is turned upward to the powerful, as long as we invest hope in
reforming the system of corporate power, we will remain enslaved. There may be good people within the
system—Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are examples—but that is not the point. It is the system that is rotten. It must be replaced.
“The
only way you can get the parties’ attention is if you take votes away from
them,” Ralph Nader told me by phone. “So,”
he said of Sanders, “How serious is he? He
makes Clinton
We must
build mass movements that are allied with independent political parties—a
tactic used in Greece
by Syriza and in Spain
“The
gates are controlled by two parties indentured to the same commercial
interests,” Nader said. “If you don’t go through those gates, if you do
what [Ross] Perot did, … you [might] get 19 million
votes [but] not one electoral vote. If
you do not get electoral votes you don’t come close. And even if you do get electoral votes you are
up against a winner-take-all. This means if you lose you don’t build for the
future as you would with proportional representation. The system is a
locked-out system. It is brilliantly
devised. It is pruned to perfect a two-party duopoly.”
We have
to organize around a series of non-negotiable demands. We have to dismantle the array of mechanisms
the rich use to control power. We have
to destroy the ideological and legal system cemented into place to justify
corporate plunder.
This is
called revolution. It is about ripping
power away from a cabal of corporate oligarchs and returning it to the
citizenry. This will happen not by
appealing to corporate power but by terrifying it. And power, as we saw in Baltimore, will be terrified only
when we take to the streets. There is no
other way.
“The
rich are only defeated when running for their lives,” the historian
C.L.R. James noted. And
until you see the rich fleeing in panic from the halls of Congress, the temples
of finance, the universities, the media conglomerates, the war industry and
their exclusive gated communities and private clubs, all politics in America
will be farce.
It is
apparent to most people across the globe that organizing political and social
behavior around the dictates of the marketplace has proved to be a disaster for
working men and women. The promised
prosperity that was to have raised living standards through trickle-down
economics has been exposed as a lie. The corporate state, understanding that it
has been unmasked with the rise of unrest, has formed militarized police
forces, stripped us of legal protection, taken over the legislative bodies, the
courts and mass media, and built the most intrusive system of mass surveillance
in human history. Corporate power, if unchecked, will suck every last bit of
profit out of human society and the ecosystem before collapse. It has no self-imposed limits. And it has no
external limits. Only we can create
them.
To save
ourselves from impending financial and environmental catastrophe we need to
build movements that have as their uncompromising goal the abolition of
corporate power. Corporation after
corporation, including banks, energy companies, the health care sector and
defense contractors, must be broken up and nationalized.
We must
institute a nationwide public works program, especially for those under the age
of 25, to create conditions for full employment. We must mandate a $15-an-hour
minimum wage. We must slash our obscene
spending on defense—we spend $610 billion a year, more than four times the
outlay of the second-largest military spender, China
We must
rebuild our infrastructure, including mass transit, roads, bridges, schools,
libraries and public housing.
We must
make war on the fossil fuel industry and turn to alternative sources of energy.
We must
place heavy taxes on the rich, including a special tax on Wall Street
speculators that would be used to wipe out the $1.3 trillion in student debt.
We must
ensure that education at all levels, along with health care, is a free right of
all Americans, not something accessible for the wealthy alone.
We must
abolish the Electoral College and mandate public financing of political
campaigns.
We must
see that the elderly, the disabled, poor single parents and the mentally ill
receive a weekly income of at least $600, or we must find them space in
state-run institutions if they require daily care.
We must
institute a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions. We must end our
wars and the proxy wars in the Middle East and
bring home our soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors.
We must
pay reparations to Iraq and Afghanistan
We must
repeal the Patriot Act and Section 1021 of the National Defense
Authorization Act.
We must
abolish the death penalty.
We must
dismantle our system of mass incarceration, release the vast majority of our
2.3 million prisoners, place them in job-skill programs and find them work and
housing.
Police
must be demilitarized. Mass surveillance
must end. Undocumented workers must be
given citizenship and full protection under the law. NAFTA, CAFTA and other free-trade agreements must be
revoked. Anti-labor laws such as the Taft-Hartley Act, along with laws that
criminalize poverty and dissent, must be repealed.
All
this is the minimum.
Do not
expect the corporate masters of war and commerce to willingly let this happen. They must be forced.
Revolutions
take time. They are often begun by one
generation and completed by the next. “Those who give the first check to a
state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin, ”Michel de
Montaigne wrote in 1580. “The fruits of public commotion are seldom
enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another’s
net.” Revolutions can be crushed by
force, as amply demonstrated by history. Or they may be hijacked by individuals such as
Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin or movements that betray the
populace. There are no guarantees that
we will move toward a worker’s paradise or socialist utopia—we might move
toward the most efficient form of totalitarianism in human history.
Radical
movements are often their own worst enemies. The activists within them have a bad habit of
fighting over arcane bits of doctrine, forming counterproductive schisms,
misreading power and engaging in self-defeating and ultimately self-destructive
internal power struggles. When they do
not carefully calculate their power and the moment to strike, they often
overreach and are crushed.
The
state uses its ample resources to infiltrate, monitor and vilify groups and
arrest or assassinate movement leaders—and all uprisings, even supposedly
leaderless ones, have leaders. Success
is not assured, especially given the endemic levels of violence that have
characterized American society.
But no
matter what happens, the chain reaction that leads to revolt has begun. Most people realize that our expectations for
a better future have been obliterated, not only those for ourselves but also
for our children. This realization has lit the fuse. There is a widespread loss of faith in
established systems of power. The will
to rule is weakening among the elites, who are entranced by hedonism and
decadence. Internal corruption is rampant and transparent. Government is
despised.
The
nation, like many prerevolutionary societies, is headed into crisis. Lenin identified the components that come
together to foster a successful revolt:
The fundamental law
of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions, and particularly by
all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century, is as follows: it is
not enough for revolution that the exploited and oppressed masses should
understand the impossibility of living in the old way and demand changes, what
is required for revolution is that the exploiters should not be able to live
and rule in the old way. Only when the “lower
classes” do not want the old way, and when the “upper classes” cannot
carry on in the old way—only then can revolution win.
When I
was a foreign correspondent I covered revolts, insurgencies and revolutions,
including the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America; the civil
wars in Algeria, Sudan and Yemen; and the two Palestinian uprisings or
intifadas, along with the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and
Romania and the war in the former Yugoslavia. I have seen that despotic regimes collapse
internally. Once the foot soldiers of
the elite—the police, the courts, the civil servants, the press, the
intellectual class and finally the army—no longer have the will to defend the
regime, the regime is finished. When
these state organs are ordered to carry out acts of repression—such as clearing
people from parks and arresting or even shooting demonstrators—and refuse their
orders, the old regime crumbles. The
veneer of power appears untouched before a revolution, but the internal rot,
unseen by the outside world, steadily hollows out the state edifice. And when dying regimes collapse, they do so
with dizzying speed. Upheaval is coming. The people must be prepared. If we are, we
will have a chance.
~~~
If the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, I'll talk with you
again next week on Friday the 15th.
God Bless You All
&
God Bless the United States of America
Floyd
No comments:
Post a Comment