James Carville has been all over the news lashing out at Obama for not being strong enough in his response to the BP oil disaster. And with the news that the oil geyser will continue spewing its stuff until August, I don't blame the man. He is, after all, from Louisiana.
But for some reason I'm not convinced he's being completely sincere. In fact, Colombia held a presidential election yesterday and (this may seem somewhat bizarre if you don't know much about him) Carville actually helped the establishment candidate who wants to encourage "foreign investment," at a time when BP is considering offshore drilling in Colombia's waters.
A political guru, frequent CNN pundit and a personality who was featured in the well known documentary The War Room, Carville moves in powerful circles in the U.S. What's less commonly known, however, is that Carville is also a virtual kingmaker in Latin America --- indeed, his professional contacts have ranged from Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo to Brazil's Fernando Enrique Cardoso to many others.
All signs pointed to the release of Carmelo Agamez Berrio, a well known Colombian human rights activist, who has been unjustly detained for almost a year in Sucre. He had been appointed a new prosecutor and senior Colombian justice officials had raised concerns about due process rights violations in his case. However, in a surprising twist last week, the 28th antiterrorism prosecutor in Bogota issued a resolution formally bringing to trial the specious investigation against Agamez.
Glenn Greenwald long ago taught us why we should always look skeptically at the fact-free prognostications of the Washington Post's Steve Pearlstein. That said, this line in Pearlstein's column today caught my eye today (h/t lutton):
"The haggling now [about the automaker bailout] is over the appropriate mechanism. My guess is that the whole thing will be wrapped up shortly after Thanksgiving, perhaps in a holiday package that will include congressional approval (but delayed implementation) of the free-trade agreement with Colombia." (emphasis added)
My last newspaper column explored how the Colombia Free Trade Agreement is about nothing other than serving corporate interests; how poll after poll after poll has shown Americans intensely oppose such NAFTA expansions; how in 2006 and 2008, a total of 69 new congressional lawmakers - mostly Democrats - won on an explicit promise to stop NAFTA expansions; and how therefore, the Republican push for this trade deal is a political ploy designed to fracture Democrats much like NAFTA fractured them in 1993.
National Conference of State Legislatures Slams Pro-Colombia FTA Resolution as Colombia Presidential Advisor Linked to Paramilitaries Is Arrested
State and Local Legislators Continue to Lead the Fight Against Failed NAFTA Status Quo Trade Policies That Undermine Their Authority to Enact Policy
WASHINGTON, D.C. - State legislators' sound rejection today of a resolution calling on the U.S. Congress to approve the Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) sent another strong signal that the trade agreement has very limited support, said Public Citizen.
The pro-Colombia FTA resolution, introduced by a Republican Florida state legislator, was resoundingly rejected by a two-to-one margin in the Labor and Economic Development committee as the Colombian ambassador observed the spring meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) today in Washington, D.C.
"That a bipartisan organization representing state legislatures so resoundingly rejects the Colombia FTA sends a loud signal that most Americans do not want to be connected with either an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the Colombian government's record of horrible human rights atrocities," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch division.
State legislators really are leading the way on trade. You may remember that it was Montana state legislators who successfully pressured Max Baucus into backing off his support for "fast track" trade authority. Now, our state legislators are leading again. Will the Democratic Congress listen?
Join the book club for David Sirota's upcoming book, The Uprising, due out on 5/27.
General Electric's former CEO Jack Welch is one of the great economic royalists of the modern day. He is the guy who said the businessman's dream is to "have every plant you own on a barge" - so that the plant can move away anytime workers demand better wages, working conditions or environmental standards. So it is no surprise that Welch is spending his retirement years penning warmed-over press releases for the back page of Businessweek - the latest of which repackages the same tired arguments for NAFTA trade model that have drowned out every rational economic argument for the last two decades.
What's telling about the piece is how vapid it really is. In 594 words, we are given just three selective statistics that portray NAFTA as a net plus for domestic employment, wages and exports - despite the more macro statistics that show NAFTA has been a net job killer, driven down wages and exacerbated our trade deficits. The rest of the Welch press release is rhetoric about the wonders of free market ideology - ya know, the same free market ideology that created the financial crisis.
We could write this off as the silly ramblings of a past-his-prime CEO, except the propaganda goes from Jack Welch's screeds to George Bush's mouth.
A lot of people gave me flack for simply pointing out that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership were saying they delayed the lobbyist-written Colombia Free Trade Agreement not to stop it, but to pass it. I was merely relaying Pelosi's own words, and now Reuters finally reports what I have been saying for the better part of two weeks. Under the headline "Pelosi offers some hope for U.S.-Colombia trade deal," the newswire reports on Pelosi's latest admission that her stalling tactic is aimed at passing the deal and rewarding Colombia's murderous right-wing government:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered some hope on Wednesday for congressional passage of a free trade agreement with Colombia, but said it would fail if the White House tries to jam the deal down Congress' throat.
"Perhaps we can get some of the trade agreements through. We did get the Peru trade agreement recently in a bipartisan way," Pelosi said in a speech to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, whose members were in Washington to push Congress to approve the Colombia free trade pact and two others with Panama and South Korea.
"I've told the White House we stand ready to discuss with them how we can proceed in bringing this legislation to the floor. I said 'you want to do it the way you want to do it, it will lose. You just want to jam it down the throat of Congress, it will lose'," Pelosi said.
Again, Pelosi has been saying this from the beginning. But national reporters don't want to report that, and even many progressive leaders in Washington are trying to pretend that the delay was an entirely positive and benevolent move.
I sympathize a little bit with that latter group - we all want to believe the Democratic Party will do the right thing and tell ourselves that the party is acting in good faith. We want to believe it no matter how many times we get trampled by that same party, whether it's NAFTA, PNTR, Peru or any of the other job-killing trade deals that Democrats have rammed through Congress.
But believing that the Democratic Party always operates on behalf of the little guy on these issues is not optimism - it's delusion, especially when we see an army of former Clinton administration officials being paid with Colombian government blood money to pass this deal. On fundamental economic and corporate issues, the Democratic Party - like the Republican Party - answers to money and power - and if this deal is going to be stopped, it is going to require a whole lot of people power to stop it. Because as our Speaker of the House is saying, she's using legislative maneuvers not to prevent this monstrosity from passing, but to prevent it from losing.
As progressives, we sometimes feel a bit uneasy about making declarative statements about the values people express in their actions. We hesitate, for instance, to call things "evil," not wanting to be like George "Wiith Us, or Against Us" Bush. That's understandable - absolutism can lead to bad places. However, sometimes when confronted with the blatant, undeniable truth, we have to call things out for what they are. That's what I did in my newspaper column today - the first of a two-column series on the anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre. In this column, I discuss the problem with blood money being used to buy off the Democratic Party.
As I keep saying, Democrats' move to delay the Colombia Free Trade Deal is not a move to kill the bill and take a stand for human rights abroad and a just economic policy at home - it is a move to make sure the bill can ultimately pass. Here's the New York Times with more evidence:
Ms. Pelosi and other Democrats said their intent was not to kill the agreement...Even though a majority of Democrats are opposed to further trade deals, under the right conditions, a sufficient number of them could probably be found to join with Republicans in approving the pact with Colombia. The agreement with Peru passed in that fashion last year.
"Globalization can be a good thing; trade can be a good thing," said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, a member of the Democratic leadership and a frequent trade advocate. (emphasis added)
As NAFTA-architect-turned-investment-banker-turned-lawmaker Rahm Emanuel spews his doubletalk, keep reminding yourself: They aren't trying to stop it, they're trying to pass it...they aren't trying to stop it, they're trying to pass it...How many times do we have to be fooled by poorly executed and unconvincing tricks before we wake up and say enough is enough?
Yesterday, I wrote a post saying there was a good, bad and potentially ugly side of Nancy Pelosi's move to delay a vote on the lobbyist-written Colombia Free Trade Agreement. The ugly side would be if this is a ploy to actually help the pact pass - and some new pieces of evidence suggest that's the goal.
Well, at least Democratic corporate hacks in Washington are being a little more honest with us about why they refuse to kill a trade deal with a murderous right-wing regime. It's not about principle, it's about what it's always about - money:
Yet Democrats would have faced unwelcome political consequences for voting to defeat the trade deal. Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), who has voted for other controversial trade deals, said Democrats would have faced "pretty bad" political fallout among supporters in the business community had they killed the agreement.
So this is what Democrats meant when yesterday CongressDaily said they thought killing the deal "is not seen as a viable political option" despite polls showing the vast majority of Americans opposing our current trade policy. That's the definition of "politically viable" in D.C.: Not whether or not a position is at odds with the American people, but whether it is at odds with Big Money.
Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) was confident that House leaders would schedule a vote on the trade pact in a post-election session, when wavering members would be more willing to support it. "I think there'll be a vote in the latter part of November, or early December," he said, adding it would likely be approved in those circumstances.
More evidence that we're watching some really nasty shenanigans unfold. Here's the real bottom line to this: Right now, even Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) - Mr. Corporate Hack - is upset at Bush's tactics. In other words, people inclined to support the deal like Baucus are worried Bush's tactics have rankled lawmakers into voting against the Colombia deal - lawmakers who normally would. So the only real reason to delay it - if it is going to be brought up again later - is to pass it, not to reject it.
This is pretty simple legislative logic. Why delay it, rather than seizing the opportunity to kill it right now? My guess: Because the Democratic leadership doesn't want to kill it - they want to pass it in a more electorally-safe way.
Here's one question: Why does there seem to be so much more liberal outrage at what's going on in Tibet or Darfur, than what has long been going on in Colombia? I don't really understand this. Sure the magnitudes might be different, but 2,500 union organizers murdered should generate some really serious outrage. But whenever it comes to labor issues and taking on neoliberals, it seems Left-istan never gets as outraged as other human rights crises. I could be wrong - but that's just my sense.
In my last post, I noted that there could be a very ugly side to Nancy Pelosi's move to delay a vote on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Well, it seems like that ugly side could be coming true. Here's CongressDaily:
House Democratic leaders are seriously considering delaying a vote on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement until after the November elections, thereby providing needed cover for vulnerable rank-and-file members, according to senior Democratic leadership sources.
CongressDaily says the lame-duck plan is gaining momentum, and that - despite polls showing the vast majority of Americans opposing this NAFTA-style trade policy - Democrats say killing the deal "is not seen as a viable political option."
The House of Representatives will decide on Thursday whether to put off indefinitely a vote on the Colombia free-trade agreement that President George W. Bush submitted to Congress this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. Pelosi, announcing the move to reporters on Wednesday, would not give a time frame for when the trade pact might be debated and put up for a vote on passage in the House. The vote on Thursday would change rules for considering the deal by eliminating a 90-day deadline for Congress to approve the Colombia trade deal.
This is good news, bad news and potentially ugly news.
For all the headlines about corruption that we saw in the lead-up to the 2006 election, we have to remember that the most pernicious form of corruption is the that is difficult to see - the kind that reporters and politicians alike pretend doesn't exist, but which lobbying disclosure records expose. This is the subject of my nationally syndicated newspaper column this week, out this weekend.
STATE BLOGS
