Elizabeth Warren Has Serious Concerns About the ISDS in the TPP

Elizabeth Warren has a blog post I have serious concerns about ISDS. She included a list of actual cases brought under previous trade policies to show that her concern is not merely hypothetical.

ISDS isn’t a one-time, hypothetical problem – we’ve seen it in past trade agreements. Just in the past few years:

  • A French company sued Egypt after Egypt raised its minimum wage.
  • A Swedish company sued Germany because Germany wanted to phase out nuclear power for safety reasons.
  • A Dutch company sued the Czech Republic because the Czech Republic didn’t bail out a bank that the Dutch company partially owned.
  • Philip Morris is using ISDS right now to try to stop countries like Australia and Uruguay from implementing new rules that are intended to cut smoking rates – because the new laws might eat into the tobacco giant’s profits.

The Obama Administration has said that they have fixed all the problems, and nothing like that will happen here. They just won’t show you how.

The Obama administration will not show you how by simply showing you the clauses in the TPP that fix these problems. Even worse, they make no attempt to explain how they have fixed it even if they won’t show you the agreement itself. You have to wonder why President Obama is making it so difficult to believe what he says. Perhaps he feeling such intense pressure to negotiate the deal, that he hasn’t got the strength to resist. He may be hoping the American public will be incensed enough to stop it.

Bernie Sanders Drops A Liberal Bomb On CNN’s Republican Talking Points

Politicus USA has the article Bernie Sanders Drops A Liberal Bomb On CNN’s Republican Talking Points. The article focuses on this CNN interview with Bernie Sanders.

The transcript that Politicus USA provides is invaluable.

CUOMO: Because when you say things about expanding entitlements and giving more to the have nots, that’s unpopular. It sounds like it’s expensive. And the people who vote may not like it.

SANDERS: I disagree with you, Chris. First of all, it is not expensive in the sense that if you say to people all over this country, should large profitable multinational corporations, who today are not paying a nickel in federal taxes because they’re stashing their money in Cayman Islands and other tax havens, start paying their fair share? The American people, across the political spectrum, say, yes, they should.

We’re losing well over $100 billion every single year because of those taxes. I’ve introduced legislation that would end that. Talk to Warren Buffett, one of the richest guys in the world. He says, you know, it’s absurd. My effective tax rate is lower than my secretaries. The American people understand that. So what we have got to do is spend money intelligently.

We have got to make college affordable for our young people if we’re going to compete in the global economy. I’ll tell you what else we need to do. Real unemployment in this country is not 5.5 percent, it’s 11 percent. We need to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. And when we do that, in terms of roads, bridges, water systems, rail, airports, we can put some 13 million people back to work. And that’s the kind of agenda that I’m going to be fighting for.

Also note his comment:

I am running for working families and the middle class, not against Hillary Clinton.

A very good way to tell you what he is running for, rather than what he is running against. If he can stay out of the gutter from where the siren call of the pundits is emanating, he could change the face of politics.

This is another episode in the ongoing series Bernie Sanders Tames the Pundits.

How did the “one percent” become so rich?

The CBC has the video interview “The Price We Pay” | Harold Crooks Documentary.

On Facebook The Other 98% shared CBC News: The National’s video.

The jobs may be going to China, but the money is going to the Cayman Islands. That’s what off-shoring really means. As long as we are allowing the 1% to shield their money from taxes, they would be fools not to take advantage. We would be (are) fools to let them buy our elected representatives who pass the laws that make this all possible. There is probably no higher return on investment than buying a politician.

Wolf Richter: “Smart Money” Prepares to Profit from Bond Market Rout

Naked Capitalism has the article Wolf Richter: “Smart Money” Prepares to Profit from Bond Market Rout. The article finishes with the following:

And bondholders carry all the known and unknown risks of those four decades in return for what is still a minuscule amount of yield. That’s why the ultimate smart money is selling them at a record pace to still eager bond-fund managers that will stuff them, and all the associated risks and potential losses, without compunction into retirement nest eggs. Thank you hallelujah central banks for this deal of a “lifetime.”

From this article, I next read the Marketwatch article Why stocks may find it tough to wiggle out of the bond-market mess. THis article starts with the following:

“The latter part of 2014 and the dawn of 2015 will probably represent one of those episodes in financial history when the fixed-income markets were gripped by a confluence of factors that is unlikely to be repeated over the next hundred years,” said Jefferies’s chief equity strategist, Sean Darby.

There’s fodder for your future tales of battles past this morning, as Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen’s assets-are-bubbly comments continue to rattle global markets, which have already been duly freaked out by plummeting global bonds. She’s hit us at a tough time.

You know my financial advice is worth every penny you pay for it, but these articles just confirm for me why I wouldn’t buy bonds at the current historically high prices for them. At least with stocks there is the possibility that a company can grow into the inflated price of its stock. With a bond, there is not even this chance to justify the current high prices.

In these days of computerized trading, you don’t even get paper to cover your walls when you find the bonds to be worthless to sell.

First on CNN: Clinton, Democratic presidential opponents to debate six times

CNN has the article First on CNN: Clinton, Democratic presidential opponents to debate six times.

First the good news:

Democrats will announce Tuesday six presidential primary debates, giving long shots a potential opportunity to share the debate stage with frontrunner Hillary Clinton, CNN has learned.

Then the bad news that could be enough to drive me out of the Democratic Party:

The DNC will set the criteria for debate inclusion and any candidate who participates in a separate debate outside of the sanctioning process will be barred from future DNC debates, a Democratic official told CNN.

It is this kind of attitude and the desire to lose at all costs, that has me wondering if the days of the Democratic Party are numbered in pretty small numbers.

The nerve of them to try to prevent more debates. I had a feeling that the DNC has bot been looking out for my interests for a long time. That’s why I have cut off all donations to committees of national Democrats. I will only make contributions to individual candidates.

If they think that I will vote for Hillary if she is the nominee, then they have another think coming.

Protecting Free Speech or Committing a Crime? 1

To start the conversation, watch this video from Larry Wilmore.

You don’t have to go so far as to even think about hate speech. All you have to do is to remember the phrase “fighting words” as explained by WikiPedia.

In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine by a 9–0 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. It held that “insulting or ‘fighting words,’ those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” are among the “well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech the prevention and punishment of [which] … have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem.”
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There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting words” those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.

— Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942

So, was Pamela Geller protecting free speech or was she guilty of the crime of inciting disorder by using fighting words?

May 6, 2015

Reader RichardH has pointed out to me, that I should have read about the Post-Chaplinsky decisions in that Wikipedia article Fighting Words. You would have to be a lawyer to figure out what is prohibited, and what is not.

After I wrote the original post, I started to wonder how the American Nazi Party was allowed to hold a march in Skokie, Illinois where there was a large population of WWII Nazi Holocaust survivors. Conveniently, Wikipedia has the article National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie.

Thanks to RichardH for keeping me honest.

At INET Conference, Warren Adds Two Pieces to Her Financial Reform Framework

Naked Capitalism has the article At INET Conference, Warren Adds Two Pieces to Her Financial Reform Framework.  The article and the speech have important things to say about a number of politico/economic topics.  I’ll select a minute few to comment on here.

From the article comes the following excerpt:

Could a President use a trade deal to override financial rules? Well, it’s been a part of trade agreements since the late 1980s, including the WTO. In fact, WTO rules prevent firewalls like Glass-Steagall: when the U.S. negotiated it in 1997, they added an intent to repeal it, which of course happened two years later, in time for the WTO’s implementation. (Size caps on financial institutions are actually also banned by WTO rules.)

Financial services deregulation is more of an issue for the TTIP, the proposed U.S.-European agreement. European negotiators, if anything more embedded with their banks, have insisted on including a financial regulation chapter, which the U.S. has thus far rejected. By the time TTIP gets locked in, another President could be in office who wouldn’t be so rigid on that point.

Here is the YouTube video. Elizabeth Warren’s remarks start at the 12:00 minute mark.

I found one comment on YouTube particularly uninformed.

youdodat2

If you’re not talking about taking the power of money creation away from these private bankers psychopaths, then you’re just talking bullshit. Debt based money has to end.

In my response, I think I have finally figured just what is so wrong about this comment and almost everything that Ron and Rand Paul have to say about the subject.

Steve Greenberg

+youdodat2, You’ve been listening to the idiotic Paul family for too long. You are fooling yourselves if you think that it is only the banks that create private money. The stock market itself creates money with far less regulation than the banks. Anytime you have an asset that the accounting rules say you must put a value on, the frequently used technique of mark-to-market has the effect of creating money.

The Paul family is far too naive in their understanding of money. You might even go so far as to say that they haven’t a clue about what they claim to be expert in.

It is about time to stop equating what knowledgeable people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have to say about banks, banking, and money with what ignorant people like Ron and Rand Paul have to say. If you are going to listen to “experts”, you need to make sure that the person you are listening to really is an expert.

Alan Grayson: No to ‘Fast Track,’ No to Trade Treachery 1

Alan Grayson explains the trade issue in the video, No to ‘Fast Track,’ No to Trade Treachery, that he has put on YouTube.

Grayson really sells the explanation of the problem.

The article on Hullabaloo, Grayson Launches New Trade Offensive, provides a commentary and a quote about something that caught my attention, and not necessarily in a good way.

Note the pivot, at 7:01, to his counter-proposal. It’s a fascinating, workable idea.
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Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of our lifetime, has offered a plan for liberating us from the trade deficit. He would require importers to obtain certificates for the goods and services they sell us. The charges for those certificates could be used to increase Social Security and Medicare benefits, rebuild our roads and schools, and cut our taxes.

I support that plan, and I will be offering legislation to implement it. It is the light at the end of the tunnel for our economy.

Here is where I really started to get the feeling of the presentation going into demagoguery. This moment went by so fast in the video, that I could hardly think very deeply about the proposal. I am happy that there is the transcript to read at our leisure and think about carefully.

As I think about it, I see that there are attractive features to the proposal, but the consequences of any legislation based on this proposal are not easy to predict. Especially when we have not even seen the legislation.

Let me list a number of consequences that are easily foreseen.

  1. The cost of imported goods will rise to cover the cost of the certificates.
  2. The level of imports will decrease.
  3. Prices for what we do buy will rise because the cost of imported goods will rise, and because the cost of American made replacements for those goods will be higher.
  4. The goods being made in America to replace the imports will mean higher wages and additional jobs for residents here.

What we don’t know, and cannot predict is the net result from these changes as far as who will benefit and who will lose.  The ultimate question is whether or not the net benefit will be positive for the USA and for the rest of the world. Even that ultimate question is not that simple.  It will take years for this country and the rest of the world to digest these massive changes.  The trajectory of benefits will have upswings and downswings which will be painful on the downswings and perhaps feel good on the upswings.  We don’t know for sure whether the long term trend,  if we keep these new policies in place, will be up or down.

See my previous post Constructing Models of the Economy to get some idea of why there is so much uncertainty in making sudden large shifts in the rules.  That post tries to make it easier for you to picture that there are large number of very large forces that are in some kind of balance at any moment in history.  The economy can be quite sensitive to small changes in the balances, let alone large  changes in the balances.

I am not saying we should not make any changes because we will never be able to accurately predict the consequences.  I am saying that when we make changes, there is very little likelihood that they will turn out exactly as we had hoped.  We need to make plans that anticipate that we will have to be constantly measuring the impact of what we have done and be prepared to make corrections.

The larger  the changes and the more quickly they are done, the more difficult it will be to control what happens.  The irony is, that the way we got into our fix of needing to make large changes quickly, is that we weren’t monitoring the situation closely enough to make the small, gradual changes that we have needed to make as soon as we saw that deregulation and trickle down economics was not working at all as predicted.

This lack of foresight is the reason why there are large and catastrophic events in history as we swing wildly between one extreme and another.

It is not easy to figure out how quickly or how slowly we need to go.  That is why we need to be wise as citizens, and we need to choose wise people to put in charge of implementing the desire of the citizens.  A large part of the wisdom we need to have is to have the humility to imagine how little we can predict the future.

Tell President Obama: Prosecute Wall Street Criminals

Democracy for America has a petition for you to sign Tell President Obama: Prosecute Wall Street Criminals.

Here is a key part of the explanation that you will see at the above link:

Wall Street banks have gotten away with way too much already. As long as they know that breaking the law will never result in anything more than a slap on the wrist, they’ll keep taking the kinds of risks that led to the last economic collapse — and would almost certainly create another crisis for working families in the future.

Who would have thought that we would have to explain this to President Obama? Next time, we need to elect someone who understands this and promises to prosecute white collar crime as vigorously as other kinds of crime. White collar crimes like the ones that some the Wall Street executives perpetrate cause more physical harm to more people than an armed robber causes when he or she displays a gun, but does not use it.

Making a promise of vigorous prosecution of white collar crime be a litmus test for the next President, is not too much to ask. It shouldn’t even be a promise that we should have to ask a Presidential candidate to make. The extremely bad precedent that Obama has set, is what makes it necessary to ask for this promise from now on.

Jon Stewart Ridicules ‘Dallas Dipsh*ts’ Fearing ‘Texas Takeover’ (VIDEO) 1

Talking Points Memo has the article Jon Stewart Ridicules ‘Dallas Dipsh*ts’ Fearing ‘Texas Takeover’ (VIDEO)

“The United States government already controls Texas, since like the 1840s, and then left and then came back — just borrow a textbook from a neighboring state, it’s all in there,” he added.

Here is the video.

A certain person sitting next to me while watching this video said, “You know, I have to stop telling people I come from Texas.”