February 19, 2013

USW Urges New Approach and Expanded Agenda for U.S.-EU Trade Talks

Leo W. Gerard, International President of the United Steelworkers (USW) issued the following statement today regarding plans announced by the Obama Administration to enter into negotiations to create a U.S.-EU Free Trade Agreement.

"The completion of the U.S.-EU High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth and announcement by the President in his State of the Union speech on the desire to begin the U.S.-EU FTA talks may provide an opportunity to finally approach trade in a way that will promote economic growth and opportunity for more workers here in the U.S. and among the EU's member countries. The similarity in our economic development level and economic systems could help reduce the downward pressure on wages and working conditions. An agreement, properly designed and implemented could be a force for progress.

"Negotiations with the EU do provide a real opportunity to ensure that workers on both sides of the Atlantic could finally benefit from a free trade agreement if their interests are properly addressed. There is more than $8 trillion in investments among all of the potential parties to the agreement. This huge cross-border investment directly links workers in the U.S. and in EU countries through an intricate web of common employers. The USW already works closely with industrial trade unions in Europe through Workers Uniting, our partnership with Unite the Union in the UK and Ireland, and the IndustriALL Global Union.

"How an agreement addresses the rights of workers vis-a-vis their employers as well as regulations and standards for workers at their workplace must be of paramount importance as this negotiation goes forward. No longer can the fundamental interests of workers be shunted aside. If our goal is to harmonize upwards and adopt best practice for commercial interests, we can do no less for the people that an agreement is said to benefit.

"At a minimum any agreement should expand on existing EU mechanisms that provide for information disclosure and consultation between workers and trans-national enterprises, strengthen regulations concerning workplace health and safety, adopt the strongest protections on the testing and control of toxic chemicals and include best practice regulations concerning contingent workers among other crucial issues. The failures of an unrestrained market and poorly regulated enterprises are evident in the global recession that is still enveloping much of the world today. A U.S.-EU agreement that puts the interests of workers at its center provides the best opportunity to promote equitable, sustainable growth. We can, and must, do better.

http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/19/5200839/usw-urges-new-approach-and-expanded.html

February 14, 2013

It's meant to deal with China by raising labor, environmental and other standards which China

cannot do without endangering the CPC's control of the country.

Here's the China People's Daily (the official CPC newspaper) take on why the TPP is bad for China:

And a report from the Pew Organization on the Obama's administration's strategy for dealing with China:


The TPP will not be the "the largest free trade agreement in U.S. history" if the Trans-Atlantic trade agreement with the EU goes through. The EU and the US have the two largest economies in the world.

One benefit of the TPP, if 'strong labor and environmental' requirements are in it (and if the strategy is to make China less competitive, they will have to be), these requirements will apply to NAFTA countries since they are all proposed members of the TPP.

February 12, 2013

Krugman in 2008 (true today): conservatives win elections by exploiting white resentment BUT

are “on the verge of losing their grip thanks to demographic change.”

Many conservatives, including old-line relatively moderate conservatives, were outraged by the political thesis of my book The Conscience of a Liberal (first published before the 2008 election) — which was that extreme movement conservatives took over the GOP a long time ago, were able to win elections by exploiting white resentment, but were on the verge of losing their grip thanks to demographic change.

But that’s pretty much exactly what Sam Tanenhaus, the Times book review editor and (posted below) a long-time conservative, is now saying.

In COAL I also argued that the place to begin a new liberal agenda was with health care reform, more or less along the lines of the Massachusetts reform, which I believed was finally achievable. (I hoped for a public option, but oh well).

I sometimes get people declaring that I don’t know anything about politics; I’m willing to agree, with the proviso that you also admit that *nobody* knows anything about politics. But I don’t think that I’m doing all that badly here …

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/the-rights-stuff/

Book review: Original Sin Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people

**snip**

It won't do to blame it all on Romney. No doubt he was a weak candidate, but he was the best the party could muster, as the GOP's leaders insisted till the end, many of them convinced he would win, possibly in a landslide. Neither can Romney be blamed for the party's whiter-shade-of-pale legislative Rotary Club: the four Republicans among the record 20 women in the Senate, the absence of Republicans among the 42 African Americans in the House (and the GOP's absence as well among the six new members who are openly gay or lesbian). These are remarkable totals in a two-party system, and they reflect not only a failure of strategy or "outreach," but also a history of long-standing indifference, at times outright hostility, to the nation's diverse constituencies—blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, gays.

The Eisenhower campaign also saw potential advantages in Brown—and a possible route, through the nation's cities, to recapturing the House, which they had lost in 1954. "GOP strategists regard this election as a period of maximum opportunity in their dream of shattering the Roosevelt coalition and regaining the allegiance of the Negroes," James Reston wrote in The New York Times. In 1956, the GOP improved its totals in black precincts by double digits in New York and Chicago, and made gains below the Mason-Dixon Line. Overall, Eisenhower received between 35 and 40 percent of the black vote, about 5 percentage points more than he did in 1952.

Then, within weeks, an authentic crisis arose. Arkansas's governor, Orval Faubus, defied a federal court order to desegregate Little Rock's Central High School, bringing in the National Guard to surround the school and block a group of black pupils from entering, while a shrieking mob threatened violence. Unable to compromise with Faubus, Eisenhower federalized the Guardsmen and also sent in 1,000 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division. For the first time since Reconstruction, U.S. government troops, armed with bayonets, "occupied" a state in the old Confederacy.

A Republican president and his party now stood at the forefront of civil rights in America. Yet within a few years, this advantage would be lost and the party would be defined thereafter by its resistance to civil rights. Why did this happen? The reason was a historical coincidence: Just as the civil rights movement became a national concern, movement conservatism was being born.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112365/why-republicans-are-party-white-people#

Hard to imagine that 60 years ago republicans were "at the forefront of civil rights in America and received 35% to 40% of the African American vote. Republicans were different back then, of course. (And conservatives in the South still elected conservative Democrats back in the day.)

February 11, 2013

CAP: Immigrants Are Makers, Not Takers (Why Heritage Foundation and CIS are wrong)

With immigration reform heating up in Congress and the White House putting its muscle behind legislative action, immigration opponents are already campaigning against common-sense reforms. Their current line of attack is an unsubstantiated claim that legalizing the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States will be too costly for our nation. Playing to ignorant prejudice, these groups falsely suggest that immigrants are “takers”—people who use more public benefits than other groups—and that as a result, legalization would cost the United States trillions of dollars.

Mainstream economists have thoroughly debunked this general stereotype of immigrants as takers, finding that immigrants are a net positive for the economy and pay more into the system than they take out. In fact, immigrants’ contributions have also played a key role in prolonging the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund. And the truth is that the cost-benefit analyses that immigration restrictionists have used to make their wild cost projections simply are not well-rounded or accurate.

Immigrants are in fact “makers,” not takers.

Even with these positive economic benefits, though, anti-immigrant groups continue to insist that immigrants take more out of the system than they pay into it. Two studies in particular have received attention lately: a 2007 study by the Heritage Foundation, which found that legalization would cost $2.6 trillion; and a 2011 study by the Center for Immigration Studies, which concluded that Hispanic immigrants use more public benefits than other groups.

Both studies rely on a snapshot of immigrants frozen in time to get to their calculations. Heritage focuses only on immigrants as retirees without taking into account the money they pay into the system during their working years. The Center for Immigration Studies focuses on families with children without taking into account the taxes their children will pay over their lifetime. Each approach is predicated on faulty assumptions.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/news/2013/02/08/52377/immigrants-are-makers-not-takers/

Hmmm, "Playing to ignorant prejudice..." sounds like a typical tactic from a particular political party.

Refuting studies from the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Immigration Studies is not particularly difficult to do given their right-wing, fact-free bias, but I am glad the the Center for American Progress went to the trouble to do it.

February 9, 2013

Juan Cole: Tunisia's 3-way class polarization - workers, upper class and fundamentalists

Belaid’s assassination was the most visible and prominent evidence of Tunisia’s class polarization. It is three-way, with workers and intellectuals of the left opposing the new government’s Neoliberal tendencies; with middle and upper classes tied to the old secular state and its institutions afraid of fundamentalism and privatization; and with the fundamentalists promoting private businessmen.

But the murder of Belaid also points to widespread security problems in the wake of the fall of the dictatorial regime of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali two years ago. The security problems derive from three quarters: simple criminal gangs, unruly neighborhood militias, and militant Salafi fundamentalists who act as Ku Klux Klan-style vigilantes against secularists. All three problems derive from the inability of the current government to reconstitute the security forces after the revolution.

Tunisia is roiled not just by a religion/secular divide but by a Religious Right vs. Workers and peasants divide, with many middle class intellectuals siding with the latter. That is why the protests took place in hardscrabble rural towns as well as in downtown Tunis. Rural Tunisia is relatively religious, but it is also disproportionately unemployed, and al-Nahda has yet to do much for them. Indeed, where they have tried to strike and protest on labor issues, it has put them down (in a way it seems uninterested in putting down violent Salafis).

As usual, a lot of pundits are looking to use the instability in Tunisia to indict the Arab Spring. But the divisions and the structural problems in the country were largely produced by the old dictatorship, which could no longer deal with them by state coercion. Tunisia is wracked by that new phenomenon, of open political struggle. The country needs to rework it into peaceful civil politics if it is to go ahead, but the struggle itself is salutary. The old Tunisia of 80,000 secret police spying on citizens’ every word and the criminalization of political speech is gone, and good riddance. People who want that back for the sake of ‘stability’ are being unrealistic; it is what produced the instability, because it was untenable in the long run.

http://www.juancole.com/2013/02/tunisias-spring-turmoil.html

February 6, 2013

Reich: So is the priority (for immigration reform) to be those who need us, or those whom we need?

(Reich seems to have forgotten the anti-immigration wing of the republican party whose responses would be:

those who need us, - Who cares what "they" need?

or those whom we need?- We don't need no stinking immigrants for anything. The only good immigrant is a non-immigrant.

The Real Debate Over American Citizenship

On one side are those who think of citizenship as a matter of exclusion and privilege — of protecting the nation by keeping out those who are undesirable, and putting strict limits on who is allowed to exercise the full rights of citizenship.

On the other are those who think of citizenship inclusively — as an ongoing process of helping people become full participants in America.

It’s also a question of who we want to join us. Engraved on a bronze plaque mounted inside the lower level of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty are Emma Lazarus’ immortal words, written in 1883: “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me.”

By contrast, a bipartisan group of lawmakers last week introduced a bill giving priority to the highly skilled. “Our immigration system needs to be … more welcoming of highly skilled immigrants and the enormous contributions they can make to our economy,” said one of its sponsors, Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

So is the priority to be those who need us, or those whom we need?

http://robertreich.org/post/42409183744

Reich goes on to discuss the long lines endured by Blacks and Hispanics in last year's election; the 'free speech' (campaign donations) of 'American' corporations which are increasingly 'foreign' in terms of their stock ownership, employees and customers; and the threat to due process of the 'white paper' on drones.

They may seem unrelated, but all these issues — who gets to be an American citizen, how easily American citizens can vote, whether global corporations are American citizens entitled to influence our elections, and whether American citizens are entitled to a judge and jury before being executed — are pieces of the same larger debate: Are we more fearful of “them” out there, or more confident about “us”? Is our goal to constrain and limit citizenship, or to enlarge and fulfill its promise?

It’s an old debate in America. The greatness of our nation lies in our overriding tendency to choose the latter.

February 4, 2013

Rand Paul Pushes Gun-Running Conspiracy (Libya to Turkey to Syria) Theory During

Benghazi Hearing.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) used today’s hearing on the Benghazi attack to confront Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about a conspiracy theory involving moving guns from Libya to Syrian rebels.

Paul, a new member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wasted no time in making a mark on the proceedings. After informing Secretary Clinton that he would have fired her for her role in the response to the attack, Paul came seemingly out of nowhere to ask Clinton about Turkey. “Is the U.S. involved with any procuring of weapons, transfer of weapons, buying, selling, anyhow transferring weapons to Turkey out of Libya?” he asked.

A clearly confused Clinton responded to the best of her ability:

CLINTON: To Turkey? I will have to take that question for the record. Nobody has ever raised that with me.

PAUL: It’s been in news reports that ships have been leaving from Libya and that they may have weapons and what I’d like to know is the annex that was close by, were they involved with procuring, buying, selling, obtaining weapons and were any of these weapons being transferred to other countries, any countries, Turkey included?

Paul’s inquiry about Turkey seems less odd if you’re familiar with Glenn Beck-inspired conspiracy theories that have been circulating among right-wing websites since the attacks in Libya. The theory goes that Ambassador Chris Stevens — who was killed during the attack — was deeply involved in the CIA project of gathering loose arms in Libya in the aftermath of Moammar Qaddafi’s downfall. Stevens then facilitated the movement of those arms from Libya to Turkey, where they then went on to Syria. The secrecy involved in moving those weapons under the table is part of why the Obama administration covered up the truth of the attack, according to the theory, which even Fox News has helped spread.

The Obama administration has repeatedly said that it will not be providing arms to the rebels in Syria, which this theory claims to counter. While the CIA was involved with helping round up the loose arms that were rampant in Libya, there is no evidence that Stevens or the State Department was involved in the operation, nor that the arms were then shipped to Syria. That Sen. Paul would use his first hearing on the Foreign Relations Committee to push this theory, despite the fact even if it were true it would fall outside of Secretary Clinton’s purview, does not say great things about his future on the body.

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/01/23/1485661/rand-paul-conspiracy-theory-libya/

That is a right-wing CT that I had not heard of before.

I thought we were rid of Glenn Beck. Is he still around somewhere pushing CT's that FOX and other right-wing rumor mongers can link to as 'proof' that a conspiracy exists?