and front and center in my thought process is the 47 letter.


I trust this President to do what is right for me. No if, and or buts about that for me.

Got friends' kids who work with him. They say he's the "real deal."

I just have a problem with the banksters carrying the day all the time. Take Larry Summers:

It's not trickle down. When my friends who lost their jobs and houses and dreams are living better, I'll live better.

Divide and conquer that has worked so well for the GOP to the point of this attempted coup, that division has to end at the door step of Democrats.

Besides, couldn't the next President end any international agreement subject to international law, with a stroke of a pen??

Cotton, Cotton?

be subject to being reversed by another President unless a bill withdrawing from the agreement was passed.

Of course I believe an agreement of this far reaching impact should actually only be passed by treaty standards which would require 2/3 majority in the Senate.

An Executive agreement is not law at all. It is no one's fault that you insist on conflating all possible agreements as the same and suspect this is not even something you actually believe to be the case as in if it was a Republican ramroding say an agreement with Israel to hammer the Palistinians such distinctions would suddenly be much clearer to you and you'd be expecting the next Democrat to cancel it and would indeed acknowledge the shit never passed the legislature.

Trusting this President is irrelevant, our laws cannot discern between which individual you trust or not, they have the authority or not to the same degree be it George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

And my point was about the absurdity of Cotton's "analysis". Obama gets it, I am with Obama.

Disgraceful.

Michael Froman and the revolving door

By Felix Salmon December 11, 2009

Michael Froman is one of those behind-the-scenes technocrats who never quite makes it into full public view. But according to Matt Taibbi, he’s one of the most egregious examples — up there with Bob Rubin, literally — we’ve yet seen of the way the revolving door works between business and government generally, and between Citigroup and Treasury in particular.

I’m not sure how much of this information is new, but a lot of it was new to me, especially the bit about Froman “leading the search for the president’s new economic team” — while he was still pulling down a multi-million-dollar salary at Citigroup, no less. Apologies for quoting at length:

Leading the search for the president’s new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama’s biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters — chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).

Incredibly, Froman did not resign from the bank when he went to work for Obama: He remained in the employ of Citigroup for two more months, even as he helped appoint the very people who would shape the future of his own firm. And to help him pick Obama’s economic team, Froman brought in none other than Jamie Rubin, a former Clinton diplomat who happens to be Bob Rubin’s son. At the time, Jamie’s dad was still earning roughly $15 million a year working for Citigroup, which was in the midst of a collapse brought on in part because Rubin had pushed the bank to invest heavily in mortgage-backed CDOs and other risky instruments…

On November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail out Rubin’s messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash and guarantees… No Citi executives are replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. It’s the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin’s fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi. “If you had any doubts at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street,” former labor secretary Robert Reich declares when the bailout is announced, “your doubts should be laid to rest.”

It is bad enough that one of Bob Rubin’s former protégés from the Clinton years, the New York Fed chief Geithner, is intimately involved in the negotiations, which unsurprisingly leave the Federal Reserve massively exposed to future Citi losses. But the real stunner comes only hours after the bailout deal is struck, when the Obama transition team makes a cheerful announcement: Timothy Geithner is going to be Barack Obama’s Treasury secretary!

Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup — Michael Froman — before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering. In the annals of brazen political swindles, this one has to go in the all-time Fuck-the-Optics Hall of Fame.

Wall Street loved the Citi bailout and the Geithner nomination so much that the Dow immediately posted its biggest two-day jump since 1987, rising 11.8 percent. Citi shares jumped 58 percent in a single day, and JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley soared more than 20 percent, as Wall Street embraced the news that the government’s bailout generosity would not die with George W. Bush and Hank Paulson.

How much influence did Froman have over the appointment of Geithner as Treasury secretary? Geithner, who wanted to become Treasury secretary and who as New York Fed president was a central (if not the central) figure in orchestrating the massive Citigroup bailout just after the election, knew what Froman’s job was in the Obama transition team, and knew that Froman was a senior executive at Citigroup.

CONTINUED...

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/12/11/michael-froman-and-the-revolving-door/

but there it is.

When Obama was putting this cabal together I think if memory serves it was just before his inauguration or in any case just after. It was all in the works, I was dumbfounded at the time. Matt Taibbi was just about the only investigative journalist on the beat that was exposing the underbelly of this at the time. And thanks for bringing up Michael Froman's role in this.

History shows they were right about NAFTA.

Manufacturing (and overall) wages and employment increased after that under Clinton, as did family income while unemployment fell dramatically. Then everything went to pot under Bush.

If you think that the devastation under Bush would not have happened without NAFTA then you have more faith in his tax and other regressive economic and regulatory policies than I do. Trade with Mexico (we already had a 'free trade agreement' with Canada) is less than 3% of our economy. Our trade deficit with Mexico is less than 1/10 of 1% of it. Hardly the cause of widespread economic problems under Bush, though it is fun to blame poor foreign workers rather than our own politicians and their regressive laws.

The idea that he was a victim of Clinton's failed trade policy is pedaled by the far-right to shift the blame.

Plenty of progressive countries have more "NAFTA's" than we do and do fine with progressive tax, labor, safety net and regulatory policies.

NAFTA’s Impact on U.S. Workers

by Jeff Faux
Economic Policy Institute, December 9, 2013

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NATFA) was the door through which American workers were shoved into the neoliberal global labor market.

By establishing the principle that U.S. corporations could relocate production elsewhere and sell back into the United States, NAFTA undercut the bargaining power of American workers, which had driven the expansion of the middle class since the end of World War II. The result has been 20 years of stagnant wages and the upward redistribution of income, wealth and political power.

NAFTA affected U.S. workers in four principal ways. First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as production moved to Mexico. Most of these losses came in California, Texas, Michigan, and other states where manufacturing is concentrated. To be sure, there were some job gains along the border in service and retail sectors resulting from increased trucking activity, but these gains are small in relation to the loses, and are in lower paying occupations. The vast majority of workers who lost jobs from NAFTA suffered a permanent loss of income.

Second, NAFTA strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits. As soon as NAFTA became law, corporate managers began telling their workers that their companies intended to move to Mexico unless the workers lowered the cost of their labor. In the midst of collective bargaining negotiations with unions, some companies would even start loading machinery into trucks that they said were bound for Mexico. The same threats were used to fight union organizing efforts. The message was: “If you vote in a union, we will move south of the border.” With NAFTA, corporations also could more easily blackmail local governments into giving them tax reductions and other subsidies.

Third, the destructive effect of NAFTA on the Mexican agricultural and small business sectors dislocated several million Mexican workers and their families, and was a major cause in the dramatic increase in undocumented workers flowing into the U.S. labor market. This put further downward pressure on U.S. wages, especially in the already lower paying market for less skilled labor.

Fourth, and ultimately most important, NAFTA was the template for rules of the emerging global economy, in which the benefits would flow to capital and the costs to labor. The U.S. governing class—in alliance with the financial elites of its trading partners—applied NAFTA’s principles to the World Trade Organization, to the policies of the World Bank and IMF, and to the deal under which employers of China’s huge supply of low-wage workers were allowed access to U.S. markets in exchange for allowing American multinational corporations the right to invest there.

The NAFTA doctrine of socialism for capital and free markets for labor also drove U.S. policy in the Mexican peso crisis of 1994-95, the Asia financial crash of 1997 and the global financial meltdown of 2008. In each case, the U.S. government organized the rescue of the world’s bank and corporate investors, and let the workers fend for themselves.

CONTINUED...

http://www.epi.org/blog/naftas-impact-workers/

Which has resulted in lower standards of living for most Americans, but if you average in those at the top -- well, NAFTA's been great for business. How great? Glad I asked:



Wealth of world’s 400 richest billionaires rose $92 billion in 2014

Figure hits $4.1 trillion

By Andre Damon
wsws.org, 3 January 2015

The wealthiest 400 people in the world saw their combined net worth grow by $92 billion last year, hitting $4.1 trillion. The bonanza for the super-rich was underwritten by governments and central banks around the world, which fueled surging stock markets and record corporate profits by pumping hundreds of billions into the financial markets.

The figures were provided by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which was initiated in 2012 and tracks the wealth of the 400 richest people in the world.

The combined net worth of these 400 individuals is greater than the gross domestic product of Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world. The average net worth of each of the billionaires grew by $240 million, to $10.25 billion.

Since the 2008 financial crash, which triggered multi-trillion-dollar bank bailouts and the infusion into the financial system of trillions more in virtually free cash, the wealth of the super-rich has nearly doubled. The net worth of the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans increased from $1.27 trillion in 2009 to $2.29 trillion in 2014.

SNIP...

Investor Warren Buffett, the world’s second richest man, according to the Bloomberg list, saw his wealth grow to $74.5 billion, up by $13.7 billion, or more than 22 percent, in the past year. Buffett’s wealth has more than doubled since 2009.

Bloomberg noted that “dozens of operating businesses the 84-year-old chairman bought over the past five decades churned out record profit” over the past year. Buffett’s business model has been to buy traditional industries such as railroads and food producers, then ruthlessly cut costs, making billions in the process. Buffett’s businesses have profited handsomely from the ongoing fall in labor costs, which have been dropping year after year since 2008 as a result of falling wages and cuts in benefits for workers.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/03/bill-j03.html

Economically speaking: For most of the people I know, the wealthiest times in human history haven't been all that great.

oversimplification is not distortion and gives ammunition to those who do not blame Bush's regressive policies for our economic problems in the 21st century.

Trade is still a much, much smaller part of our economy than it is in really progressive countries. To blame our economic problems on an aspect of trade (a small part of our economy) ignores the fact that progressive countries do not view trade as bad for their workers.

When there are more people looking for jobs that are now overseas, companies who do look to hire tend to find more people who will work for less money.

That's good for the ownership class. Not good for the working class.

Ask why Apple, HP, Acer and a whole lot more make their laptops in China.

trade much more than we do AND have worker compensation that is higher than ours? Apparently progressive countries don't think that 'trade deals serve to lower worker compensation' or they wouldn't do them.

Of course, progressive countries have legal and popular support for unions, high/progressive taxes, strong safety nets and effective corporate regulation, all policies promoted FDR along with increased trade. Perhaps there is a lesson there for us.

"agreements".

By the way, Germany "progressive". Bullshit, ask the Greeks about how progressive the Krauts really are.

They should have never been allowed reunification, every time it is world domination time this trip it is economic rather than rolling tanks but the devastation is still there.

Fuck Germany.

"agreements" may be as useful as they are in modern progressive countries.

German policy towards Greece is indeed horrible but it does not diminish the historical success the German people have had empowering unions, providing an effective safety net, taxing the rich and regulating their corporations. If you wish to ignore that historical success because of a terrible policy towards Greece, go right ahead. That way we learn nothing from the experience of other countries and can go our own "exceptional" way.

How about Sweden? Do you want to "fuck" them and their success because of some current Swedish policy which you happen to disagree with?

protecting it is not reasonable.

IF we had the same labor protections as Scandinavians, THEN I might reconsider my stance on the TPP.

Since we do not have the strong labor protections of these countries it seems ridiculous to argue that free trade hasn't hurt Sweden and Germany, etc.

Workers in our country do not have anywhere near the same protections that workers in Sweden and Germany have.

Yeah, the Reagan deregulation did a lot more damage than NAFTA: https://bluntandcranky.wordpress.com/2015/02/27/economist-proves-reagans-deregulation-caused-todays-income-inequality/
But NAFTA was still a disaster. TPP doesn't look good at the moment either, due to the secrecy.

all by himself.

I consulted to the auto industry during the late 90's and early Oughts, and can testify that jobs flowed South across the border at an amazing rate during the Clinton years.

The industry called towns like Saltillo in Mexico "NAFTAvilles".

In general manufacturing jobs and wages increased under Clinton. Undoubtedly those increases did not occur equally in all areas.

area, and draw a valid conclusion.

Hint: the trend has NOT been upwards since NAFTA.

Cars last longer, etc. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but the pace of change ain't gonna slow.

Not 100% of the cause, but NAFTA was a factor.

He gave a talk to an assembly (of who knows who) at Hofstra University back in the early-mid 2000's which was broadcast on C-Span - Standing there at the dais boasting of his greatness and directly took credit for authoring NAFTA Stunned for a moment after hearing him bragging about, it suddenly occurred to me that it made perfect sense that he would have a direct hand in it.

Just curious if you think knowing the actual architects involved in something of such significance might give you pause with regard to the high opinion you seem to hold for it. ?

K&R!

Obama selects former Monsanto lobbyist to be his TPP chief agriculture negotiator

This cartoon, I believe, is 101 years old:



Analysis of what's new since then that should be of interest to Democrats and all who believe in democracy.



Thanks for grokking and doing, Omaha Steve. It means the world.

I happened to be in Ottawa, Canada while NAFTA was being
negotiated. While we were visiting their Office of Foreign Affairs, I leaned
over to a Canadian diplomat and asked him if he agreed with some of the
progressive critics of the deal who said it was nothing more than a
bill of rights for corporations. He said, "That is entirely correct."
NAFTA was a rotten deal for the citizens of all three countries.
Please stop peddling distortions.

We're still working out the bugs on those pesky environmental and labor side agreements* to NAFTA, and we'll have them just any day. You wait and see! Now, it's on to TPP, and trust us, it'll be a boon to the United States. And if not a boon, then surely a boondoggle, and that's two syllables more than a mere boon.

*The mere fact that environmental and labor considerations were worth nothing more than a someday, somewhere "side" agreement should be sufficient for anyone who doesn't stand to profit personally from "free" trade to oppose NAFTA.

WRITTEN BY RICK COHEN / 17 March, 2015 / Buzzfeed 15 March, 2015

Since the days of the North American Free Trade Agreement, negotiated under the administration of President George H.W. Bush and ratified under President Bill Clinton, free trade agreements and “fast track negotiating authority” have been controversial issues, generally sought by the White House regardless of the political party and increasingly opposed by labor unions and political “progressives.” What constitutes a “progressive,” and who can claim that word, is at the heart of a controversy reported upon by Kate Nocera and Evan McMorris-Santoro for Buzzfeed.

President Obama has been supporting a new trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership and seeking fast track negotiating authority, which would basically give the White House the ability to bring the completed agreement to Congress for an up or down vote, but with no ability to amend or filibuster. Nocera and McMorris-Santoro picked up on a Politico report about a “rift” among progressives regarding the TPP.

A new, hitherto unknown entity called the “Progressive Coalition for American Jobs” has emerged with the purpose, it appears, to “give the president trade promotion authority and establish the Trans-Pacific Partnership.” The Coalition’s dot.org website takes you to a “fact sheet“ that contends that President Obama’s negotiating stance on the TPP will “level…the playing field for American workers and protect…jobs here at home.” They contend that unlike previous trade agreements, this one, under President Obama’s firm hand, would get the signatory countries to respect collective bargaining rights for their workers, prohibit “exploitative child labor and forced labor” (does that mean that there are non-exploitative versions of this?), set minimum wage and maximum work hours standards (what those might be isn’t specified), and adhere to environmental protection standards.

“There’s something weird about the group, though,” the Buzzfeed writers reveal. “No one in the Washington, D.C., progressive community seems to have ever heard of them before.”

Nocera and McMorris-Santoro reveal that the people behind his coalition, not identified on the coalition’s website, are former members of the Obama campaign team, including Mitch Stewart, who had run Organizing For America, an organization that emerged from the Obama campaign, Lynda Tran, another former OFA person, and Jeremy Bird, the campaign’s former field director who with Stewart created the campaign consulting firm 270 Strategies. According to the Buzzfeed reporters, “Tran told BuzzFeed News the purpose of the group was to boost liberal voices who support the Obama trade agenda.”

CONTINUED...

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/policysocial-context/25789-progressive-coalition-for-fast-track-and-tpp-appears-from-nowhere.html

Not always popular around here.

trade agreement might be for our, and the world's good long-term.

While I read all the bad stuff that COULD happen from groups who need to attract interest to keep their organization viable, I wonder whether they really know. I mean they talk about how secret the negotiations are, but they seem to know all the bad things that will happen.

Is it possible that the truth is not as bad as some folks believe. Could it be more like this post on a website in Oregon:

"Trans-Pacific Partnership: Our company, Nutcase helmets, is one of thousands in Oregon that rely on overseas customers for growth. With support from local economic development agencies and improvements in technology, accessing global markets is becoming less burdensome for small companies. But we need modern trading rules to ensure a more level playing field. That's why we support President Barack Obama's call for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

"The agreement would raise environmental, labor and intellectual property protections in Asian countries like Vietnam and Malaysia, while also giving Oregon exporters lower tariffs and more consistent access to markets like Japan and Canada.

"Trade has been good for our company. It's fueled our growth and allowed us to hire more Oregonians who share a passion for our products. We hope that the members of our congressional delegation embrace the opportunity to deepen our relationship with Oregon's most important trading partners in the Pacific Rim."

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/03/trans-pacific_partnership_deba.html

________________



To repeat what I have posted before, I'm still convinced Obama will not endorse a final agreement that sells us down the river. I know there are plenty who thought he'd gut Social Security, push the pipeline, work against net neutrality, etc., but he hasn't.

And I believe Obama when he responded to Matt Yglesias a few weeks ago by saying: "Where Americans have a legitimate reason to be concerned is that in part this rise has taken place on the backs of an international system in which China wasn't carrying its own weight or following the rules of the road and we were, and in some cases we got the short end of the stick. This is part of the debate that we're having right now in terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal that, you know, we've been negotiating. There are a lot of people who look at the last 20 years and say, 'Why would we want another trade deal that hasn't been good for American workers? It allowed outsourcing of American companies locating jobs in low-wage China and then selling it back to Walmart. And, yes, we got cheaper sneakers, but we also lost all our jobs.'"

"And my argument is two-fold. Number one: precisely because that horse is out of the barn, the issue we're trying to deal with right now is, can we make for a higher bar on labor, on environmental standards, et cetera, in that region and write a set of rules where it's fairer, because right now it's not fair, and if you want to improve it, that means we need a new trading regime. We can't just rely on the old one because the old one isn't working for us."

"But the second reason it's important is because the countries we're negotiating with are the same countries that China is trying to negotiate with. And if we don't write the rules out there, China's going to write the rules. And the geopolitical implications of China writing the rules for trade or maritime law or any kind of commercial activity almost inevitably means that we will be cut out or we will be deeply disadvantaged. Our businesses will be disadvantaged, our workers will be disadvantaged. So when I hear, when I talk to labor organizations, I say, right now, we've been hugely disadvantaged. Why would we want to maintain the status quo? If we can organize a new trade deal in which a country like Vietnam for the first time recognizes labor rights and those are enforceable, that's a big deal. It doesn't mean that we're still not going to see wage differentials between us and them, but they're already selling here for the most part. And what we have the opportunity to do is to set long-term trends that keep us in the game in a place that we've got to be. . . . . . ."

http://www.vox.com/a/barack-obama-interview-vox-conversation/obama-foreign-policy-transcript

__________________


Truthfully, it appears to me we are undermining Obama's chance to get something that helps our country (and others) long-term. Whatever fears we conjure up on this issue, I am convinced doing nothing will not help us long-term.

I'm also reminded of something Paul Krugman said recently -- People I normally agree with, blame NAFTA for things caused by other factors. Even recent TPP critic Robert Reich, says he still believes NAFTA was good, but should have gone further with respect to human rights and the environment. I'll be darned, if that is not what Obama says he is trying to do.

But, we all know he's secretively trying to screw us, and big corporations are going to make a lot of money (as if mom-and-pop local businesses -- who often pay the lowest wages -- have the means to compete in international trade).

Personally, as long as human/worker rights, the environment, etc., are improved, I'm fine with these companies making big bucks -- but spreading the wealth to us and other countries, either through paying decent wages or taxing the hell out of them.

End of Rant