Republican Congress just proposed $300M cut in Amtrak funding

~ susie

As I pointed out several times, Republicans have been hacking away at Amtrak funding for decades — because they would rather privatize the lines, and we know how well that always works out. But this time, they have incredibly bad timing and you need to let your Congress critters know what you think: As investigators still… Continue reading “Republican Congress just proposed $300M cut in Amtrak funding” →

Pope Francis vs. USA imperialism

~ susie

oscar romero

I think everyone knows or suspected that the CIA ran the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, so this is a very interesting canonization:

Pope Francis is soon to beatify the late Monseñor Óscar Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 by a right-wing, pro-capitalist death squad. Unlike others whom Francis has already consecrated, the Blessed (and, sooner than later, Saint) Romero will be a holy figure whose killers still walk the earth.

If a saint is a sanctified man of God, what do we call the killers of a saint? Is theirs an especial evil? I’m no theologian, but it seems that to kill a saint is in excess of mere man’s law. The Catholic Catechism exhaustively extols the sanctity of saints, saying that Christ’s “holiness shines in the saints.” How then do we describe a powerful organization that trains and gives sanction to the killers of saints? Even the Vatican says that Romero “was shot by a right-wing death squad,” which, as everyone who understands recent Salvadoran history knows, was trained in the United States.

During the Cold War, the Georgia-based School of the Americas (now called WHISC) trained tens of thousands of Central American soldiers for right-wing governments and insurgencies in order to neutralize leftist influence in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Romero’s El Salvador, where civil wars in the 1970s and ’80s pitted U.S.-trained rightists against socialists and leftists who opposed their countries being used as a plantation in service of a Washington-backed elite.

A UN truth commission in 1993 would find that two-thirds of the right-wing soldiers in El Salvador’s horrific civil war were U.S.-trained, many of them to operate the “death squads” that became a feature of Central America while Washington played with a heavy hand to direct the region’s politics and economics.

Bishop Romero was a thorn in the side of Washington, preaching liberation theology in defense of the poor and becoming known as the “Voice of the Voiceless.” Increasingly worried about Washington’s meddling in El Salvador’s burgeoning war between rightists and leftists, Romero wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter in 1980, calling out the United States’ support for the murderous right-wing forces who “repress the people and favor the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy.”

He continued, condemning Washington’s major role in the creation of an armed, brutal capitalist elite:
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Victory for now

~ susie

bernie and liz

Let’s see if we can’t hold the votes together for the next round. But yes, it was sweet:

A seemingly unstoppable coalition of the powerful assembled to advance the Trans Pacific Partnership trade bill: A Democratic president aligned with the Republican majority in both chambers of Congress and the full lobbying might of Corporate America. But on Tuesday afternoon, the Senate Democratic minority delivered a surprise defeat to President Obama and a severe setback to one of the last few items on his presidential agenda. They blocked consideration of “fast track” trade authority – a crucial vehicle to get the Pacific trade pact through Congress. The victors: the ascendant populist wing of the Democratic Party, and its spiritual leader, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. “Over and over, America’s workers have taken the brunt of bad trade deals,”the former Harvard professor and scourge of big business told a gathering of the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, hours before Tuesday’s vote.

“We can’t keep pushing through trade deals that benefit multinational companies at the expense of workers,” she added, with theatrical urgency. “Government cannot continue to be the captive of the rich and powerful. Working people cannot be forced to give up more and more as they get squeezed harder and harder.”
Warren masterfully undermined the trade bill, by highlighting the administration’s obsessive secrecy (the details of the proposed agreement are classified) and the role of corporate interests in drafting the deal (500 non-government advisors participated, she said, 85 percent of them industry executives or lobbyists).

“And now this trade deal is getting the full court lobbying press from those same giant multinational corporations,” she said. “The middle class is on the ropes and now is the time to fight back.”
Under intense pressure from the Warren wing, 44 of the 45 Democrats present Tuesday afternoon defied Obama. Even Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the chief Democratic advocate for the fast-track bill, buckled.Proponents fell eight votes short of the 60 they needed to take up the fast-track bill. Senate free-traders will likely find a way to revive the bill, but Tuesday’s defeat will embolden opponents in the House, where the free-trade package already faced trouble. However the trade debate is resolved, Tuesday’s defeat in the Senate is likely to be a turning point, because it shows that the populists are now firmly in control of the Democratic Party. Anger over growing inequality has reached critical mass, and a backlash has begun against a political system that has, over the last three decades, allowed 100 percent of all income growth to go to the wealthiest 10 percent. The trade deal has for now become the victim of that anger – less because of the details of the TPP than because it hasn’t been accompanied by more protections and assistance for American workers. “I believe in this,” Obama said of the trade deal, “the same way… that I believe in a higher minimum wage. The same way that I believe in stronger protections for workers who are trying to get a voice in their company. The same way I believe in equal pay. The same way I believe in paid sick leave.” But Obama’s actions haven’t matched his words, and he didn’t require Republicans to accept any of those priorities before he joined them in pushing for free-trade legislation.Senate Republicans drove more Democrats into opposition when they declined requests to bring up other trade-related bills other than legislation offering a meager (and reduced) amount of training funds for workers who lose their jobs.

[…] At the White House, press secretary Josh Earnest called Tuesday’s vote a “procedural snafu.” But Obama was undone by more than procedure. His would-be successor, Hillary Clinton, was not courageous enough to take a position on the trade legislation, but her silence gave Democrats more freedom to oppose it. And Democrats in Congress bristled at Obama’s disparagement of opponents of the trade bill as emotional, illogical and dishonest. “The president is making some fairly nasty remarks about people on the other side, that they don’t understand we’re in the 21st century,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, said at the Roosevelt Institute gathering, at the National Press Club. “Actually we do. I don’t think he understands.”

The biggest flaws about the TPP

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

President Obama 2015
David Dayen really lets Obama have it:

It’s beneath the dignity of the Presidency to so aggressively paint opponents as not just wrong on the facts, but hiding the truth on purpose. Warren has responded without using the same indecorous tactics. Unfortunately, I don’t have the same self-control. So by way of response, here are ten moments where the President or his subordinates have lied – call it “misled” or “offered half-truths” or whatever; but I’m in an ornery mood so let’s just say lied – about his trade agenda:

1. 40 PERCENT: The President and his team have repeatedly described TPP as a deal involving nearly 40 percent of global GDP. This tells only part of the story. First of all, the U.S. by itself represents 22 percent of global GDP; a bill naming a post office would involve that much. Second, we already have free trade agreements with six TPP partners – Canada, Mexico, Australia, Singapore, Chile and Peru – and between them and us, that’s 80 percent of the total GDP in this deal. The vast majority of the rest is represented by Japan, where the average applied tariff is a skinny 1.2 percent, per the World Bank.

You can see this paragraph in graphic form here. The point is that saying TPP is about “40 percent of GDP” intimates that it would massively change the ability to export without tariffs. In reality it would have virtually no significance in opening new markets. To the extent that there’s a barrier in global trade today, it comes from currency manipulation by countries wanting to keep their exports cheap. The TPP has no currency provisions.
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Long night

~ susie

The train crash happened maybe a mile from my house. Fire and police sirens were wailing and the helicopters hovered all night. Sometimes it’s a little like living in a war zone, because I live a few blocks from I-95 and whenever there’s a car crash, the traffic and news helicopter hover for hours and it’s loud. Last night, it sounded like there were five or six helicopters over the crash scene. This morning, they’ve restricted the copters to two miles from the crash, so it’s a little quieter.

It’s the main train corridor for the Northeast. It’s closed for at least a week.

Nobody knows what happened yet, but no one says the train was speeding. Six people are dead, eight more are still in critical condition, and dozens more are injured. If I had to guess, I’d guess it was a maintenance issue. Amtrak has been so underfunded, for so long. (Thanks, Republicans!) Maybe now that it’s happened near the New York media center, and the bobbleheads are realizing hey, that could have happened to me! something will finally be done.

My mom was in a train derailment once and she wouldn’t even talk about it. So it’s traumatic. So, as my mother would say, “Say a little prayer.”

PHILADELPHIA — Emergency workers here on Wednesday searched through the wreckage of a New York-bound Amtrak train that derailed and overturned late Tuesday, killing six people, injuring dozens more, and disrupting train service for thousands of riders in the Northeast region.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were expected to arrive in the morning and join officials from multiple other agencies trying to determine what caused the crash.

The train carrying 243 people was headed to New York from Washington when it derailed around 9:30 p.m., officials said late on Tuesday. Sixty-five people, including six who were in critical condition, were taken to hospitals, the mayor of Philadelphia, Michael A. Nutter, said.

“It is an absolute disastrous mess,” Mr. Nutter said. “I have never seen anything like this in my life.”