zaterdag 20 juni 2015

Geen Jorwert zonder Brussel 30

Het AD meldt zijn lezers vanochtend:

Volgens het Oostenrijkse onderzoeksinstituut voor Economie Wifo staan er in Europa meer dan twee miljoen banen op de tocht en loopt de economische schade mogelijk op tot 100 miljard. De Europese santjes tegen Rusland en de reactie uit Moskou daarop, spelen een doorslaggevende rol in de dieper worden crisis, zeggen economen.

Hillary Clinton's Wall Street

Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Address

Friday, 19 June 2015 00:00 By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | News Analysis

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Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks to reporters at a state launch party for her presidential campaign, in Concord, N.H., June 15, 2015. (Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist/The New York Times)

“Perfect! Perfect!” exclaimed a woman looking around at the Four Freedoms Park on New York City’s Roosevelt Island as a large crowd waited for Hillary Clinton to announce her presidential candidacy last weekend.

And so it was. Secretary Clinton had chosen an ideal setting to link her destiny to the founding father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the political giant whose famous proclamation in 1941 of the Four Freedoms – freedom of speech and worship, freedom from fear and want — defined the essence of American ideals after a devastating economic disaster and as we prepared to enter a great world war.

“Perfect! Perfect!” Except for one thing — something the exultant spectator packed in the crowd at ground level might not have been able to see. As the camera pushed in toward the horizon behind Clinton, there it was, beyond the island and across the water: the skyline of Wall Street, the embodiment of financial might and its moguls and barons – “the malefactors of great wealth,” as his cousin Teddy called them – that FDR took on in his fight to save democracy from unbridled greed, and capitalism from itself.

As Clinton spoke — “Prosperity can’t be just for CEOs and hedge fund managers” and “Democracy can’t be just for billionaires and corporations” — you could imagine the juxtaposition to have been deliberate, staged by her managers to superimpose her rhetorical defiance of plutocracy against its glass and steel castles off in the distance. No doubt she had thrown around herself this cloak of populism because it is the current fashion – a superb and timely one – among many Democrats, especially progressives battling the oxymoronic Wall Street Democrats who in the past thirty years hijacked FDR’s party and severed it from its working class roots.

So it was refreshing to see her sally forth to do battle with the hyenas of Wall Street (as one noted hedge fund manager candidly described his ilk) proclaiming that, “The financial industry and many multinational corporations have created huge wealth for a few by focusing too much on short-term profit and too little on long-term value, too much on complex trading schemes and stock buybacks, too little on investments in new businesses, jobs, and fair compensation.”

Her loyalists were presenting her to us as the reincarnation of the young woman she was in the seventies and eighties, the student who wrote her senior thesis on the organizer Saul Alinsky, interned at a fearless and controversial civil rights law firm,worked as an attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund, investigated the treatment of migrant workers and chaired the board of the Legal Services Corporation.

Yet you could also wonder if they had been unaware of another possible reading of the metaphor presented by the sight of Roosevelt Island against the skyline of Wall Street — something her handlers didn’t intend: a mockery of the words she was speaking at that very minute.

She is, after all, a favorite of the giant banks, the CEOs and hedge funds she now was castigating. Between 2009 and 2014, Clinton’s list of top 20 donors starts out with Citigroup and includes JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, whose chief Lloyd Blankfein has invested in Clinton’s son-in-law’s boutique hedge fund. These donors are, as the website Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt notes, “the ones who gamed the system by buying politicians like her and then proceeded to burn the economy down to dust and ash while making a financial killing in the process.”

They’re also among the deep-pocket outfits that paid for speeches and appearances by Hillary or Bill Clinton to the tune of more than $125 million since they left the White House in 2001. It could hardly escape some in that crowd on Roosevelt Island, catching a glimpse of the towers of power and might across the river: Can we really expect someone so deeply tethered to the financial and business class – who moves so often and so easily among its swells – to fight hard to check their predatory appetites, dismantle their control of Congress, and stand up for the working people who are their prey?

Consider the two Canadian banks with financial ties to the Keystone XL pipeline that fully or partially paid for eight speeches by Hillary Clinton. Or her $3.2 million in lecture fees from the tech sector. Or the more than $2.5 million in paid speeches for companies and groups lobbying for fast-track trade. According to TIME magazine and the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2014, “Almost half of the money from Hillary Clinton’s speaking engagements came from corporations and advocacy groups that were lobbying Congress at the same time… In all, the corporations and trade groups that Clinton spoke to in 2014 spent $72.5 million lobbying Congress that same year.”

Then look at David Sirota’s recent reporting for the International Business Times, especially the revelation that while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, her department “approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data… nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.”

Those nations include Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar, each of which “gained State Department clearance to buy caches of American-made weapons even as the department singled them out for a range of alleged ills, from corruption to restrictions on civil liberties to violent crackdowns against political opponents.”

Further, American defense contractors like Boeing and Lockheed who sold those arms and their delivery systems also shelled out heavily to the $2 billion Clinton Foundation and the Clinton family. According to Sirota, “In all, governments and corporations involved in the arms deals approved by Clinton’s State Department have delivered between $54 million and $141 million to the Clinton Foundation as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to the Clinton family, according to foundation and State Department records. The Clinton Foundation publishes only a rough range of individual contributors’ donations, making a more precise accounting impossible.”

The Washington Post reports that among the approximately 200,000 contributors there have also been donations from many other countries and corporations, overseas and domestic business leaders, the odious Blackwater Training Center, and even Rupert Murdoch of celebrity phone hacking fame.

Meredith McGehee, policy director of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, told David Sirota: “The word was out to these groups that one of the best ways to gain access and influence with the Clintons was to give to this foundation.”

We pause here to note: All of these donations were apparently legal, and as others have written, at least we know who was doling out the cash, in contrast to those anonymous sources secretly channeling millions in “dark money” to the chosen candidates of the super rich. In The Atlantic, Lawrence Lessig, campaign finance reform activist and director of Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics put it well:

The question is not whether Hillary Clinton is a criminal. Of course she is not. The question is whether she can carry the mantle of a reformer. Can she really stand above the cesspool that is Washington — filled not with criminals but with decent people inside a corrupted system trying to do what they think is good — and say, this system must change. And does she really see the change that’s needed, when for the last 15 years, she has apparently lived a life that seems all but oblivious to exactly Washington’s problem.

We see “exactly Washington’s problem” in how, during the 1990s, Bill Clinton became the willing agent of Wall Street’s push to deregulate, a collaboration that enriched the bankers but eventually cost millions of Americans their homes, jobs, and pensions.

Thanks to documents that came to light last year (one even has a handwritten note attached that reads: “Please eat this paper after you have read this.”), we understand more clearly how a small coterie of insiders maneuvered to get President Clinton to support repeal of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act that had long protected depositors from being victimized by bank speculators gambling with their savings. Repeal led to a wave of Wall Street mergers.

As you can read in stories by Dan Roberts in The Guardian and Pam and Russ Martens online, the ringleader of the effort was Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, who breathlessly persuaded the president to sign the repeal and soon left office to join Citigroup, the bank that turned out to be the primary beneficiary of the deal. When it overreached and collapsed, Citigroup received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of U.S. finance. Rubin, meanwhile, earned $126 million from the bank over ten years.

According to The New York Times, Rubin “remains a crucial kingmaker in Democratic policy circles” and, as an adviser to the Clintons, “will play an essential role in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president…”

Hillary Clinton, as a young Methodist growing up in Park Ridge, Illinois, was weaned on the social ethics of John Wesley, a founder of Methodism and a courageous champion of the poor and needy; we have her word for it and the witness of others. “Do all the good you can,” the Methodist saying goes, “in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”

But over time, Hillary Clinton achieved superstar status among Washington’s acculturated class – that swollen colony of permanent denizens of our capital who may have come from the hinterlands but can hardly resist the seductive ways of a new and different culture in which the prevailing mindset is: It’s important to do good but more important to do well.

Lawrence Lessig believes she is an unlikely reformer – “which is precisely why she might be a particularly effective one.” But her way of life has marinated for a long time now in the culture of wealth, influence, and power — and a way of thinking engrained deeply in our political ethos, one in which one’s own power in democracy is more important than democracy itself.

It will take a conversion worthy of John Wesley to wrest free of that mindset, but God forbid we should have to live with another White House eclipsed by the skyline of Wall Street.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

MICHAEL WINSHIP

Michael Winship is senior writer of the new weekly public affairs program, "Moyers & Company," airing on public television. Check local air times or comment at www.BillMoyers.com.

BILL MOYERS

A broadcast journalist for more than four decades, Bill Moyers has been recognized as one of the unique voices of our times, one that resonates with multiple generations. In 2012, at the age of 77, Moyers begins his latest media venture with the launch of "Moyers & Company." With his wife and creative partner, Judith Davidson Moyers, Bill Moyers has produced such groundbreaking public affairs series as "NOW with Bill Moyers" (2002-2005) and "Bill Moyers Journal" (2007-2010).

For his work, Moyers has received more than 30 Emmys, two prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, nine Peabodys, and three George Polk Awards. Moyers' most recent book, "Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues," was published in May 2011. He currently serves as president of the Schumann Media Center, a nonprofit organization that supports independent journalism.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31474-hillary-clinton-s-wall-street-address

vrijdag 19 juni 2015

TPP 10

William Rivers Pitt | The Scorpions, the Frogs and the TPP: Prepare to Be Stung

Thursday, 18 June 2015 00:00 By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed

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House Speaker John Boehner talks to reporters about support in the House to give President Barack Obama power to accelerate a broad trade accord with Asia, on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 13, 2015. The House has just passed President Obama's bill giving him fast-track trade authority by a slim margin of 218 to 208. (Photo: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)

An Aesop fable, "The Scorpion and the Frog," has been much on my mind today. Short version: A scorpion asked a frog to carry him across a stream. "How do I know you won't sting me?" asked the frog. "Because if I do," replied the scorpion, "I will die, too." Halfway across the stream, however, the scorpion stung the frog. As they sank to their mutual doom, the frog gasped, "Why?" The scorpion replied, "Because it is my nature."

As I watched the House pass President Obama's bill giving him fast-track trade authority (TPA) by a slim margin of 218 to 208, I thought to myself, "Here are the scorpions, and we are the frogs."

Some 28 Democrats voted in favor of it, while nearly twice that number of Republicans, fifty, voted against it. The bill allows the president to submit trade agreements to Congress for a straight vote with no amendments attached. It is, in every respect, the first step toward the president's ultimate goal: passage of the dangerous, foolish, destructive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement.

Refresher: The TPP is based on the NAFTA model, but with vastly broader powers and implications. NAFTA was an astonishing job-killer in the US, and the TPP will be worse. It is a massive corporate power grab by multi-national corporations whose control, upon passage, over every aspect of our lives will be multiplied a hundred-fold. Food, medicine, the internet, and especially jobs will be profoundly affected, and if the corporations are challenged, they can seek redress in a trade court whose power will supersede US laws.

The fast-track bill was shot to pieces last week through some fairly clever maneuvering by the Democrats. Packaged in that vote with the TPA was a program going by the nauseating euphemism "Trade Adjustment Assistance," or TAA (more on that in a moment). Even though most Democrats support the TAA, they voted it down with Republican help as a means of upending the whole rowboat, and it worked ... until today, when the TPA was brought to a vote again, but without the TAA attached, and it passed.

A word on this "Trade Adjustment Assistance" thing. Let's say you work for a software company doing customer assistance over the phone. You make a decent living and get health benefits. You go to work one day and find a note on your desk informing you that, thanks to the wonder of the TPP, your job is being air-mailed to the Pacific Rim. Please clean out your desk by the end of the day, here's a form for COBRA, and thank you for your service. You go looking for a new job, only to find that every position in your field has also crossed the ocean.

That's not outsourcing, or getting laid off, or getting royally screwed. It's "Trade Adjustment." There would be "assistance" for you, but the folks on the Hill don't seem interested in passing that portion of the deal. It was more important to get the big deal done, and leave the little deal - you, your livelihood, your future - for some nebulous "later." They promised they would ... and if we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.

That's not some idle fantasy, mind you. Despite all the happy talk from the president and his suddenly enthusiastic Republican allies about the TPP creating jobs for US workers, the very existence of a "Trade Adjustment Assistance" bill gives vivid lie to their hyper-optimistic hogwash. That bill exists because they know, as sure as little fishes swim in the sea, that the TPP will be a job-killer, and they created an "Assistance" plan as some sort of half-assed Band-Aid for all the people who will be streeted if this thing comes to be ... but they haven't passed it. Go figure.

Now, as the logic goes, this looks to be an uphill battle across the board. The GOP-dominated Senate must gather two 60-vote majorities to be able to pass the TPA and TAA separately, bind them together with baling wire, and send this lump of stupid back to the House for yet another vote, where it will have to be reconciled and passed again. Everyone from Mitch McConnell to Lindsey Graham to the sink in the Senate men's room is swearing on stacks of Bibles that they won't pass the former without the latter, and the president has likewise sworn he won't sign the former without the latter.

I trust those sentiments about exactly as far as I can spit a bowling ball. President Obama has stapled his "legacy" to this abomination, and congressional Republicans are positively gleeful: They get to look "bipartisan" in an election season, and by golly gee, a whole slew of their friends - along with the friends of a slew of corporate-entity Democrats - will be swimming in new revenues if this thing passes. All that cheap labor on the other side of the ocean ... manna from Heaven, for them.

If you find my lack of trust misplaced, feature this: Malaysia, one of the countries included in the TPP deal, is considered a "Tier 3" offender on the global scale measuring human trafficking. Other Tier 3 countries include Syria, Iran and North Korea. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) drafted and passed out of committee an amendment to the TPP that would bar Tier 3 nations from participating in the trade deal.

The White House called that amendment a "deal-breaker," because they want Malaysia included. They applied great pressure, Menendez folded, and the amendment was watered down to say only that Tier 3 countries would have to make "concrete efforts" to stop human trafficking, otherwise known more commonly as slavery.

President Obama and his newfound Republican allies are so bent on getting this deal done that they will turn their backs on rampant, brutal slavery with some tepid language tossed over their shoulder about "efforts." If you think a little thing like assistance for US workers who lose their jobs to this agreement will stop them, I have a nifty bridge over San Francisco Bay to sell you. They know the TPP will cost US jobs, and that it throws a wink and a nod at human trafficking abroad, and they simply don't care.

Who are the scorpions, and who are the frogs? Turn on the news. You'll figure it out pretty quick.

We're about to get stung. After all, it is their nature.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

WILLIAM RIVERS PITT

William Rivers Pitt is Truthout's senior editor and lead columnist. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know, The Greatest Sedition Is Silence and House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation. His fourth book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co-written with Dahr Jamail, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in New Hampshire.

TPP Stands For Totalitarian Pacific Partnership

TPP Is Not a Trade Fight—It’s a Fight for Democracy

The more we know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership the more we see what a raw deal it is for your democratic rights. It's time for a comprehensive movement to restore a forward-looking people's politics.

Published: June 18, 2015 | Authors: Jim Hightower | NationofChange | Op-Ed

White House spokesperson Josh Earnest dismissed it as a procedural snafu, and it was — but not in the way he meant.

The “it” was the stunning June 12 vote last week in the House of Representatives that wrecked that high-balling freight train called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. TPP is the global trade scam that was being railroaded through Congress, carrying an unbelievably odious load of freight that would give more power to Big Pharma, Wall Street, Walmart, Big Oil frackers, Silicon Valley monopolists, agribusiness giants, climate change deniers, job exporters, exploiters of labor and other multinational corporate elites.

None other than President Obama was running this locomotive, and GOP congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner were the chief freight handlers. With the full corporate establishment onboard the TPP, its passage was a done deal. Except for one unforeseen obstacle: you. And you. And you. In other words, the American people!

The more you learned about what the TPP is carrying, the more you realized what a raw deal it is for your democratic rights, your jobs, income, health, environment, food, etc. — so the more involved you got in the StopTheTPP.org movement. “You The People” rose up in nearly every congressional district, and even though the national media didn’t notice you, Congress did. Thus, the done deal derailed — to the shock of Corporados and their politicos, nearly 70 percent of the House voted with the people against the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Of course Obama & Co. are trying to put their railroad job back on track, but that’ll be a heavy lift. The wreck of the TPP was not due to a glitch in legislative procedure, but to the establishment’s procedural miscalculation that we Americans will just sit still as it autocratically uses secrecy and lies to snatch away our democratic sovereignty.

The contrived wisdom foisted on us by the acolytes of the Holy Corporate Order is that ordinary folks can’t stop the Powers That Be from enthroning both an economic oligarchy and political plutocracy over us.

Indeed, the power elites on Wall Street, in Washington and up in the corporate suites got a major comeuppance when the U.S. House rejected their TPP scheme last Friday. The Trans-Pacific Partnership masqueraded as a free trade agreement, but of the 30 chapters of this thousand-page document, only six deal with trade — the other 24 add up to a book of anti-democratic horrors, further rigging the system to enrich the global corporate elite, while ensuring ever-widening inequities for the rest of us.But as a friend of mine puts it: “Those who say it can’t be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”

Yet, the elites got a comeuppance because…well, because the grassroots literally came up. Such smart, savvy and scrappy public interest champions as Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and Larry Cohen of the Communications Workers of America dug out the details of TPP’s secret power play and went to the countryside to alert regular Americans. They and many, many others strategized, organized and mobilized, creating a mass coalition to oppose the entrenchment of what would be a global corporate kleptocracy. This was building beneath the radar of the clueless establishment media, which continue to assert that opposition to the TPP is coming from labor unions. Labor has certainly been key, but it is hardly alone, for environmental groups, small businesses, mayors, state officials, religious leaders, family farm advocates and a wide array of other grassroots activists have enlisted in the crucial democratic cause.

What we have here is something big, something important for the long run: The beginning of a cohesive, comprehensive movement to restore a forward-looking people’s politics based on the egalitarian principle that we’re all in this together.

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/06/18/tpp-is-not-a-trade-fight-its-a-fight-for-democracy/

Neoliberal Lies

David Brooks Declares War on 'Democratic Tea Party'--Unarmed With Facts

The Washington chattering class is really upset that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) looks like it’s going down. David Brooks pulled out all the stops, using his New York Times column (6/16/15) to yell at “Tea Party” Democrats for not supporting the fast-track authority that would facilitate passage of the TPP.
Unfortunately, Brooks was largely unarmed with facts when it came to the attack. To start, he tells readers;

The North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, probably didn’t affect the American economy too much. But the Mexican economy has taken off. With more opportunities, Mexican workers feel less need to sneak into the US.

If the Mexican economy has taken off since NAFTA, they managed to conceal this fact from the IMF and other keepers of official statistics. Here is the path of per capita GDP in the United States and Mexico post-NAFTA:

Source: International Monetary Fund.

Developing countries like Mexico are supposed to have more rapid growth than rich countries like the United States. Instead, the gap has increased by about 5 percentage points, as growth in the US has exceeded growth in Mexico since NAFTA took effect. (The chart shows growth in international dollars, not adjusted for inflation.)
Brooks also seems to be inventive in his assessment of patterns of immigration. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of Mexican immigrants to the United States rose from 4.3 million in 1990 to 11.7 million by 2010.
Okay, so maybe Brooks didn’t get NAFTA quite right; let’s see what else he has.

In Asia, the American-led open trade era has created the greatest reduction in poverty in human history. The Pacific trade deal would lift the living standards of the poorest Asians, especially the 90 million people of Vietnam.

Hmmm. Can we really call China and India’s development policies “American-led”? I suspect the people of these huge countries would take some offense at that characterization. Furthermore, neither has come close to following the “Washington Consensus” development path. As far as Vietnam, its per capita income has grown at a 4.8 percent annual rate over the last decade. It doesn’t look like it is waiting for Congress to approve the TPP to save them.
Then we have David Brooks quoting Tyler Cowan:

Do you get that, progressives? Poorest country = biggest gainer. Isn’t that what we are looking for?

Well, the data may not agree with Mr. Cowan here, at least if we take post-NAFTA Mexico as our model.

According to a survey by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, 83 percent of the nation’s leading economists believe that trade deals have been good for most Americans. That’s not quite the level of consensus on man-made global warming, but it is close.

Let’s see–that would be 83 percent of people who did not see the $8 trillion housing bubble that crashed the economy. I hope that the track record of the scientists who write on global warming is a bit better.
Then we have the specific projection of the gains from TPP:

The authoritative study on the Pacific trade deal, by Peter Petri, Michael Plummer and Fan Zhai, suggests it would raise US incomes by 0.4 percent per year by 2025.

Well, it may not be “authoritative,” but it is certainly the study showing the largest gains: approximately two months of normal growth–a one-time gain, not year after year–which will be felt by around 2027, after the TPP is fully implemented. The United States Department of Agriculture was somewhat less optimistic, projecting gains to GDP of approximately zero.
Both of these studies may be overly optimistic in projections of aggregate gains. (They say nothing about distribution.) Neither takes account of higher prices for drugs and other items that would be affected by the stronger and longer patent and copyright protection that is a main part of the TPP.
Yes, that is “protection,” as in protectionism. These government granted monopolies raise the price of the protected items far above the free-market price. To take one example that has been in the news lately, the Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi sell for $84,000 for a 3-month course of treatment in the United States. A high-quality generic version is sold profitably in India for less than $1,000.
It is estimated that 3 million people in the United States have Hepatitis C. If we could give them all the generic drug rather than pay for the patent-protected version in the US, the savings would be over $240 billion (@ 1.3 percent of GDP). And that is just one drug.
In this case, the patent protection has the same effect as putting a 10,000 percent tariff on the price of the drug. And all good economists know how bad tariffs are. In addition to raising the price of the product, they encourage corruption, like lying about the safety and effectiveness of protected drugs. It is very likely that a model that included the increased costs associated with stronger and longer patent and copyright protection would show the TPP a loser in terms of GDP growth.
Then we have Brooks telling us to give up on manufacturing jobs:

Democrats point out that some workers have been hurt by trade deals. And that’s true. Most manufacturing job losses have been caused by technological improvements.But those manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back.
The best way forward is to increase the number of high-quality jobs in the service sector.

Well, some of us don’t believe in picking winners and losers like Mr. Brooks, but one thing we could do is get a more competitive dollar by discouraging other countries from propping up its value against their own currencies. This is the main factor behind the $500 billion (@ 3 percent of GDP) annual trade deficit in the United States. If the trade deficit were closer to balanced, it would bring back millions of the manufacturing jobs that Brooks apparently does not like. It would also move the economy back toward full employment, strengthening the labor market more generally.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration has not made addressing the trade deficit a priority. (Companies like Walmart and GE benefit from an over-valued dollar, since it allows them to buy and/or produce goods cheaply abroad.) It opted not to make currency values a part of the TPP.
Then, sensing that his economic arguments are likely to fail, Brooks pulls out the bomb (emphasis in original):

Imperil world peace. The Pacific region will either be organized by American rules or Chinese rules. By voting against the trade deal, Democrats went a long way toward guaranteeing that Chinese rules will dominate.

Got that–the Chinese are coming. So if we don’t pass a trade pact that will make the countries of Pacific region pay more for our drugs and other protected products, they will all turn to China.
Are you scared yet?
OK, look for more of these hysterical diatribes as the One Percent tries their best to sell the TPP. They have tons of money and power, so they may pull it off, but at least we get the entertainment value of these people making fools of themselves.

Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press(6/11/15).
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or to public editor Margaret Sullivan at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @Sulliview). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

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Pope Francis' Revolution

With Bernie Sanders calling for a political revolution based on economic fairness, I thought this from Paul Ferrell at MarketWatch, a Murdoch-owned Dow Jones website, was interesting. Read the whole thing, but here are a few teasers:

Mark your calendar: June 18. That’s launch day for Pope Francis’s historic anticapitalist revolution, a multitargeted global revolution against out-of-control free-market capitalism driven by consumerism, against destruction of the planet’s environment, climate and natural resources for personal profits and against the greediest science deniers.
Translated bluntly, stripped of all the euphemisms and his charm, that will be the loud-and-clear message of Pope Francis’ historic encyclical coming on June 18. Pope Francis has a grand mission here on Earth, and he gives no quarter, hammering home a very simple message with no wiggle room for compromise of his principles: ‘If we destroy God’s Creation, it will destroy us,” our human civilization here on Planet Earth.

snip

The fact is the pontiff is already building an army of billions, in the same spirit as Gandhi, King and Marx. These are revolutionary times. Deny it all you want, but the global zeitgeist has thrust the pope in front of a global movement, focusing, inspiring, leading billions. Future historians will call Pope Francis the “Great 21st Century Revolutionary.”

Yes, our upbeat, ever-smiling Pope Francis. As a former boxer, he loves a good match. And he’s going to get one. He is encouraging rebellion against super-rich capitalists, against fossil-fuel power-players, conservative politicians and the 67 billionaires who already own more than half the assets of the planet.

That’s the biggest reason Pope Francis is scaring the hell out of the GOP, Big Oil, the Koch Empire, Massey Coal, every other fossil-fuel billionaire and more than a hundred million climate-denying capitalists and conservatives. Their biggest fear: They’re deeply afraid the pope has started the ball rolling and they can’t stop it.

He then lists eight of "pope’s key warning punches edited in the Catholic Climate Covenant, from his “Apostolic Exhortation,” and in London’s Guardian and other news sources ..." I'll just list the headers, but it's the detailed quotes here that is most interesting:

1. Capitalism is threatening the survival of human civilization
2. Capitalism is destroying nonrenewable resources for personal gain
3. Capitalism has lost its ethical code, has no moral compass
4. Capitalists worship the golden calf of a money god
5. Capitalists pursuit of personal wealth destroys the common good
6. Capitalism has no respect for Earth’s natural environment
7. Capitalists only see the working class as consumers and machine tools
8. Capitalism is killing our planet, our civilization and the people

I like the smell of revolution in the morning, don't you?

ORIGINALLY POSTED TO ACCUMBENS ON SAT JUN 13, 2015 AT 04:22 PM PDT.

ALSO REPUBLISHED BY STREET PROPHETS , ANGLICAN KOSSACKS, AND I ♥ DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM.

donderdag 18 juni 2015

GEEN STEDENBAND MET TEL AVIV 3

Sonja18 juni 2015 21:31:00 CEST

Ronny Naftaniel is dan wel weg bij het CIDI, maar hij gaat gewoon door, deze keer geholpen door het Parool:

"Het is bizar om deze generatie inwoners van Tel Aviv de vlucht van circa twintigduizend Palestijnen uit Jaffa, 68 jaar geleden, aan te wrijven. Een vlucht die nota bene veroorzaakt werd doordat de Palestijnen zich gewapenderhand keerden tegen de VN-beslissing zowel een Joodse als een Palestijnse staat op te richten."

De werkelijkheid: Jaffa: from eminence to ethnic cleansing

D E _ O N E I N D I G E _ O O R L O G
d o o r _ S t a n _ v a n _ H o u c k e

Interview met Sami Abou-Shehadeh

'Wij moeten telkens onze eigen geschiedenis en herkomst ontkennen.'

Sami Abou-Shehadeh is 31 jaar, student geschiedenis en hij verzamelt gegevens over Jaffa en leidt ons rond in het oude havengebied.

Na ons door het oude Palestijnse Jaffa te hebben geleid, met zijn haven, vervallen gebouwen, gerenoveerde gebouwen en nieuwbouw voor joodse yuppen, eten we in een Palestijnse visrestaurant. Jaffa behoorde samen met Haifa tot de twee belangrijke havens van Palestina. Hoewel Jaffa door de Verenigde Naties was toegewezen aan de toekomstige Palestijnse staat werd de hele stad in 1948 etnisch gezuiverd. Van de ongeveer 70.000 Palestijnen bleven er slechts 3.650 achter, die allen in de oude buurt rond de haven onderdak zochten. Sami Abou-Shehadeh:

‘De Palestijnen die op de of andere reden wisten te blijven, kwamen tot 1966 onder militair bestuur te staan. Deze buurt werd omheind en de Europese joden die de huizen van de verdreven Palestijnen in bezit hadden genomen, noemde het deel waar de Palestijnen woonden dan ook het getto. Die herkenden dat onmiddellijk. Als je hier nu vraagt naar het getto word je naar deze buurt verwezen. De etnische zuivering was een immens traumatische gebeurtenis voor de Palestijnse gemeenschap, die diepe sporen heeft nagelaten. In 1948 verloren de Palestijnse vluchtelingen van Jaffa niet alleen de meerderheid en hun gemeenschap, ze verloren ook hun vaderland en in één klap al hun bezittingen. Een jaar later verloor ook het handjevol achterblijvers hun bezit. Toen volgde in 1950 de zogeheten ‘wet van het bezit van afwezigen’ waarbij de staat Israël alle eigendommen in beslag kon nemen van Palestijnen die naar het buitenland waren verdreven. Het was simpelweg gelegaliseerde diefstal. Mijn familie bijvoorbeeld die bezit had in een dorp hier vlakbij werd gedwongen in het getto te blijven onder militair bewind en mocht niet vrij reizen. De Israëlische overheid concludeerde vervolgens dat wij niet op ons land waren en confisqueerde ons bezit. Ik kom uit een boerenfamilie en een van mijn grootvaders, die spoedig daarna stierf, geloofde dat de ware genadeklap voor hem niet de Nakba zelf was, de etnische zuivering, maar het confisqueren van zijn land. Het was voor het eerst na jaren zwoegen dat hij een eigen boomgaard bezat en die verloor hij. Hij was volkomen rechteloos en heeft nooit begrepen hoe dat kon. Mijn grootvader was een gevangene geworden in zijn eigen land, hij mocht de amandelbomen niet meer zien bloeien, de geur van nat geregende aarde niet meer opsnuiven, hij kon de vogels niet meer door de lucht boven zijn land zien vliegen, kon de cicaden niet meer te keer horen gaan. Hij verloor zijn hele universum, net als de meeste anderen was zijn hele bestaan verbonden geweest aan de grond, hij leefde ervan, de aarde gaf hem zin en betekenis, de grond was alles, het was de werkelijkheid waarin hij geleefd had. Zijn hart brak. Ondertussen begon in het begin van de jaren vijftig de staat Israel Jaffa te bevolken met joodse immigranten en de Palestijnse achterblijvers zagen hoe hun bezit onder de nieuwkomers verdeeld werd zonder dat ze ook maar iets daartegen konden ondernemen. Volgens mij verklaren deze gebeurtenissen het feit dat er in de jaren vijftig en zestig zo’n hoog percentage criminaliteit bestond onder de Palestijnen in Jaffa. De samenleving was totaal ontwricht geraakt, vooral ook psychologisch. Men had de oorlog in 1948 verloren, vervolgens kon men in 1949 het eigen bezit niet verdedigen, en tenslotte plaatste de staat de joodse indringers, de vijand, niet alleen in hun eigen buurt, maar zelfs in hun eigen huis. Ze kregen joodse nieuwkomers ingekwartierd. U kunt zich voorstellen dat de overgrote meerderheid van de Arabische mannen met hun oriëntaals gevoel voor eer een geweldige psychologische dreun kregen. Ze waren niet in staat geweest hun vaderland te verdedigen, en ook niet hun bezit, en zelfs niet de huizen waarin ze woonden. Ze waren gebroken en raakten verslaafd aan de opium of alcohol of gokken. Die generatie is kapot gemaakt. Maar met de opkomst van de tweede generatie na de Nakba, de eerste studentengeneratie, begon er een verandering op te treden binnen de Palestijnse gemeenschap hier. Men werd zich bewust van het feit dat ook Palestijnen rechten hebben en dat we kunnen bogen op een rijke geschiedenis. Het probleem waarmee de Palestijnse buurt hier wordt geconfronteerd is dat sinds 1951 Jaffa onder het gemeentebestuur van Tel Aviv valt en alle stadsplanners joden uit Tel Aviv zijn. Zij besloten in de loop van de jaren zestig om het Palestijnse getto van Jaffa te slopen. De plaatselijke bevolking kreeg geen vergunning meer om hun huizen te renoveren of om bij te bouwen. Het moest volledig van de kaart geveegd worden, onzichtbaar worden gemaakt. Er moest een hypermoderne Rivièra voor in de plaats komen, een soort Côte d’Azur van het Midden Oosten. En daarmee zouden niet alleen alsnog alle Palestijnen worden verwijderd, er zou zo ook een definitief einde zijn gekomen aan de fysieke herinnering aan de Palestijnse historie in Jaffa.

Tussen 1975 en 1985 liet de gemeenteraad van Tel Aviv meer dan 3000 appartementen in de getto slopen. Het puin werd op het strand van Jaffa gestort om zo meer ruimte te maken voor nieuwbouw. Tien jaar lang werd daar ook huisvuil en allerlei rotzooi gedumpt. Ik herinner me dat als we er in de jaren tachtig gingen zwemmen de strandwacht meteen kwam aanrennen om ons weg te sturen vanwege het glas, het gif, en de ratten. Op een bepaald moment werd de illegale stortplaats niet meer geaccepteerd door de locale bewoners en ze begonnen een juridische procedure. Uiteindelijk besliste het Israëlisch Hoog Gerechtshof in 1986 dat het afgelopen moest zijn met die puinhoop. Het was een van de voorbeelden dat de plaatselijke Palestijnen mondiger zijn geworden en niet alles meer over hun kant laten gaan, zoals de eerste generatie deed. Maar die rechterlijke uitspraak werd al snel vergeten tot er zich in de jaren negentig ontploffingen voordeden in de vuilnisberg. Toen besefte de gemeenteraad dat daar niet gebouwd kon worden en kwam er een einde aan hun Rivièraproject. Nu hebben ze een aangepast plan. De gemeenteraad van Tel Aviv wil de arme en niet kapitaalkrachtige Palestijnen uit de buurt langs de kust weg hebben zodat de huizen kunnen worden gerenoveerd en worden verkocht aan rijke joden, die over de zee uit willen kijken. De gemeenteraad stelt dat dit niet de opzet is, maar dat dit nu eenmaal de werking is van de vrije markt. Zo zien we dat de vrije markt toch dat kan bereiken wat de joodse staat niet kon: het verdrijven van de laatste Palestijnen uit het getto van Jaffa. Ik las onlangs in de krant dat één vierkante meter in het noordelijk deel van deze buurt al 8000 dollar kost. Dus een gewone woning van 200 vierkante meter kost meer dan anderhalf miljoen dollar en niemand in de Palestijnse gemeenschap kan zich dit bedrag permitteren, dus vertrekken ze en worden hun huizen opgekocht door rijke joden. Maar waar moeten ze naartoe? Het probleem is dat Jaffa is omgeven door joodse plaatsen. En daar wordt niet voor Palestijnen gebouwd, er staan geen moskeeën of kerken of scholen voor hen. Men is dus aangewezen op Jaffa. Er is nu dan ook een buitengewoon groot woningtekort en de financieel zwakke Palestijnse gemeenschap probeert de krankzinnige prijsontwikkeling te bestrijden.

In Israël bestaat er geen serieuze competitie tussen Palestijnse en Israëlische jongeren om de eenvoudige reden dat wij volkomen gemarginaliseerd zijn. Palestijnen zijn al vanaf het begin van de joodse natie tweederangs burgers. In Israël beheersen de joden alles, wij worden vooralsnog getolereerd maar niet geaccepteerd. En wij weten dat. Van de staat mogen wij onszelf niet zien als Palestijnen, wij worden Arabische Israëli’s genoemd, en die mogen slechts een ondergeschikte rol spelen. Wij moeten telkens onze eigen geschiedenis en herkomst ontkennen. Op Palestijnse scholen in Israël mag er niet over de Nakba worden gesproken. Het is ons niet toegestaan onszelf als slachtoffer te beschouwen van de Israëlische etnische zuiveringen, doen we dat wel dan worden we helemaal beschouwd als een vijfde colonne van de vijand. De eerste generatie van de Nakba had het wat dat betreft nog moeilijker, die verdrong de geschiedenis. Zij waren zo getraumatiseerd dat ze hun persoonlijke ervaringen met niemand wilden delen. Toen ik de oude mensen over 1948 interviewde, wilde de meerderheid na twee of drie keer niet meer met mij praten. Ze konden het gewoonweg niet. Samen met mijn joods-Israelische vriend Ori geef ik rondleidingen in Jaffa. Aan hem zie ik duidelijk het verschil met ons. Hij is van de derde generatie joodse immigranten. Zijn grootvader behoorde tot de generatie van de grondleggers van de staat Israël, zijn vader was een gerespecteerde rechter en hijzelf doet momenteel zijn doctoraal in filosofie. Ze behoren tot de elite van dit land. Hij erft zijn familiebezit, zoals zijn vader dat deed. Maar bij de Palestijnen is die continuïteit vernietigd. Wij erven niets, omdat we alles verloren hebben. Zelfs de achtergebleven Palestijnen die na 1948 nog land bezaten in Israël, zagen hun bezit in de jaren vijftig en zestig geconfisqueerd worden. De Palestijnse gemeenschap was decennialang kapot geslagen. Palestijnen konden alleen nog maar voor de joodse economie werken. Bovendien was een groot deel van de Palestijnse elite gevlucht. Daarnaast worden we op elk niveau gediscrimineerd, werk, huisvesting, onderwijs. Het gevolg is dat de Palestijnen geen onderdeel vormen van de Israëlische elite, je vindt ons nagenoeg niet in de academische wereld, niet in het management van de economie, niet in de politieke- en zeker niet in de militaire toplaag. En de elite bepaalt hier alles, zoals overal ter wereld. Wij bevinden ons in de marge van deze samenleving, al heel lang.

Sinds de laatste twee decennia beginnen de Palestijnen zich bezig te houden met wat hun eigen identiteit is binnen Israël. De eerste twee generaties hadden het bijzonder moeilijk, die waren meer gericht op de vraag: hebben we morgen nog te eten? Het overleven was het belangrijkste. Maar de nieuwe generatie bezint zich wel degelijk over hun Palestijnse identiteit, denkt na over een nationale identiteit waarop ze trots kunnen zijn. Het probleem is nu niet zozeer meer Israël, als wel de Palestijnen elders. Oslo dwong de PLO om de Palestijnen in Israël te behandelen als Israëli’s. Wij vormen geen onderdeel van de onderhandelingen. Wij staan alleen, op onszelf terug geworpen en dat is een zeer gecompliceerde en frustrerende situatie voor elke Palestijn die voor rechtvaardigheid strijdt. Het doodt elke hoop op iets gemeenschappelijks, een gemeenschappelijke Palestijnse identiteit. Hoewel men geïsoleerd is, worden de Palestijnen in Israël wel sterk beïnvloed door wat er in de rest van de Arabische wereld en in Palestina gebeurt. Wij bezitten geen intellectuele elite die een serieuze identiteit kan helpen opbouwen voor ons Palestijnse Israëli’s. Wij horen bij niemand. Beide partijen sluiten ons uit. De Israëlische identiteit is een gesloten identiteit, die wordt volkomen bepaald door het joods zijn. Het is ook de reden waarom de eerste en tweede generatie nooit Israëli’s werden. Nu wordt voor de nieuwe generatie de Palestijnse identiteit steeds belangrijker. Men heeft een eigen historisch bewustzijn ontwikkeld, het besef van de Nakba dwingt ons na te denken over wie we zijn en over wat onze positie moet zijn. Dat maakt je niet trots, geenszins, maar het maakt je wel bewust van wie je bent, van de traditie. Volgens mij is er niets om als Palestijn trots op te zijn, onze geschiedenis is er een van continue mislukkingen, absoluut geen geschiedenis om mythen op te bouwen. Het was voor mij ook geen reden om geschiedenis te studeren. Ik studeer geschiedenis omdat ik ervan hou en omdat ik van Jaffa hou. Overigens zal het straks zeer moeilijk voor mij zijn om een baan te vinden waarbij ik onderzoek kan verrichten. Er zijn maar weinig universiteiten hier voor ons Palestijnen waar we aan de slag kunnen. Bovendien zal ik moeten concurreren met Israëli’s die zijn afgestudeerd aan de beste Amerikaanse universiteiten, zoals Princeton, Yale en Harvard. Wat ik het liefst zou willen doen is het lesgeven op een Palestijnse middelbare school. Ik heb een jaar lang les gegeven op het Terra Santa College in Bethlehem, maar de rector van de school hield niet erg van de inhoud van mijn lessen. Hij vond mijn informatie gevaarlijk. En vergeet niet, alle schoolhoofden in Israël moeten eerst goedgekeurd worden door de veiligheidsdienst en voelen dus altijd de adem in hun nek van de zionistische overheid.’ De positie van Sami is illustrerend voor de positie van alle Palestijnse Israëli’s: hij kan niet voor- noch achteruit, het is alsof hij door een niemandsland zwerft, op zoek naar zijn volk om zichzelf te vinden.

http://www.stanvanhoucke.net/deoneindigeoorlog/interviews/abou1.html

Ik heb deze informatie ondermeer naar alle Amsterdamse gemeenteraadsleden gestuurd. U kunt hen ook schrijven, hier zijn hun email-adressen:

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