The TPP: Our President Drops The Mask

My last post on the topic. Dean Baker continues to do an excellent job of exposing this shameless sellout.

One Democratic Senator (Tom Carper of Delaware) joined 51 Republicans voting for fast track. Mitch McConnell voted against it when it was clear it would fail so that he can bring it up again. So who will benefit from the TPP?

The People's View:

Big labor unions and liberal members of Congress have picked a fight against the global expansion of the rights of workers by mounting do-or-die opposition against the Trade Promotion bill moving through Congress that will allow the President to bring the Trans-Pacific Partnership to Congress for an up-or-down vote. In doing so, American labor is displaying key symptoms of its self-inflicted collapse.

Rep. Paul Ryan, on CNBC with Joe Kernen shilling for the TPP this morning, does not give a hairy rat's behind about the rights of workers. Neither does the Chamber of Commerce, also shilling for this execrable multinational corporate government deal.

I remember when President Obama's fans explained his Catfood Commission as "eleventy-dimensional chess." It wasn't. He's been working for Wall Street the entire time.

President Gas is tap dancing
For the banker he's a thief
He isn't very honest
But he's obvious at least

P.S. This isn't over. There will be another vote tomorrow, after a couple fig leaves have been added. Our President and the GOP only need 7 or 8 Democrats to switch votes to get this through the Senate. Some who voted against it yesterday are just hoping for token concessions in order to cover their fealty to the richest few.

The people won this round because Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown effectively organized opposition and because voters persistently called their Congresscritters to let them know it's a bad deal. Keep calling!

Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. And at Kos.
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Eric Holder Resigns

Here's John Cassidy at the New Yorker: Why Didn’t Eric Holder Go After the Bankers?

Amid all the coverage of Eric Holder’s resignation, I still haven’t seen a convincing answer to one question: Why didn’t the Justice Department, under his leadership, prosecute some of the senior bankers whose firms were largely responsible for the subprime-mortgage blowup and the Great Recession? It’s a gap in Holder’s record that historians will ponder at the same time they criticize his record on civil liberties, particularly his endorsement of the surveillance state, and praise him for trying to tackle some enduring problems in the American criminal-justice system, such as the imposition of long prison sentences for minor crimes and the scandalously high rates of incarceration, especially among minority groups.

Yes, John, if you ignore the fact that both Holder and Lanny Breuer (Assistant Attorney General, head of the DOJ's Criminal Justice division) came from white shoes criminal defense firm Covington and Burling, it might be difficult to answer that question.

And if you don't mention it in your article, you're doing a disservice to your readers. Scot J. Paltrow (Reuters): Insight: Top Justice officials connected to mortgage banks.

While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm's clients included the four largest U.S. banks - Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo & Co - as well as at least one other bank that is among the 10 largest mortgage servicers.

A particular concern by those pressing for an investigation is Covington's involvement with Virginia-based MERS Corp, which runs a vast computerized registry of mortgages. Little known before the mortgage crisis hit, MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, has been at the center of complaints about false or erroneous mortgage documents.

Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. -- roughly 60 million loans.

But evidence in numerous state and federal court cases around the country has shown that MERS authorized thousands of bank employees to sign their names as MERS officials. The banks allegedly drew up fake mortgage assignments, making it appear falsely that they had standing to file foreclosures, and then had their own employees sign the documents as MERS "vice presidents" or "assistant secretaries."

Covington in 2004 also wrote a crucial opinion letter commissioned by MERS, providing legal justification for its electronic registry. MERS spokeswoman Karmela Lejarde declined to comment on Covington legal work done for MERS.

A President doesn't pick people like Holder and Breuer for the top positions at the DOJ if he wants Wall Street criminals brought to justice...quite the opposite in fact.

That youtube is parody, of course, but it's also your answer, John Cassidy.

The actual Frontline piece was damning enough that Lanny resigned shortly after it was aired. (We needn't cry for him, he's back at Covington in the newly-created role of vice-chairman of the firm, his reward for servicing the clientele while at the DOJ.) And speaking of Bill Black:

William R. Black on Prosecuting Criminal Banker CEOs: Obama and Holder Don’t Even Care Enough to Fake It

P.S. Here's Mario A. Murillo on one of Holder's cases at Covington: Holder, Chiquita and Colombia. I find it notable for mentioning candidate Obama's opposition to our free trade agreement with Colombia as a reason for disappointment with his nomination of Eric Holder. Of course, Our President would forget about his opposition to agreements like this just months after he was sworn in.

Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire and Daily Kos.
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Do Fish Wear T-shirts?

I linked to Matt Taibbi's mock JP Morgan haiku contest at Jennifer's, and she noted...

Matt Taibbi: The entry by "Fish" I liked because of the clever Twitter-age five-syllable ending – this is like one of those actual Japanese haikus where a single sound symbol may count as two on:

Alas, feesh did not win one of the two t-shirts. But keep living the dream, feesh!

Cross-posted at Three Bulls!. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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Better Than Ezra

Here's a Wonkblog post about the Administration's efforts to further screw the American worker:

How Congress might have already tied Obama’s hands in trade negotiations

Quoted in the post are:

James Bacchus, a former member of Congress who served as a judge at the World Trade Organization and now chairs Greenberg Traurig’s global trade practice.

Thomas Bollyky, a former negotiator for the U.S. Trade Representative who’s now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Stanford professor Judith Goldstein, who calls this emerging dynamic (foes of granting fast-track authority) a “Baptist-bootlegger coalition.”

Chris Wenk, the Chamber of Commerce’s point person on trade issues.

And just one opponent: Lori Wallach of Public Citizen. Even the caption "Obama needs leverage with the Europeans. Congress could help." is slanted in favor of granting fast track authority to get these trade deals done.

So here's Dean Baker:

Of course there is no reason the deals have to be complicated. If the trade deals focused on removing traditional trade barriers such as tariffs and quotas, there would not be "a zillion different interests and moving parts." There would be some formulaic wording written into the agreement that specified the rate at which these restrictions would be pared back.

The reason there are a zillion moving parts is because the Obama administration went to the oil and gas industries to ask how they can use the trade agreement to get around environmental restrictions on drilling. It went to the food and agricultural industries to ask how they could get around food safety rules. It went to the pharmaceutical industry to ask it how it can use these deals to increase patent protections and jack up drug prices. It went to the entertainment industry and asked how it can use these deals to strengthen copyright enforcement and require Internet intermediaries to take responsibility (and incurr expenses) to help enforce copyrights.

Note: The Wonkblog post was written by Lydia DePillis, not Ezra Klein. However, I wanted an excuse to put up this youtuber.



NAFTA was begun by President G.H.W. Bush, and finished by Bill Clinton.

"First of all, because NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement." - Bill Clinton, September 14, 1993

"In a few moments, I will sign the North American free trade act into law. NAFTA will tear clown trade barriers between our three nations. It will create the world's largest trade zone and create 200,000 jobs in this country by 1995 alone. The environmental and labor side agreements negotiated by our administration will make this agreement a force for social progress as well as economic growth. Already the confidence we've displayed by ratifying NAFTA has begun to bear fruit. We are now making real progress toward a worldwide trade agreement so significant that it could make the material gains of NAFTA for our country look small by comparison." - Bill Clinton, December 8, 1993

So what happened? "As of 2010, U.S. trade deficits with Mexico totaling $97.2 billion had displaced 682,900 U.S. jobs. Of those jobs, 116,400 are likely economy-wide job losses because they were displaced between 2007 and 2010, when the U.S. labor market was severely depressed." - Robert E. Scott, Economic Policy Institute, May 3, 2011

Similarly, it was G.W. Bush who began Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. And neither the results of NAFTA nor five years of high unemployment due to the financial meltdown have dissuaded our President Hope and Change from pursuing "NAFTA on steroids" one iota. Serving "our" multinational corporations by screwing the American worker has been bipartisan ever since 3rd Way corporatists captured the Democratic party.

Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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Hope and/or Change News Roundup

1. From a Tom Coburn interview (R-OK) by Ezra Klein:

EK: On the other side of that hypothetical, let’s say Obama wins, but Republicans hold the House and maybe even take the Senate. How do they act in that hypothetical? Are they more or less willing to compromise with Obama?

TC: I don’t know. I’m not good at predicting that. If President Obama is president again, those problems are still there and we have to solve them. He knows that. We’ve had conversations where he’s told me he’ll go much further than anyone believes he’ll go to solve the entitlement problem if he can get the compromise. And I believe him. I believe he would.

2. Did the White House Direct the Police Crackdown on Occupy?

by DAVE LINDORFF

A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

3. Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?

by Jeremy Scahill

On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.
...
While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed.

Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”

That post is dated March 13, 2012, and so is perhaps not "news". How many of you have heard about it? If we had a functioning press, this would be a big deal, and there would be substantial pushback. But we do not, and I only read about it because Glenn Greenwald linked to it in...

4. Obama’s new free speech threat by Glenn Greenwald

There is substantial opposition in both Yemen and the West to the new U.S.-backed Yemeni President, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Hadi was the long-time Vice President of the Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, and after Saleh finally stepped down last year, Hadi became President as part of an “election” in which he was the only candidate (that little fact did not prevent Hillary Clinton from congratulating Yemen “on today’s successful presidential election” (successful because the U.S. liked the undemocratic outcome).
...
The Post article notes that, as unusual as this Executive Order is, Obama issued a similar one for Somalia in 2009, and it has one other precedent: “In 2006, President George W. Bush issued a similar order regarding Ivory Coast in West Africa.” Newspapers should just create a template that says that for every article: this radical and controversial power that Obama has just seized for himself has its genesis in the executive power and war theories of Bush/Cheney. Except for the power to secretly target U.S. citizens for due-process-free assassination-by-CIA and the manic war on whistleblowers — those are Obama originals — that’s a reliable claim to make, which is the point.

5. Comfortable Shoes Department By Charles P. Pierce

Right now, if nothing else changes, it looks very much like Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, is going to keep his job.

Dear Debbie Wasserman-Schultz: That heinous future actually could happen if you don't get out of the Green Room and get the DNC off the stick here. I'm still not kidding. If the Democrats blow this one, and if it's proven that the DNC could have helped in any way and didn't, you should be fired before the sun goes down.

Newsflash for Charles P. Pierce: DWS is Obama's handpicked DNC Chair, like Tim Kaine before her. If Obama wanted her to jump to Tom Barrett's aid, she'd be asking, "How high?"

As BDR might say, C.P.P.'s Obamapostasy will never be ready.

(Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)
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Conan

I started watching Conan back when I lived in NYC. Hard to imagine watching Leno instead (I rarely turn the TV on here in Ohio, so it's sort of a mute/moot point).
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If it was fun, they wouldn't call it work

Americans' job satisfaction falls to record low


Also! Nina Hagen.



Furthermore! Tequila Mockingbird.


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Why does the Washington Post hate America - data collection

Neal Gabler in the L.A. Times:

Politics as religion in America

There is something terrifying in this. The media have certainly been cowed; they treat intolerance as if it were legitimate political activity.

Jamison Foser at Media Matters:

Like a dog that's been beat too much

But what is stunning is that even as they run chasing after every story conservatives hype, the media apologize for not doing so more quickly. That's just what they've done the past week.

On Sunday, Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander devoted his column to conservative complaints that the paper had been too slow to cover ACORN. Alexander agreed with the complaints and suggested the "tardiness" was a result of liberal bias.
...
And Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli worrying "that we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It's particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view."
...
So whom did Alexander quote or paraphrase arguing that the media don't exhibit a liberal bias or that they have devoted too much attention to ACORN, or that -- as the new study released this month makes clear -- that they haven't bothered to fact-check the sensational right-wing claims about ACORN that they report? Nobody.

I think both these pieces are excellent. However, I'm no longer willing to give a paper like the Post the benefit of the doubt. They're sensitive to conservative criticism the way Br'er rabbit was sensitive to being thrown into the briar patch.

I've linked this before. It's just one incident that the Post quickly regretted. I think of it as an isolated incident the way a smoking gun with fingerprints on it is an isolated piece of evidence in a murder investigation.

More to come, but what do you all think? My opinion is that big corporations have bought our politicians, they've bought our media, and they are driving the country into a series of catastrophes.

UPDATE i: Language will be a problem.

What's Liberal? (Hanx, Perfesser Bérubé!)

What's Conservative? Republican, Democrat? How about the divide between editorial and news, at least as respected in name only as Church and State?

I know corporate leg-humping when I see it, and accusations of 'liberal bias' just allow the Washington Post to hump corporate leg harder.
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Why Do Republicans Hate America?

(The second screencrap from Drudge is small, but it contains a deliberate lie.)

Why?

I realize there are some who didn't want the Olympics because they were bad at sports in high school.

But the Republicans were following (as always) the cues they were given by Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh: Obama is trying to get Chicago the Olympics, and therefore this is the worst thing in the history of the world!11!!

Cue Drudge2.0:


That's right, if Chicage gets the Olympics, it's bad for Obama. Of course, the other thing is also true, as seen below.

The Washington Post worries that traditional news outlets like The Post simply don't pay sufficient attention to conservative media or viewpoints. Perhaps the Post could follow up its recent waste of op-ed space on the likes of Dick Cheney, John Bolton, and such as with a John McCain post about how he would have won the Olympics for Page, Arizona.


(Screencap from Media Matters for America)




The Weekly Standard knows it showed the ugly face of conservatism. So they covered it up.

If the Washington Post wants to report conservative views, this is a major opportunity. I think Marcus Brauchli meant that the Post should report EVEN MORE of what conservatives want reported, instead.

And that will be my contest entry.


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Goldman Sachs - Boeing 2012!

I don't see how we're ever going to get this cat back into the bag.

I see a 2012 election between Goldman Sachs-Boeing and United Health Care-Archer Daniels Midland. Guns and money versus health insurance and corporate farming.

May the greediest and most corrupt win (as usual)!

P.S. If the above wasn't entirely clear, I blame the hour and the headache. What I'm saying is with representation like this, why not just give up the pretense that our Senators and such as do anything besides serve the corporations that purchased their souls.

Anyways, here's TIME magazine, seeking to improve my day!


If you get your information from liberal sources, the crowd numbered about 70,000, many of them greedy racists. If you get your information from conservative sources, the crowd was hundreds of thousands strong, perhaps as many as a million, and the tenor was peaceful and patriotic.

Take it away, Glennzilla
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