|
It's Time to End Orwellian Surveillance of Every American |
 |
|
Friday, 08 May 2015 13:15 |
|
Sanders writes: "I voted against the Patriot Act every time, and it still needs major reform."
U.S. senator Bernie Sanders speaks at a town hall meeting at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 26 office, May 5, 2015, in Lanham, Maryland. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
It's Time to End Orwellian Surveillance of Every American
By Bernie Sanders, TIME
08 May 15
I voted against the Patriot Act every time, and it still needs major reform.
 welcome a federal appeals court ruling that the National Security Agency does not have the legal authority to collect and store data on all U.S. telephone calls. Now Congress should rewrite the expiring eavesdropping provision in the so-called USA Patriot Act and include strong new limits to protect the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.
Let me be clear: We must do everything we can to protect our country from the serious potential of another terrorist attack. We can and must do so, however, in a way that also protects the constitutional rights of the American people and maintains our free society.
Do we really want to live in a country where the NSA gathers data on virtually every single phone call in the United States—including as many as 5 billion cellphone records per day? I don’t. Do we really want our government to collect our emails, see our text messages, know everyone’s Internet browsing history, monitor bank and credit card transactions, keep tabs on people’s social networks? I don’t.
Unfortunately, this sort of Orwellian surveillance, conducted under provisions of the Patriot Act, invades the privacy of millions of law-abiding Americans.
The surveillance law originally was passed by Congress in 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I voted against it. I voted against reauthorizing the law in 2005 when I was still in the House and voted “no” again in 2011 in the Senate when Congress passed the most-recent four-year extension of the law. I believed then and am even more convinced today that the law gave the government far too much power to spy on Americans and that it provided too little oversight or disclosure.
The law expires at the end of this month, and Congress already has begun to debate how to revise and improve the law. We should give intelligence and law enforcement authorities the strong tools they need to investigate suspected terrorists, but the law also must contain strong safeguards to protect our civil liberties. Under legislation I have proposed, intelligence and law enforcement authorities would be required to establish a reasonable suspicion, based on specific information, in order to secure court approval to monitor business records related to a specific terrorism suspect. In renewing the surveillance law, Congress also should reassert its proper role overseeing how intelligence agencies use, or abuse, the law that our intelligence community has operated in a way that even they knew the American public and Congress would not approve.
We should strike a balance that weighs the need to be vigilant and aggressive in protecting the American people from the very real danger of terrorist attacks without undermining the constitutional rights that make us a free country.
 |
|
FOCUS | Can a Black Man Win the GOP Nomination? |
|
|
Friday, 08 May 2015 11:09 |
|
Galindez writes: "Let's be honest, the Tea Party was the result of a black man being elected president of the United States."
Ben Carson. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Can a Black Man Win the GOP Nomination?
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
08 May 15
 n Monday, two new candidates joined the Republican field. I’m going to say it – neither one of them has a chance to win the Republican nomination, because the party is still full of racists and bigots. Let’s be honest, the Tea Party was the result of a black man being elected president of the United States.
I can hear some of you saying, “What about Ben Carson? He is supported by the Tea Party.” Sure he is: it’s good politics, a good cover for the racism in the party. Ben Carson is a trendy pick for conservatives. It even makes it look like the party has left its racism behind. I’m not buying it. I don’t think many of Carson’s public supporters will vote for him in the end. And yes, I don’t believe the GOP is ready to nominate a black man for president. Dr. Carson declared his intention to seek the Republican Party nomination on Monday in the city of his birth, Detroit.
The second candidate to enter the race Monday was Carly Fiorina. While there is still a lot of sexism in the party, I do believe the Republicans could nominate a woman. Carly Fiorina is not that woman, though. I haven’t heard a strong case for why she would make a good president. She was forced out of her CEO position at Hewlett Packard, and was trounced in her campaign for the Senate in California. I guess one could argue that George W. Bush was worse at running a business, but he at least got elected governor of Texas before running for president. Besides, he really lost anyway.
Neither Fiorina nor Carson has ever been elected to anything. I guess one could argue that Ike never held elected office, but I don’t think Carson or Fiorina ever served as the equivalent to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe. So yes, you can argue that both candidates are long shots because of their lack of experience. Most of the media will focus on their experience and ignore the racism and sexism that is still rampant in the party.
You’re right, I did say that a woman could win the party’s nomination, but it is still harder than it would be for a man with the same qualifications.
I am not saying that all Republicans are racist or sexist, but as a party they continue to support racist and sexist policies and do a poor job of controlling the overtly racist and sexist members of their party.
While the history of racism in both parties goes much further back, it was the GOP’s Southern strategy during the days of Nixon that embraced using race to win elections. We must face the fact that racism still is more prevalent in the South. Republican policy is tailored toward reassuring rednecks that their way of life will be protected. It is not just African Americans who are the boogeymen in the Republican game – other minorities and gay, lesbian, and transgendered people are portrayed as the enemy, too. It’s done with code words that are grouped into the Republican’s “values” agenda. They can say traditional values or family values or any other kind of values. What they are really saying is we won’t let “them” change our way of life.
Times change, lifestyles change, progressives evolve and accept people with alternative lifestyles, but conservatives resist change. How else could the Republican Party do so well with working class white men who vote against their economic interests when they vote for candidates who oppose higher wages, access to quality healthcare, preservation of the safety net for seniors and other programs to help the middle class and the poor? They use fear: fear of immigrants, gays, and black people to keep them in the Republican party.
As a party, they do everything can to make it harder for minorities and the poor to vote. Voter ID laws are a modern day poll tax. When most people lose their wallets it takes them very little time to replace their identification. When a poor person loses his ID it can be much harder. If you have been homeless or moving around a lot, there is a good chance you don’t have a copy of your birth certificate, which you will need to get a replacement ID. Good luck getting a copy of your birth certificate if you don’t have ID. It’s a vicious circle, and costly for someone who is poor. So Voter ID laws have a greater impact on people Republicans don’t want to vote. Inner city, predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods are where poverty is most prevalent, so the motivation behind Voter ID laws is racist.
Even Republicans who are not racist or bigoted have failed to condemn those in their party who clearly are. I’m not going to judge whether Rand Paul is racist or not, but he had to fire two staffers, while putting the blame on the media and defending the fired staffers to the end, saying they were not racist. One of them would don a mask made with a Confederate flag and go on the radio calling himself the “Southern avenger.” He regularly made racist remarks, including saying that Abraham Lincoln’s assassin had his heart in the right place. Paul’s inability to see that his staffer was a racist is troubling, but also not surprising.
Racists and bigots are part of the GOP base. When Rand Paul blamed the “liberal media” for the firing, he sent a message to would-be supporters who were racist. Without condoning the staffers’ statements, he sent a signal that he understands their views and that they have nothing to fear from him.
Remember the racist “birther” movement? Even after most Republican elected officials agreed that the president was born in Hawaii, those who knew that they needed the “birther’s” support to get elected not only didn’t distance themselves from the movement but added fuel to the fire. We all know about Donald Trump, but Mike Huckabee showed his racism as well. “If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather,” Huckabee said in a radio interview in 2011. Huckabee’s staff later said he misspoke and that he meant to say Indonesia but the Mau Mau Revolution was in Kenya. Huckabee should have condemned the interviewer who said: “How come we don’t have a health record, we don’t have a college record, we don’t have a birth certificate – why, Mr. Obama, did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to present a birth certificate?” We had a birth certificate, and Mike Huckabee knew it, but failed set the record straight so he could keep favor with the racist “birthers.”
In conclusion, there are good people who are Republicans, but simple electoral math says that without rednecks the Republicans can’t win most elections. Even the most enlightened Republican candidate has to be careful to not alienate the “bubba” vote or he will lose the election. For those reasons, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are only window dressing in this election. Rank and file Republicans will point to them as evidence that the party has moved beyond its hateful past. Some may even vote for them, especially Republican women (for Fiorina). But in the end this race will be between the old money, which is behind Jeb Bush, the Koch money, behind Scott Walker, and some grudge money that opposes the Bush machine. Marco Rubio has one of those billionaires in his corner. But Rubio is a Latino, and so is Ted Cruz. Aren’t they boogeymen too? No, they are Cuban – the right kind of Latino. More on that in a future article.
Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
|
|
|
FOCUS | Why Nike Is the Problem, Not the Solution |
|
|
Friday, 08 May 2015 10:20 |
|
Reich writes: "Tomorrow President Obama will be giving a speech promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Paradoxically, he's chosen to give it at Nike headquarters in Oregon."
Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
Why Nike Is the Problem, Not the Solution
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
08 May 15
 omorrow President Obama will be giving a speech promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Paradoxically, he’s chosen to give it at Nike headquarters in Oregon.
Nike isn’t the solution to the problem of stagnant wages in America. Nike is the problem.
It’s true that over the past two years Nike has added 2,000 good-paying professional jobs at its Oregon headquarters, fulfilling the requirements of a controversial tax break it wrangled from the state legislature. That’s good for Nike’s new design, research and marketing employees.
But Nike’s U.S. workers make only a tiny percent of Nike’s products.
In fact, Americans made only 1 percent of the products that generated Nike’s $27.8 billion revenue last year. And Nike is moving ever more of its production abroad. Last year, a third of Nike’s remaining 13,922 American production workers were laid off.
Most of Nike’s products are made by 990,000 workers in low-wage countries whose abysmal working conditions have made Nike a symbol of global sweatshop labor.
As wages have risen in China, Nike has switched most of its production to Vietnam where wages are less than 60 cents are hour. Almost 340,000 workers cut and assemble Nike products there.
In other words, Nike is a global corporation with no particular loyalty or connection to the United States. Its loyalty is to its global shareholders.
I’m not faulting Nike. Nike is only playing by the rules.
I’m faulting the rules.
Trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership protect corporate investors but lead to even more off-shoring of American jobs.
They make it safer for firms to relocate abroad – the Cato Institute describes such investor protections as “lowering the risk premium” on offshoring – thereby reducing corporate incentives to keep jobs in America and upgrade the skills of Americans.
If the Trans Pacific Partnership goes into effect American wages will be dragged down by further losses of manufacturing jobs.
All workers with similar skill levels face downward wage pressure when Americans displaced from better-paying manufacturing jobs join the glut of workers competing for non-offshorable jobs.
Jobs being lost to imports pay Americans higher wages than the jobs left behind. Government data show wages in import-competing industries (e.g. manufacturing jobs) beat those in exporting industries overall.
We can’t educate our way out of this. American workers with a four-year college degree are also highly vulnerable to job offshoring, according to a study by Princeton economist Alan Blinder.
He found that the one out of every four American jobs in finance, information technology and professional services could be offshored in the foreseeable future.
Bottom line: we need new rules for the global economy that allow Americans to win.
Instead, the Trans Pacific Partnership – which includes 12 nations, including Vietnam, but would be open for every nation to join – would lock us into an expanded version of the very policies that have failed most American for the past twenty years.
The White House says the TPP includes strong labor and environmental standards. But these are the same standards included in George W. Bush’s last agreements.
No doubt Nike is supporting the TPP. The corporations would get a tax cut on its Vietnamese and Malaysian-made goods. But even with the tariffs in place, Nike’s current expense for those $100-plus shoes is less than $10 per pair. So don’t expect that tax cut to result in cheaper prices for American consumers.
Needless to say, the TPP wouldn’t require Nike to pay its Vietnamese workers more. Nikes’ workers are not paid enough to buy the shoes they make much less buy U.S. exported goods.
Nike may be the perfect example of life under TPP, but that is not a future many Americans would choose.
|
|
I Agree With Hillary Clinton |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=34760"><span class="small">Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren's Blog</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 08 May 2015 08:58 |
|
Warren writes: "I have serious concerns about ISDS - a policy in the new TPP trade agreement that would let foreign companies challenge American laws outside of American courts."
Elizabeth Warren. (photo: Sen. Warren's Office)
I Agree With Hillary Clinton
By Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren's Blog
08 May 15
have serious concerns about ISDS – a policy in the new TPP trade agreement that would let foreign companies challenge American laws outside of American courts.
I’ll give you a recent example of how it works: A big mining company wanted to do some blasting off the coast of Nova Scotia. The Canadian government refused to provide permits because it thought the blasting would harm the local environment and scare off fish that local fishermen needed to make a living.
Thanks to an ISDS provision in a past trade agreement, that mining company didn’t have to go to a Canadian court to challenge the permit decision – they went right to a special ISDS panel of corporate lawyers. Last month, the international panel ruled in favor of the mining company, and the decision cannot be challenged in Canadian courts.
Now the Canadian taxpayers may be on the hook for up to $300 million in “damages” to the mining company – all because their government had the gall to stand up for its environment and the economic livelihood of its local fishermen. And the next time a foreign company wants a blasting permit, what will the Canadian government do?
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.
Let's send a loud message to our trade officials: No vote on a fast-track for trade agreements until the American people can see what’s in this TPP deal – ISDS and everything else. Sign the petition right now.
I’m not the only one worried about ISDS. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in her book last year:
"We should avoid some of the provisions sought by business interests, including our own, like giving them or their investors the power to sue foreign governments to weaken their environmental and public health rules, as Philip Morris is already trying to do in Australia. The United States should be advocating a level and fair playing field, not special favors."
In March, more than a hundred law professors from all around the country wrote a letter about their concerns about ISDS. And five of the country’s top legal and economic experts – Joseph Stiglitz, Larry Tribe, Judith Resnik, Cruz Reynoso, and H. Lee Sarokin – all agree:
"ISDS weakens the rule of law by removing the procedural protections of the legal system and using a system of adjudication with limited accountability and review. It is antithetical to the fair, public, and effective legal system that all Americans expect and deserve. Proponents of ISDS have failed to explain why our legal system is inadequate to the task. For the reasons cited above, we urge you to uphold the best ideals of our legal system and ensure ISDS is excluded from upcoming trade agreements."
This isn't a partisan issue. I don’t often agree with the conservative Cato Institute, and I suspect they don’t often agree with me. But the head of Cato’s trade policy program said:
"[ISDS] raises serious questions about democratic accountability, sovereignty, checks and balances, and the separation of power... Sen. Warren’s perspective on ISDS is one that libertarians and other free market advocates should share."
The Obama Administration says you have nothing to worry about – to trust them that nothing could possibly go wrong. But they won’t release the text of the TPP agreement to the public for you to see it for yourself.
Frankly, "just trust us" isn’t good enough – not for a trade deal that multinational corporations have been working on for years while the public has been kept in the dark.
|
|
