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They're Fast-Tracking the Future, TPP Style - But We Can Stop Them |
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Friday, 24 January 2014 14:27 |
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Eskow writes: "There has been an understandable sense of outrage over the Obama administration's attempt to ram the most extreme trade deal yet through Congress with a 'fast-track' provision that forbids amendments or filibustering."
President Obama. (photo: Charles Dharapak/AP)
They're Fast-Tracking the Future, TPP Style - But We Can Stop Them
By Richard Eskow, Campaign for America's Future
24 January 14
 he "TPP," or Trans-Pacific Partnership, is our nation's newest proposed trade deal. It was negotiated without democratic input, and they're trying to ram it through Congress the same way. Like NAFTA before it, the TPP would kill jobs. It would also cause lasting harm to democracy, here in the United States and around the world.
There has been an understandable sense of outrage over the Obama administration's attempt to ram the most extreme trade deal yet through Congress with a "fast-track" provision that forbids amendments or filibustering. Representatives who have had very little chance to review the bill will be expected to vote on it without the chance to change it.
Dave Johnson has rounded up some of the latest reactions from across the political spectrum, including objections from House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in Congress over its lack of "transparency" (Leader Pelosi's term). And it's true that the treaty's provisions have been kept secret from everyone - everyone, that is, except for the 600 corporate lobbyists and executives who've been reading it all along.
The imbalance of power which this reflects doesn't end on our nation's shores.
In this insightful analysis of TPP negotiation records released by WikiLeaks, doctoral candidate Gabriel Michael illustrates the ways in which the United States has been at odds with the rest of the world - or, at a minimum, has held substantially different positions from other nations in a number of key areas.
This graph from Michael summarizes the relative positions of the nations involved:
When it comes to this deal, "We Are Not the World." As Mr. Michael notes, "the TPP is anything but an agreement amongst 'like-minded' countries, as the United States trade representative has described it."
The U.S. differs most sharply from the other nations on matters of intellectual property. The WikiLeaks documents show that every other country in the negotiations stood against American intellectual property demands. But the U.S. also has significant disagreements with the other nations on matters of law, rulemaking, and the environment.There's evidence that the United States is pushing back on climate change and resisting other forms of environmental protection. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has expressed concern that the United States may be attempting to restrict financial regulations, and has taken a position on the topic of tobacco.
President Obama's negotiators also fought for the right of corporations to sue foreign governments over their laws and regulations. Australia has objected to this provision on the grounds that it gives corporations equal status with independent nations - but, as we will see, that's implicit in much of the TPP process.
Our government isn't just trying to push through a draconian treaty. It's working to make it even worse.
But why is the U.S. so sharply out of alignment with the other countries negotiating this treaty? Probably because it's the nominal home of some of the world's largest corporations. (They're "nominally" American because, although they're typically run by Americans, they tend to employ most of their workforces and pay their taxes - if at all in - other nations.)
The U.S. negotiators' hard-line positions conform closely to the interests of these nominally American corporations. Whether it's Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, tech, Hollywood, major polluters like the oil companies, or risk-taking financial institutions on Wall Street, the American negotiators have been fighting for their interests - while disregarding the interests of the taxpayers who pay their salaries.
Although these negotiators were appointed by Democrats, their positions don't seem to differ from those taken by Republican Administrations. That reflects a political system which is increasingly being corrupted by campaign cash, and by the post-political work opportunities which American-run multinationals can offer sitting politicians.
It's not unfair to say that the flaws in this treaty reflect the flaws in our democracy.
It's easy to understand why President Obama and his team want to "fast-track" this deal. Not only are its provisions unpopular with the general public, but any changes that Congress might make would then have to be negotiated with all of the treaty participants. And that list of participants isn't restricted to the nations who will become this treaty signatories if it is passed.
The real negotiations, the toughest give-and-take, has almost certainly not been among sovereign nations but among "sovereign" corporations. That's why hundreds of corporate representatives saw this treaty before any elected representatives did. In many cases, they were the ones doing the wheeling and dealing. Rice producers, dairy corporations, financiers, corporate beef, Big Pharma, and manufacturers of textiles, footwear, and technology … they had to negotiate with their governments, and perhaps with each other as well.
Here's food for thought: Fast-tracking could become the model for a new and profoundly subversive model of governance - one in which elected government becomes little more than an afterthought to corporate-backed deal-making. It's not hard to imagine a dystopian future where this becomes the norm.
In the right hands it might make a good science-fiction novel: a world in which individual governments, treaty organizations and even the United Nations have been replaced by a new governing body comprised entirely of corporate representatives. Think of it as a World Financial Parliament or a Global House of Corporate Lords, where the only "voting" the rest of us do happens when we watch a movie, play a video game, or take a prescription medication.
And even when we do, we don't really have much of a choice at all.
But the fight isn't over. Congress is reluctant to pass this unpopular bill, especially in an election year. That makes public pushback especially important right now. An impressively broad coalition of organizations, including the Campaign for America's Future, has come together to oppose fast tracking the TPP. You can get more information and take action here.
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FOCUS | Bailout Architect Runs for California Governor; World Laughs |
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Friday, 24 January 2014 13:12 |
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Taibbi writes: "Kashkari was not just a former Goldman banker handed a high government post - he was a former Goldman banker handed a high government post by a former Goldman banker."
Matt Taibbi. (photo: Rolling Stone)
Bailout Architect Runs for California Governor; World Laughs
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
24 January 14
 want to apologize for this space being blank for quite some time. I actually spent the bulk of the last two days on a long blog post about the "Dr. V." story in Grantland. But then I got all the way to the end, and realized I was completely wrong about the entire thing.
So, I spiked my own piece. Now I've been in Talk Radio-style "This is totally dead air, Barry" territory for about two weeks. I could swear I saw a cobweb when I logged on this morning.
So thank God for Neel Kashkari, and the news that this goofball footnote caricature of the bailout era has decided to run for Governor of California. Never in history has there been an easier subject for a blog post.
If you don't remember Kashkari's name, you might be excused – he was actually better known, in his 15 minutes of fame five years ago, as "The 35 year-old dingbat from Goldman someone put in charge of handing out $700 billion bailout dollars."
Now you remember. That guy! Neel Kashkari when he first entered the world of politics was a line item, usually the last entry in a list of ex-Goldman employees handed prominent government and/or regulatory positions, as in, ". . . and, lastly, Neel Kashkari, the heretofore unknown Goldman banker put in charge of the TARP bailout program . . ."
Kashkari was not just a former Goldman banker handed a high government post – he was a former Goldman banker handed a high government post by a former Goldman banker, in this case former Goldman CEO and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.
Neel was also the human parallel to the original TARP proposal written by Paulson, which was famously just three pages long.
Paulson's TARP proposal was essentially the last, unaired episode of Beavis and Butthead, with the three pages of script just containing a single scene in which Butthead walks into the U.S. Senate and says, "Can you, uh, like, give us 700 billion dollars? Uh-huh-huh."
Kashkari then was more or less an equally blank slate, a little-known tech banker from Goldman's San Francisco office who somehow ended up being Paulson's choice to administer a bailout that Paulson wanted to feature no oversight whatsoever. The original three-page proposal specified no review "by any court of law or any administrative agency."
It never came to that, not exactly – Paulson had to expand his three-page proposal – but it's worth remembering now that the Treasury's original plan for the bailout was to give literally unlimited powers to distribute $700 billion of taxpayer money to a low-level banker that prior to 2006, even Hank Paulson had never heard of.
So Kashkari takes the job as bailout czar and starts hurling fistfuls of cash at the banks, in a fashion that turned out later to have been beyond haphazard. Critically, even though the Treasury promised only to give out TARP funds to institutions that were "healthy" and "viable," Kashkari had no protocol in place to even decide whether a bailout recipient was solvent or not.
They forked over billions in cash to failing institutions and then failed to enforce crucial provisions, like for instance measures put in place to prevent executives from bailout-out companies from giving themselves huge bonuses.
This latter failure was what led to one of Kashkari's more infamous public appearances, in which Maryland congressman Elijah Cummings raked Kashkari over the coals for allowing AIG executives to give themselves $503 million in bonuses. "I wouldn't want to be asking my friend for some money to stay afloat," hissed Cummings. "Then my friend, who can barely afford to go to McDonald's, sees me in a restaurant costing $150 a meal. There's absolutely something wrong with that picture!" He added:
I'm just wondering how you feel about an AIG giving $503 million worth of bonuses on the one hand, and accepting $154 billion from hard-working taxpayers. You know, because I'm trying to make sure you get it. What really bothers me is all these other people who are lined up. They say, well, is Kashkari a chump?
After this "chump" episode, and others, Kashkari apparently became despondent. He and his wife reportedly were particularly upset by a snickering item in Gawker. The item read, "Financial Crisis Taking a Toll on Our Favorite Asshole Banker," and made the neatly cruel observation that that Kashkari, who was a fit/lean/bald banker of Paulsonian persuasion when he arrived in Washington, had begun "putting on classic stress-related weight under his chin."
The item featured before and after photos. The "after" photo was shot from just below chin level. It was brutal.
Now, a lot of people have been ripped in Gawker. I think everyone with a Q rating above 0.00003 has been ripped in Gawker. I personally remember having to Google-image Peter Beinart because Gawker described me as looking like the computer-generated love child of Beinart and Ashton Kutcher. It's an Internet-age rite of passage and they give great service – I mean, Gawker's insults are almost always really good. Probably most people who get ripped on the site flip out at first, and then laugh about it later.
Not Kashkari. He was so mortified by items like the Gawker bit that he literally disappeared into the woods like Ted Kaczynski and committed himself to a vengefully ascetic fitness regimen, apparently determined to return someday to society and have the last word.
This is not a joke. The Washington Post actually tracked Kashkari down in the woods after the bailouts. They photographed the tiny shed he'd built for himself in Nevada County, California. They were shown the incredible list-of-things-to-do he'd written on his way out of Washington. I have to keep repeating this, but this isn't a joke:
1. buy shed
2. chop wood
3. lose twenty pounds
4. help with Hank's book
The Post was then invited to watch as Kashkari lived out his hilarious homage to Rocky IV, getting in shape by his lonesome in the woods, fiercely splitting log after log with an ax, recalling a past slight with each blow:
Kashkari raises his ax.
"It felt like I got jumped."
"Like three guys beat the crap out of me."
Whack, whack.
The massive block of sugar pine breaks, the crack bouncing off the mountain.
Kashkari is recalling his testimony before Congress, while splitting logs to feed the stove for the winter. He is down to his last two chain-sawed trees.
"Members of Congress will tell you they agree with you, and then in public they blast you. I understand their anger, but the playing at politics when so much was at stake -- "
Whack. The ax blade flies off its wooden handle.
After enough of this, there was no more stress-related neck-jelly, no sir!
Kashkari, in shape again, soon-re-entered the finance world, taking a high-profile job with the bond fund PIMCO, run by notorious Wall Street insider Bill Gross.
The new choice of employer was significant because as numerous critics have subsequently pointed out, PIMCO was one of the major beneficiaries of the government's rescue of Wall Street. In December 2008, the Fed hired PIMCO to be one of four investment firms put in charge of managing a Fed program to buy up the toxic mortgage-backed securities that were threatening to tank the economy at the time.
Gross, at the time, warned that the government would have to "open up the balance sheet of the U.S. Treasury" (i.e. the state would need to cough up taxpayer money) in order to prevent "continuing asset and debt liquidation" (to prevent Wall Street jerks from being blown up by their own bad bets). Conveniently, Bill Gross and PIMCO happened to be sitting on $500 million of mortgage-backed holdings at the time. Which meant, as Babson College professor Peter Cohan put it: Bill Gross, who manages $830 billion, has convinced the U.S. Treasury to use your taxpayer dollars to bail him out of his bad investments.
So Neel Kashkari was the administrator of the biggest corporate welfare program in history, took shit for it ("Beating on the Hill," he would pencil for certain times in his calendar), went into the wilderness to get his mind and body right after the experience, then re-emerged to take a high-paying job with a company that was a significant beneficiary of government largesse.
While at PIMCO, Kashkari dipped a little toe in the lake of politics once again by penning an editorial for the Post ("No more me-first mentality on entitlements," July, 2010) denouncing government aid programs. He argued – and again, this is no more a joke than the Rocky-IV-cabin-in-the-woods thing was – that even though we have an economy successfully founded on self-interest, accepting government benefits, by which one assumes he means things like Medicare, is the wrong kind of selfish:
Our belief in free markets is founded on the idea that each individual acting in his or her self-interest will lead to a superior outcome for the whole. The financial crisis has reminded us that free markets are not perfect -- but they do allocate capital better than any other system we know. A "me first" mentality usually makes markets more efficient.
But this "me first" mentality can also lead to shortsighted political decision making . . .
Kashkari's solution? People who accept government benefits should take the long view and just say no:
Cutting entitlement spending requires us to think beyond what is in our own immediate self-interest. But it also runs against our sense of fairness: We have, after all, paid for entitlements for earlier generations. Is it now fair to cut my benefits? No, it isn't. But if we don't focus on our collective good, all of us will suffer.
Again, this came from a guy who handed out hundreds of billions of dollars of welfare to Wall Street companies, effectively subsidizing the massive compensation packages of Wall Street executives. This same person then went to work for a company that got a fat government contract to help other Wall Street investors unload their bonehead investments on the taxpayer.
Then, after all that rescue money disappeared, Kashkari made the interesting observation that there was not enough left over to pay benefits for other people. So, he effectively said to Americans on benefits, stop being so selfish. Tighten your belts. All of us will suffer otherwise.
This is the person who has now decided to run for Governor of California. It seems Jerry Brown has become his own personal Dolph Lundgren. A friend of mine sent me the news by email and suggested I say nothing at all about his decision, other than to post the headline above the following clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm81LSKJC2k
Kashkari's platform seems to be centered around restoring jobs and schools, but also seems targeted at waste – he called Jerry Brown's $68 billion high-speed rail project a "crazy train" and said it reflected "misplaced priorities."
Humorously, and predictably, Kashkari's campaign has already sprouted serious leaks. It turns out he has a somewhat spotty voting record (I do, too, to be honest, but I'm not running for governor), and he's already had to acknowledge publicly that he has not always voted – although, he says, "I believe voting is very important."
The Kashkari story is a perfect little allegory about the arrogance and cluelessness of the people who run the American economy. Kashkari talks passionately about free markets, forgetting that he was the individual who was actually in charge of the biggest-in-American-history government program to subvert the free market, bailing out countless institutions that should otherwise have gone out of business due to their own incompetence and corruption.
He talks about how the "free markets" allocate capital better than any system we have, but then again he was the person who had to step in when that system failed and institute a different system of capital allocation, one in which public treasure was unorganically re-allocated from taxpayers to private companies. His complaints about "misplaced priorities" are almost beneath comment – there's just not much to say about someone who committed public funds to million-dollar bonuses but believes regular people accepting government benefits have a "me-first" mentality.
Anyway, having this guy run for public office is like a gift from the blogging gods. How funny will this get? Will this one go to 11? I'm taking the over.
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The Obama Tapes |
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Friday, 24 January 2014 09:21 |
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Remnick writes: "One area where the President is particularly touchy is the often repeated notion, in Washington and elsewhere, that if he only courted and/or punished members of Congress more aggressively he would get more legislation through the House and Senate."
President Obama, deep in thought. (photo: Pete Souza)
The Obama Tapes
By David Remnick, The New Yorker
24 January 14
his week's issue of the magazine contains "Going the Distance," a portrait of Barack Obama, drawn from interviews with the President at the White House and on Air Force One during a fund-raising swing through Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. There was also an on-the-record call just as the piece was closing for publication. I think I will get no argument that the piece was long enough, thank you, but there were some moments that further illustrated the President's capacity to argue both sides of a question and, when needed, to opt for a magnanimous non-answer rather than launch a rhetorical missile. So, for the record …
First of all, yes, I did ask about Chris Christie - and got nowhere quick. Obama's answer fell into the magnanimous non-answer category. ("Well, I like Christie personally, and we've had a good working relationship on specific issues like the Hurricane Sandy recovery," he said. "Beyond that, David, I just don't have enough facts to offer a judgment.") I think it is safe to say that Obama saw no advantage in stepping into that particular puddle.
And, yes, I also asked about "Duty," the new memoir by Robert Gates, who served as Defense Secretary for both George W. Bush and Obama - and who was, at times, critical of both. Gates got a lot of attention for suggesting in his book that Obama had lost faith in the mission in Afghanistan. When I asked Obama about that, his response resembled the ink cloud a squid expels. Obama said that Gates had sent him an inscribed copy, and I asked what it said.
"Well, it was reflective of a genuine friendship that I think we built up over time. And I don't take the press's characterization of the book at face value," Obama said.
"What I do believe is true, not just for Bob Gates and this National Security Council but for every national-security team in every modern White House, is that there is going to be some back and forth and give-and-take between Cabinet secretaries and White House staff. And the criteria that I imposed throughout my first term, and will continue to insist on in my second term, is: Are we getting it right? Even if it's messy, even if sometimes folks are frustrated, even if the conversations get heated - in the end of the day, are we putting forward the best possible policies to secure this country, and protect our troops, and make sure that if we send them on a mission it's the right mission and they've got the tools they need to succeed?
"And I think my understanding, at least, is that Robert Gates acknowledged that at the end of the day, in a very difficult circumstance, we made the right decisions and oftentimes ignored political expedience to do so. And that's ultimately how I'm going to measure success, and, hopefully, how history measures success.
"The one thing - and I said this publicly, so you could probably get a transcript of this, when I was in a bilateral with the Spanish President - the one thing I did say, getting to my motivations or body language in some of these meetings, is that war should be hard for everybody involved, that you should be asking tough questions at all times - most of all, of yourself. And that, if you are not asking difficult questions of yourself and your team, then you can end up with bad policy that hurts the national interest and that, in my mind, is a betrayal of those young men and women who I'm putting in harm's way."
In other words, Obama will answer more fully in his own memoir.
One area where the President is particularly touchy is the often repeated notion, in Washington and elsewhere, that if he only courted and/or punished members of Congress more aggressively he would get more legislation through the House and Senate. Obama has clearly given a lot of thought to the rap that if only he acted like L.B.J. he would succeed with more frequency.
"There's no doubt that personal relationships matter at the margins and can tip something over the finish line if things are aligned to get - if things are aligned for legislation to happen," Obama said. "So I have no doubt that Ronald Reagan's relationship with Tip O'Neill helped to facilitate the Social Security deal getting done. And the personal relationship and social relationship that O'Neill and Reagan may have had paid some dividends.
"But had Tip O'Neill not seen it to be in his interests to do a deal with Ronald Reagan because he had a whole bunch of conservative and Southern Democrats whose districts had been won by Reagan, and had Reagan not been looking at polls from his advisers telling him that Social Security was a very popular program and that he couldn't be seen as antagonistic toward it, it wouldn't have mattered how many drinks Reagan and Tip O'Neill had together.
"The interesting thing is that, when I was in the state legislature, I had great relationships with my Republican colleagues. And we had poker games and we had golf outings - so much so that I ended up having a number of Republicans say nice things about me when I ran for President. It came back to haunt them later."
I interrupted, mentioning Kirk Dillard, a Republican friend of Obama's in the Illinois State Senate. When Dillard ran for governor in 2010, his opponents ran ads against him using that friendship as evidence of his disloyalty to the conservative cause.
Obama agreed. "As one example," he said, "when I was in the U.S. Senate, I formed friendships with folks like Tom Coburn that continue to this day. And I actually enjoy spending time with a lot of these folks.
"There have been times where I've been constrained by the fact that I had two young daughters who I wanted to spend time with, and that I wasn't in a position to work the social scene in Washington. But having said all that, on fundamental issues like getting Republicans to raise taxes or eliminate loopholes, or getting Democrats to consider reforms to entitlement programs, what matters is the makeup of their districts and their electorates, and I think probably, just from a purely political point of view, the bigger challenge that I've had has to do with the fact that there is a core group of Republican House members in particular who know that I lost their districts by twenty-five or thirty points, and that there is a Republican base of voters for whom compromise with me is a betrayal. And that - more than anything, I think - has been the challenge that I've needed to overcome.
"Another way of putting it, I guess, is that the issue has been the inability of my message to penetrate the Republican base so that they feel persuaded that I'm not the caricature that you see on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, but I'm somebody who is interested in solving problems and is pretty practical, and that, actually, a lot of the things that we've put in place worked better than people might think.
"And as long as there's that gap between perceptions of me within the average Republican primary voter and the reality, it's hard for folks like John Boehner to move too far in my direction.
"The last point I'll make on this: when it comes to Democrats, the truth of the matter is, with fairly thin margins over the last five years, what's been remarkable is the degree to which Democrats have been unified and worked with this Administration to accomplish some big things, even when there were a lot of political risks involved. And I'd like to think that part of that is because the Democrats up on Capitol Hill that I have relationships with know that the things I'm fighting for are things they care deeply about, and that I have a genuine commitment to seeing them succeed. You haven't seen me, I think, go out of my way to play against Democrats on the Hill. But I've tried to be supportive of them in every way that I can."
Obama spoke about the need to acknowledge the history of American foreign policy, its successes but also its misadventures and even disasters. Here is an even fuller version of the answer I quoted in the piece:
"My working premise, what I believe in my gut, is that America has been an enormous force for good in the world, and that if you look at the ledger and you say, What have we gotten right and what have we gotten wrong, on balance, we have helped to promote greater freedom and greater prosperity for more people, and been willing, as I think I said to you earlier, to advance causes even if they weren't in our narrow self-interest in a way that you've never seen any dominant power do in the history of the world.
"And so, to apologize for certain historic events out of context, I think, wouldn't be telling an accurate story. On the other hand, I do think that part of effective diplomacy, part of America maintaining its influence in a world in which we remain the one indispensable power, but in which you've got a much more multipolar environment, is for other people to know that we understand their stories as well, and that we can see how they have come to certain conclusions or understandings about their history, their economies, the conflicts they've suffered. Because, if they think we understand their frame of reference, then they're more likely to listen to us and to work with us.
"So for me to acknowledge the fact that we were involved in the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran is not to pick at an old scab or to do a bunch of Monday-morning quarterbacking. It's to say to the Iranian people, We understand why you might have some suspicions about us; we've got some suspicions about you because you have held our folks hostage and murdered our people and threatened our allies. So, now that we understand each other, can we do business?
"That, I think, is useful and important precisely because we are far and away the most powerful country in the world. And, having lived overseas, the one thing I know is how much the world admires America, but also how much the world thinks America has no clue as to what's going on outside our borders."
Later, he added, "Now, if other countries don't think we see them or know them or understand them, then they may grudgingly coöperate with us where they have to, because it's in their self-interest, but, at the margins - where we need them to participate in Iran's sanctions, or we need them to work with us around a non-proliferation agenda - a population that thinks we hear them, we understand their history, is more likely to support their leaders when they work with us. That's part of exercising effective power in the world."
I asked Obama if he would say he was the first President to acknowledge these historical events in the way that he does.
"I think, if you look at Kennedy's best speeches, the notion that we are connected with folks around the world, and that we lead not simply by the force of arms but because of values and ideals, and that we have to uphold them, is part of what made Kennedy an inspiration not just in this country but around the world," Obama said. "And he may not have spoken about certain specifics in the same way, but partly that's because he lived in a more innocent time, in some ways.
"When I make a speech now, it is broadcast around the world in an instant, and there are entire blogs devoted to picking apart every factual assertion that is being made, and people expect a level of accuracy and understanding that wouldn't have been the case in 1961 or '62."
Finally, one of the biggest headlines of the second Inaugural Address had to do with Obama's commitment to work harder on climate change. I don't have the sense that this is in the forefront - but maybe we will know something more concrete after the State of the Union, on January 28th. There was one interesting exchange worth noting, for the record:
Q.: Mr. President, when the Copenhagen pact was signed, our carbon emissions were about the same as the Chinese. Now the Chinese are double ours - double. And you've now had meetings with the Chinese leadership, and you know the forces that impinge on them in terms of development and lifting people out of poverty. But, as I think I remember you saying, if India and China develop at our rate we'll be "four feet underwater."
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, we've got problems.
Q.: What leverage do we have?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, the good news is the Chinese and Indians understand that. I may have mentioned this to you earlier - the most popular Twitter account in China is the U.S. Embassy's daily air-quality measurement. When you talk to China experts, they will tell you that the most active, robust civic organizations, and the area where there's been the loudest complaint about government inaction, alongside corruption, is the issue of the environment. The Chinese understand that if things continue on this pace they're going to run out of water, and they're not going to be able to stem the kind of pollution you see in Beijing during the summers, and things are just going to get worse.
So we've seen some progress, very modest. Their willingness to work with us on the hydrocarbon reductions that are embodied in the Montreal Protocol, I think, are an example of that. But my goal has been to make sure that the United States can genuinely assert leadership in this issue internationally, that we are considered part of the solution rather than part of the problem. And if we are at the table in that conversation with some credibility, then it gives us the opportunity to challenge and engage the Chinese and the Indians, as long as we take into account the fact that they've still got, between the two of them, over a billion people in dire poverty.
And it's not sufficient for us to just tell them to stop. We're going to have to give them some help. We're going to have to take some of our research and development on things like clean-coal technology and be able to export it to them or license it to them. We're going to have to look at our best practices, or, probably more pertinently, Japanese best practices, on energy efficiency, and figure out how can some of that stuff get written into Chinese and Indian building codes. There's going to be a process where we help them leapfrog some of the development stages that we went through.
This is why I'm putting a big priority on our carbon action plan here. It's not because I'm ignorant of the fact that these emerging countries are going to be a bigger problem than us. It's because it's very hard for me to get in that conversation if we're making no effort. And it's not an answer for us to say, Well, since the Chinese and the Indians are the bigger problem, we might as well not even bother.
It's also why, though, sometimes I get into arguments with environmentalists on something like carbon capture or natural gas. The notion that not only [can we] duplicate the emissions rates of Sweden, let's say, but that the Chinese and the Indians can anytime soon, frustrates me. Factually, that's just not feasible. It's not correct. And so if we can figure out a carbon-capture mechanism that is sufficiently advanced and works, then we are helping ourselves, because the Chinese and the Indians are going to build some coal plants, and even if we don't build another coal plant in this country, there are going to be a lot of coal plants around the world that are built. And we have a huge investment in trying to figure out how we can help them do it more cleanly.
Natural gas is a fossil fuel. If it's not done correctly, the methane emissions are profound. There could be, obviously, environmental consequences if some of the chemicals involved seep into the groundwater. But, if we can get that right, then for us to see natural gas supplant coal around the world the same way it's happening here in the United States, that's a net plus.
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Why Wendy Davis Terrifies the GOP |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=22220"><span class="small">Jason Sattler, The National Memo</span></a>
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Friday, 24 January 2014 09:02 |
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Sattler writes: "The National Rifle Association didn't just stop the effort to close the loopholes in background checks, even though that effort was supported by more than 8 in 10 Americans. It has crushed academic research on gun violence to the point that we don't even know how many people commit suicide at gun ranges each year."
Texas State Senator Wendy Davis is running for governor and is facing sexist attacks. (photo: Bob Daemmrich/Corbis)
Why Wendy Davis Terrifies the GOP
By Jason Sattler, The National Memo
24 January 14
he National Rifle Association didn't just stop the effort to close the loopholes in background checks, even though that effort was supported by more than 8 in 10 Americans. It has crushed academic research on gun violence to the point that we don't even know how many people commit suicide at gun ranges each year.
Some say the gun rights movement has learned from what happened to the tobacco industry, as decades of denial gave way to legislation that has increasingly diminished the ability of their product to be consumed in public.
But smoking tobacco laced with nicotine isn't a Constitutional right, unlike the right to bear arms or a woman's right to choose. If firearms advocates want to search for an example of effectively legislating away a right, the can look at what their allies in the anti-abortion rights movement have achieved.
Exactly 41 years after the Supreme Court ruled that a woman's right to privacy via the "due process" clause of the Constitution gave her a limited right to end a pregnancy, 87 percent of counties in the United States lack an abortion provider. The right's effort to use local and state control to enact laws and regulations make it impossible to provide the procedure in most of the country. And they're far from done from trying to make abortion rights "a thing of the past," as Governor Rick Perry vowed last year before signing legislation that will force dozens of clinics to close.
State Senator Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth) rose to speak for 14 hours against laws that were clearly designed to close as many clinics as possible, making an abortion far more difficult to obtain, and then ban the procedure earlier than the Supreme Court had previously ruled was Constitutional.
Imagine if you couldn't purchase a gun in 87 percent of the country. Imagine if nearly every day in some state a new piece of legislation was being considered that didn't close gun shops but made it impossible for them to operate, forcing buyers into the black market. Gun owners may not mind that because buying a gun from a private individual is less of a hassle. But the industry, which finances the NRA, would never let that happen.
Despite what Republicans want you to believe, there is no "abortion industry." We know this because an "industry" would never let the march against women's rights proceed as rapidly as it has in the last few years.
Knowing that abortion is actually more common where it's illegal, the right is pushing women into a black market that could cost them their health and their lives. The only hope women have is the courts, politicians and activists willing to stand up for the right to choose.
Wendy Davis did just that in a way that captured the country's attention. It infuriated those against abortion rights who brand their opponents as murderers, or with the more stinging "infanticide." And now that Davis is raising lots of money in her effort to become Texas' governor, they're seizing on every inconsistency in her story to shame her as a bad mother and craven opportunist.
Shaming women who attempt to exercise their right to have an abortion is an effective tactic. One of the women who went to Kermit Gosnell's vile clinic, where actual crimes were committed, reported that she avoided the local Planned Parenthood because "the picketers out there, they scared me half to death."
Even politically, Democrats have at times adopted the talking point that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare" because that's what people say in polls that they want. In a CNN/ORC poll last May, 42 percent said abortion should be legal in few circumstances while 25 percent were in favor of "all," 11 percent said "most" and 20 percent said "none."
The "none" is the official opinion of the GOP in its party platform, even as Republicans oppose the family planning and sex education that are the best hopes for actually reducing unintended pregnancies. And the "none" position is winning, with just one vote on the Supreme Court threatening to end more than four decades of choice.
Wendy Davis is a threat to those who feel their position for "life" is on the march. She says, "I'm a mother who made the choice to keep my child and I will fight for you to have your choice." Her life story and courage are inspiring and embolden others to speak out. She's even redefining being "pro-life" in a way that holds conservatives responsible for the care of children after being born.
So Republicans must destroy her.
The anti-abortion movement - like the gun rights movement - sees any hope for its opponents as something to be destroyed before it can make actual progress.
One conservative said the recent attempts to undermine Davis' life story remind him of Rush Limbaugh's pyrrhic attack on Sandra Fluke. But they bear more resemblance to the way the right tried to undermine now-Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), another singular voice from the left who enrages the right with fear.
Republicans kept trying to call her out for mistakenly saying she had Native American ancestry. But in the end all they did was reveal their own dizzying hate and the emptiness of their arguments.
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