Author: Tom Sullivan

Yves Smith on the art of class war

Yves Smiths’s post Tuesday summarizes the challenges of reigning in (pun intended) the One Percent and of running a blog with that purpose. Knowing your opponent is key, but mastering the gory details of finance is its own challenge. It is a worthwhile read.

You need to be a soldier in the war to demystify finance, because its supposedly arcane and impenetrable nature is one of its biggest weapons. It’s easy to dismiss critics if they can be depicted as ignorant. There are costs to citizenship. One such cost is knowing your enemy, their strategies, their tactics, and the terrain on which they fight. That requires not passing familiarity with finance, but knowledge of it.

A key piece of that knowledge is “private equity is a government sponsored enterprise.” From tax subsidies to investments in government pension funds to sovereign wealth funds, these investments make money using the government, she writes, and,

… close to half the investment capital in private equity funds is contributed directly by government entities. In this respect, private equity is little different than companies like Fannie, Freddie, and Solyndra that are regularly criticized in the media as recipients of government subsidies.”

It no longer seems magic once the audience knows how the trick is done. That’s why private equity masters cloak their methods in arcana:

And this process explains the hypersensitivity of financiers like Tom Perkins and Steve Schwarzman, who become outraged by even mild criticisms of or attempts to regulate their industry. They recognize that the biggest threat to them is delegitimation. As long as they can maintain the illusion that their profits are fairly earned by their own effort (as opposed to extensive government subsidies and backstops), that all of their services, as currently configured, are essential for commerce, and that it’s all so complicated and difficult that no one can replace them, they will continue to have the whip hand. Over you. And your pension, if you have one. And your workplace, if they buy it for one of their asset-stripping projects.

That is why it is important to penetrate their veils of secrecy and complexity. Pay attention to these men behind the curtain. They don’t have superpowers and their know-how is not as lofty as they pretend. Their secrecy and sleight of hand are meant to disguise that many of their services are socially destructive (like most over-the-counter derivatives, which are used for tax or accounting gaming) or extractive by virtue of being overpriced, which might be defensible in a truly private industry but not one that is even more heavily supported by the government than the defense industry. In other words, your apathy and resignation play straight into the hands of the banksters. Do you really want to make their lives easier?

So broadcast the trick. Call them socialists. Make them own it. When even financiers are doing it, the term is, as George Will writes this morning in his forumlaic snark, “a classification that no longer classifies.“

McConnell v. Snowden
by Tom Sullivan

BREAKING: Obama signs bill reshaping NSA's phone records program, renewing powers that had expired.— The Associated Press (@AP) June 3, 2015

Passage of the USA Freedom Act does not end the debate about privacy and government spying. It is hardly a speed bump. The FBI surveillance flights reported yesterday demonstrated that. As Digby observed last night, “And just wait until the drone fleet gets going…”
The last time the press exposed a fleet of government aircraft operating behind shell corporations, the aircraft were ferrying terrorism suspects to exotic CIA “black sites” or foreign prisons for torture.

But the debate in the Senate over the Patriot Act was not about that. What Dan Froomkin wrote last week about the Patriot Act debate and
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell bears repeating:

Anybody paying attention knows it’s not a policy debate. The reasons McConnell and others cite for wanting to extend the program as is — despite the fact that it’s flatly illegal, essentially useless, and spectacularly invasive — are laughable. In fact, the compromise they’re willing to fight to the death to oppose was actually proposed by the NSA.

The issue is they just don’t want Snowden officially vindicated, by an act of Congress.

That is to say, they damned well don’t care that what’s being done is illegal. They only care that it got exposed. Which is something, I guess. Wall Street doesn’t even care that much.

The Republican “meltdown” over failure to renew the Patriot Act included what Sen. Barbara Boxer described on All In with Chris Hayes last night as a temper tantrum by McConnell. The Senate Majority leader even committed a messaging faux pas by repeating a headline calling his failure “a resounding victory for Edward Snowden.” Bad move.

The Guardian this morning calls the reforms’ passage a vindication for Snowden. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden noted that more needs to be done:

“This is the only beginning. There is a lot more to do,” Wyden told reporters after the vote. “We’re going to have very vigorous debate about the flawed idea of the FBI director to require companies to build weaknesses into their products. We’re going to try to close the backdoor search loophole – this is part of the Fisa Act and is going to be increasingly important, because Americans are going to have their emails swept up increasingly as global communications systems begin to merge.”

He also pointed to a proposal in the House “to make sure government agencies don’t turn cell phones of Americans into tracking devices” as another target for NSA reformers.

Meantime, watch the skies.

Lunatic mainstream
by Tom Sullivan

Newsweek examines how Timothy McVeigh’s anti-government ideas have crept into the body politic since he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. What once was the lunatic fringe is now the Republican base:

Militia sympathizers today have the ears of many Republican politicians. Texas Governor Greg Abbott vowed to keep watch on the U.S. military this spring as it runs a series of war games called Jade Helm 15. Some Texans sensed an armed federal takeover of the Lone Star State and demanded action. Senator Cruz said of their fears, “I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty, because when the federal government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don’t trust what it is saying.”

As the Jade Helm 15 nonsense demonstrated, from the militias to the gold bugs to the Agenda 21 nuts to the Cliven Bundys to the Tenthers, the fringe has gone mainstream. Laws nullifying federal gun laws – even banning their enforcement – have sprung up in red states across the country:

Besides freeing guns from Washington’s control, there are also bills nullifying Obamacare, the National Security Agency and Common Core, as well as federal laws on other environmental standards, marijuana and tracking license plates. The federal government is “diving off into areas unchecked that they’re not supposed to be involved in,” said Montana state Representative Krayton Kerns, who introduced a bill in 2013 to limit the ability of local police to help enforce federal laws. “Not only is it our right in state legislatures to do this, it’s our obligation to do it,” Kerns told NBC News. “Somebody’s got to put a ‘whoa’ on it.” Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is such a nullification enthusiast that he created a separate “Federalism Unit” devoted to fighting federal government “abuses of power.”

Oklahoma, once the victim and symbol of where the paranoia leads, now leads the way in furthering McVeigh’s anti-government agenda. Newsweek reports that last year Oklahoma lawmakers passed an Agenda 21 nullification act. In 2014, it made any federal gold coins legal tender.

There are some intriguing similarities between the current political climate and that of the mid-’90s, when McVeigh gathered up the fertilizer for his Ryder truck bomb. Back then, as now, a Democratic president presided over an improving American economy, and his popularity provoked the fear and loathing of an edge of the right-wing political spectrum contemplating—and occasionally engaging in—armed resistance.

Leading Republicans both feed and feed off of the government-as-enemy sentiment. As Newsweek makes clear, GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates such as Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, and Mike Huckabee are all too eager to feed the anti-government sentiment against the beast they themselves want so badly to ride.

It reminds me of George Burns in Oh, God! sending a message to a popular televangelist that he’s a phony: “If he wants to get rich, tell him to sell Earth shoes. But personally tell him I’d like him to shut up.”

[h/t Dave Neiwert]

Section 215 sunsets
by Tom Sullivan

USA Freedom Act advances 77-17 in the Senate. Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act expired at midnight, ending (temporarily, at least) the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records:

In a double blow for Washington security hawks, represented by embattled Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, it now looks likely that Congress will have to wait several days before passing that bill, the USA Freedom Act.

The reform legislation, which bans the NSA from collecting Americans’ telephone records in bulk, was initially opposed by McConnell. But with the clock ticking down toward the midnight expiration of broader powers initially granted after 9/11 under the Patriot Act, Republican leaders had few options but to get behind the bill as the best way of preserving other surveillance authority.

Democrats Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico spent time on the Senate floor last night debunking past assertions by the intelligence community that the bulk collection was essential to national security. Conventional intelligence gathering is sufficient to do the job without bulk collection of Americans’ data, they argued. “Not a single instance” of bulk collection materially improving security has turned up, Wyden said.

.@RonWyden ODNI has given 5 different explanations for why [Clapper lied] abt collecting data on millions of Americans.— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 31, 2015

Heinrich and others credited whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the secret program as a factor in shifting the debate:

“No doubt it played a role,” Republican senator Dean Heller told the Guardian. “I think it played the same role for me as it did for most of the American people, who were surprised and stunned that the government had this sort of access to this kind of data.”

Security hawks forecast apocalypse with a chance of brimstone:

Round up the unusual suspects

When the IRS’ chief of criminal investigation this week uttered the phrase “World Cup of fraud,” for a moment I thought he meant criminal indictments were finally being issued for Wall Street bankers over the criminal practices that precipitated (and followed) the 2008 financial crisis. How naive.

“If you touch our shores with your corrupt enterprise, whether that is through meetings or through using our world class financial system, you will be held accountable for that corruption,” FBI Director James Comey said of the charges leveled this week against officials of FIFA, international soccer’s governing body.

Not being a big team sports guy myself – as the Monkees’ Davy Jones said, “It’s ’cause I’m short, I know.” – I had to Google FIFA. This explainer from Vox helps:

The BBC wonders what the U.S. is doing policing international sports, finding, “To prosecute cases that involve foreign nationals, US authorities need only prove a minor connection to the United States.” So, the U.S. Department of Justice finds the time and the authority to investigate an international sports organization that “falls into a netherworld of governance,” to indict and arrest its officials in foreign countries for paying bribes through U.S. banks, yet cannot seem to show the same courtesy to top bank officials in this country for bringing the world economy to its knees, for hurting two-thirds of American families and continuing to hurt states years later.

Just so we’re clear.

Again, the usual suspects are implicated:

CitiBank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, HSBC Holdings PLC and Bank of America Corp. are deeply involved in the bribes, kickbacks and laundering money schemes of some top FIFA officials and sports executives that have been indicted by the US law enforcement. According to a 164-page indictment released by the US Department of Justice, the banks participated in illegal payment schemes and wire transfers in the amount of millions of US dollars.

On Wednesday, US authorities charged nine officials of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and five sports executives, alleging they were part of a scheme in which more than $150m in bribes were paid in exchange for the commercial rights to football tournaments.

The scheme involves top global financial institutions such as JPMorgan and HSBC, both of which have recently paid billions of dollars in fines for illegal trading and manipulation of foreign exchange markets.

Yet it is the unusual suspects who got rounded up while Wall Street’s Ugartes wring their hands over FIFA’s “poor devils.”

More than meets the eye
by Tom Sullivan

When a conservative politician uses some oddball term that makes my ears prick up, makes me cock my head like a dog and baroo, I have learned to dig deeper and not simply shrug it off. It is often a dog whistle. There’s more going on than meets the ear.

So when President Obama went to bat for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, kept it out of public view, and seemed ready to go to the mat for an agreement that seems likely to hurt American workers, you would think I might have done the same instead of thinking it was just the neoliberal agenda. But when Mike Lux yesterday (Slavery? Really?) highlighted that, in pursuit of the TPP, the first African-American president was ready to oppose any moves by the Senate requiring Malaysia to put the brakes on its tolerance for slavery, something finally clicked. Perhaps there was more going on than meets the eye. I dug deeper.

First, Ryan Grimm at Huffington Post:

That measure would bar governments considered to be complicit in human trafficking from receiving the economic benefits of a fast-tracked trade deal. Menendez, the author of the provision, has described it as a human rights protection that will prevent U.S. workers from competing with modern-day slave labor. The administration has pushed against the provision, saying it would prevent Malaysia from participating in the deal, and eliminate incentives for the country to upgrade its human trafficking enforcement. Human rights advocates strongly support the language that passed the Senate on Friday.

The president argues that if the U.S. doesn’t cut deals with these partner countries, China will, to U.S. disadvantage.

But you know all that. Mike Lux at C&L writes, “We’re not going to object to slavery because a country that openly engages in it might trade more with China than with us? Doesn’t this kind of blow up the whole ‘most progressive trade agreement in history’ thing?”

Then I came across this post from Gaius Publius at Down With Tyranny, referencing Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism:

Cue Antifa:

Malaysia’s membership in the circle of TPP nations is not vital because Malaysia — it’s vital because of the Malacca Straits, through which virtually all the shipping in that part of the world passes. It’s a bottleneck, a chokepoint, and if Malaysia is “driven into the arms of China” then China can close those Straits to shipping how, when, and as they please.

Which would neuter the US Navy in that part of the world, reducing them to observer status. When people at the Pentagon talk about America’s role as the world’s policeman, they are talking about the Navy’s ability to project overwhelming force wherever and whenever needed. The three little chokepoints world trade and shipping depend on are the Strait of Hormuz, the Straits of Malacca, and the Panama Canal. Taking one of those and giving control of it to China and Friends — or to anyone but the US Navy — puts the world’s policeman in a clown suit.

And Andrew Watts added yesterday:

In terms of geopolitics, a pseudo-science imo, there isn’t a more strategic chokepoint in the world. A quarter of the world’s shipping goes through the Straits of Malacca. Look at a list of member states of TPP and tell me this isn’t an anti-Chinese military alliance or there are alternative shipping lanes. The transportation routes via the Eurasian Silk Road is one way to circumvent this potential naval blockade but shipping via the sea has always been cheaper than shipping by land.

The only reason why business and intellectual property rights is apart of the deal is because Obama needs to bribe as many domestic power centers as possible to pass it. This is straight outta his Obamacare playbook. The reason for the secrecy is probably due to the military nature of the pact. in any case nobody wants the perception that this is preparation for some future Sino-American war.

But if I were a Chinese political leader in Beijing I would not trust any assurances to the contrary that come from Washington.

Strait of Malacca control was also one of the domino theory issues that contributed to the Vietnam War.

Correct. Which proves that the US military has always had it in it’s sights AND they’re willing to go to war for control over it.

Gaius has much more must-read background at Down With Tyranny. But he offers three possible (and non-exclusive) explanations for why Obama might accept being the “Slavery in Asia” president:

▪ One explanation is pretty simple. He thinks no one will notice, or if they do, they’ll quickly forget. Pretty simple explanation, especially given that his best corporate friends control almost all of the messaging via corporate media.

▪ Another explanation is best expressed by Andrew Watt above. To repeat:

The only reason why business and intellectual property rights is [a part] of the deal is because Obama needs to bribe as many domestic power centers as possible to pass it. This is straight outta his Obamacare playbook.

That’s actually very kind to Obama. It says that he’s being a responsible president from a military standpoint, and bribing all major U.S. corporations — Nike, for example, corrupt as it is (do click) — to get the deal he needs because of solid national security concerns. As explanations go, this results in higher legacy points than the other ones do.

▪ The final explanation? He’s simply cashing out, feathering his future nest, foaming his own landing, getting his meal ticket punched, setting the table for the feast of his 20 years of life — his post-electoral, Obama Global Initiative legacy-tour life. You can’t ride the corporate stratospheric rails to Davos if corporate jet owners don’t like you. You can’t give speeches for $400,000 each (give or take) if you don’t give the check-writers a reason to say thanks.

Having lived through the Vietnam War and having seen the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution debunked decades after it passed, I find the Straits of Malacca explanation compelling. Although I wonder how an ice-free Arctic Ocean might impact its importance for world shipping. (And the U.S. controls one side of the Bering Strait.)

Great, now we’re probably going to hear insufferable chatter again from OFA about Obama playing multi-dimensional chess.

What a tangled web. I wonder, if we’re going to raise a stink about entering a trade pact with a Malaysia that tolerates slavery, is Malaysia going to raise a stink about entering a trade pact with a United States whose past president the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal so recently convicted in absentia for war crimes? Guess it’s a good thing the Senate didn’t pass language excluding countries that engage in torture from joining the TPP.

“I’m really sorry for what’s about to happen.”
by Tom Sullivan

As the saying goes, this is why we can’t have nice things.

Perhaps you remember #JustOneLegislator from February? Freshman North Carolina state senator Jeff Jackson made national news when the Charlotte Democrat was the only legislator to show up for work in Raleigh after a snowstorm. Jackson took to Twitter to muse about all the things he was getting done as a legislature of one. His Tweets landed him on Buzzfeed and made him Rachel Maddow’s Best New Thing in the World.

It turns out it really is a lot easier to get things done when Republican leaders stay home.

Jackson filed two bills in March meant to clean up some loopholes in existing laws, one concerning the definition of statutory rape and another regarding federal sex offenders. In Jackson’s words, “low-hanging fruit.” No-brainer legislation with Republican co-sponsors. But the bills stalled in committee. One GOP legislator apologized, saying, “I’m really sorry for what’s about to happen.”

An editorial in the Charlotte Observer explains:

On Wednesday, Jackson’s fears were confirmed. The bills have both been added to the House abortion bill that would, among other things, extend the mandatory waiting period for abortions to 72 hours.

Why add two good bills on sex crimes to one bad and unrelated bill on abortion? Because now, when Democrats vote against the abortion bill, they’ll also be voting against tighter rules on sex offenders and statutory rapists. You can imagine the TV ads the next time one of those Democrats faces a Republican election challenge.

No one has a clue which Colonel Mustard did it, in the committee room, with the monkey wrench. As usual, Republican leaders won’t say.

Since Jackson’s bills have Republican support, and since the GOP holds supermajorities in both houses, Jackson’s Republican co-sponsors will get their language passed regardless of how the Democrats vote. Perhaps the GOP leadership also wants to slap down the freshman Democrat for being uppity. These guys rarely do anything that is not at least a twofer.

This is not the first abortion restriction to advance since Pat McCrory won North Carolina’s governorship in 2012. McCrory was blunt when asked in a debate what further abortion restrictions he would sign into law, answering, “None.” Then in July 2013, claiming, “This law does not further limit access,” McCrory signed a bill that would “eliminate abortion coverage for public employees and individuals who have insurance through federal health care law’s public exchanges … ban sex-selective abortions and impose additional regulations on abortion clinics.” Several clinics across the state shut their doors.

The 2013 bill was just a warmup. A final Senate vote on the newest abortion measure could come next week.

A nation of hoarders
by Tom Sullivan

Last night NPR ran a story on how police departments like Seattle’s are archiving masses of data gleaned from cities’ license plate scanners. They’ve only scratched the surface of what might be done with it:

Newell is a PhD student at the University of Washington. He studies surveillance and is experimenting with what people can find out from stored license plate data. The scanners have already proven themselves when it comes to finding stolen cars, but Newell says with a big enough data base of this information, people could do so much more.

“As we mix data between roving systems on these patrol cars and systems mounted on, say red lights, law enforcement could get a much better picture of our individual movements,” he says. “And with enough data, [police can] predict when we might leave our home and when we might be at home, for instance.”

That capability is still “rudimentary,” and the data is mostly in the hands of private companies and contractors, not the government’s. Still, the hair on the back of privacy advocates’ necks is already standing up. But this isn’t another post about government spying and privacy concerns.

NPR reports that law enforcement officials across the country are worried Congress may force them to throw away data they have already collected, as well as restrict how they may collect, store, and use automated license plate recognition (ALPR) data in the future … for purposes they haven’t thought of yet … using technology that hasn’t been invented yet.

That got me thinking. They’re not alone. ALPR is just a smaller version of what the NSA is doing on a grander scale with phone records, etc. The NSA built Bluffdale (the Utah Data Center) so it could hoard — that is the word, isn’t it? — the sum total of “all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’” You know, for later. Because who knows? Some odd bit of random pocket litter might prove important someday. To somebody. Somewhere. And heaven forbid we should ever be forced to throw it out.

God help us. That’s not law enforcement. That’s a psychological disorder.

Super-deluxe, Extra-special, Inc.
by Tom Sullivan

Avoiding responsibility is just what the corporate form was designed for, wasn’t it? That’s why corporations will always go to the mat to protect their special rights and privileges as super-citizens. Those include not to facing jail time for repeated criminal behavior. Petty crime? Three strikes and you’re out. Corporate crime? Nobody’s counting. Justice for corporate crime is a different ball game.

“Banks have been on a criminal wilding,” Katrina vanden Heuvel writes, “allegedly laundering money for drug dealers, systematically defrauding homeowners on their mortgages, routinely committing perjury in courts and much more.” Their companies pay fines, yet virtually no one in charge goes to jail. Isn’t that special?

RJ Eskow ticks off a lengthy series of criminal behavior by large banking firms: Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS Financial Services. All repeat offenders:

In an expanded version of a survey we first reported on in 2012, an updated study on behalf of law firm Labaton Sucharow found a deep-seated culture of immoral behavior among bankers in the United States and Great Britain. And it found that the situation was getting worse, not better, noting “a marked decline in ethics” since the first study was conducted.

Two-thirds of voters surveyed believe the market is rigged by and for insiders. Eskow writes:

These voters are right – and they’re not alone. William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, spoke in 2013 of “deep-seated cultural and ethical failures” and “the apparent lack of respect for law, regulation and the public trust” in the culture of our biggest banks.

Dudley reached that conclusion in 2013, and the Labaton Sucharow study suggests that banker ethics have gotten worse since then.

Our banking system has a design problem, because its incentives are broken. Financialization is stifling the productive economy. And the systemic threat posed by our biggest banks has made them immune from real punishment.

Except, I would argue that the design problem is not isolated to banks. Corporate capitalism has metastasized. The banks have simply grown so big that their cancers are visible to the naked eye.

In London right now, an interactive play lets audience members have a go at making the choices corporate super-citizens usually get to make:

… In Zoe Svendsen’s play World Factory at the Young Vic, the audience becomes the cast. Sixteen teams sit around factory desks playing out a carefully constructed game that requires you to run a clothing factory in China. How to deal with a troublemaker? How to dupe the buyers from ethical retail brands? What to do about the ever-present problem of clients that do not pay? Because the choices are binary they are rarely palatable. But what shocked me – and has surprised the theatre – is the capacity of perfectly decent, liberal hipsters on London’s south bank to become ruthless capitalists when seated at the boardroom table.

It is not them. It is not just lax regulation or enforcement. It is the system. Paul Mason, economics editor of Channel 4 News, argues that capitalism is “a mode of regulation, not just of production.” That is, it is an organized market system that merely looks spontaneous. Bank CEOs walk free after committing fraud on a global scale “because a company has limited liability status, created by parliament in 1855 after a political struggle.” Because, I argue, we created corporations as privileged, jail-resistant, super-deluxe, extra-special citizens. That is the design problem. Why is it a surprise when they behave like spoiled children?

It is Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment writ large: “What happens when you put good people in an evil place?” Put college students in a mock prison, assign some the role of prisoners and others the (privileged) role of guards, and within days the “guards became abusive and the prisoners began to show signs of extreme stress and anxiety.” What happens when you put ordinary people in a corporate environment – not for days, but for years – privileged with limited liability and with the economic imperatives and incentives of the capitalist model? As Eskow says, “Crooked bankers aren’t born. They’re made.”

Paul Mason writes:

Our fascination with market forces blinds us to the fact that capitalism – as a state of being – is a set of conditions created and maintained by states. Today it is beset by strategic problems: debt-ridden, with sub-par growth and low productivity, it cannot unleash the true potential of the info-tech revolution because it cannot imagine what to do with the millions who would lose their jobs.

Because metastasized corporate capitalism does not care about anyone or anything beyond “expected future profits.” The Great Recession proved that. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is about to prove it again. It is not in need of better regulation or a software patch, but a new operating system.

Marx believed capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. Well about now, corporate capitalism is looking pretty seedy.

Isn’t that special?
by Tom Sullivan

Re: Trans-Pacific Partnership investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals.

Query: If corporations can sue over loss of “expected future profits” they didn’t earn, can people get food over loss of “expected future work”?

It has always seemed to me that people should be holding the corporate leash, not wearing the collar. “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” Yet we seem ready to hand mega-corporations a new and improved leash.

TPP is a “sellout of democracy” by “well-intentioned, sophisticated, realistic people … used to disregarding democracy when they want to accomplish something important,” writes Duke law school’s Jedediah Purdy at Huffington Post (emphasis mine):

From what we know of the TPP, it works as an economic policy straitjacket, locking its members into a shared set of market rules. It even brings in “investor-state dispute settlement” — a fancy term for allowing foreign corporations to sue governments whose lawmaking interferes with their profits, outside the courts of law, in suits resolved by private arbitrators. All of that is fundamentally anti-democratic. It reverses the basic and proper relationship between a political community and its economy. But plenty of Americans are seeking just that reversal. Not all of them believe the market is perfect and magical; but they believe it works, more or less, and that democracy does not. They are more than half right that this democracy, “our democracy” (a phrase that’s hard to say without irony), does not work. And that is the reality that makes their anti-democratic agreement so plausible.

I just said it in plain English. That extra-legal process violates not only democratic principles, but all the “Makers” and “personal responsibility” bullshit our corporate Brahmins spew to keep the rest of us in line — especially the poorest among us. But when you are that special, living your hypocrisy is just another of the perks.