More on secrets in trade…TPP
And some vigilant independent watchdogs are tracking the negotiations with sources they trust, including Dean Baker and Yves Smith, who join Moyers & Company this week. Both have written extensively about the TPP and tell Bill the pact actually has very little to do with free trade.
Instead, says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “This really is a deal that’s being negotiated by corporations for corporations and any benefit it provides to the bulk of the population of this country will be purely incidental.” Yves Smith, an investment banking expert who runs the Naked Capitalism blog adds: “There would be no reason to keep it so secret if it was in the interest of the public.”
Yves Smith and Dean Baker on Secrets in Trade from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Of course if you want to go there almost all federal product regulations are due to industry preferring one standard to 51 or 52 standards (depending on if you include Puerto Rico). One example is the federal toilet water usage rules. States were adopting their own rules, and the toilet industry ask the feds to adopt one standard to reduce the logistical difficulties involved in 52 standards. One sees some of the state by state effects if you look at power lawn equipment on the web you see a good bit of it marked not for sale in California.
Baker is like a broken record and rarely says anything useful.
Smith is excellent.
Rusty I think by “useful” you mean “anything I am able to actually refute”.
Or can you point out issues on which Dean has actually been wrong? With the possible exception of his timing of the housing bubble whose peak IMHO he placed too early (c. 2004) but whose existence only the most stubborn would deny.
On the other hand I understand full well why Dean’s repetiviteness would get to you. Because nobody likes having their noses rubbed in their own errors.
As a matter of disclosure I consider Dean to be a friend, and in fact something of a mentor, and we touch base from time to time. But to my mind he shares some of the same ‘crime’ as does the Shrill One Krugthulu – being right too early. Kind of like the ‘pre-mature anti-fascists’ bashed by the American Communist Party after Molotov-Ribbentrop came a cropper with Operation Barbarossa.
Bill Moyers, fair and balanced…Not.
Hans is your point that liberal voices should not be heard in major media? Or that the proliferation of conservative voices like Krauthammer, Will and Kristol who never seem to be missing from the airwaves is somehow just to be accepted but Moyers should be rejected on principle.
The whole derisible point about “Fair and Balanced” as used by Fox is that it was a total joke to start with by people who were rabidly against the very existence of the “Fairness Doctrine” to begin with.
Long-time Republican Operative Roger Ailes was given a ton of money and a free head by Neo-Conservative Australian turned American Rubert Murdoch to establish an American version of Murdoch’s British and Australian media outlets, themselves unabashedly and unashamedly Conservative with a capital C. And there was nothing particularly wrong with that, even if a lot of people on the Left laughed at the idea that the Big Three Broadcast networks or their cable affiliates or CNN were ever particularly liberal. Butwhat was almost criminal was Fox’s conceit in claiming that they had no bias at all, that only they were calling it straight down the middle, that they and only they were “Fair and Balanced”. They made a mockery of the whole concept, and given Ailes entire history of agitprop on behalf of the Republican Party did so with malice aforethought and in turn reaped the rewards earned by the mock-worthy. In a word – mockery.
It is frankly perverse for the Right Wing media to insist on a version of the Fairness Doctrine for other media outlets which they have opposed in principal and in their own practice. Bill Moyers has exactly ZERO obligation to be ‘fair and balanced’ in absense of the previously existing ‘Fairness Doctrine’ and certainly Ailes wouldn’t have it any other way when applying to his own operations.
Moyers has a point of view. Maddow has a point of view. Limbaugh has a point of view. Hannity has a point of view. What of it?
It is perfectly legitimate to point out that Moyers has a bias, or at least a perceived bias. But to accuse him of crimes that the Right does not at all accept as being crimes when applied to themselves is just bizaare and stupid. Or at least scores about a minus 5 on the Snark Effectiveness Scale.
“OOOHH, oooh, ‘…not’ . GOOD one Hans!”. Hmm, er, maybe …Not.