May 22, 2015: Response from the White House, Shroud of Secrecy, Deep Suspicions

On April 19^th I sent an email to the White House registering my displeasure with both the ‘leaked’ content of pending multilateral trade agreements and the processes by which the products of these negotiations are being presented to the Congress and the American people.  This afternoon I received a reply in which the administration is, predictably, defending its position.

Dear Joseph: Thank you for writing.  My Administration is pursuing a trade agenda that will place our workers, farmers, manufacturers, and businesses at the center of the 21st-century global economy—one that promotes both our interests and our values.  Trade done right is a critical part of my strategy to create jobs, spur growth, and strengthen the middle class. With 95 percent of the world’s customers living outside our borders, our ability to access new markets is vital to our economic well-being.  The export of American-made products supports millions of jobs here at home that pay up to 18 percent more than non-export-related jobs.  And, 98 percent of the more than 300,000 companies that export are small businesses.  However, even though more American businesses are exporting than ever before, most businesses still don’t export anything—leaving an incredible amount of opportunity that can be unlocked for our middle class.  To take advantage of that opportunity and level the playing field for our workers and businesses, we’re moving forward with the most ambitious trade agenda in American history, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In the Asia-Pacific region, the Trans-Pacific Partnership will knock down barriers that block American made goods and services while promoting high standards in the fastest-growing region in the world, including the strongest enforceable labor and environmental provisions of any trade agreement. To protect our workers, the trade agreement will require countries to set a minimum wage, protect the freedom to form unions and collectively bargain, and work to end child and forced labor.  To preserve the environment, it will require countries to take tangible steps to curb wildlife trafficking, crack down on illegal logging, and prevent overfishing.  That’s why conservation organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy agree that the enforceable provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership are a critical step forward for environmental protection. Some prior trade agreements, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, have not lived up to their promise.  The Trans-Pacific Partnership addresses these problems through strong enforcement mechanisms, including for the labor and environmental standards.  This means that if our trading partners, including Canada and Mexico, aren’t playing by the rules, we can hold them accountable.  The agreement also includes new rules that make sure our businesses and property owners are protected from having property taken by foreign countries, while making sure that foreign corporations can’t undermine or get around our own laws and regulations.  Because we know that unfair currency practices by some governments hurt our workers, businesses, and farmers, we are working with Congress on new tools and standards that will make it easier for us to protect American workers and firms from unfair competition. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is also America’s opportunity to lead in the Asia-Pacific.  The alternative to this agreement is to let other powers, like China, carve up the region and drive down standards through bad trade agreements.  We cannot stay on the sidelines while China and other countries write the rules of the road.  We have to seize this opportunity to help American workers and businesses compete on a level playing field in the world’s largest markets in the decades to come. To help us secure the benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, we are working with Congress to enact Trade Promotion Authority, which allows Congress to put forward its priorities for negotiating trade agreements.  The new version of Trade Promotion Authority Congress is considering guarantees that future trade agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, will have progressive, pro-worker, and pro-environment standards.  This gives us the leverage to bring home the best possible agreements for the American people. The new Trade Promotion Authority mandates unprecedented transparency by requiring that any trade agreement be published online for 60 days before I sign it, and Congress will then have months to review, debate, and hold hearings on the details of the agreement before they vote on it.  And while we have not yet finalized the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the current agreement is available for all members of Congress to read and review, and we have conducted over 1700 regular briefings with members of Congress on the status of the negotiations and have provided full similar briefings for labor groups, environmental groups, and other interested parties. With a highly educated workforce, an entrepreneurial culture, strong rule of law, and abundant sources of affordable, clean energy, the United States has what’s required to be the world’s manufacturing hub.  My Administration is working every day to help businesses locate, grow, and hire here so that our businesses ship goods all over the world stamped with "Made in the U.S.A." The good news is that this is already beginning to happen—over the last few years, our manufacturers have been steadily creating jobs in the U.S. for the first time since the 1990s.  Good trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership will continue that trend and ensure that jobs are not outsourced, but rather are created here at home.  We will continue to push forward on these efforts because we know that when the playing field is level, American workers and businesses don’t just compete, they win. Again, I appreciate your message.  I am confident we can support job growth at home and boost exports while promoting our values and raising standards around the globe. Sincerely, Barack Obama

While the prospects of trade agreements that benefit all parties are indeed a noble goal worthy of the support of all, such outcomes are difficult to achieve.  In principle there is nothing wrong with the goals or efforts to achieve these goals.  But the president, I fear, is being a bit disingenuous when he maintains that ‘fast track’ authority mandates ‘unprecedented transparency’, for the process has been anything but transparent.  Additionally citing the ‘1700 briefings’ of members of congress does not include the fact that members are brought into a room, alone, and given not only time limits on when they can read, but are presented with only select documentations.  For instance, documents concerning the shifting positions of other parties to the agreements are not part of the portfolio.  Additionally, they are not allowed to bring staff, take notes, nor speak with the press concerning the content of the agreements.  Several Senators, including Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have loudly complained about the process, the secrecy and the difficulty in getting timely information that envelope this process.  The shroud of secrecy that has descended upon these proceedings only raises the suspicion that something untoward is in the works. 

What we have ‘learned’ about the content of these agreements have come through ‘leaks’ to select spokesman and from what critics have been able to glean from the proceedings.  It still begs the question: if these agreements are such a boon to America, and such a good deal for the manufacturing sector and the middle class, why then have the details not been forthcoming?  Why has such a shroud of secrecy been cast over the proceedings?  Lastly, why is it necessary to ‘fast-track’ these agreements?  The history, of which this administration is most assuredly aware, is that these kinds of agreements have proven bitter pills for Americans to swallow.  If the current agreements under discussion do in fact address the lingering rancor that previous trade agreements have engendered why then isn’t this administration releasing the draft agreements and speaking openly and honestly with the American people about the benefits contained therein?  Instead the Administration maintains a studied silence.

Perhaps this explains why it has taken nearly six weeks to send a pro forma response to a concerned citizen who harbors deep suspicions that no good will come of this.   I hope I am wrong; but I fear I am not.

December 23, 2010: The Gathering Storm, Go It Alone, Relative Assurance

There were two problems concerning the 2008 election cycle. The first is that unlike 1932 the impending economic collapse was, through swift action, averted. Hardship, when it came, was much more divisive, falling upon the working poor and only part of the middle class. The upper classes suffered only momentary reversals soon ameliorated by the application of the salve of Federal largesse. So too with the upper middle class, which was barely inconvenienced. But the middle class and lower middle class continued to suffer the pummeling, as had the working poor, of the last four decades. The result was that unlike 1932, the new Administration came to power with not nearly the congressional majorities and, in the Senate, a majority hanging on the uncertain votes of Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and Blanche Lincoln. The second was that the political process produced in both candidates for the presidency men who, for vastly different reasons, did not possess the political capital with which to deal with these problems.

Inauguration day proved to be a bright and sunny gala event, but there were ominous signs about for anyone with eyes to see. At the congressional lunch that afternoon, Senators Kennedy and Byrd were taken from the gathering, both suffering from failing health, and about the new president stood not the reincarnation of the New Dealers but the very architects of this miserable crisis.

In 1999 after 13 presidential vetoes, the Clinton Administration, at the urging of Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and his underling Tim Geithner, signed off on a Republican backed repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Passed during the Depression the Glass-Steagall Act prohibited Banks and lending institutions from investing in the stock market. The purpose of the act was to prevent a crash on Wall Street from threatening the financial institutions of this country. For sixty years the United States had experienced the usual ups and downs of the business cycle, had its stock market bubbles, its boom times and its financial hardships. But for sixty years we had no financial crisis; economic downturns and recessions to be sure, but we had no financial crises portending another Great Depression.

All that began to change as the “Boomers” came to adulthood and began the long and determined process of getting their hands about the throat of the economic goose that lays the golden egg; that is the systematic dismantling of the New Deal. Among the first casualties, during the Nixon years, was the removal of the requirement that one must hold stock for a given period of time—45 days as I remember it—under severe penalty. This provision worked to take the ‘volatility’ out of the market and reduce speculation and, by extension, speculative bubbles. By the time the Clintons came to power the old New Deal safeguards had been largely dismantled in favor of the Republican Market fetish with only Glass-Steagall remaining as the main bulwark of protections. Having learned nothing from the Savings and Loan Crises and scandal in the wake of the Reagan years, the new ‘centrist’ Democrats completed the coup de grace by finally ridding Wall Street of the last impediment to grand larceny. And so with the banks and the insurance and the financial houses merging, with the mixing of stocks with savings, banking and real estate, and the movement of investment capital into the ever more esoteric instruments of derivatives, credit-default swaps, and hedge funds, the economic order became ever more exploitive; and, with an ever greater portion of the wealth landing in ever fewer hands, unstable. And so, by the time the Clintonites had handed power over to ‘Ol Two-Cows’, the conditions were ripe for the fleecing of the economy on a truly grand scale; and the creation, by way of the so-called “day traders” of economic instability the likes we haven’t seen since Herbert Hoover.

It took nearly 8 years for the ‘casino days’ to give way to another great economic calamity, but the Federal Reserve had learned enough from past experience, and the Republican minority had enough dog in the fight to move with some alacrity to meet the emerging crisis, at least while it was on their watch. Not so after power was handed back to the custodians of sound public policy. As inauguration day approached Republican support for sound economic policy--even the bail-out of their Wall Street benefactors—evaporated in the name of the true god of Republicanism: unlimited political expediency. It became clear, as he assumed the reins of power, that Obama would have to go it alone.
One forgets that on that cold March morning in 1933 when FDR stood on the capitol steps and declared that “we have nothing to fear, but fear itself” that not only had the crisis developed from a Wall Street collapse into a full-fledged world-wide Depression, and that after over three long years of suffering and an unemployment rate estimated at 25%, the voters had returned an electoral majority of three quarters of the House and two-thirds of the Senate. We also forget that FDR had been a national public figure for over a decade. History records in 1920 the sweeping victory of the son of Blooming Grove as Harding and Coolidge went about the business of repudiating Wilson’s “New Freedom” by putting the scions of Wall Street back in the saddle. What we don’t remember is that the Democratic candidate for Vice President was none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Subsequent to the electoral defeat the nation watched his life threatening battle with polio and his long recuperation, his rise to the governorship of New York, and his emergence as the leading contender for the 1932 presidential nomination. When he stood on the capital steps, the country had a general understanding of the man in which they had placed so much hope.

Likewise with Eisenhower who, as wartime commander, had given the nation long exposure to his leadership and its capabilities, emerging as a national figure in whom one could place great trust. The same could have been said about Lyndon Johnson who had served a long time in the congress and had emerged as a national political figure as Senate Majority Leader. Nixon, although less trustworthy, had established formidable foreign policy credentials and, given the realities of the Cold War, went a long way toward establishing political confidence. Likewise Gerry Ford who had been on the national political stage for over a decade as House Minority Leader before becoming, as a product of the Watergate Scandal, the consensus candidate to replace Nixon.

The great undoing began in 1968. The “Boomers” coming of age coincided with that tragic year of violence and assassination. Beginning with the disillusion brought by the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the protests and riots, the remnants of the disillusioned and the ‘New Left’ converged upon the Democratic National Convention creating a backlash so violent that the party determined to reform itself root and branch. Creating the McGovern Committee, George McGovern would transform the party rules governing the Presidential nominating process and in so doing vaulting himself, by 1972, to the party’s nomination. The process, when completed, would transform the Democratic Party opening it to women and minorities, and vastly increasing the number of primaries, taking the party’s nomination from the hands of a few political ‘king-makers’ like Chicago’s Richard J. Daley and placing it in the hands of ‘the people’. There were other, unintended, consequences. First by making the nomination a long primary battle. in which voter turn out is consistently low compared to the general election. the reforms greatly increased the power of single-issue groups. Secondly, by eliminating the ‘winner-take-all” nature of the primary results in each state in favor of proportional allocation of convention delegates, the reforms greatly increased the length of the campaign. Lastly the reforms, until the moneyed interests created new levers of control, created the opportunity for absolute unknowns to seize the nomination.

As early as 1972 the consequences of the party’s reforms became evident. Nominating a relative unknown Senator from South Dakota the party presented a convention that gave voice to every single issue group within the Democratic coalition. The result as McGovern himself was to ruefully observe years later, was that “I opened the doors and three million people ran out”. There were other consequences. Not only did the middle class forsake a party that was increasingly organizing itself around single-issue social issues instead of broad-based bread and butter issues, but placing the nomination in honorable but uncertain hands did nothing to instill confidence. The result was another convention circus and a Nixon Landslide.

The Democrats were handed the election, in spite of their reforms, by the criminal ineptitude that characterized the dark side of the Nixon personality. What emerged was a newly elected president who found himself, on inauguration day, at polar opposites of where FDR had stood a generation before: as an absolute unknown using the speech to begin the process of defining himself before the American people.

Who is this man? That is the lingering question every voter faces when making the lonely decision in the voting booth. It’s always a ‘pig-in-a-poke’ but only relatively so. There are times when the process gives us some assurances. But, increasingly, in recent years not. With Reagan we could be assured that we would be heading in the wrong direction. With Bush less so. But with the emergence of Clinton and Obama we have men achieve the presidency with no record of fighting and, on occasion, winning on behalf of the coalition that is the party. The result is that we invest our hopes and aspirations into a nearly absolute unknown. The new President emerges with support a mile long but an inch deep.

Let me put it another way. Of the great mischief that the “Boomers” have visited upon the republic nothing, except perhaps their fooling with the tax code, nearly compares with the rage for term limits. The great winners of term limits are the lobbyists, special interests, and the executive. Previously a newly elected member of the house or senate would go about spending his first years doing constituent services, voting to support broad-based economic and social programs, and bringing home the ‘bacon’ to his or her district. Over time, although a constituent would find fault with a vote here or there, the citizens would learn to trust his judgment. This would give a member of the legislature, and should that person become governor, the trust needed to have the political capital necessary to govern. So too in national politics. By watching Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan emerge to national prominence the public could register approval or disapproval with relative assurance. The supporters of these men when, as when Reagan moved to raise taxes, could blame it on subalterns and demand “let Reagan be Reagan” knowing his heart if not his head. Not so with Carter, the Bushes, Clinton and now Obama.

December 17, 2010: The No-Nothing Party, Icon of Idiocy, Chump Change

In the British sitcom “Are You Being Served?” Mrs. Slocum would, when confronted with the pusillanimous machinations of management cry: “weak as water, I’m telling you they’re weak as water”. Last night, as the Democrats put the finishing touches on their era of control, the Congress passed and sent to the President extension of the Bush-Era tax cuts making complete the capitulation of hope to the forces of greed.

So ends the Nancy Pelosi era as House Speaker. For her part she has done a marvelous job of advancing the interests of the middle class for the well being of the country. The problem has been the United States Senate which, through the unprecedented use of the filibuster, has proven itself the most dysfunctional institution in America. The House has passed a record number of landmark bills. But over 400 such acts sit languishing in the Senate which, because of abuse of arcane rules, needs 60 votes to act. The result is that the Rescumlicans have been able to engage in a “scorched earth” policy of opposing nearly every act short of capitulation by this White House, backing away from even their own proposals--like low interest loans to small businesses, pay-as-you-go congressional spending restraints, and creation of a bipartisan deficit reduction panel--once the White House has signed on.

There were early signs of trouble before the newly elected President was even sworn into office. Confronting an international economic collapse, he had signed on to the Bush era TARP legislation to bail out the banking system and the troubled insurance giant AIG to the tune of nearly 700 billion dollars. Already, during the waning days of ‘Ol Two-Cows, there were rumblings from the idiot wrong ready to let the International House of Cards collapse on their own watch. But, knowing that the Democrats would do the responsible thing, they were given the luxury of voting no despite the tearful pleas on House Minority Leader John Boner. Responsibility and sound public policy are anathema to these fools. As the upcoming inauguration approached and the incoming administration was scurrying for support for additional legislation to fund the government, stabilize the markets, and stimulate the economy--then hemorrhaging nearly 700,000 jobs a month--the new administration could muster only three Rescumlican votes in the Senate and none in the House. It was a pattern that was to repeat itself, with very rare exceptions, for the first two years of the Obama Administration.

De ja vu. Alas, we have been here before. I’ve seen that movie too. Re-reading Bob Woodward’s The Agenda, about the opening days of the Clinton Administration I was reminded once again of the behavior of the idiot wrong when the public has had the temerity of denying them their “god-given” right to rule. The remnants of the Clinton Administration that Obama had gathered about him could and did tell him that you cannot reason with fools, but to no avail. The Rescumlicans, in their ceaseless efforts to smear the historical record, are forever telling us that it was the Rescumlican Congress under the leadership of “Baby Huey” Gingrich that brought about balanced budgets and budget surpluses. The problem with that argument, as always, is the historical record keeps getting in the way. As Woodward recalls, and as the congressional record records, Clinton made the first moves at deficit reduction by instituting massive spending cuts in 1993 to the tune of around 180 billion dollars. He also completed a long series of tax increases, begun under Reagan and continued by Bush the Elder to address the failure of the Reagan Era tax cuts to reduce deficits, by raising the marginal rates on the richest Americans to 39%. The reason the Clinton Administration pursued this policy was that they thought they could lower interest rates and in so doing Americans could refinance homes and restructure debt. With lower interest rates Americans would then have more money to spend creating, it was hoped, a bigger stimulus to the economy than would happen through deficit spending. This adoption of conservative monetary orthodoxy made sense when interest rates, then at near record levels, were throttling the economy. Nevertheless this singular feat of political courage in the name of sound fiscal policy was accomplished with not a single Rescumlican vote in either the House or Senate. In fact Al Gore, then Vice President of the United States, had to cast an historical tie-breaking vote in the senate to pass the bill 51-50. This was two years before “Baby Huey’s” infamous ‘contract on America’ and the Rescumlican control of the Congress. Nevertheless the right-wing echo chamber has been convincingly making the argument that it was the Rescumlican ‘brake’ on the excesses of the ‘tax-and-spend’ liberals that created the surpluses and the prosperity. The result is that the No-Nothing party has been able to engage in a ‘scorched-earth’ policy of voting against virtually every Democratic attempt to right the ship of state and, by delaying economic recovery, reap the political harvest.

The situation was further inflamed by Rusty rush to judgment Limbaugh who announced shortly after the inauguration that he hoped for the failure of the Obama administration saying that if Obama wins, America will lose. This despite the awful beating the country had taken at the hands of the conservatives. Nevertheless there followed a brief comedy of errors in which several leading Rescumlicans, Governor Rick Perry of Texas, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Rescumlican national chairman Michael Steele among others took umbrage with the fatuous blowhard, over one or another of his daily pronouncements, only to quickly call into his program and genuflect before this “icon of idiocy”. It became quickly understood that to stray from the ‘party line’ would, by incurring the wrath of those that nearly monopolize the public airways and the cable talk shows, mean the humiliation of publicly bowing and scraping before the tribunes of greed. What followed, after an all-too-brief period, was the public spectacle of those responsible for governance quickly falling to their knees to snort every emanation from the backsides of this corpulent, drug-addled, intolerant fool.

One of the last things the senile old actor did before leaving office was repeal the so-called ‘fairness doctrine’ as it pertained to broadcast media. Leaping into the breech Limbaugh has, through outrageous and inflammatory commentary, spawned a virtual cottage industry of right-wing howlers and hate mongers nearly 450 of which now dominate talk radio and have, in recent years, invaded our homes through the open sewer that is becoming cable television. The result is that the well of public discourse has been poisoned as charges real or imagined--and more imagined than real--fill the public airwaves. The recent flap over Obama spending 200 million dollars a day on a trip to India, involving a tenth of the U.S. Naval fleet is a case in point. Any damn fool knows that not since the middle of the last century has the President traveled by boat. Nevertheless the wholly fatuous charge was picked up from some obscure Indian publication and. never fact-checked, made it’s way by the usual channels unto Fox Noise and talk radio as god’s own truth. Similarly the Shirley Sharrod case in which an employee of the Agricultural Department was brutally savaged by Glenn Beck and Fox Noise forcing her resignation only to find on examination that her remarks were taken grossly out of context and what she actually said was precisely the opposite of what was implied by the reporting. These episodes, and there are far too many to be repeated here, demonstrate the ability of the idiot wrong to not only lift things out of context but to create issues out of whole cloth and present them as fact following Joseph Goebbels practice of repeating the lie often enough until it is believed.

Nowhere was this dictum demonstrated to more telling effect than the Rescumlican so-called ‘grass-roots’ but in actuality ‘astro-turf’ campaign to derail health reform. Nakedly acting in the interests of the insurance cartel, Dick Armey--a veteran of misrepresentations on this issue dating back to his smears of the Clinton era health care reform effort--and other Rescumlican operatives organized assaults on ‘town-hall’ meetings by inflaming the public over the alleged creation of “death panels”. This is, of course, fatuous nonsense. There was no basis to the charge. In fact rationing of health care services, which has often led to people being denied care in life threatening or life ending situations, already exists in the form of insurance company policies and practices. Care is denied for pre-existing conditions. Caps were installed on some care. Nevertheless this cry was picked up by the howlers on the wrong and repeated by their leadership finding expression in that mindless half-governor from Alaska and, famously, in Senator Charles Grassley’s remark about the government “pulling the plug on grandma”. What ensued, through these antics, was a year-long food fight involving the backing and filling of one administration position after another until, in the end, we were left with a perfectly Rescumlican health care plan, one that would have made Mitt Romney, in previous incarnations, proud. First to be sacrificed before ‘negotiations’ even began was the single-payer option. In effect, it would be Medicare for everyone. This has been part of the basic Democratic Creed since Truman and what was generally understood to be what Health Care meant. The retreating administration then drew a line in the sand saying that any bill would have to include a ‘robust’ public option. Facing further opposition and a storm of protests from shills of the cartel, the ‘public option’ too was cast aside. Without a single “No-Nothing” vote Health Care now became health care insurance reform or as Wendell Potter, former industry spokesman turned critic, called it the “Health Insurance Guaranteed Profit Act.”

Gone are the days of joy and hope. Gone are the visions of massive ‘shovel-ready’ projects designed to put America back to work while rebuilding its decaying infrastructure. Gone are visions of new technologies like solar, high speed internet and rapid rail. Gone are visions of “spreading the wealth around a little” as Obama so succinctly put it to ‘Joe the Plumber’. Once again a miserable bargain has been struck: a paltry extension of unemployment benefits in exchange for massive tax breaks for the wealthy including reductions in the estate tax. Once again we are left gnawing the bones thrown us by Boner and the economic royalists. “Change we can believe in” has become chump change rattling our otherwise empty pockets.