What's in Romney's Offshore Accounts?

by Ben Adler on Wednesday, July 4, 2012 by The Nation

Mitt Romney has been very reluctant to release his tax returns. In all his previous campaigns he refused to release any of them. This time, under pressure, he has given us only the last two years.

    But he must disclose more. If you want to know why, read Nicholas Shaxson’s piece in the new issue of Vanity Fair. In it, Shaxson raises important questions about some strange aspects of Romney’s financial history:

§ What is in Romney’s offshore accounts? He has sheltered much of his wealth in tax havens such as Bermuda, but he has not disclosed anything about those investments. For instance, Shaxson writes, “There is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as ‘a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.’ He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor…. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an ‘excepted investment fund’ that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates.”

§ Why is Romney still being paid by Bain Capital? He left the firm more than ten years ago. Given its varied investments, could the fact that he is still being paid by them create a conflict of interest in office? Shaxson writes, “Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from it—in early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers.”

§ Why has Romney opened foreign bank accounts, such as a Swiss account with $3 million that appeared on his 2010 returns but not his 2011 returns? How much has kept in offshore accounts in the past? Was he betting against the strength of the US dollar? How might such financial interests affect his policies as president?

§ Are Romney’s blind trusts really blind? Their trustee is Bradford Malt, his personal lawyer. Malt invested $10 million of Romney’s money in the Solamere Founders Fund, co-founded by his son Tagg and Spencer Zwick, a Romney campaign fundraiser. Malt’s and Romney’s claims that this is coincidental and Romney knew nothing of it strains credulity. If Romney knows what his blind trusts invest in, how might his investments influence his political decisions?

§ How much has Romney invested with Elliot Associates? Shaxson reports, “Elliott buys up cheap debt, often at cents on the dollar, from lenders to deeply troubled nations such as Congo-Brazzaville, then attacks the debtor states with lawsuits to squeeze maximum repayment. Elliott is run by the secretive hedge-fund billionaire and G.O.P. super-donor Paul Singer, whom Fortune recently dubbed Mitt Romney’s ‘Hedge Fund Kingmaker.’ (Singer has given $1 million to Romney’s super-pac Restore Our Future.) It is hard to know the size of these investments. Romney’s financial disclosure form lists 25 of them in an open-ended category, ‘Over $1 million,’ including So­lamere and Elliott, and they are not broken down further.”

§ How did Romney build a $102 million Individual Retirement Account (IRA)? Did he avoid paying taxes in doing so? During Romney’s fifteen years at Bain Capital taxpayers were allowed to put only $2,000 annually into IRAs and $30,000 into another fund. Romney won’t say how his account generated such astronomical returns. The only explanation anyone has come up with, offered by Wall Street Journal reporter Mark Maremont, is that Romney stuffed his account with deliberately undervalued shares of Bain stock. Incidentally, Bain is still contributing to Romney’s and his wife’s IRAs.

§ Did Bain serve as a tax haven for foreign criminals? As Shaxson explains, “Private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States, and a filing for Mitt Romney’s first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this. One foreign investor, of $2 million, was the newspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company’s pension fund. The Bain filing also names Eduardo Poma, a member of one of the ‘14 families’ oligarchy that has controlled most of El Salvador’s wealth for decades; oddly, Poma is listed as sharing a Miami address with two anonymous companies that invested $1.5 million between them. The filings also show a Geneva-based trustee overseeing a trust that invested $2.5 million, a Bahamas corporation that put in $3 million, and three corporations in the tax haven of Panama, historically a favored destination for Latin-American dirty money—’one of the filthiest money-laundering sinks in the world,’ as a US Customs official once put it.”

Shaxson does not allege that Romney or Bain has ever broken the law. But the public has a right to know about the ethics and probity, not mere legality, of Romney’s personal and professional financial history. Romney has made business experience the central pitch of his candidacy, so how can he claim that how he manages his money is irrelevant?

                                     © 2012 The Nation

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Offshore Accounts,Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd,2012 Elections,Current Events,Bain Capital,Solamere Founders Fund

Friday Funnies: Supreme Court & ObamaCare Edition

   There were no new late-night shows this week that were not in reruns. So, I am bringing you some political crap from one of my favorites, Bill Maher.

Bill Maher:  "I could not wait to start using my Obamacare. Today, I swallowed a fist full of birth control pills and then washed it down with poison. What do I care, it’s free?"

"The Tea Party is furious. They say this is a slippery slope to dental care."

"Down in Louisiana, Republican Governor Bobby Jindal said he's just going to refuse to implement Obamacare. That's it, 'F**k you all. I'm just not doing it.' So if you need an operation in Louisiana, you're going to have to pay for it the old-fashioned way: Stand on a balcony, flash your tits, and hope someone throws you money."

"What was really so hard for the conservatives to swallow was that Justice John Roberts was the one that did this. Gotta give it up to Justice John Roberts, that was a very studly move he made. But boy, for the conservatives, he was their hero. This is like they threw a big surprise party for their dad and they found him in bed with a black guy."

"They shouldn’t be so sad, the Supreme Court also had a ruling this week that was somewhat in their favor. In the Arizona immigration case they did rule that the police can consider you suspicious down there if you have significant difficulty communicating in English. Who knew George Bush was an alien."

"I secretly want Romney to win because, look, I'm a comedian. Mitt Romney is an ultra-Caucasian Mormon zillionaire who uses his dog as a hood ornament. For me not to secretly want him as President, it's like Halliburton secretly not wanting a war."

"So Mitt, if you are serious about winning, you have to think outside the box. what about, hear me out, Romney-Zimmerman 2012? It's unorthodox, but who better than George Zimmerman to personify your campaign theme of, 'I think the black guy's up to no good.'

"But you know who might be the perfect Mitt Romney Vice President? Mitt Romney. That's right, Mitt. Yourself! Now, of course, this is a controversial pick, because frankly, there are not many issues where you have seen eye to eye with you. (audience applause) I mean, you like you as a person, but on policy, it's gonna be kinda hard to bridge the gap between you and your stance on health care, immigration, gun control, abortion, climate change, campaign finance, Afghanistan, gay rights, space exploration, treaty of the sea, Megan's Law, the infield fly rule. OK, forget that one."

Jay Leno: "Last night was the big annual congressional baseball game between the Democrats and Republicans, and the Democrats won 18-5. Of course the Democrats won. Did you see who the umpire was? Chief Justice John Roberts."

"The Obamacare ruling makes Roberts the first Republican to favor an insurance law with an individual mandate since, well, Mitt Romney."

Technorati Tags: ObamaCare,RomneyCare,Mitt Romney,Barack Obama,John Roberts,The Supreme Court,Late Night Talk,Bill Maher,Political Humor,Current Events

New Report on the Dangers of Genetically Modified Foods

by Richard Schiffman

“Aren’t critics of genetically engineered food anti-science? Isn’t the debate over GMOs (genetically modified organisms) a spat between emotional but ignorant activists on one hand and rational GM-supporting scientists on the other?”

These questions are posed by Earth Open Source, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to assuring the sustainability, security, and safety of the global food system. They answer their own questions in a new study “GMO Myths and Truths.” The myth, they say, is that GM foods have been proven safe. The truth is that there are hidden dangers which corporate-funded research has not yet adequately investigated.

What makes this report unusual is that it was authored not by the usual food activists and environmentalists, but by two well known genetic engineers with help from an investigative reporter. The team conducted an exhaustive survey of hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies and concluded not only that GM food crops pose significant, if largely under-evaluated, health risks, but that they have so far failed to deliver on their promise to increase crop yields and lower herbicide and pesticide use.

The authors argue, moreover, that there are already safer environmentally friendly ways to grow more food for the planet’s exploding population. By focusing on the false panacea of genetic modification as a way to feed the world’s hungry, vital research dollars have been siphoned away from more promising lower-tech approaches to increasing the efficiency of the global food system.

The report’s authors include Dr Michael Antoniou of King's College London School of Medicine in the UK, who helped to develop genetic engineering for medical applications, and John Fagan, a biomedical researcher and expert in food system sustainability and GMO testing, who returned $614,000 in grant money to the National Institutes of Health in 1994 because of his concerns about the safety and ethics of genetic modification.

The paper, produced together with Claire Robinson, research director of Earth Open Source, comes out at a critical moment as California voters are considering a referendum which will appear on their ballot in November calling for the labeling of genetically modified foods in the state. Such labeling is already mandatory in Europe, China, India and many other nations.

Seventy percent of the foods that Americans purchase in the supermarket contain ingredients (mostly corn, soy and canola oil) that are genetically modified. The food industry, and often the media, assure us that there is a scientific consensus that GM foods are equivalent nutritionally to foods that have not been modified and not a danger to those who consume them. But it is just not true that all scientists agree. Given the uncertainties in the field and the lack of long-term health studies, some groups like the American Academy of Environmental Medicine and the Union of Concerned Scientists have called for labeling of GM foods.

If Californians agrees, it could have a big impact on the rest of us. Some believe that if the labeling referendum there passes, other states may follow suit. Furthermore, as I reported in the Guardian last month, if food companies are made to label GM foods in California, the nation’s most populous state, they may well do so all over the country, rather than maintain a costly two-tier packaging and distribution system.

The food and biotech industries are expected to fight the labeling initiative with a multi-million dollar statewide PR blitz, like the one which helped to defeat a similar measure in Oregon in 2002. But nearly 90% of Americans-- Republicans and Democrats equally according to a recent survey-- want to see GMOs labeled. This latest report on the dangers of genetically engineered foods will give the referendum’s advocates valuable ammunition in the upcoming California debate.

Here are some of the conclusions of the report:

*Genetically modifying crops, which involves the transfer of genes between biologically unrelated species, is not an extension of traditional plant hybridization, but a radical departure which can produce new toxins or allergens in food that are unlikely to be spotted in current regulatory checks.

*GM foods have not been adequately safety tested. There has been no long term research, and the few short term studies have been inadequate. In many cases proprietary restrictions put in place by biotech companies like Monsanto have prevented independent research by scientists not connected to the corporations which are making claims about their safety.

*Animal studies of the effects of GM foods have disclosed clear signs of toxicity– notably disturbances in liver and kidney function and immune responses.

*Over 75% of genetical modification are to to increase crop tolerance of herbicides. Where these crops are grown there has been a massive increases in herbicide use.

*Over half of GM crops are engineered to withstand application of Monsanto’s best selling Roundup. Contrary to the company’s claims Roundup is not safe at the levels it is being use, but has been found to be associated with miscarriage, birth defects, neurological development problems, DNA damage, and certain types of cancer. A public health crisis has occurred in GM soy-producing regions of South America, where people exposed to spraying with Roundup and other agrochemicals report escalating rates of birth defects and cancer.

*There is insufficient evidence that the BT toxin engineered into the plant structure of corn and cotton (whose seeds are used in food oil production) is safe for human consumption. Bt crops have been found to have toxic effects on laboratory animals in feeding trials. These toxins have also been found circulating in the blood of pregnant women in Canada and in the blood supply to their foetuses.

*GM crops have not been shown to offer higher crop yields, enhanced nutritional value or greater drought tolerance, as they have been hyped to do. The products of conventional breeding continue to outstrip GM in all of these arenas.

*Conventionally bred, locally adapted crops, used in combination with environmentally sustainable farming practices, offer a safer, cheaper and more efficient way to ensure global food security than genetic modification.

“Crop genetic engineering as practiced today is a crude, imprecise, and outmoded technology,” says the report's coauthor John Fagan. “Recent advances point to better ways of using our knowledge of genomics to improve food crops, that do not involve GM."

Selling patented genetically modified seeds, and the agro-chemicals designed to be used with them, has earned biotech giants like Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta untold billions of dollars in the past two decades. But what is good for these corporate bottom lines may not be good for human health, or the integrity of the environment.

Published on Thursday, July 5, 2012 by Common Dreams

                       www.commondreams.org

 

Technorati Tags: GMO,Genetically Modified Organisms.Earth Open Source,Dr Michael Antoniou,John Fagan,Genetically Modified Foods,Current Events,Monsanto,Dupont,Bayer,Syngenta,Roundup

Robert Reich: Mitt Romney IS the Economic Crisis

Wed Jul 04, 2012     by Dartagnan

Robert Reich says the attacks on Romney's tenure at Bain Capital miss the larger point, one which even the White House is not prepared to acknowledge: Mitt Romney is not simply a callous vulture capitalist, he is the living embodiment of the financial catastrophe that brought this country to the edge of ruin.

[T]he real issue here isn’t Bain’s betting record. It’s that Romney’s Bain is part of the same system as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine’s MF Global and Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs—a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls, and the losers are most of the rest of us.

The thousands of job losses caused by Bain's "bad bets," while providing rich fodder for the Administration's campaign ads, are really just a microcosm of a self-perpetuating, labyrinthine tax system geared to rewarding the wealthiest with the privilege of betting their fortunes on money they've neither earned nor done anything to deserve, with little or no personal risk. Reich calls it "casino capitalism:"

The biggest players in this system have, like Romney, made their profits placing big bets with other people’s money. If the bets go well, the players make out like bandits. If they go badly, the burden lands on average workers and taxpayers.

The fortunes raked in by financial dealmakers depend on special goodies baked into the tax code such as “carried interest,” which allows Romney and other partners in private-equity firms (as well as in many venture-capital and hedge funds) to treat their incomes as capital gains taxed at a maximum of 15 percent. This is how Romney managed to pay an average of 14 percent on more than $42 million of combined income in 2010 and 2011. But the carried-interest loophole makes no economic sense. Conservatives try to justify the tax code’s generous preference for capital gains as a reward to risk-takers—but Romney and other private-equity partners risk little, if any, of their personal wealth. They mostly bet with other investors’ money, including the pension savings of average working people.

    So when Romney touts his business acumen, he's really bragging about his ability to take advantage of a tax code rigged by himself and others like him to skew the playing field in such a way that in reality poses very little personal risk to himself.  For example, another "loophole" in the Tax Code permitted Romney, as a private equity partner, to place virtually unlimited amounts into a tax-deferred IRA by allowing Romney and his partners to grossly underestimate the "value" of their contributions, because the Code only considers a partnership interest in terms of its "future value."   You and I (and ninety-nine percent of Americans who did not have the good fortune and connections to work for a private equity firm) are limited to deferring a few thousand dollars per year from taxes. Mitt Romney's IRA, according to Reich, approaches 100 million dollars.

The Tax Code also makes interest on debt tax-deductible, fostering a huge incentive to substitute debt for equity, leading to debt-fueled bets made by banks and financial institutions intent on "leveraging America to the hilt," and culminating in the economic catastrophe that the Bush Administration was forced to finally confront in 2008, and that we still find ourselves mired in today.

But for the banks, private equity firms, hedge funds and other financial institutions who brought on the crisis--and for Mitt Romney-- there was no catastrophe.  Two-thirds of all income gains realized between the mid-1980's and 2007 were in the financial sector, showered on the people who made their livelihood playing with other people's money.  People like the folks at Bain Capital, who structured their deals so they would always profit, even though some of the companies they funded ultimately collapsed under the weight of excessive debt.  And when the collapse ultimately occurred, the same people who had profited mightily from leveraging the rest of the country were given a massive bailout. The fact is that the economic crisis directly felt by nearly all "ordinary" Americans was never really felt by the people who caused it. That's the benefit of playing with other people's money.

The Tax code is an opague behemoth, unfathomable to most Americans. When Americans think of tax issues, they think of income tax rates, they think of how their tax money is spent.  They generally don't think in terms of whether interest on debt obligations may be deductible, because your average American doesn't have the wherewithal to get his hands other people's mortgages.  But the folks who are attempting to buy the election for Mitt Romney think of nothing else.  While people like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers have their pet social issues to amuse themselves, the real issue here is and has always been taxes, or, more correctly, ways to avoid paying taxes.

We’ve entered a new Gilded Age, of which Mitt Romney is the perfect reflection. The original Gilded Age was a time of buoyant rich men with flashy white teeth, raging wealth and a measured disdain for anyone lacking those attributes, which was just about everyone else. Romney looks and acts the part perfectly, offhandedly challenging a GOP primary opponent to a $10,000 bet and referring to his wife’s several Cadillacs. Four years ago he paid $12 million for his fourth home, a 3,000-square-foot villa in La Jolla, California, with vaulted ceilings, five bathrooms, a pool, a Jacuzzi and unobstructed views of the Pacific. Romney has filed plans to tear it down and replace it with a home four times bigger.

We’ve had wealthy presidents before, but they have been traitors to their class—Teddy Roosevelt storming against the “malefactors of great wealth” and busting up the trusts, Franklin Roosevelt railing against the “economic royalists” and raising their taxes, John F. Kennedy appealing to the conscience of the nation to conquer poverty. Romney is the opposite: he wants to do everything he can to make the superwealthy even wealthier and the poor even poorer, and he justifies it all with a thinly veiled social Darwinism.

So in response to the greatest Economic crisis since the Depression, the Republican Party has coalesced behind the crisis' own walking, talking, living embodiment. The mantra that such a person represents the class of "job creators" is just a newly packaged form of Social Darwinism: survival of the "fittest" at the expense of economic "inferiors." This philosophy was embraced and expanded by 19th Century "thinkers" such as William Graham Summer (cited by Reich), and now channeled by the Republican Party in foisting upon us its nominee for the Presidency:

In 1883, Sumner published a highly influential pamphlet entitled "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other", in which he insisted that the social classes owe each other nothing, synthesizing Darwin's findings with free enterprise Capitalism for his justification.[citation needed] According to Sumner, those who feel an obligation to provide assistance to those unequipped or under-equipped to compete for resources, will lead to a country in which the weak and inferior are encouraged to breed more like them, eventually dragging the country down. Sumner also believed that the best equipped to win the struggle for existence was the American businessman, and concluded that taxes and regulations serve as dangers to his survival.

It's hard to find a better description of the Republican Party platform or Mitt Romney's campaign, wouldn't you say?

When Romney simultaneously proposes to cut the taxes of households earning over $1 million by an average of $295,874 a year (according to an analysis of his proposals by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center) because the rich are, allegedly, “job creators,” he mimics Sumner’s view that “millionaires are a product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done.”

Reich believes too few in the Democratic Party are willing to acknowledge the obvious, either because they are similarly tethered to Wall Street's millions, or because to acknowledge that Romney is in fact the perfect face of the economic crisis would be to acknowledge the overwhelming pervasiveness of the problem.  And to acknowledge the scope of the problem would require them to come up with solutions.  Circling above all of this discussion, of course, is the haunting shadow of Citizen's United.   But for Reich, the "clear and present danger" facing this country is the plutocrat about to accept the Republican nomination for the Presidency--

at the very time in our nation’s history when these views and practices are a clear and present danger to the well-being of the rest of us—just as they were more than a century ago. Romney says he’s a job-creating businessman, but in truth he’s just another financial dealmaker in the age of the financial deal, a fat cat in an era of excessively corpulent felines, a plutocrat in this new epoch of plutocrats. That the GOP has made him its standard-bearer at this point in American history is astonishing.

The face of every foreclosure, of every job loss, of every dream of retirement or a secure future wiped out by what we euphemistically call the "financial crisis" will mount the stage at his Party's convention in Tampa Bay this August.

You can donate to President Obama's re-election campaign here.

Originally posted to Dartagnan on Wed Jul 04, 2012

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Bain Capitol,Barack Obama,2012 Elections,Wall Street,Current Events,Politics,Vulture Capitalist

Conservatives want to campaign on health care, but look at who they nominated

By  kos   Tue Jul 03, 2012

This seriously cracks me up!

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court health care ruling, the early conventional wisdom was that an unfavorable health care ruling at the court would be good for Republicans politically, even as it was a serious policy setback for conservatives. But that's not shaping up to be the case. Mitt Romney, after giving a brief statement decrying the decision, has been virtually silent on criticizing the health care law. He's been on vacation and his campaign has been giving off clear signals that it doesn't want to make health care a major part of the election.

Conservatives are furious! The Breitbarts ran a piece headlined:

CONSERVATIVES TO MITT: QUIT NOW IF YOU WON'T FIGHT OBAMATAX!

Too bad Romney can't fight this shit. The "tax" was created by the conservative Heritage Foundation, enthusiastically adopted by Romney in Massachusetts, and upheld by the Supreme Court's foremost corporatist justice. And there would be even more Roberts on the court if Romney wins in November. He's promised it.

If conservatives have a problem with any of this, then maybe they shouldn't have nominated him in the first place. It's not as if they didn't have a choice. They just made a crappy one.

Their big idea, their candidate.

Why are they angry again?

On the other hand, it WOULD be awesome for Romney to quit now. Maybe we'd get Herman Cain redux!

Technorati Tags: 2012 Elections,Affordable Health Care Ac,Mitt Romney,ObamaCare,Current Events,Politics

FloriDUH’s Rick Scott Doesn’t Care About His Struggling/Poorer Residents…

… or the average one, for that matter. If you are not a corporation you do not exist in Scott’s eyes.   

     Not that this comes as a surprise to anyone, Governor Snott  Scott has told Fox Noise Channel that he will not expand Medicaid nor will he set up insurance exchanges in FloriDUH because it is bad policy and that it would be to costly to Floridians.

    Scott also told Fox News that he is hopeful that the law will be repealed by a new president in November, that being Mitt Romney, the original implementer  of the bill ( RomneyCare ) in the state of Massachusetts while he was the Governor.

   “ We’re not going to implement Obamacare in Florida. We’re not going to expand Medicaid because we’re going to do the right thing. We’re not going to do the exchange.” tampabaytimes.com

   Of course, this had been expected by the FloriDUH Democrats all along.

    In another observation, it would appear that Mr. Scott has been reading the Romney “ flip-flop “ manual in order to pick up a few pointers as Scott has stated to many news outlets that in the unlikely event that the ACA was upheld by the Supreme Court, that the state would be ready to implement the law in Florida.

  “ It’s my job, if it’s the law of the country, to be ready when it’s the law…when it’s the law of the land, we’ll implement the law.” Palm Beach Post- Nov 2011

   “ We will follow the law, but we’re not going to make any movements until that unlikely day comes.” Florida Today Scott’s spokesperson in June 2012

   “ If it’s the law of the land, then we will comply…” Gov. Scott in conference call 11 days ago.

  Dick Rick Scott and his hoods in Tallahassee have had 2 years to come up with their own plans for healthcare in the state, and, just as is with the rest of the Republicans sitting on their asses in Washington, D.C., they have nothing on the table. Zero, nada, zilch. The Republican’s in government do not give a shit about the middle class or the poor in America. They cannot create a jobs program. They cannot create a healthcare program. They can create massive unemployment, a very shitty economy, and tax cuts for corporations who pay next to nothing already!

   The racist Republican Party are still seething because they had their asses handed to them by a black man back in 2008. They’ve spent the past 4 years trashing America and, thanks to Citizens United, they and their corporate masters are now trying to buy the next election because they have nothing to run on. Republicans cannot win an election on policy ( they have none ) and they cannot win a fair election. They have to steal everything to get anything.

   If you, my friends, are stupid enough to put Romney in the White House, then you deserve the royal fucking that you will be getting. Unfortunately, the rest of us have to pay for it also.

   To the state of FloriDUH. You are getting what you voted for, so deal with it. Maybe you’ll learn what many of us already know.

     Republican SUCK

 

Technorati Tags: Rick Scott,Florida,Health Care Reform,Medicaid,ObamaCare,Republicans,Current Events,Politics,The Uninsured

President Obama: Corporate Globalizer

By Mark Engler     on  Friday, June 29, 2012

With recent revelations about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, it is now safe to say that President Obama has surpassed George W. Bush as a champion of the flawed and offensive ideology of corporate globalization.

This argument requires some explanation. Here’s the backstory: As the Bush administration commenced in the early 2000s, many argued that his foreign policy represented a continuation of the Clinton-era approach to promoting “free trade” neoliberalism overseas. However, I contended that, especially after the launch of the Iraq war in 2003, the unilateralist bullying of the neocons represented a split from past practice.

No doubt, big arms and big oil had their needs met by the Bush agenda. But his administration was wary of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, which were central instruments of U.S. policy under Clinton. The Bush approach relied on our-way-or-the-highway, coalition-of-the-willing hard power. This made a significant portion of corporate America uncomfortable, especially businesses trying to navigate and expand in foreign markets. It also left the soft-power agenda of “free trade” in an uncertain state.

This was essentially the thesis of my 2008 book, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy. Around the time the book came out, I wrote:

In October 2007...the Wall Street Journal reported that the [Republican] party could be facing a brand crisis as “[s]ome business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don’t share.”

When it comes to corporate responses to [Bush’s] Global War on Terror, we mostly hear about the likes of Halliburton and Blackwater—companies directly implicated in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and with the mentality of looters. Such firms have done their best to score quick profits from the military machine. However, there was always a faction of realist, business-oriented Republicans who opposed the invasion from the start, in part because they believed it would negatively impact the U.S. economy. As the [Bush administration’s] adventure in Iraq has descended into the morass, the ranks of corporate complainers have only grown.

The “free trade” elite have become particularly upset about the administration’s focus on go-it-alone nationalism and its disregard for multilateral means of securing influence. This belligerent approach to foreign affairs, they believe, has thwarted the advance of corporate globalization. In an April 2006 column in the Washington Post, globalist cheerleader Sebastian Mallaby laid blame for “why globalization has stalled” at the feet of the Bush administration. The White House, Mallaby charged, was unwilling to invest any political capital in the IMF, the World Bank, or the WTO....Frustrated by Bush’s failures, many in the business elite want to return to the softer empire of corporate globalization and, increasingly, they are looking to the Democrats to navigate this return.

My concern back then was that a Democrat (either Obama or Hillary Clinton) would be elected to office and then abandon the overt militarism and “imperial globalization” of the Bush administration, but embrace a subtler, more multilateralist “free trade” neoliberalism—reclaiming the agenda of corporate globalization. I would have been pleased if this prediction had proved wrong. Sadly, Obama has provided irrefutable evidence that he has boarded the corporate globalist bandwagon.

At the end of the administration’s first year, I gave Obama a “B” for trade policy on a report card for Foreign Policy In Focus. While there was some rumbling about resurrecting stalled bilateral trade deals with Korea, Panama, and Colombia, the administration hadn’t done much to push things forward. Things were quiet. And given the kind of trade deals that Washington has brokered in the last couple decades, no news is good news in this arena.

Unfortunately, by 2011, the administration was pushing these so-called “free trade” deals hard. It succeeded in passing them through Congress and then signing them into law last fall.

Obama’s trade policy grade was plummeting, but new information shows things to be even worse. In the past month the president has officially failed out of “fair trade” class. On June 13, Public Citizen released a leaked document showing that the TPP—a trade agreement being negotiated between the United States and eight Pacific countries under considerable secrecy—is shaping up to be as bad as NAFTA or worse.

Public Citizen wrote in a press release:

Although the TPP has been branded a “trade” agreement, the leaked text of the pact’s Investment Chapter shows that the TPP would:

—Limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S. boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms;

—Extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries;

—Establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges; and

—Allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.

In the weeks since that leak, it has been reported that Mexico and Canada will both be joining TPP talks, setting the stage for the creation of a behemoth trading bloc. This bloc will operate based on rules backed (and often concocted) by corporate lobbyists.

It didn’t have to be this way. It was not preordained that President Obama would become Corporate-Globalizer-in-Chief. The base of the Democratic Party has aligned itself firmly against the “free trade” agenda—so much so that both Obama and Clinton campaigned in 2008 against the NAFTA model and in favor of a “fair trade” alternative. In fact, going into the 2012 elections, there’s evidence that Obama’s betrayal of earlier vows could be a significant liability among voters and a bitter pill for key constituencies the president needs if his campaign is going to overcome the enthusiasm gap between progressives and the Republican faithful.

Yet instead of taking the chance to redefine American interests in the world as something other than securing profits for U.S. businesses, Obama has allowed an ingrained pro-corporate obsequiousness to permeate the office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Department of State.

It’s not the unilaterist hubris of the Bush administration. But it’s still a detestable foreign policy—and a sorely missed opportunity for something better.

© 2012 Dissent Magazine

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