CounterCurrents: How Obama And Congressional Republicans Intend To Pass TPP Into Law — After The November Elections, Exposing And Thence Punishing Worst Polluter Nations Via Weighted Annual Per Capita Greenhouse Gas Pollution Scores

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In Solidarity
Binu Mathew
Editor
www.countercurrents.org


Beef Ban Hysteria Raises Its Ugly Head Again: Two Men Lynched To Death In Jharkhand
By Countercurrents.org

http://www.countercurrents.org/cc180316A.htm

The 'beef ban hysteria' whipped up by hindutva fundamentalists has claimed two more lives. Accroding to Times of India, two Muslim men herding eight buffaloes on their way to a local Friday market were bashed up and hanged to death from a tree by unknown assailants at Balumath forests in Latehar district, of Jharkhand state of India, in the wee hours on Friday. The buffaloes were freed by the men and locals claimed the assailants were Hindu radicals. "The sight suggested that the two of them were subjected to extreme levels of brutality. It means that the assailants were moved by extreme hatred," a police officer said.


The Illegal Arrest Of Debaranjan Sarangi
By Biswapriya Kanungo & Trijeeb Nanda

http://www.countercurrents.org/nanda190316.htm

In the early morning of 18th March 2016, Debaranjan Sarangi, a Human Rights Activist, was picked up by plainclothes police from the Kucheipadar village of Rayagada District, Odisha. Debaranjan was in Kucheipadar to attain a funeral ceremony of one of his friends’ father. The police claims of arresting Debaranjan while executing a non-bailable warrant issued by the court of JMFC, Kashipur, in pursuance of a criminal case registered in the Tikri police station of Raygada District in 2005. Everyone including his advocate was clueless about the whereabouts of Debaranjan, till he was produced before the court of JMFC, Kashipur, in the evening. Without considering his bail application the court extended his remand till 22nd March 2016


ABVP Attacks Lecture On Bhagat Singh By Prof. Chaman Lal
By Vidya

http://www.countercurrents.org/vidya190316.htm

After the initial attack by ABVP goons, we reorganized, resisted and pushed back the goons. The police surrounded us but did not stop the ABVP. Prof. ChamanLal,after being introduced by Dr. Vikas Gupta, began his talk. He started by highlighting the lack of democratic space in the university and how Bhagat Singh would have viewed those disrupting such programmes as stooges of colonial and imperialist powers. He invoked the words of Bhagat Singh to reiterate the meaning of fighting for the country. The ABVP goons who had beensloganeering now openly threatened Prof. ChamanLal and all those who had gathered – ‘jobhagatsingh ki raah chalega, who afzalki maut marega’, ‘deshkegaddaronko, golimaarosaalonko’. Prof. ChamanLal responded with slogans of ‘inquilabzindabad’. Once again, this time the police took exception to this and the SHO directly confronted Prof. ChamanLal and told him to mind what he says


Bail To Umar Khalid And Anirban Welcome, But Questions On Justice Remain
By Samar

http://www.countercurrents.org/samar190316.htm

The bail finally granted to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya is welcome. Despite the media gaze, it took almost a month for the students, who are accused of sedition on flimsy grounds, to be released. This showcases the nature of Indian Magistracy, and yet the repeated rejection of their bail plea would not shock anyone for whom the Indian judicial system is old hat


Exposing And Thence Punishing Worst Polluter Nations Via Weighted 
Annual Per Capita Greenhouse Gas Pollution Scores
By Dr Gideon Polya

http://www.countercurrents.org/polya190316.htm

The latest shocking global temperature data indicate that it is now too late to avoid a catastrophic plus 2 degrees Centigrade temperature rise. Annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution per se is a flawed measure of national culpability for this because it ignores rich countries outsourcing industrial pollution to China, and impoverished countries compelled to pollute to barely survive. A better measure of culpability is weighted annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution taking relative per capita income into account, this revealing that the worst polluters on this basis include the rich Anglosphere countries of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland


Our Economic Growth System Is Reaching Limits In A Strange Way 
By Gail Tverberg

http://www.countercurrents.org/tverberg190316.htm

If a person doesn’t understand what the problem is, it is easy to come to the wrong conclusion. Part of our problem is that we need a growing amount of net energy, per capita, to keep the economy from collapsing. Part of our problem is that entropy problems such as rising debt, increased pollution, and increasing complexity tend to bring the system down, even when we seem to have plenty of energy supplies. These are the two big problems we are facing that few people recognize


How Obama And Congressional Republicans Intend To Pass TPP Into Law — After The November Elections 
By Eric Zuesse

http://www.countercurrents.org/zuesse190316.htm

TPP, and perhaps TTIP and TISA, will be voted on after the elections and will almost certainly be passed into law; and, if Bernie Sanders will have been elected as President, he will do everything possible to undo them. Clinton almost certainly will not. Trump is a big question-mark

Back on 10 December 2015, the head of the U.S. Senate, the pro-Obama-trade-deals Republican Mitch McConnell, said that Obama shouldn’t try to pass his TPP or any other of his three mega-trade-deals until after the November elections, because Senators and Representatives won’t vote for it until the voters have already voted for their re-election (so that they’ll then be free to vote against those voters’ interests).

The previous congressional votes on these deals showed that congressional Republicans overwhelmingly favor them but many congressional Democrats oppose them. For example, in the crucial vote, in the Senate, only 37 of the 100 Senators voted against the enabling legislation (without which legislation they can’t pass), called “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority,” which will enable the President to ram these treaties through Congress, and 30 of these Senators were Democrats, 5 (Collins, Cruz, Paul, Sessions, and Shelby) were Republicans, and 2 (Sanders and King) were independents. That’s both independents, 30 of the 44 Democrats, and only 5 of the 54 Republicans. So: these bills are overwhelmingly Republican trade bills, which were created by a ‘Democratic’ President.

These deals will be enormously favorable to large international corporations, at the expense of workers’ rights, consumer rights, and environmental protection; so, it’s natural that they have overwhelming Republican support in Congress.

However, Republican voters are overwhelmingly against these bills. For example, on 18 February 2014, Huffington Post headlined "Conservatives Oppose Fast Track, TPP: Poll,” and reported that "Voter opposition explains why Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and even Joe Biden are wary about pushing the issue before the mid-term elections,” and all three of those people are Democrats. The Democratic leaders in Congress might be with the President on these bills, but most other congressional Democrats are opposed to these bills. However, "Republicans [Republican voters] overwhelmingly oppose giving fast-track authority to the president (8% in favor, 87% opposed), as do independents (20%-66%), while a narrow majority (52%) of Democrats are in favor (35% opposed). The takeaway: Republicans should be afraid, very afraid of voting for fast track if they want to keep their jobs: Two-thirds (68%) of Republicans say they are less likely to vote for a Member of Congress who votes to give President Obama fast-track authority.” And congressional Republicans overwhelmingly ignored their own Republican voters on this: they voted for Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority for the President anyway. (Their billionaire campaign donors demand it.) Furthermore: "John Boehner and GOP leaders support Obama’s trade agenda.” Whereas Democratic voters were in favor of these trade-bills because they come from a ‘Democratic’ President, Republican voters were overwhelmingly opposed to these trade-bills, merely because the President had a ‘Democratic’ label — but the people who represented Republican voters in Congress served their campaign-donors on these bills, not the people back home (who would perhaps take this as ‘bipartisanship’ and consider it favorably in that false light).

After the November elections, and the billions of advertising dollars that are spent on fooling voters to re-elect their existing supposed ‘representatives’ in Congress or else to elect their opposite-Party opponents, those incumbents will then be free to pay back their donors by voting for TPP and any other Obama trade-deal.

This article also said:

The poll found voters across the board believe so-called ‘free trade’ deals are bad for working Americans:
• Two-thirds (66%) say a convincing reason to oppose fast-track authority for TPP is that “workers in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia are exploited and paid as little as 28 cents an hour, which creates unfair competition that drives down wages for American workers.”
• By a 35-point margin, the voting public believes the TPP deal would make things worse (56%) rather than better (21%) in terms of American wages and salaries.
• Three in five voters (62%) feel this is a convincing argument against fast- track authority: “This is a NAFTA-style trade deal, and since NAFTA, the United States has run up an eight-trillion-dollar trade deficit, resulting in millions of lost manufacturing jobs.”
• Voters are three times as likely to say that preventing U.S. jobs moving overseas should be a top goal for trade deals as they are to cite opening foreign markets to U.S. exports.
• By a five-to-three ratio, voters anticipate that the TPP deal would make things worse (52%) rather than better (30%) for American jobs.
Voters understand precisely who will benefit from the TransPacific Partnership - and who will be hurt:
• American voters overwhelmingly expect TPP to be a good deal for large corporations: 72% say it will help these corporations and just 17% say it will hurt them.
• However, voters have the opposite expectation when it comes to a vastly more popular institution: America’s small businesses. Just 24% feel that TPP would help small firms, while 64% think TPP will mostly hurt small businesses.
• Significantly, voters in small business households (in which a voter either owns or works for a small business) believe that TPP will harm small firms: 61% say they expect TPP to hurt more than help small businesses.

Hillary Clinton helped to pass NAFTA into law, but in both 2008 and 2016 presented herself to Democratic primary voters as if she had never favored NAFTA, TPP, or any similar legislation. Bernie Sanders has consistently voted against those bills. Donald Trump says that he’s against those bills but he has no actual voting-record by which to judge his sincerity.

So: TPP, and perhaps TTIP and TISA, will be voted on after the elections and will almost certainly be passed into law; and, if Bernie Sanders will have been elected as President, he will do everything possible to undo them. Clinton almost certainly will not. Trump is a big question-mark.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Right To Be A Coward 
By Waqas Farooq Kuttay

http://www.countercurrents.org/wfk190316.htm

The February 09 event at JNU which got enough media attention still remains the talk of the day. It was alleged that there were some outsiders notably Kashmiri students who raised the anti-India slogans. A few days back, I had a discussion with my friends over the dreadful possibilities which those ‘allegedly involved students’ would have faced if caught by the police or if they came to spotlight. My friends sturdily maintained that they should have gone into hiding but I strongly discarded the idea. My friends stuck to their position forwarding a different set of arguments that I countered. I don’t know which set of arguments are right or wrong. I am just writing it down