By Stan Sorscher in Huffington Post – The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a 12-country NAFTA-style trade deal with two serious problems. It doesn’t work, and it’s bad for democracy. First, everyone is in favor of trade. We can have good trade policy that raises living standards or bad trade policy that works fabulously well for a few, but very badly for everyone else. More than any other policy, trade policy creates winners and losers. For instance, pharmaceutical companies are big winners. Their expanded patent monopolies will cost everyone else billions. Nike is a winner because new investor protections will apply to its operations in Vietnam, where Nike already exploits the lowest cost labor they could find on earth.
Bill McKibben suggested that the massive People’s Climate March in September had helped cause theUS-China climate announcement of a few weeks ago. He tweeted, “First reaction to US China climate news: We should do more of these big protest-type things, they seem useful.” But did the People’s Climate March actually cause these policy outcomes? Maybe. The truth is that it’s really difficult to assess the causal impact of protests. Many of the same things that drive people out to the streets also influence politicians to take actions in support of the movement’s cause. When the tide of public opinion shifts to support a movement, for example, we can expect to see both more protest and more favorable policy outcomes.
The New York Times and Bloomberg News got a look at a draft of a new UN report on climate change. It’s bleak, to say the least. From the Times: Runaway growth on the emission of greenhouse gases is swamping all political efforts to deal with the problem, raising the risk of “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts” over the coming decades, according to a draft of a major new United Nations report. Global warming is already cutting grain production by several percentage points, the report found, and that could grow much worse if emissions continue unchecked. Higher seas, devastating heat waves, torrential rain and other climate extremes are also being felt around the world as a result of human emissions, the draft report said, and those problems are likely to intensify unless the gases are brought under control. The world may already be nearing a temperature at which the loss of the vast ice sheet covering Greenland would become inevitable, the report said. The actual melting would then take centuries, but it would be unstoppable and could result in a sea level rise of 23 feet, with additional increases from other sources like melting Antarctic ice, potentially flooding the world’s major cities.
With This Decade’s Climate Policy, Expect More Warming Than if Nothing Was Done at All. The fundamental climate change policy question today is not how much we should reduce carbon dioxide emissions by when, but what will currently proposed carbon dioxide emissions reductions do to our climate in the near-term? In addition, what are the ramifications of short-lived climate pollutants that are discounted by the traditional long-term 100-year climate policy time frame? Our current policy has changed little from the dawning of the Kyoto Protocol era. This era dates back to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and embodied the roots of current climate policy extending back to the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC) in 1988. Currently proposed (June 2014) EPA regulations on carbon dioxide emissions reductions are only 13 percent more stringent than Kyoto’s goals and do not address short-lived climate pollutants or the short-term climate time frame. (1)
It took nine months for the 396 cleaners that had been made redundant by the Greek Finance Ministry to gain their victory. Since September 2013, they have been on strike, selling T-shirts to survive and pay for banners and other activism materials, and facing police brutality. In May 2014, the court of Areios Pagos ruled that the women, who used to clean tax and customs offices across the country, should return to their posts immediately, since the layoffs were not supported by any study that proved them to be in the state’s best interests. However, this was only the beginning. The Greek government declined to comply with the court’s ruling, and applied for an appeal. The case will be transferred to a higher court in September, but, according to the cleaners’ lawyer, Yiannis Karouzos, the case can’t be re-examined, and the first decision will only be technically checked for legal errors. The Supreme Court that accepted the government’s request for an appeal issued the reasoning behind this decision, stating that “ensuring the continuation of the state’s financial policies (…) is linked with the general public interest, as opposed to the personal interest of each cleaner.”
Farmers across El Salvador united to block a stipulation in a US aid package to their country that would have indirectly required the purchase of Monsanto genetically modified (GM) seeds. Thousands of farmers, like 45-year-old farmer Juan Joaquin Luna Vides, prefer to source their seeds locally, and not to use Monsanto’s GM seeds. “Transnational companies have been known to provide expired seeds that they weren’t able to distribute elsewhere,” said Vides, who heads the Diversified Production program at the Mangrove Association, a community development organization that works in the Bajo Lempa region of El Salvador. “We would like the US embassy and the misinformed media outlets [that are pressuring the Salvadoran government to change their procurement procedure] to know more about the reality of national producers and recognize the food sovereignty of the country,” he added. During the last two months, the US government has been attempting to pressure the government of El Salvador to sign the second Millennium Challenge Compact with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a US foreign aid agency created during the presidency of George W. Bush.
A new study finds remarkably little difference between the views of people who live in red (Republican) districts or states, and those who live in blue (Democratic) districts or states on questions about what policies the government should pursue. The study analyzed 388 questions asking what the government should do in regard to a wide range of policy issues and found that that most people living in red districts/states disagreed with most people in blue districts/states on only four percent of the questions. “A Not So Divided America,” contradicts the conventional wisdom that the political gridlock between Democrats and Republicans in Congress arises from deep disagreements over policy among the general public. The study was a joint project of Voice Of the People and the Program for Public Consultation (PPC), affiliated with the University of Maryland. “Clearly, the gridlock in Congress is not driven by the people,” said PPC Director Steven Kull, who led the study. “Although some research has shown partisan polarization in response to broad ideological slogans, on specific questions about what government should do, the study found hardly any difference between red and blue districts.”
The United States has been at war — major boots-on-the-ground conflicts and minor interventions, firefights, air strikes, drone assassination campaigns, occupations, special ops raids, proxy conflicts, and covert actions — nearly nonstop since the Vietnam War began. That’s more than half a century of experience with war, American-style, and yet few in our world bother to draw the obvious conclusions. Given the historical record, those conclusions should be staring us in the face. They are, however, the words that can’t be said in a country committed to a military-first approach to the world, a continual build-up of its forces, an emphasis on pioneering work in the development and deployment of the latest destructive technology, and a repetitious cycling through styles of war from full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again. So here are five straightforward lessons — none acceptable in what passes for discussion and debate in this country — that could be drawn from that last half century of every kind of American warfare: 1. No matter how you define American-style war or its goals, it doesn’t work. Ever.
If you want to understand why it’s the case that on the one hand, the US public and the majority of Congress turned against the war in Afghanistan a long time ago, and yet on the other hand, it’s been so hard to end the war, this week’s warmonger media storm against the diplomatic rescue of US prisoner of war Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has been very instructive. It’s been known for years that a key step toward ending the war would be exchanging five Taliban prisoners of war at Guantanamo for the release of Sgt. Bergdahl. There has never been any serious dispute of the case that this would be a key step toward ending the war. I challenge anyone to find a counter-example to my claim. The political forces that are trashing the deal to rescue Sgt. Bergdahl are the same political forces that got us into the Iraq war. They are the same political forces who want to keep the Afghanistan war going indefinitely. They are the same political forces who want to keep the Guantanamo prison open indefinitely. Again, I challenge anyone to provide a single counterexample of someone in Congress who voted against the Iraq war, or who has been a leader in trying to end the war in Afghanistan, or who has been a leader in trying to close the Guantanamo prison, who is now trashing the diplomatic deal to rescue Sgt. Bergdahl.
Why are the opinions of the majority so widely misreported or overlooked? Perhaps it is that the emerging populist attitudes of the Populist Majority contrast starkly with those of American elites. The following contrasts elite opinion with that of majority opinion on a range of issues, in a recent survey funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. 1 Unless otherwise stated, elites are defined as at or near the top 1 percent of U.S. wealth-holders and have an average income of more than $1 million annually. Public opinion was calculated by averaging polls together from various mainstream firms, such as Gallup and Pew, on a wide range of issues: We live in a populist moment. The populist debate has only just begun, and as long as this economy is not working for working people, majority support for the new populism is likely to build, not dissipate. Politicians in both parties are likely to find it necessary to appeal to those attitudes, not scorn them.
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