Up Date: 7:00 PM EDT The California High Speed Rail Bill has passed 21 – 16.
Today is the crucial vote for High Speed Rail project in the California State Senate. As, BruceMcF pointed out in this week’s Sunday Train, it all hinges on the Democrats.
In response to complaints, including from Senators (Joe) Simitian and (Alan) Lowenthal, that too much was being spent in the less heavily populated central valley, and not enough money was being spent in the more populous LA Basin and Bay Area, the revised Business Plan includes “early investment” in the bookends, to help prepare them for blended operation of HSR alongside more local rail services.
That early investment includes an agreement that will allow for the funding of the electrification of the Caltrain Corridor, serving Simitian’s own district, and key to the long term survival of the Caltrain service so that it is available for use when the next petroleum crisis hits.
But, going by the description of a Simitian staffer of his position, these changes may not have been enough to convince Simitian to switch to a position of support for actually building HSR.
The bill passed the Assembly and Gov. Jerry Brown has said that he will sign it but there are at least 6 Democratic hold outs. Since there all the Republicans are opposed and to pass the bill needs 21 of the 25 Democratic Senators, the funding totally hinges on these Senators.
The California state Assembly on Thursday approved an $8 billion high-speed rail financing plan that likely will face a tougher vote in the Senate over the system’s projected $68 billion cost and concerns about its management.
The project, expected to take decades to complete, has the backing of Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, who says a bullet train network will boost job creation and provide an alternative to car and plane travel in the country’s most populous state. [..]
If it is approved, California could begin selling bonds for the project and lock in federal funds for a line in the state’s Central Valley.
Senator Leland Yee, a Democrat from San Francisco, said the plan’s supporters have their work cut out winning him over, a sentiment other Democratic senators have shared with Reuters in recent days.
As David Dayen at FDL News notes, if the bill is not passed, California will lose the billions in promised funding for the project from the Federal government:
This is crucial, because the federal Department of Transportation has made clear that they will revoke their $4.3 billion in federal funds for California’s HSR project, most of which came out of the stimulus package, if the state doesn’t approve funding today. This would undoubtedly stall the project, perhaps permanently. And California is probably the furthest along of any state on a high speed rail system.
Building this leg of the system is crucial to transportation in the region, energy and fuel economy and it will create jobs in hard hit California. All of that should offset any negatives of bond funding, by increasing revenue brought in from more people workong and spending in California. Let’s hope a couple of these Democrats wake up and see the advantage to being at the forefront of a new transportation age.
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
The settlement between government authorities and Barclays over the bank’s attempts to rig benchmark interest rates drew a picture of a bank that was negligent and corrupt at various times and to varying degrees. Unfortunately, as big banks go, that comes as no shock.
It would be a shock if regulators and prosecutors found the resources and willingness to go wherever the rate-rigging scandal leads, even to the upper echelons of the world’s biggest banks and powerful central banks, including the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve.
In a better America, Mitt Romney would be running for president on the strength of his major achievement as governor of Massachusetts: a health reform that was identical in all important respects to the health reform enacted by President Obama. By the way, the Massachusetts reform is working pretty well and has overwhelming popular support.
In reality, however, Mr. Romney is doing no such thing, bitterly denouncing the Supreme Court for upholding the constitutionality of his own health care plan. His case for becoming president relies, instead, on his claim that, having been a successful businessman, he knows how to create jobs.
This, in turn, means that however much the Romney campaign may wish otherwise, the nature of that business career is fair game. How did Mr. Romney make all that money? Was it in ways suggesting that what was good for Bain Capital, the private equity firm that made him rich, would also be good for America?
Forget Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay-they were mere amateurs in financial crime. The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.
Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen. Or, indeed, imagined. The scandal over Libor-short for London interbank offered rate-has resulted in a huge fine for Barclays Bank and threatens to ensnare some of the world’s top financers. It reveals that behind the world’s financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption. The modern-day robber barons pillage with a destructive abandon totally unfettered by law or conscience and on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.
If ever there were an election pre-ordained as a result of a country’s economic performance, it would be that of Mexico. The ruling PAN party was destined to lose because it presided over a profound economic failure for more than 11 years. Almost any government in the world would have lost under such circumstances. [..]
More than half of all Mexicans are living below the official poverty line, but the new government has little to offer the poor majority or even to produce the long-term growth that Mexico once had. Sadly, Mexico’s economic progress will probably be quite limited until there is a more level playing field for elections.
My emotions after the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act last week went through various stages: confusion (thanks, CNN), shock and finally sheer joy. It was a complete surprise to have the highest court uphold the entire law, including the individual mandate. Liberals rightly celebrated the ruling as a historic step toward ensuring a better quality of life for all Americans. [..]
It seems foolhardy for governors to reject what is basically free money to help more people in their own states gain health insurance. Josh Barro wrote just after the ruling that while the White House’s stick was taken away, its carrot-the federal government’s picking up 100 percent of the states’ Medicaid expansion tab for the early years, gradually declining to 90 percent after that-would be enough to incite states to participate. And they stand to see other economic benefits. States that already provide coverage and care to people living at 133 percent of the poverty line would no longer shoulder those costs, saving them millions. Even for those that don’t offer such coverage, the bill stands to save all states money by getting rid of the “hidden tax” they pay in higher insurance premiums that account for the cost of covering the uninsured, also potentially saving millions.
You can conduct byzantine transactions through opaque investment accounts and private corporations in offshore tax havens such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Or you can credibly run for president at a time of great economic distress.
I don’t think you can do both.
Let me be clear that I have nothing against wealth. In fact, I have nothing against great wealth, which is how I would classify Mitt Romney’s estimated $250 million fortune. We can argue about the social utility of private equity firms such as Bain Capital, but Romney isn’t responsible for distorting the system so that financiers are grossly overpaid. He just took advantage of the situation.
Increasingly, however, I have to wonder whether the achievement Romney touts as his biggest asset in running for president-his business success-might be seen by many voters as a liability.
The huge LIBOR scandal that involves the manipulations of rates by the big banks is like a black hole that is sucking more and more into its center. Nor is this scandal victimless, as former former Barclay’s chief executive Bob Diamond would have the world believe.
As the Libor scandal has given an outlet for long-simmering anger against wanker bankers in the UK, there have been some efforts in the media to puzzle out who might have won or lost from the manipulations, as well as arguments that they were as “victimless” or helped people (as in reporting an artificially low Libor during the crisis led to lower interest rate resets on adjustable rate loans pegged to Libor; what’s not to like about that?)
What we have so far is a lot of drunk under the streetlight behavior: people trying to relate the scandal to the part that is most visible and easy to understand, meaning the loan market that keys off Libor. As much as that’s a really big number ($10 trillion), it is trivial compared to the relevant derivatives. From the FSA letter to Barclays:
The Eurodollar futures contract traded on the CME in Chicago (which is the largest interest rate futures contract by volume in the world) has US dollar LIBOR as its reference rate. The value of volume of that contract traded in 2011 was over 564 trillion US dollars.[..]
Devil’s advocates have also argued that while Barclays submitted improper Libor rates, there’s no evidence they influenced the rates. I read the FSA document quite differently.
Recall that (so far) we have two phases of activity: one from 2005 to 2007, in which derivatives traders at Barclays would lean on the Submitters on a regular basis to place bids that would help improve the profits of positions they had on, and a later phase, during the crisis, where Barclays felt its peers were submitting lowball figures to the daily fixings and it was getting bad press for being an outlier, and it went to posting what it though were competitive, as in artificially low, data.
Atrios thinks that British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is Stupid
At one point in The Godfather Part III, Michael Corleone sagely remarks: “Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.” It was this lesson that George Osborne, as so often in his political career, forgot this week. After his aides were forced to “clarify” that he had never alleged that Ed Balls was personally involved in the Libor scandal (rather that he had “questions to answer”, a distinction without a difference if ever there was one), opinion is hardening among Conservative MPs that the Chancellor has overreached himself.
In a fascinating piece in today’s Times (£), Sam Coates and Roland Watson collate a series of off-the-record barbs from Tory backbenchers. One MP describes Osborne’s obsession with the alleged role of Balls and “Whitehall sources” in the scandal as a “red herring”, adding: “There was no smoking gun.” Another opines: “People want us to sort out the effing banks, not worry about what Ed Balls might have said four years ago.” Osborne’s dual role as Chancellor and chief Tory strategist is also called into question (the increasing view among Tory MPs is that he isn’t good at either job). One MP comments: “When are we going to get a Chancellor who is not part time? You can’t run the sixth largest economy in the world with a mate-ocracy.”
I haven’t paid too much attention to this uproar since I feel it is a distraction to the issue of real health care reform. But since everyone seems to think it’s significant, I will let our readers decide.
CBS News’ reporter Jan Crawford reported that Chief Justice John Roberts had switched his vote on the individual mandate, supporting it under the right of Congress to levy taxes, allowing the Health Care Law to stand.
After the historic oral arguments in March, the two knowledgeable sources said, Roberts and the four conservatives were poised to strike down at least the individual mandate. There were other issues being argued – severability and the Medicaid extension – but the mandate was the ballgame. [..]
On this point – Congress’ commerce power – Roberts agreed. In the court’s private conference immediately after the arguments, he was aligned with the four conservatives to strike down the mandate.
Roberts was less clear on whether that also meant the rest of the law must fall, the source said. The other four conservatives believed that the mandate could not be lopped off from the rest of the law and that, since one key part was unconstitutional, the entire law must be struck down.
Because Roberts was the most senior justice in the majority to strike down the mandate, he got to choose which justice would write the court’s historic decision. He kept it for himself.
Over the next six weeks, as Roberts began to craft the decision striking down the mandate, the external pressure began to grow. Roberts almost certainly was aware of it. [..]
It is not known why Roberts changed his view on the mandate and decided to uphold the law. At least one conservative justice tried to get him to explain it, but was unsatisfied with the response, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation. [..]
Never mind the ramifications on the limits the ruling puts on Congress’ ability to regulate interstate commerce, it completely ignored precedent (Wickard v Filburn). Roberts’ siding with the conservatives drew the ire of Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY):
Although he upheld the health care law on another basis, Roberts sided with the court’s four conservatives in declaring that Congress may not, under the Commerce Clause, force people to engage in a market transaction. The five-member majority view effectively rewrites existing law. It’s the first time since before the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn, a precedent that was affirmed in the 2005 case Gonzales v. Raich, that the Supreme Court has placed a limit on Congress’s authority make national economic regulation that substantially affects interstate commerce.
In 2005, during Roberts’ confirmation hearing, Schumer grilled the soon-to-be chief justice on whether he would support the legal framework established by Wickard.
“Now it was reaffirmed in the Raich case and that is a precedent of the court, just like Wickard, that I would apply like any other precedent,” Roberts said at the time. “I have no agenda to overturn it. I have no agenda to revisit it. It’s a precedent of the court.”
TPM asked Schumer whether Roberts went back on his word in the ‘Obamacare’ decision.
“Yes he did,” the senator said. “If you read his testimony about Wickard, about some of the other, more recent Commerce Clause cases at the hearing, and looked at what he said here, it’s quite different.”
But the news media and some pundits are far more interested in who leaked the story
But who are those two sources?
GWU Law professor Orin Kerr, the one who got the ball rolling on this discussion, notes that Crawford’s story has details “only the justices and their clerks would likely know.”
“The leaks go into what the justices were thinking and what signal they meant to send with their actions,” he argues (and provides evidence – but you should read the story because there’s plenty). “Further, I doubt Crawford would run with a story with that kind of detail that was sourced less directly. So my best guess would be that the two sources she relies on are from the among the justices and their clerks.”
But Kerr rules out the clerks, simply because a clerk would be “crazy” to leak. “A clerk who leaked this and is identified has likely made a career-ending move. … Even assuming a clerk or two was so extraordinarily dismissive of the confidentiality rules to leak this, it would be nuts to leak over the weekend when you have to show up at the court for work tomorrow.”
Then law professor Paul Campos wrote this piece for Salon.com suggesting that there us strong evidence that Roberts penned both decisions:
It’s notable that Crawford’s sources insist on the claim that the joint dissent was authored specifically in response to Roberts’ majority opinion, without any participation from him at any point in the drafting process that created it. It would, after all, be fairly preposterous for the four dissenters to jointly “author” an opinion that was in large part written originally by the author of the majority opinion to which the joint dissenters were now so flamboyantly objecting.
Yet that, I am told by a source within the court with direct knowledge of the drafting process, is exactly what happened. My source insists that “most of the material in the first three quarters of the joint dissent was drafted in Chief Justice Roberts’ chambers in April and May.” Only the last portion of what eventually became the joint dissent was drafted without any participation by the chief justice.
This source insists that the claim that the joint dissent was drafted from scratch in June is flatly untrue. Furthermore, the source characterizes claims by Crawford’s sources that “the fact that the joint dissent doesn’t mention [sic] Roberts’ majority … was a signal the conservatives no longer wished to engage in debate with him” as “pure propagandistic spin,” meant to explain away the awkward fact that while the first 46 pages of the joint dissent never even mention Roberts’ opinion for the court (this is surely the first time in the court’s history that a dissent has gone on for 13,000 words before getting around to mentioning that it is, in fact, dissenting), the last 19 pages do so repeatedly.
University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos broke the news on the Last Word that, according to his sources inside the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote both opinions in the case involving President Obama’s health care reform law. MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell is rejoined by Prof. Campos and author Glenn Greenwald to take about the leaks, Roberts’ vote and what it say about the institution of the Supreme Court.
So the right is flipping out because Roberts voted with the “liberal” justices to uphold the law based on a twisted view that the penalty for not buying health care insurance is a tax. The so-called “left” is cheering but totally misses the long term problems this ruling has created. I still say the “leaks and who did the leaking” is a tempest in a tea pot that is distracting from the main issue that this country needs universal health care.
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
The Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of health care reform inadvertently opened a hole in health insurance coverage that could harm some of the nation’s poorest citizens. The problem arises from a mismatch between how the law was framed and how the court’s ruling will affect Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor. [..]
In states that choose not to expand Medicaid, substantial numbers of the very poor could be left out of coverage. The reform law provides tax credits to help people with incomes between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level (about $23,000 to $92,000 for a family of four) buy private insurance. But the bill’s drafters made no provision to provide subsidies for anyone below the poverty line because they assumed that those people would be covered by expanded Medicaid.
Last week’s Supreme Court decision upholding of the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law moves the United States closer to the goal of health coverage for all. All other developed countries have it. But so do some developing nations – Brazil, Thailand, Chile. These countries are mostly middle income. But one country on the list is among the poorest of the poor: Rwanda.
The point is not that Americans should envy Rwanda’s health system – far from it. But Rwanda’s experience illustrates the value of universal health insurance. “Its health gains in the last decade are among the most dramatic the world has seen in the last 50 years,” said Peter Drobac, the director in Rwanda for the Boston-based Partners in Health, which works extensively with the Rwandan health system.
It couldn’t have happened without health insurance.
There is a solution to unemployment: if we worked the same shorter hours as Germany, we’d eliminate joblessness overnight
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, a distinguished British economist, took the lead last week in drafting a sign-on “Manifesto for Economic Common Sense“, condemning the turn toward austerity in many countries. This manifesto seems destined to garner tens or even hundreds of thousands of signatures, including mine.
While the basic logic of the manifesto is solid, there is an important aspect to the argument that is overlooked. We can deal with unemployment every bit as effectively by having people work fewer hours, as we can by increasing demand.
The most important point to realize is that the problem facing wealthy countries at the moment is not that we are poor, as the stern proponents of austerity insist. The problem is that we are wealthy. We have tens of millions of people unemployed precisely because we can meet current demand without needing their labor.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” as my old Texas momma used to instruct my brothers and me. But apparently, five of the justices on our Supreme Court didn’t have mommas with such ethical sensibilities – or perhaps they’re just ignoring their mommas’ wisdom now in order to impose their extremist political agenda on you and me.
That agenda became startlingly clear in 2010, when the black-robed cabal of Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Sam Alito hung their infamous Citizens United edict around America’s neck. It allowed unlimited sums of corporate cash to spew into our elections, effectively legalizing the wholesale purchase of America’s elected officials. In his majority decision, Supreme joker Kennedy drew from his deep well of political ignorance and judicial arrogance to declare that these gushers of special interest money “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”
Is he on the court – or in a comedy club? Not only were Kennedy and his fellow corporatists wrong on the substance of their decree, but also ridiculously wrong on the politics. You don’t need a law degree to see that CEOs are presently flooding this year’s presidential and congressional races with hundreds of millions of corporate campaign dollars, gleefully perverting the political process to buy government policy for their own gain. That not only gives the appearance of corruption, it is corrupt.
A workers’ cooperative in the Goose Island area of Chicago is desperately trying to stop the liquidation of a windows and doors factory the sale of which will scuttle their plans but benefit some well-connected investors.
Union members who put their bodies on the line not once but twice to save their windows and doors factory in Chicago found out Sunday that their former employer has broken a pledge to give workers a fair chance to buy factory equipment and plans instead to sell off machines as soon as Friday rather than let a Black and Latino-led workers’ cooperative buy and keep the plant in operation.
The workers, members of the United Electrical and Machine Workers of America Local 1110, sat in and briefly occupied their plant this February after owner, Serious Energy of California, announced a shut-down and a plan to move jobs out of state. Many of the same workers occupied the same factory in December 2008, becoming a cause-celebre at the height of the unemployment crisis.
While Europe roils in economic turmoil, London is preparing for a lavish jamboree of international good will: in a few weeks, the city will host the 2012 Summer Olympics.
But behind the spectacle of athletic prowess and global harmony, brass-knuckle politics and brute economics reign. At this nexus sits the International Olympic Committee, which promotes the games and decides where they will be held. Though the I.O.C. has been periodically tarnished by scandal – usually involving the bribing and illegitimate wooing of delegates – those embarrassments divert us from a deeper problem: the organization is elitist, domineering and crassly commercial at its core.
The I.O.C., which champions itself as a democratic “catalyst for collaboration between all parties of the Olympic family,” is nonetheless run by a privileged sliver of the global 1 percent. This has always been the case: when Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympics in the 1890s, he assembled a hodgepodge of princes, barons, counts and lords to coordinate the games. Eventually the I.O.C. opened its hallowed halls to wealthy business leaders and former Olympians. Not until 1981 were women allowed in.
It’s two years and this has not gone away. Some of the titles of the players have switched but essentially all the names are the same. Remember, this was Barack’s idea. We are still up the creek
(transcript for the hearing impaired is in this link)
Cutting Social Security and Medicare is how Sen. Simpson thinks the US can obtain fiscal responsibly works and his co-chair, Investment banker and former Clinton chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, who negotiated Social Security cuts with Newt Gingrich, now wants to do it again.
Although the commission is composed of 10 Democrats and 8 Republicans and the final report will need a super majority of 14 to pass, most of the members are Wall St. fiscal conservatives to whom Obama and Congress have catered.
Warnings from both House Majority and Minority leaders, Rep. John Conyers and John Boehner, that the final report will be presented to a lame duck Congress were ignored by Obama, Reid and Pelosi who are determined to bring whatever this commission decides to a vote by the end of the year. Now Pelosi has sealed the deal by slipping in the provision into the War Funding bill that requires the House to vote on whatever the Senates passes.
This Presidential Commission, which is also proposing tax hikes beyond the increases in 2011 when the Bush tax cuts expire, is selling out the middle class who is virtually up that “shitty” creek without a paddle and can’t afford to buy a paddle.
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
The highest court in the land has spoken. That’s how President Obama characterized the Supreme Court’s surprising – and welcome – decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, the signature domestic achievement of Obama’s first term. With its divided and bitterly contested 5 to 4 ruling, the arch-conservative Roberts Court spared a major piece of progressive legislation and, in the process, rescued the 35 million uninsured Americans who would have suffered, had the law been struck down. [..]
Right after the highest court in the land spoke, however, one of the lowest forces in the land spoke, too.
Americans for Prosperity, the shadowy conservative super PAC, announced that it would run $8.2 million worth of attack ads to slam health-care reform in nearly a dozen key swing states. No doubt many more of the GOP’s secretive sugar daddies will soon follow suit.
While the Occupy movement has forced a public discussion of extreme corporate influence on every aspect of our lives, behind closed doors corporate America is implementing a stealth strategy to formalize its rule in a truly horrifying manner. The mechanism is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Negotiations have been conducted in extreme secrecy, so you are in good company if you have never heard of it. But the thirteenth round of negotiations between the United States and eight Pacific Rim nations will be held in San Diego in early July. [..]
Think of the TPP as a stealthy delivery mechanism for policies that could not survive public scrutiny. Indeed, only two of the twenty-six chapters of this corporate Trojan horse cover traditional trade matters. The rest embody the most florid dreams of the 1 percent-grandiose new rights and privileges for corporations and permanent constraints on government regulation. They include new investor safeguards to ease job offshoring and assert control over natural resources, and severely limit the regulation of financial services, land use, food safety, natural resources, energy, tobacco, healthcare and more.
Evidence supporting the existence of climate change is pummeling the United States this summer, from the mountain wildfires of Colorado to the recent “derecho” storm that left at least 23 dead and 1.4 million people without power from Illinois to Virginia. The phrase “extreme weather” flashes across television screens from coast to coast, but its connection to climate change is consistently ignored, if not outright mocked. If our news media, including-or especially-the meteorologists, continue to ignore the essential link between extreme weather and climate change, then we as a nation, the greatest per capita polluters on the planet, may not act in time to avert even greater catastrophe. [..]
Add drought to fire and violent thunderstorms. According to Dr. Jeff Masters, one of the few meteorologists who frequently makes the connection between extreme weather and climate change, “across the entire Continental U.S., 72 percent of the land area was classified as being in dry or drought conditions” last week. “We’re going to be seeing a lot more weather like this, a lot more impacts like we’re seeing from this series of heat waves, fires and storms. … This is just the beginning.”
On Friday, June 29th, German Chancellor Angela Merkel acquiesced to changes to a permanent Eurozone bailout fund-“before the ink was dry,” as critics complained. Besides easing the conditions under which bailouts would be given, the concessions included an agreement that funds intended for indebted governments could be funneled directly to stressed banks.
[T]he eurozone’s bailout fund (backed by taxpayers’ money) will be taking a stake in failed banks.
Risk has been increased. German taxpayers have increased their liabilities. In future a bank crash will no longer fall on the shoulders of national treasuries but on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a fund to which Germany contributes the most.
In the short term, these measures will ease pressure in the markets. However there is currently only 500bn euros assigned to the ESM. That may get swallowed up quickly and the markets may demand more. It is still unclear just how deep the holes in the eurozone’s banks are.
The ESM is now a permanent bailout fund for private banks, a sort of permanent “welfare for the rich.” There is no ceiling set on the obligations to be underwritten by the taxpayers, no room to negotiate, and no recourse in court.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) issued a final ruling today against the U.S. country-of-origin labeling (COOL) law. This popular pro-consumer policy, which informs shoppers where meat and other foods were raised or grown, enjoys the support of 93% of Americans, according to a 2010 Consumers Union poll. Now Congress must gut or change the law to avoid the application of punitive trade sanctions.
The original meat labeling law passed as part of the 2002 farm bill and was expanded in the 2008 farm bill to apply to other foods like fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Canada, Mexico, and several other countries filed a complaint regarding the policy with the WTO in December 2008 calling the popular consumer measure a “disguised” barrier to trade. The organization initially ruled in their favor in November 2011, but the U.S. filed an appeal in March 2012. Today, a WTO tribunal made up of three trade officials ruled that the U.S. law is a violation of the WTO’s legally binding “Technical Barrier to Trade” agreement. The ruling is final. If the United States does not gut or change the law, the WTO can apply punitive sanctions, usually in the form of tariffs on U.S. exports. The ruling also casts into doubt the WT0-legality of other popular labeling laws.
After Hurricane Katrina washed over New Orleans, many survivors had virtually nothing left to lose. But the city’s teachers were then hit by the storm’s ripple effect: the loss of thousands of jobs in the tattered school system. Recently, a civil district court ruled that the state had effectively robbed thousands of school employees of funds that were supposed to help tide them over as the city recovered.
After Katrina, the New York Timesreports, most New Orleans schools were taken over by the state’s Recovery School District, which absorbed a stream of federal aid while the local school board was left impoverished:
In December 2005, the local school board, with few schools and little money in its control, passed a resolution firing 7,500 school employees, who at that time had been on “disaster leave without pay,” an employment status that Judge Julien found in her decision to be “fictional.” She concluded that the state was liable for rendering the local board unable to fulfill its contractual obligations to its workers.
The ruling could lead to major payments to teachers whose careers and wages were upended by the purge. But aside from recompense for “disaster leave,” New Orleans public schools will remain adrift in a flood of drastic reforms. After Katrina, the city became an incubator for non-unionized charter schools and “experimental” restructuring plans.
When rich countries like the U.S., Japan, and NATO nations get together periodically to discuss the future of development funding for Afghanistan, who represents the interests of women and children who actually live there? Mostly men.
Even though research shows that durable security accords responsive to real conditions for civilians in war zones require women’s participation in the planning stages. Even though United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 recognized this reality, and called for significant numbers of women to be present in all security talks.
On July 8-9 in Tokyo governments, international organizations, and other major donors will meet to discuss and take on financial commitments for a ten year period after 2014. As global players discuss funding Afghanistan’s future development, will they continue the pattern of devoting 90% of funds to building the Afghan army and police forces? If they really want peace, they will invite Afghan women to the table and listen to their expert testimony on how to make Afghanistan a safe place for them and their families.
In 2005 while George W. Bush still sat in the Oval Office, James Bamford penned this article for the New York Times Week in Review titled The Agency That Could Be Big Brother. Mr. Bamford, the author of “Puzzle Palace” and “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency“, wrote about the National Security Agency which was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. This agency is now the largest of the security agencies surpassing the CIA and other spy organizations. And it is still growing. The agency now has sites all over the US and around the globe and we have no idea what their budget is or for that matter what they are doing with all that information. In 2005, controversy over whether the Pres. Bush broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court (FISA) and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens had provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment. Now today, Pres. Barack Obama, a Democrat, expands the NSA’a power and there is not silence, but support from the Democrats. We don’t even know how much is spent by the NSA since their budget is classified. Heh, Congress doesn’t know either. But I digress.
Columnist David Sirota wrote in the Seattle Times that the NSA now claims that “it can’t tell Congress about its activities violating the privacy of Americans because doing so might violate Americans’ privacy”.
In a letter to senators Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mark Udall, D-Colo., the agency wrote: “(A) review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.” [..]
So why would the NSA nonetheless refuse to provide one? Most likely because such an estimate would be a number so big as to become a political problem for the national-security establishment.
According to the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, “The U.S. government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001.”
That’s right, millions – and that’s merely what happened with one of many programs over the last decade.
Moving forward, Wired notes that the NSA is building the “Utah Data Center” – “a project of immense secrecy” designed “to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.”
Appearing at the Socialism 2012 conference in Chicago, Salon.com contributing editor and civil rights lawyer, Glenn Greenwald gave a speech on Challenging the Surveillance State. Glen suggests that if you can’t watch all four videos the last one about the harms from ubiquitous surveillance is the most important one. He also points out FDL’s Kevin Gosztola’s excellent commentary and summation of the speech.
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Marcus Agius, the chairman of Barclays, resigned on Monday, saying “the buck stops with me.” His was the first departure since the British bank agreed last week to pay $450 million to settle findings that, from 2005 to 2009, it had tried to rig benchmark interest rates to benefit its own bottom line. [..]
The rates in question – the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and the Euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor – are used to determine the borrowing rates for consumers and companies, including some $10 trillion in mortgages, student loans and credit cards. The rates are also linked to an estimated $700 trillion market in derivatives, which banks buy and sell on a daily basis. If these rates are rigged, markets are rigged – against bank customers, like everyday borrowers, and against parties on the other side of a bank’s derivatives deals, like pension funds.
If Europe continues its steady march to financial depression and collapse of the Euro, no politician will be more to blame than German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Last week, Merkel repeated the same pattern that has characterized her behavior since the sovereign debt crisis began — resisting sensible reforms until the costs of delay became overwhelming, and then reversing course 180 degrees only after the damage was far greater than necessary. [..]
Merkel, characteristically, still opposes any respite for the suffering Greeks. It is up to the rest of Europe to isolate her again so that she can reverse course citing changed circumstances. Nor is Merkel willing to seriously rein in the financial speculation against government bonds that turns moderate budgetary problems into dire crisis. This, too, will take the resolve of wiser leaders.
The election of 2012 raises two perplexing questions. The first is how the GOP could put up someone for president who so brazenly epitomizes the excesses of casino capitalism that have nearly destroyed the economy and overwhelmed our democracy. The second is why the Democrats have failed to point this out. [..]
Part of the answer, surely, is that elected Democrats are still almost as beholden to the wealthy for campaign funds as the Republicans, and don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them. Wall Street can give most of its largesse to Romney this year and still have enough left over to tame many influential Democrats (look at the outcry from some of them when the White House took on Bain Capital).
As the presidential election builds up steam, the Washington elites in both parties are actively scheming to find ways to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for retired workers. The media have widely reported on efforts to slip through a version of the deficit reduction plan developed by Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson. Since the vast majority of voters across the political spectrum reject cuts to these programs, the Washington insiders hope to spring this one on us after the election, when the public will have no say.
That is the sort of anti-democratic behavior we expect from elites who naturally want to protect their own interests. Of course, the rest of us are more concerned about the well-being of the country as a whole rather than preserving the wealth of the richest 1 percent.
IF ever there were an election preordained as a result of economic performance, it would be Mexico’s election on Sunday. The ruling National Action Party, or PAN, was destined to lose because it had presided over profound economic failure for 11 years. Almost any government in world would have lost under such circumstances.
Commentators, focused on the six-year-old drug war, have largely neglected to note the depth of Mexico’s economic problems. Let’s start with the basics: Since 2000, when the PAN was first elected, income per person in Mexico has grown by just 0.9 percent annually. This is terrible for a developing country, and less than half the rate of growth of the Latin American region during this period – which was itself not stellar. If we just look at per capita growth since the last election, in 2006, Mexico finishes dead last of all the countries in Latin America.
Nearly 1 million Floridians will be denied access to Medicaid they would have otherwise received under the Affordable Care Act if Governor Rick Scott gets his way. The Supreme Court ruling last week on the law made it easier for states to opt out of an expansion, and Sunday night the governor’s office e-mailed a statement from Scott that “since Florida is legally allowed to opt out, that’s the right decision for our citizens.” [..]
But now hospitals in South Carolina and Florida are looking at a rate reduction without the corresponding increase in Medicaid coverage.
Hospital lobbies are always powerful in state politics, and could yet convince state legislators to buck the ideological governors and support an expansion. Combine the big industry money with a powerful narrative about denying coverage to hundreds of thousands of people, plus the diminishing returns of rallying against Obamacare-particularly after the fall elections-and by 2014 it’s possible Florida, South Carolina and other states will end up participating. They’re just going to make a lot of noise first.
The past Sunday constitutional lawyer and contributing editor at Salon.com Glenn Greenwald appeared with Chris Hayes on MSNBC’s “Up with Chis Hayes”to discuss the history of anonymous speech in politics and debate whether spending money is an exercise of free speech. The other guests on the panel are Maria Hinojosa, anchor of NPR’s Latino USA and president of Futuro Media Group; Rep. Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont and member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee; and Heather McGhee, vice president of policy and research at the progressive think tank Demos.
Glenn also penned a scathing piece on Sen. Diane Feinstein’s (D-CA) attack on our First Amendment rights using, oh noes!, Terror! as an excuse. Glenn makes the point that Feinstein’s outrage over Julian Assange and Wikileaks is tantamount to an attack of freedom of the press.
The supreme Senate defender of state secrecy and the Surveillance State, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, yesterday issued a statement to Australia’s largest newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, demanding (once again) the prosecution of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. To see how hostile Feinstein is to basic press freedoms, permit me to change “Assange” each time it appears in her statement to “The New York Times“:
The head of the US Senate’s powerful intelligence oversight committee has renewed calls for [The New York Times] to be prosecuted for espionage. . . .
“I believe [The New York Times] has knowingly obtained and disseminated classified information which could cause injury to the United States,” the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dianne Feinstein, said in a written statement provided to the Herald. “[It] has caused serious harm to US national security, and [] should be prosecuted accordingly.”
As EFF’s Trevor Timm noted, there is no sense in which Feinstein’s denunciation applies to WikiLeaks but not to The New York Times (and, for that matter, senior Obama officials). Indeed, unlike WikiLeaks, which has never done so, The New York Times has repeatedly published Top Secret information. That’s why the prosecution that Feinstein demands for WikiLeaks would be the gravest threat to press freedom and basic transparency in decades. Feinstein’s decades-long record in the Senate strongly suggest that she would perceive these severe threats to press freedom as a benefit rather than drawback to her prosecution designs.
Under Sen. Feinstein’s premise we should have prosecuted Woodward and Bernstein and every other reporter who has exposed government wrong doing. I wonder is she would like to take on Dick Cheney for outing a CIA agent to get us into a war based on a lie, the consequences of which we will never know.
In 2005 while George W. Bush still sat in the Oval Office, James Bamford penned this article for the New York Times Week in Review titled
Recent Comments