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- Links 5/11/14
- TPP Is Another Upward Transfer of Wealth
- Neil Barofsky: Geithner, in His Forthcoming Book, Resorts to Already Discredited Factual Mischaracterizations and Name Calling
| Posted: 11 May 2014 03:55 AM PDT New species of metal-eating plant discovered in the Philippines Science Daily (furzy mouse) The power and perfection of a crocodile in one slow-motion jump Sploid The $13 Billion Mystery Angels Businessweek. Unknown squillionaires, dark matter of the 0.01%. Federal Data: Americans keeping vehicles longer since start of recession WaPo Here to Stay — Beyond the Rough Launch of the ACA NEJM Pranab launches RuPay, India's own card payment network The Hindu Why Oracle's Copyright Victory Over Google Is Bad News for Everyone Wired (EFF’s view). Web host gives FCC a 28.8Kbps slow lane in net neutrality protest Ars Technica (SW) Maintain true net neutrality to protect the freedom of information in the United States White House Petition. 62,177 down, 37,823 to go. Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Did an Israeli spy hide in Al Gore’s bathroom? Haaretz Black Mobility Belies U.S. Civil Rights Hope as Milestone Nears Bloomberg Jackson Rising: Black Millionaires Won’t Lift Us Up, But Cooperation & the Solidarity Economy Might Black Agenda Report, and Jackson Rising: An Electoral Battle Unleashes a Merger of Black Power, the Solidarity Economy and Wider Democracy SolidarityEconomy.net (diphtherio). Class Warfare
Treasury says debt payments could be prioritized in default scenario Reuters. Well, naturally. Welcome to Britain, the new land of impunity Guardian Italy's Beppe Grillo battles to sustain anti-establishment message FT Triumph of the ‘bearded lady’: Conchita Wurst wins Eurovision Song Contest for Austria EuroNews (video) Ukraine
Can an American Soldier Ever Die in Vain? Foreign Policy Ex-Blackwater guard indicted on murder charge for Iraq shooting Reuters Likhit Dhiravegin Interview – Part 2: On the orchestration of a political vacuum Asian Correspondent. It’s interesting to think that one Thai elite faction could be using a Gene Sharp-like “pillars of the regime” strategy against another elite faction. Non-violence is nonetheless force, a force for good or evil. ‘Don’t remove the cone’: latest advice on the Net The Nation. Or you’ll be beaten unconscious by anti-government “guards.” Auto sector slams on brakes Bangkok Post. Bad for business. Slow Exit of the Midwest's Winter Buries Gardens in a Deep Freeze Times. Not just the Midwest! Consumers to be big winners in solar/storage revolution Renew Economy (PT). ISS HD Earth Viewing Experiment, ISS HD Earth Viewing Experiment NASAtelevision on USTREAM. Science NASA (Live streaming video). Awesome. How to Trick the Guilty and Gullible into Revealing Themselves Online WSJ Antidote du jour:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here. |
| TPP Is Another Upward Transfer of Wealth Posted: 11 May 2014 12:55 AM PDT Lambert here: The Democratic leadership has been doing a lot of head fakes to the left, lately. But not on trade! So I guess they care about that. Roger Bybee, a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and University of Illinois visiting professor in Labor Education. Originally published at Triple Crisis. Those at the top have never done better," President Obama ruefully acknowledged in his January 28 State of the Union speech. "But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened." Yet, moments later, Obama heartily endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which as drafted directly reflects the demands of "those at the top" and would, if passed, severely intensify the very inequality spotlighted by the president. The TPP would provide transnational corporations with easier access to cheap labor in Pacific Rim nations and new power to trump public-interest protections—on labor, food safety, drug prices, financial regulation, domestic procurement laws, and a host of others—established over the last century by democratic governments. The nations currently negotiating the TPP—which together comprise nearly 40%of the world economy—include the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Among them, Malaysia, Brunei, Mexico, Singapore, and Vietnam, are all notorious violators of labor rights The TPP's labor provisions are far too weak to begin uplifting wages, conditions, and rights for workers in these nations. As with NAFTA, the TPP will benefit U.S. companies relocating jobs to low-wage, high-repression nations, argues economist Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). This would also exert strong downward pressures on the pay of U.S. workers, "Most U.S. workers are likely to lose out from the TPP," Weisbrot says. "This may come as no surprise after 20 years of NAFTA and an even-longer period of trade policy designed to put lower- and middle-class workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world." Obama has billed the TPP as a "trade agreement" that will create U.S. jobs. The pact, however, actually has little to do with reducing trade restrictions. Tariffs are now a minimal factor for most global trade. Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, points out that only five of the TPP's twenty-nine chapters are about trade at all. But the remaining provisions cover such immensely important measures as the creation of a kind of corporate supremacy over the democratically established regulations enacted by member nations. If an existing law threats to diminish profits, corporations in the TPP nations would be entitled to bring their complaint to an international dispute panel of anonymous corporate members, who could impose major financial penalties on the "offending" countries. "The Trans-Pacific Partnership," Wallach concludes, "is a Trojan horse for a host of awful measures that have nothing to do with trade and would never get through Congress in the light of day." Some of the most controversial TPP features have become public only thanks to Wikileaks. American participation in the TPP negotiations has been limited to a tiny circle of just 600 top corporate executives. Numerous members of Congress have complained about the secrecy surrounding the negotiations, charging that it exceeds even that practiced by the Bush-Cheney administration. The public's understanding of the massive stakes involved in the TPP has been further hampered by the failure of major media to offer even minimal analysis. The major-network news shows, according to a new study by Media Matters, made no mention at all of the TPP from August 2013 through January 2014. Despite remaining in the shadows, the TPP has met fierce opposition from both elected representatives and hundreds of labor, consumer, small-farmer, health-reform, and other civic organizations. TPP's only foreseeable path to passage in the near future had been the use of a "fast-track" procedure, under which NAFTA and subsequent international agreements have been negotiated. Instead of the normal process of deliberation and debate by Congress, the fast-track process (which requires separate congressional approval) substitutes minimal debate and permits no amendments. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, acutely aware of residual public resentment against NAFTA's 20-year legacy of job loss and wage decline, has firmly ruled out the fast-track route for the TPP. Influential Democratic senators like Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have already directed their fire at the TPP, with Warren demonstrating her seriousness by voting against Obama's nominee for U.S. Trade Representative, former Citigroup director Michael Froman. Meanwhile, 150 House Democrats and several dozen Republicans signed a November letter opposing the fast-track process. "We're seeing 'trans-partisan' opposition to the Partnership," said Michael Dolan, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) legislative representative on trade issues. As with NAFTA where some conservative Pat Buchanan-style nationalists saw a transnational corporate threat to U.S. sovereignty, some normally pro-corporate members of Congress are adopting an oppositional stance. The Republican opposition to the TPP includes Tea Partiers Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and over 20 others. According to Arthur Stamoulis, executive director of the Citizens Trade Campaign which is leading opposition to the TPP, the stance of these Republicans goes beyond their seemingly-reflexive opposition to any Obama initiative. While a number of Tea Party Republicans voted in favor of the three Obama-promoted free-trade agreements in 2011, they are viewing the TPP differently because of its magnitude and due to pressure from the Republican base. "Because of its massive size, the TPP has captured a lot more attention from the Right than the Korea pact ever did," Stamoulis says. "With Republicans' base much more engaged on the TPP—the Tea Party Nation and others opposing it—I expect to see a lot more Republican opposition this time around, and indeed, we already are seeing that." The visceral dislike of Obama by many on the Right may add fuel to rightist opposition to the TPP and the fast-track procedure, Stamoulis concedes, but he points out that opposition to corporate-style globalization has been mounting among Republican voters for some time. "Polls showed that Republican voters' opposition to free-trade agreements existed back during the Bush administration as well," he notes. On the Democratic side, only a relative handful of remaining "free-traders" (their ranks having been thinned in recent elections that unseated a number of the pro-globalization Dems) like Rep. Ron Kind (Wisc.), stand with Obama at this point. Unlike the NAFTA vote in 1993, where about almost half of House Democrats and over 3/4 of Senate Republicans voted for the measure, Democrats in both Houses have become notably disenchanted with the results of "free trade" and the resultant offshoring of jobs. "Democratic opposition to job-killing Free Trade Agreements has hardened in recent years," says CTC's Stamoulis. "Not only do more members of Congress understand the disastrous effects of pacts like NAFTA, but they also see that two years into President Obama's biggest trade agreement to date—the Korea Free Trade Agreement—not only is our deficit with South Korea up, but the promised exports are actually down." The Democratic base, as reflected in polling data, also seems more actively opposed to any massive new free trade agreement, based on their experiences with 20 years of job losses and community devastation that they see as products of NAFTA. A wide array of mostly progressive organizations, including 564 labor, environmental, family farm, human rights and other groups, signed on to a letter opposing the fast-track route to passing the TPP. With this pressure from the grass roots, "Democrats in Congress are beginning to understand not only the policy folly of TPP, but the political folly associated with it as well," Stamoulis states. With implacable opposition to the TPP among both the president's strongest allies and most ardent enemies, the TPP has little realistic passage before the November mid-term elections, the Teamsters' Dolan told Dollars & Sense. But there is still a danger that Obama might seek to gain passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, using the fast-track procedure, in the "lame-duck" session after the elections when defeated and retiring members of Congress are no longer accountable to voters. However, such a ploy would leave Obama with a legacy of making little headway for workers against rising inequality*, while succeeding only in promoting the TPP and other trade agreements that will worsen America's glaring economic fault lines.** NOTE * Lambert here. That’s not a bug. It’s a feature. NOTE ** Dittoez. |
| Posted: 10 May 2014 10:25 PM PDT By Neil Barofsky, former Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, is a partner in the Litigation Department of national law firm Jenner & Block LLP; focuses his practice on white collar investigations, complex commercial litigation, monitorships and examinerships. Immediately before joining Jenner & Block, Mr. Barofsky was Senior Fellow at New York University School of Law's Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, an adjunct professor at the law school, and affiliated with the Mitchell Jacobson Leadership Program on Law and Business. He is also the author of Bailout. I have been looking forward to the release of former-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's new book for some time. As one of the central architects and managers of the government's response to the financial crisis, he deserves much of the credit for what went right in the bailout, and much of the blame for what went wrong. Agree with him or not (and I often did not), his perspectives could be important to our understanding of those tumultuous years. I have not yet seen a full copy of the book, but I was informed of some of the things that he said about me and SIGTARP, the oversight agency that I headed during Mr. Geithner's tenure as Secretary. Unfortunately, rather than addressing the many important policy disagreements that we had during the time – most importantly, our repeated criticism that Mr. Geithner's management of the bailout woefully failed to fulfill the promise made to the American people that TARP would be used to help struggling homeowners on Main Street as well as the big banks – Mr. Geithner resorts to already discredited factual mischaracterizations and name calling. First, Mr. Geithner suggests that it was improper for the federal law enforcement agents who worked at SIGTARP to carry weapons or have bullet-proof vests. This comment demonstrates Mr. Geithner's ignorance with respect to law enforcement safety protocols and is frankly insulting to the dedicated law enforcement officers who work at SIGTARP. SIGTARP's federal agents have all of the same law enforcement powers and responsibilities as the FBI, the Secret Service, and any other white-collar federal law enforcement officers. No one would suggest that an FBI agent would execute an arrest or search warrant in a potentially armed white collar defendant's home without following standard safety protocols, and Mr. Geithner's suggestion that SIGTARP agents should not have been afforded those same protections is uninformed and dangerous. Sadly, this lack of comprehension of the important role of law enforcement too often informed Geithner's attitude toward potential fraud in the TARP programs. His team often resisted antifraud protections that we insisted be included in the programs, claiming that the banks who were participating in the programs could simply be trusted, a perspective that now has proven to be naïve at best. Thankfully, with help from Congress, other oversight bodies, and even, at times, the Federal Reserve, we were able to overcome Treasury's resistance and protect the TARP programs from potentially devastating losses, something that Mr. Geithner once even thanked me for. Hank Paulson* also recognized the important role that we played in deterring criminal conduct, something that he told me was one of our signature accomplishments when he came to speak to my class at NYU. Secretary Paulson also told me that it was his belief that we had done the country a great service by reassuring the American people that someone was on guard protecting their interests. (I reported this conversation, with Secretary Paulson's permission, in my book). Mr. Geithner, however, apparently claims that Secretary Paulson shared his dim view of me. I would be surprised if that were in fact true. Next, he apparently claims that in a July 2009 report I said that the government might lose $23.7 trillion, which he concludes was "damaging." What the report actually ascribes to that number (at page 138) is the "Total Potential Support Related To Crisis" (and not potential losses) of the myriad pledges of support to the financial system from an alphabet soup of agencies and programs. The numbers underlying that estimate, of course, were provided to us by Treasury and other governmental agencies, the report was vetted with Treasury before it was issued, and the report makes clear in a series of caveats that it was not an estimate of actual potential losses. Unfortunately, Mr. Geithner refuses to allow facts to get in the way of good hyperbole. Mr. Geithner also apparently calls me a number of names and claims that I lacked the necessary financial knowledge or experience for the job. I take great pride in the professional and skilled team that we assembled and the detailed and widely respected reports detailing the bailout that we issued. Indeed, they have widely been heralded as the most complete record of the government's efforts. Mr. Geithner also ignores the facts when he suggests that we failed to report on the returns on TARP's investments and that we criticized him without suggesting alternatives. In fact, we issued reports every single quarter that detailed how much money came back to Treasury and that included dozens of recommendations to improve the programs. *In a quote attributed to me in the recent New York Times article on Geithner's book, it incorrectly ascribes a comment I made about Geithner and his Treasury team to be about Secretary Paulson and Ben Bernanke. Below is taken from the email exchange I had with Andrew Ross Sorkin which makes clear what I said. Unfortunately, the Times has so far refused to issue a correction.
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