House Rejects Trade Bill, Rebuffing Obama’s Dramatic Appeal
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"Noting deep ties between the country's top trade negotiator and Wall Street banks, ten groups representing millions of Americans are calling on the White House to make public all communications between U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and the massive financial institutions that stand to benefit from proposed trade deals."
More on lobbyists, http://www.ip-watch.org/2015/06/05/confidential-ustr-emails-...
".. Many of the industry representatives are themselves former USTR officials ... Jim DeLisi of Fanwood Chemical said he had just seen the text on rules of origin, and remarked, “Someone owes USTR a royalty payment. These are our rules. … This is a very pleasant surprise.”
Look at how hard it is to get a budget deal done in just our country, because everyone plays to the media and their most extreme constituents. Multiply that by every country looking at the deal. Too many parties second guessing the process kills any chance of a trade agreement good or bad.
Matt Drudge just posted the headline "PELOSI SAYS NO TO OBAMATRADE; TAKES BRAVE STAND FOR AMERICA" ... stuff's getting weird, man.
http://robertreich.org/post/84984296635
It really explains a lot, like why a lot of people feel so differently about Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders, or Jeb Bush vs. Rand Paul. I think we could say that Sanders and Paul are members of a new invisible party of populists, while Bush and Clinton are members of a pro-establishment party.
All presidential candidates except Paul and Sanders are firmly on the "establishment" side.
But I'm sure we'll also hear the other candidates give plenty of lip service to the populists this election cycle and turn around and forget about all that as soon as they're elected.
It's why Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich would occasionally team up on an issue - they're both in the bottom half of the graph.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/11/conservative-t...
That's about the only thing I can think of if Drudge is saying good things about Pelosi
The trade agreement would be public; only the negotiations that produced the agreement would remain confidential (so that countries can bargain and compromise more readily).
What President Obama is asking for right now is not approval of the trade deal, but the ability to make the deal. This power (trade promotion authority, or "fast track") is not new, but rather the renewal of a piece of legislation that dates back to 1974 and is standard for such trade agreements, having been in effect for most years since then.
Whether or not the final proposal is worth passing when it comes to vote, I would rather not encourage the use of such tactics, lest they backfire some day.
The focus upon "secrecy" also risks obscuring more pertinent criticism, especially when the final text is released (if the process isn't derailed first), in which case people might wonder what the fuss was about.
(sidenote: Going to start calling comments like this "In SuperPoesition").
Roll call on TPA: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2015/roll362.xml
The Democrats downvoted the TAA section, it will get a new vote next week and then it goes straight to the President (both have to pass at once).
A repeat of the House TAA vote has been scheduled for next Tuesday. What could cause a change in votes between today and Tue?
TARP lost 228-205 in a first vote. Then the stock market went down a bit and despite constituent phone calls being 300-1 against TARP, Congress added 448 pages (of mostly pork) to the bill and passed it anyway.
Dear citizen, you are facing ___ because ___ years ago, bill ___ was drafted by lobbyists ___, legitimized by playbook moves ___ and approved by ___ votes. Opposing votes were reversed after playbook moves ___, also used in ___ preceding bills.
I can only imagine what this quote would say if these people spoke in truth about what they really want.
Nationally a detrimental move with greater costs, but locally they might very well be better off without it.
The standard story trotted out about trade are the steel tariffs implemented by Bush 43. Highly beneficial for the small number of steel workers in the US, but an effective tax on every other consumer. Forgot the figures from way back when, but IIRC we could have paid every steel worker $2-300,000/yr for the rest of their lives and still come out far ahead as a country.
The story of trade they tell in undergrad econ is that the country as a whole will benefit while individuals / individual sectors will be hurt. The country as a whole will benefit so much that we can help those that are hurt and still come out ahead. Unfortunately, this is america, so we virtually never get around to helping those that are hurt, or when we do, it's not at all effective [1]. So trade, in practice, is a transfer from those less well-off to those more well-off.
Not to mention that Obama is a liar and the purpose of this treaty is to remove worker protections. See, eg, the position of labor in vietnam: they widely oppose the TPP. We're a rich country and we can afford to not use virtual slave labor to make our clothes.
[1] http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/no-help-displa...
* Workers currently paid on average $40k/year will lose their jobs. * They will get new jobs paying on average $60k/year * The businesses that pay them will get an extra $200k/year in profit.
I pulled those figures out of thin air, but you can play around with them and see that it's very easy for a trade agreement to be good for everyone while still being disproportionately better for the people who control the business.
What is most objectionable are the 2/3+ of the agreement that is about things like corporations suing states, extensions of excessive copyright and patent laws, etc.
The other problem is that the American worker took it in the shorts after NAFTA. A bunch of jobs suddenly moved to Mexico, and then to Asia.
The United States would have benefited more from automating those jobs rather than just having them leave. Had NAFTA not gone into effect, companies would have had to do more automation.
Tada!
While people can be in general better off, I still think the situation is unfair and it's reasonable to oppose the treaty just on the question of fairness, but that's a much more complicated conversation.
You can't possibly actually believe this.
Consider nafta: we traded relatively well-paying blue collar jobs for cheap manufactured goods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFTA's_effect_on_United_State...
Give them a few months, they'll have it in line.
Currently, European oil and gas corporations are pushing for a carbon tax. The reason is that they think they'd displace a lot of coal usage if both where priced accurately. In the US the coal lobby is currently stronger than the gas lobby (even with cracking).
Corporations compete, even in lobbying, sometimes this leads to surprisingly positive sounding outcome.
(I say "sounding" as its not clear if the worse-than-carbon-for-climate-change methane that gas production produces would be costed properly if gas companies are driving the "carbon" tax)