Tag Archives: Barack Obama

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Trans-Pacific Partnership: Secrecy Plus “Fast Track” Does Not Equal Free Trade

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Free trade thumb
Free trade thumb (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wants president Barack Obama to declassify details of an upcoming “free trade agreement,” the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Obama’s response incorporates two mutually exclusive claims:  First, that the deal isn’t secret and that Warren’s just tub-thumping to rouse her progressive base; second, that okay, yes, parts of it are secret, but the secrecy is necessary.

Setting aside Obama’s poke at her motivations, Warren is right. The TPP is a bad deal. The secrecy surrounding some of its components is there for a reason: Most of us won’t like what’s in it.

That’s also why Obama is pushing the US Senate to give him “fast track” authority, getting him a straight up-or-down vote as soon as he unveils the treaty instead of having to justify its details and face the possibility of amendment demands.

The first and most important thing to understand about the Trans-Pacific Partnership is that no, it’s not a “free trade” agreement.

Even if we knew none of the details of TPP (we do know some of them), we could reach that conclusion by noticing how lengthy, complex and detailed the negotiations are. Free trade is simple. All it requires is for the involved governments to forswear restrictions on commerce between their nations.

Heck, it could even be done unilaterally. The US could simply announce that it’s lifting all tariffs, quotas and limits from imports and exports, and invite other nations to do likewise. If worry-warts want a poison pill provision for “balance,” that’s easy too: Just mandate that if any nation imposes restrictions on American goods, the worst of those restrictions will be mirrored for all goods originating in the offending country.

TPP isn’t “free” trade.  It’s “managed” trade. Its managers are industry lobbyists and their pet politicians. They don’t care a fig for freedom. Their priorities are easy profits and political advantage.

We already know that in at least one sector — so-called “intellectual property” — TPP is the opposite of free trade, or for that matter freedom of any kind. We know this because whistleblower group Wikileaks procured and released a copy of the treaty’s draft chapter on IP.

That chapter would impose the worst parts of America’s draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act,  patent system and other anti-freedom, anti-innovation laws on all parties, globally damaging the ability to copy, to improve, to innovate — and bringing de facto Internet censorship into force — all so Disney can wring a few more bucks out of its 88-year-old mascot mouse and Big Pharma can hold the world’s patients hostage to high drug prices for a little bit longer.

TPP is a bad deal for producers and consumers worldwide. Let’s demand REAL free trade instead.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Mandatory Voting vs. Consent of the Governed

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Diagram of US Federal Government and American ...
Diagram of US Federal Government and American Union. Published: 1862, July 15. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At a Cleveland town hall event in mid-March, president Barack Obama mulled the possibility of legally requiring Americans to vote, noting the existence of such laws in other countries like Australia. “It would be transformative if everybody voted,” he said. “That would counteract money more than anything. If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map of this country.”

It’s easy to understand Obama’s sensitivity on the subject of non-voting. He won re-election in 2012 with a popular vote of just barely one in five Americans — a hair over 50% of votes cast by a little more than 40% of the population. Not much of a mandate, is it? Nearly six in ten Americans either chose not to vote or weren’t allowed to vote (children, convicted felons in some states, etc.).

Obama’s estimate of Americans’ intelligence is noteworthy as well. When he says that mandatory voting would “counteract money,” what he presumably means is that Democrats would win more elections if they could force people who don’t pay attention to the debate — the campaign commercials, campaign brochures and campaign events that money buys — to vote. To re-write the Statue of Liberty’s famous line, “give me your ignorant, your uninformed, your apathetic …” I don’t know if he’s right about that, but doesn’t it seem a bit unflattering to Democrats and to their prospective new constituents?

Mandatory voting sticks in libertarian craws for obvious reasons, one of which Sheldon Richman notes in a March 25 column on the subject: A “right” to vote implies a right to NOT vote. Voting might be a “right,” or it might be a “duty,” but it can’t be both.

Mandatory voting also flies in the face of the alleged basis of American government’s legitimacy, per the Declaration of Independence:  “Consent of the governed.” Compelled voting smacks of “you must consent whether you want to or not.” Which, of course, is not really “consent” at all.

Over the last half-century, voting in American elections has become easier and easier. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited racial discrimination in registration and voting.  The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (“Motor Voter”) made registration easy and convenient, available at any government office. Many states have loosened their absentee voting rules and some are moving to “vote by mail” systems eliminating the need to schlep down to a physical polling place and wait in line.

Yet only 37% of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2014 mid-terms.

Maybe the majority of Americans who don’t vote are trying to tell Obama and his fellow politicians something. Polling by Rasmussen says that fewer than 20% of Americans believe the federal government enjoys that “consent of the governed” I mentioned earlier.

Maybe it’s time to proceed to the next step the Declaration mentions and “alter or abolish” the federal government for lack of consent to its existence and actions.

Maybe it’s time to do things differently.

Maybe that’s what “mandatory voting” advocates are so afraid of.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Florida Senate: Wrong on Cuba

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RGBStock Havana

On March 24, Florida’s State Senate voted 39-1 to condemn recent moves by president Barack Obama toward normalizing US relations with Cuba.

There’s no nice way to put this: Those 39 state senators voted in favor of maintaining the Castro regime in perpetuity. They voted against freedom for 11 million Cubans. Incidentally, they also voted against the economic interests of all Floridians and against reunification for Florida’s families of Cuban descent.

Freedom is a virus. Wherever free people go, they spread the desire for freedom to those less free than themselves. That desire is infectious. It’s also deadly to authoritarian regimes.

For 55 years, the US government has quarantined Cuba via embargo. That quarantine didn’t prevent the spread of authoritarianism from Cuba to other parts of the world (see, for example, Nicaragua and Venezuela). It just prevented the spread freedom to Cuba.

We’ve seen this effect, and its opposite, elsewhere. The obvious pairing to demonstrate the claim is China versus North Korea. China has become progressively more free over the decades in which it has enjoyed normalized relations with the US. Not completely free by any stretch of the imagination, but much freer. North Korea, under sanction and embargo, remains an utterly totalitarian state.

In Cuba, the embargo’s beneficiaries are the Castros and their henchmen.

In America, the embargo’s beneficiaries are moneyed interests who don’t want to compete with Cuban sugar, cigars or tourist destinations, as well as generations of “anti-Castro” Cuban emigre politicos who procure donations and US government grants to think about and talk about overthrowing the Castro regime … with no prospect of ever actually doing so, and no desire to see it done unless the transition puts them, and only them, in power in Cuba.

In Cuba and in America, everyone else is a victim, not a beneficiary, of the embargo.

It’s time for Cuban students to start attending America’s universities and for Cuban farmers to start selling their goods in America’s markets.

It’s time for American tourists to start visiting Cuba’s beaches and for American engineers to start improving Cuba’s infrastructure.

It’s time for Florida and Cuba alike to gain the advantages of new nearby trade partners (Tampa is closer to Havana than it is to Atlanta).

It’s time to end the quarantine and spread the freedom virus.

If Florida’s politicians won’t lead on this issue, they should at least get out of the way.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.