Fareed Zakaria

Three Little Words: How Bill Daley Can Be Your Next Hero

Richard Eskow — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:58:08 -0500

Wall Street is widely despised by an American public that lives with the consequences of bank behavior every day. The President and the party were once widely trusted by the public to rein in the banks and save the economy, but that reputation's been tarnished by the fact that they're now seen as overly cozy with the big financial players. And who can forget those visitor logs that showed just how entwined the Administration and big business have always been?

With all the traffic between this Administration and Wall Street, maybe this week's Presidential appointees should be sworn in on a round -trip ticket for the Acela Express.

The choice of a JPMorgan Chase exec to run the White House operation seems like a bad move under the circumstances, and it probably is. But if Bill Daley took three simple words to heart, and had the President's blessing to act on them, it could change everything.

Wall Street White House

If the President had taken a tougher and more populist stand against the banks in his first two years he would have won more independents, his base wouldn't have been as apathetic, and the election results could have been very different. And President Obama squandered a lot of his reputation as a reformer by stacking his White House with Wall Street-friendly advisors, which only compounded the Democrats' difficulties in an unemployment-wracked election year.

Only in Washington, a city whose perceptual and social bubble provides reality-proof insulation, could anyone believe that the solution is to appoint more Presidential advisors from the banking industry.

There's a good argument to be made that the White House officially became a branch office of Wall Street this week. It's not just the appointment of Chase exec Bill Daley as the extremely powerful Chief of Staff. Gene Sperling, the latest is a string of Robert Rubin disciples in the Administration, is about to be appointed to replace Larry Summers. Sperling took $800,000 from Goldman Sachs to run a charity for poor women trying to start businesses in Third World countries, and has accepted as many bloated speaking fees from Wall Street as his predecessor had. (There's the awkward matter of that "$11,000 per op-ed" writing deal with Bloomberg, too. Some of us appreciate Sperling's impact on market valuations for editorial writing.)

Sperling's returning to the job he held under Bill Clinton, which leads Ezra Klein to make the argument that Obama's "running the government like a business," where ""having done the job well before is the best predictor of being able to do it well now." But the Rubin/Summers/Sperling team didn't do the job well. They helped deregulate Wall Street, and that led to disaster. No business on earth would hire people whose past performance had been so weak - much less ones who could hurt the organization's image with its customers (who in this case are the voters.)

And let's not forget one other personnel move this week: Paul Volcker, who valiantly and vainly tried to end rampant speculation by the megabanks, officially left the President's service. (He had un-officially been given the boot almost from the beginning, when Larry Summers began denying him Presidential access.)

All in all, the White House hasn't had a very sterling record of independence from the corrosive influence of big bank money, and this week brought back some bad memories. It reminded many people about Larry Summers, and those fat Wall Street checks. And it brought to mind OMB Director Peter Orszag, who left for a cushy job at Citigroup and was replaced by another Citigroup exec. And Tim Geithner, who to his personal credit has never cashed in on a fat Wall Street job (although he probably will), but was seen as far too close to Wall Street after his stewardship of the New York Fed and his supervision of the Goldman Sachs "backdoor bailout," which funneled taxpayer money to Goldman through AIG.[1]

This week's appointments are shaping up as a public relations disaster for the Administration. Alex Pareene at Salon is probably right: This appointment won't really please anybody but Washington pundits. The left, except for the few leaders who have personal relationships with Daley, is dismayed. The center is increasingly convinced that the White House isn't interested in helping Main Street. And this move plays right into the hands of the right, who'll play it up for all it's worth. (On Twitter, from @michellemalkin: Bill Daley's "centrist"/"business" bio = greasing Fannie Mae patronage factory gears, serving TARP recipient JP Morgan.)

Who's happy? Jamie Dimon, the Chamber of Commerce, and the lobbyist for Patton Boggs - but they'll still make their campaign checks out to Republicans. Mitch McConnell and some other Republicans said nice things, too, but that won't stop them from trying to undermine everything the President tries to do.

That leaves only voters. And whether they're on the the left, the right, or the center, this one's gonna hurt 'em.

Why Daley?

Daley, as everybody now knows, is the son of the late Chicago mayor and the brother of the current mayor. His political perceptions are likely to be an even bigger liability than his resume. He's a Board member of Third Way, which is one of many signs that he thinks "centrism" represents what wealthy and powerful people in Washington agree on, rather than what people in the country agree. Most people in both parties (and the Tea Party) want to protect Social Security and Medicare, tax the rich, and crack down on the banks.

So why was he chosen? Democratic leaders, including Al Gore and Howard Dean, speak extremely highly of him. His appointment will soothe executive egos - temporarily. And there may be a little bit of Chicago horsetrading involved, too. Think about it: Rahm Emanuel wanted to run for mayor, and suddenly Dick Daley announced he wouldn't seek re-election. I said at the time that Dick's probably going to be rewarded with a cabinet appointment, and I still wouldn't rule that out. And while Dick has said he won't endorse a candidate this year, the third Daley brother will issue an endorsement. It all could've been coincidence, but it seemed choreographed: Rahm says he wants to run, Daley steps aside, Rahm says he's "surprised," etc. etc.)

Then there are those discontented executives we keep hearing about. Although I doubted it at first, I was wrong: There's no question anymore that business leaders genuinely feel slighted by this Administration. My apologies, Fareed Zakaria: I still think those CEOs were playing you for tactical reasons, too, but it's now clear their egos are also bruised. I should've known better: I've known enough highly successful business executives to know how vain, petty, and sensitive they can be. That's one reason for this latest wave of appointments - but it won't placate these execs, and the voter blowback is likely to shock the President's team.

They say that Bill Daley's a likeable, energetic guy who gets things done.He probably is. But his appointment sends a cynical message to the base and independents, and his political instincts could drive the Administration in exactly the wrong direction? But not necessarily: There's still a way to save this thing.

How Bill Daley Can Be Your Next Hero

Here's a suggestion for Bill Daley, three simple words that could turn everything around for the President and his party: Be Joe Kennedy.

Progressives were appalled when FDR appointed that noted stock market manipulator Joe Kennedy to be the first head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Kennedy had a reputation as a ruthless and unscrupulous master of insider trading. He was a master of the reckless and speculative financial instruments of his day, the early 20th Century equivalents of CDOs and mortage-backed securities. But Kennedy took his job seriously, went after the sharks ferociously, and help stabilize the capitalist system so effectively that it remained sound for another seven decades.

Bill Daley hasn't been personally implicated in JPMorgan Chase's misdeeds, so he certainly doesn't have Joe Kennedy's pre-SEC reputation. By all accounts he's a decent, ethical guy. But his bank's reputation isn't so unsullied. Despite Jamie Dimon's massive PR initiative on behalf of his own reputation, the problems are significant: Sloppy and probably illegal foreclosure management, for which the bank has set aside more than $2 billion for repurchases and litigation costs; millions in cash that got spread around Alabama in pursuit of some deals for municipal bond derivatives ( it cost three-quarters of a billion in fines for the bank to be able to say it "neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing"); and a few other little odds and ends, too (more here.) Daley's certainly heard a lot about these problems, and he can put that knowledge to good use in his new job.

Daley isn't being appointed to SEC, of course. He's been chosen to be the President's gatekeeper and right-hand man. But he can play a Joe Kennedy-like role for the President, in everything from managing his schedule to communicating with senior aides ... and in speaking with the business community. He has business credibility, and when executives come complaining to the White House he'd be the perfect guy to tell them to "cut the sh*t and cooperate." He certainly knows something about tough Irish political dynasties. If Daley's willing to use his industry knowledge and experience to force the White House into a tougher, smarter reform approach, he could wind up becoming everybody's hero.

Do I think that's the likeliest scenario? Frankly, no. The mindset these days seems to be that today's business executives, who can match their Roosevelt-era brethren in greed and vanity, can be cajoled and placated by a few more compromises. But that's not going to happen. The White House and other Democrats will probably continue to backtrack and plead for quite some time, but they'll never be able to outbid Republicans as Wall Street lackeys. So the day may yet come when they realize that compromise isn't going to work.

When that day comes, we can only hope that Bill Daley from Chicago remembers the legacy of Joseph P. Kennedy from Massachusetts.

_____________________________________________________

[1] Disclosure: I used to work at AIG.

This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project.

Austerity Chic: It's This Year's "Weapons of Mass Destruction"

Richard Eskow — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:38:31 -0400

Sometimes our political commentariat seems to go fashion-crazy. When a new trend gets popular it overwhelms everything in its path: logic, poltical divisions, even expert opinion. The latest vogue is deficit reduction, and our nation's Anna Wintours tell us we simply have to have it. In Washington, screaming about being in the red is the new black.

Call it "austerity chic," and it's catching on fast. We've already written about an odd quartet of recent austerity-chic pieces from pundits that included Tom Friedman and Anne Applebaum. These pieces tell us why we should find this new style appealing: Self-denial is what makes a nation great.

We've seen this herd mentality before, of course, most notably in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The experts warned us what would happen, but our keyboard-clacking dedicated followers of fashion thought they knew better. Ever eager to issue the clarion call for sacrifice - on somebody else's part - they issued their calls to arms. Their support played a pivotal role in building support for the invasion.

How'd that work out for you?

Once again, the experts tell us that the warning lights are flashing red and the fashionistas aren't listening. That was made clear again this morning, when a conference call was held to announce that 300 economist and civic leaders have signed a statement saying that "there is a grave danger that the still-fragile economic recovery will be undercut by austerity economics." The statement, released by the Institute For America's Future*, adds: "A turn by major governments away from the promotion of growth and jobs and to premature focus on deficit reduction could slow growth and increase unemployment - and could push us back into recession."

Contrast those sentences with the fetishized way Friedman approached reduced spending in his column. "The Greatest Generation's leaders were never afraid to ask Americans to sacrifice," he writes, whereas today's Americans "had a values breakdown." Here's what Friedman's missing: With 15 million people unemployed and 44 million in poverty, a lot of people are sacrificing right now. As for Applebaum, her orgiastic descriptions of "axe-wielding," "slashing" British budget cuts have to be read to be believed (although I did provide a summary here, if you're the type who shuts their eyes during slasher movies.)

Friedman and Applebaum aren't the only dedicated followers of fashion to join the austerity trend, of course. As we noted in the Friedman/Applebaum piece, Megan McArdle high-fived another business writer for dismissing retirement as a "vacation" while adding that "decades-long" vacations are an indulgence we can no longer afford. And Fareed Zakaria has flirted with the Austerians more than once, although he leans more toward letting all the tax cuts expire. Zakaria's followed at least two other trends recently - the notion that fear of Obama is hampering business investment and the idea that the Great Recession was really your fault - so this isn't a great surprise. (I'm not as down on Zakaria as it might sound. He's a smart guy and his TV show's usually quite interesting. Maybe his "fashion sense" just gets in the way of his common sense.)

In the world of political fashion, Republicans set the trend and others follow. Austerity chic's no exception. As with Iraq, it has just enough Democratic support to provide the "bipartisan" gloss needed to give it critical mass. The latest supporter is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who upped the rhetorical ante recently by declaring the deficit a "national security threat." Erskine Bowles and Rep. Steny Hoyer are among the other prominent Democrats who have jumped on the bandwagon.

But if some Democrats are including are wearing a splash of this year's color, right-wingers are painting their faces with it. John Boehner's call for a 15% cut in domestic spending would plunge the nation back into a deep recession. The Tea Partiers' calls for deep cuts in Social Security would immediately plunge 20 million seniors into poverty, followed shortly thereafter by a massive spike in unemployment as their purchasing power leaves the economy. And their cuts to Medicare and education would further crush our already-wounded economy. (For more information, see Adele Stan's Five Ways the Tea Party Agenda Screws Tea Party Supporters.)

As Dean Baker pointed out on this morning's call, government spending is not the cause of our current deficits. Two wars and a massive tax cut turned a surplus into a massive deficit. (I'd add a massive bank bailout with no reqruiements to limit profits or increase lending.) And, as Baker observed, greater unemployment always leads to greater deficits. Robert Reich, another participant in the call, observed that last quarter's slowdown in the growth of the economy is a warning sign in an already-grave situation. Theresa Ghilarducci suggested that an increase in Social Security could help stimulate growth. All agreed that greater spending is urgently needed to stimulate the economy, leaving deficits to be addressed once economic conditions are healthier.

If "austerity" is this year's "WMD," that doesn't mean that's deficits aren't a concern. They are, and so is the need to keep powerful weapons out of the wrong hands. It's a matter of proportion and priority. The economists who signed today's statement understand the need to reduce the deficit. But they also know that the economy needs to recover first, and that budget cuts - like military might - must be directed toward genuine threats.

Right now the 300 people who signed this statement are as outnumbered as the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. Let's hope they do as well. As for Applebaum and Friedman, is it churlish to point out that they were both cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq? I don't think so. Then, as now, they embraced and promoted a Beltway trend without sufficient thought or foresight. And they've demonstrated a stubborn resistance to face reality in both cases. Applebaum greeted the bipartisan Baker report on Iraq with resentment. She continues to insist, against most experts' opinions, that we won't know whether the war went well for at least a decade. And now, unbowed by past errors, she's trying to drum up support for an attack on Iran.

As for Friedman, he said "we need to give the war six more months" so many times that observers began describing these intervals as "Friedman units." Friedman's enthusiasm for that war led him to the most notorious moment of his career, when he told Charlie Rose that it didn't matter which country we attacked. Any Muslim nation would do, he said, as long as Muslims everywhere saw "American boys and girls going door to door and saying ... you don't think we care? ... You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this."

That was fifteen Friedman units ago, and people change. Friedman's done his mea culpa on the war, which is commendable, and his support for a government-backed "green revolution" is an excellent idea (one that contradicts his newfound austerity passion). Still, he's about to do another major disservice to the American people. He may think it's wise and even inspirational to frame spending cuts as a form of national sacrifice. But the wrong people will be sacrificed,especially in this political climate The economists who signed today's statement understand better than Friedman does what will happen if austerity wins the day.

When asked what piece of fashion advice she would give, Catherine Deneuve suggested that women look in the mirror before going out and remove one piece of jewelry. Austerity-for-its-own sake is a bauble that makes its wearer look overdressed and leaves other people unclothed. We need to have the courage to invest in the future, rather than slashing spending out of political trendiness and a failure of nerve.

A lot of people are hurting right now. To let them languish would be Washington's way of telling them to "suck on this." But helping them would also help the economy recover and grow, which would benefit everybody. It would also send a message to them, and to the world, the this country still believes in its own future. It would be a signal of renewed confidence in the American Dream.

Sure, it will be hard work to turn things around, but it's like the old folks used to say: Hard work never goes out of fashion.

_______________________

*I am a fellow at the Campaign For America's Future, the Institute's sister organization.

(UPDATE: Yet another fashionista dresses himself in austerity chic as a journalist applauds.)

(UPDATE II: Via Glenn Greenwald, we learn that Digby told us of an an austerity-chic pioneer who can afford all the newest fashions.)

For more information on the statement, see here, here, and here.

Fareed Zakaria's "Greedy Consumers" & Hive Mind CEOs

Richard Eskow — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:13:28 -0400

Fareed Zakaria is an interesting writer who says some sensible things, as when he called the intensity of the war in Afghanistan "disproportionate" to the threat. But he also reflects the biases and distorted perceptions of a punditocratic subculture that continues to paint average citizens as reckless children and business executives as Delphic sages. Zakaria all but blamed the Great Recession on greedy consumers a while back: "If we wanted a bigger house, a better TV or a faster car, and we didn't actually have the money to pay for it, no problem. We put it on a credit card, took out a massive mortgage and financed our fantasies."

Now he says that corporations are sitting on $1.8 trillion in unused cash, money that could stimulate the economy, in part because business leaders are frightened of the President. How does he know? He says he spoke to a "series" of non-randomly-selected CEOs (he doesn't say how many) and, like hive-mind children in a Village of the Damned sequel, they spoke the same words and thought the same thoughts: "They still admire him," Zakaria writes, but they "all think that he is, at his core, anti-business." He is not of our kind ...

The Hive Mind unanimity of these proclamations are cause for skepticism in themselves. And I haven't read Zakaria's interview transcripts, but trust me: If these CEOs could safely make money by spending that cash today, Leon Trotsky could be in the White House painting it red and they'd still get busy writing checks.

The Great Recession was created in boardrooms and not living rooms. Bankers' decisions are tying these non-bank CEOs' hands. And if you take the "greedy consumer" idea to its logical conclusion we would be a society that imprison the marks and bails out the con men.

Oh, wait ...

Zakaria insists, based on his secret conversations with CEOs "who did not want to be quoted by name," that they're not just hoarding cash because of economic uncertainty (although he acknowledges that as the "primary cause"). What makes it worse, he says, is that they all think Obama's too much of a lefty.

Zakaria also adds that while "there is a strong case" (albeit a lefty one) for "a temporary and targeted stimulus," it looks "politically impossible." If enough people in his position repeat that idea, of course, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if a stimulus is proclaimed impossible and these CEOs are sitting only the only remaining big chunk of cash, what's the only remaining conclusion? We better give them what they want.

Zakaria's CEOs chant in unison about the evils of regulation, but for a hive mind they're surprisingly vague on specifics. Zakaria mentions health reform, although essentially all of the "top 500" nonfinancial companies already provide coverage; cap-and-trade, whose future is uncertain; and financial reform, which is likely to help these nonfinancial companies obtain credit (while retaining their access to the kinds of derivatives they use for risk management purposes.)

The CEOs are uniformly polite, as such collective entities usually are in sci-fi movies. "Many ... voted for Barack Obama." "They still admire him." It's the "politics," and their (eerily unanimous) perception that he's "anti-business," that adds an additional brake on their desire to spend. Here's the bottom line: Any executive of a publicly-traded company who failed to spend the money needed to serve a ready-to-buy customer base would be violating her or his duty to stockholders and would probably be fired immediately.

Their problem isn't politics - it's customers. As in, they don't have any.

Business isn't spending because consumers aren't spending. Consumer expenditures are flat and savings rates are up. Households have the same concerns about the economy that CEOs have, and they're reacting the same way: by spending less and hoarding cash. Granted, they don't have to answer phone calls from Fareed Zakaria while they're doing it, which simplifies their day somewhat, but otherwise the reaction is strikingly similar.

Greedy consumers: Where are they when you really need 'em?

Then there are the problems that banks have created for these CEOs. (Remember, they run non-financial corporations.) One of their greatest problems is that they can't trust their banks to be there when they need them. As the Wall Street Journal reported: " In the darkest days of late 2008, even large companies faced the threat that they wouldn't be able to do the everyday, short-term borrowing needed to make payrolls and purchase inventory." One of the reasons companies keep cash on hand is out of fear that could happen again. And, as we've discussed before, banks have slashed lending to the small businesses that represent a large customer base for these companies.

Banks aren't lending to consumers, either, or they're lending at inflated rates. And thanks in part to the "Greedy Consumer" folktale, there is no political will to pressure banks to write off some of the inflated value of the mortgages on their books. That would free up more money for other spending while potentially reducing the foreclosure rate, and it would distribute the "moral hazard" of greedy behavior a little more fairly. But we're inevitably going to be told it's "politically impossible."

To be fair, Zakaria never specifically endorses the purported views of these CEOs as his own. He just lets the impression drift into the ether: An anti-business Obama is frustrating business and stifling growth. His piece is especially frustrating because all the right information and conclusions are there. But like a Blair Witch inscription or a backward-looped message on a rock song, the message has to be decoded and the real information extracted: "There is a strong case for a temporary and targeted government stimulus." "Big government spending can only be a bridge ..." (Nobody denies that.) "Economic uncertainty was the primary cause of (business) caution."

The commentariat subculture which sees these facts yet still repeats the myths does so, I suspect, because it is determined to be bravely "centrist" - no matter where the facts may lead.

Make no mistake. Zakaria is absolutely right when he says that "Obama needs to outline a growth and competitiveness agenda that is compelling to the (nonfinancial) business community." But that agenda must include returning the financial business community to sound and productive lending practices. It must give customers the wherewithal needed to buy the products these businesses make - which means jobs. It must rebuild our infrastructure. Then these businesses will undoubtedly free up more of their $1.8 trillion, knowing that it can be used to create products for a market that's able to buy them. Which all sounds great, except that according to Fareed Zakaria it's "politically impossible."

Apparently there's more than one Hive Mind on the loose these days.

The Growing Power of the Fair Trade Uprising

David Sirota — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:32:19 -0400

LOUISVILLE, KY - I spent yesterday in Ohio's three biggest cities - Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. With the Buckeye State among the hardest hit by lobbyist-written trade policies, it wasn't surprising that NAFTA was at the center of discussion at events for THE UPRISING in Ohio (you can listen to my Ohio NPR interview from yesterday here for a taste).

Over the last few years, polls show the public has moved to something of a consensus position on trade: full-on opposition to NAFTA-style pacts. That's for good reason as this Associated Press report shows. Tearing down tariffs and protections without regard for the consequences is not only a dangerous departure from the policies that built America's economy, but also a deliberate way to force American and foreign workers into a wage-cutting, environment-destroying, union-busting race to the bottom.

The AP story shows the destructive domino effect of NAFTA and the subsequent NAFTA-style agreements like China PNTR. When multinational corporations shift jobs to Mexico, right-wing trade fundamentalists in Washington offer up a "let them eat cake message" telling workers in Ohio that the shift at least helps impoverished workers south of the border. Then, of course, those workers in Mexico are forced to slash their own wages to compete with desperate workers in China. When the jobs inevitably shift to China, Mexico is left in shambles, and then Chinese workers are forced to slash their own wages to make sure jobs don't go to Vietnam or North Korea, where corporations are angling to employ enslaved labor.

Meanwhile, many of these trade fundamentalists like Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria flaunt their supposed environmentalism and humanitarianism by publicly worrying about issues like global warming and the erosion of human rights in the developing world - even though the domino effect they cheer on creates pressure on governments to reduce their pollution controls and human rights in order to retain foreign investment.

The problem, of course, is that it's hard to argue with NAFTA backers because they aren't interested in facts. It was none other than Friedman who admitted he vigorously backed a recent NAFTA-style trade deal without even bothering to read it. He, like every other reporter and commentator in Washington, calls NAFTA-style pacts "free trade" - despite the fact that they include thousands of pages of protectionist provisions for corporate profits, despite the fact that even the original architects of NAFTA have long admitted that these agreements aren't free, but instead create "managed" trade. That's the big problem - these deals are managed to enrich the elite at the expense of the rest of us.

Just like it's impossible to argue about reality with deranged religious fundamentalist terrorists, it's impossible to argue with deranged trade fundamentalists who cloak economic terrorism in the language of enlightenment. It gets to the point where Limousine Libertarians in wealthy enclaves like Boulder take to the websites of major newspapers to cite charts showing the decimation of Americans' wages as proof that NAFTA works for Americans.

Left for dead, of course, is a place like Ohio.

Wealthy pundits from New York and Washington drop into the Buckeye State every four years to berate the occasional Democratic presidential candidate who dares to question NAFTA at the quadrennial photo-op at an abandoned manufacturing plant. In the general election, those Democratic presidential candidates then inevitably hire teams of Wall Street insiders who back NAFTA as their top economic advisers, and then scurry to business publications to reassure corporate lobbyists that no, they aren't really serious about reforming our trade policy. Their Republican opponents, meanwhile, head to places like Colombia to tell the right-wing regime there that America - that purported beacon of freedom to the world's masses - will be helping murderous developing-world governments continue to brutalize workers.

But this quadrennial cycle of deception may finally be changing - and not because of the benevolence of any presidential candidate, but because the political tectonics of trade have shifted so dramatically thanks to those who are doing the unglamorous - but critical - work of leveraging real power.

Groups like Public Citizen and the Citizens Trade Campaign have ignored the Partisan War Syndrome that plagues parts of the blogosphere and the progressive left, and used this election as an instrument of the uprising - rather than seeing the election as an objective unto itself. They have, for instance, used the hard-fought Democratic primary to elicit concrete commitments on trade policy from the candidates - including nominee Barack Obama. Those efforts have been supported by a group of industrial state lawmakers, who have similarly leveraged the election as a way to force a conversation about trade into the national political debate. That conversation has been so intense it even wedged its way into the Republican presidential nomination through the candidacy of Mike Huckabee - a candidacy that won Republican primaries in some of the most conservative states based, in part, on his fair trade message.

These moves around trade suggest the emergence of true movement thinking out of the tumult of the uprising I describe in my book. This fair trade movement may continue to be ignored by the media (and, frankly, much of the blogosphere), but it represents one of the most encouraging transpartisan developments of the last few years. Out of the shadows of the crumbling factories that I have driven by here in Ohio may indeed come real change - if this movement continues to coalesce.

This is an ongoing series from the national tour for THE UPRISING. You can order The Uprising at Amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

Fareed Zakaria's "Expertise" and Elite Propaganda's Insulting Dishonesty

David Sirota — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:00:19 -0500

Fareed Zakaria, as his Newsweek biography is happy to tell you, is a Very Important Person looked to as an "expert" on international issues. Somehow, he retains this billing despite advocating for the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation, hiding his dual role as simultaneous "journalist" and Bush administration adviser, insisting that the Iraq War is "over," and publishing fact-free columns like this week's on international trade.

Zakaria is alarmed that presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are actually giving voice to the concerns of the vast majority of Americans who polls show are unhappy with our current lobbyist-written trade policies - policies that pundits like him have jammed down the country's throat. Really, Zakaria says, how dare presidential candidates have the nerve to actually represent the people and not the Punditburo.

This is disdain for the majority is standard fare for a magazine bloviator typing out columns from the comfortable confines of a Manhattan office. But what's striking is Zakaria's attempt to wrap elitism in altruism.

To review: Our trade policy includes no labor, environmental or human rights protections, but includes restrictive protections for corporate profits - patent protections that keep drug prices high in the developing world, intellectual property protections that hurt innovation in the developing world, etc. Our trade policy also includes massive agricultural subsidies rigged to reward multinational corporate agribusiness over family farmers both here and abroad. None of this is news - and you might think such basic facts would be well known to "experts" like Zakaria.

But think again. In his column, he cites a mythical "struggling farmer" in the developing world who he says believes "access to world markets is far more important than foreign aid or U.N. programs." Apparently, Zakaria hasn't noticed that many of those farmers that he supposedly cares so much about are right now in the process of revolting against the final implementation of NAFTA and the Peru Free Trade Agreement. He apparently also never saw the acclaimed documentary "Life and Debt" which charts how developing-world farmers are thrown into poverty when their markets are opened up to taxpayer-subsidized agribusiness - and how that poverty then breeds insurrections that requires violent military interventions to crush. Then again, that's how elitists like Zakaria like their policies implemented - they believe "freedom" in the Mideast should be ushered in at gunpoint, and "free" trade brought about at the tip of a bayonet. Ah, the joys of neoconservative "freedom."

Zakaria goes on to lament that in pushing for labor and environmental standards, Democratic presidential candidates "are pandering to the worst instincts of Americans, encouraging a form of xenophobia and chauvinism and validating the utterly self-defeating idea of protectionism." He says this hurts America's image because "what is said in Ohio is heard in Ghana and Bangladesh and Colombia as well." Yet, Newsweek's "expert" apparently didn't have 5 minutes to actually research the topic at hand. Because had he spent that small amount of time actually "reporting" (I know, an outdated endeavor for today's pundits), he would have quickly found this recent worldwide public opinion study from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showing majorities all over the globe "think trade harms the environment and threatens jobs and want to mitigate these effects with environmental and labor standards." Yet according to Zakaria, presidential candidates expressing those exact feelings run the risk of engendering an anti-American "backlash." In truth, the only "backlash" they are creating is one from elitists like Newsweek's economic "expert."

The rest of the column whines on much like this, with Zakaria firing out most of the tired fallacies of the right - my favorite of which is the one where he channels John McCain - the man who recently said "NAFTA has created jobs, and I think it's been good for our economy, I think it's been good for the Canadian economy, and I think it's been good for the Mexican economy." Zakaria one-ups McCain, saying "NAFTA has been pivotal in transforming Mexico into a stable democracy with a growing economy." Yes, folks - forget about the Mexican election that just took place under a shroud of controversy, forget about the Chiapas unrest, forget that a million Americans have been put out of work because of NAFTA and forget that 19 million more Mexicans now live in poverty than the pre-NAFTA era. McCain and Zakaria say NAFTA has been terrific for Mexico - and so we should just accept that as fact.

Back in November, Time magazine's Joe Klein was humiliated for passing off patent lies as facts, and responded by saying "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." One journalism observer called it a low-point in the profession's history. But I would say Zakaria takes that distinction. In this column about trade, he actually comes right out and declares that when it comes to "the facts about trade," he has no interest in "go[ing] into them in any great detail."

Like the rest of his well-paid cronies in the media Establishment who rail on populism, he expects us to believe - without a shred of actual factual proof or "reporting" - that the poor farmer in the developing world is eager to be thrown off his land by subsidized multinational agribusiness companies; thrilled that the protectionist provisions in America's trade policy make medicine prices unaffordable for him and his family; upset that any American political leaders would talk about protecting his labor and human rights so as to prevent ongoing exploitation; and in awe of that supposedly great economic and political utopia known as Mexico - a place where economic inequality, poverty and political unrest runs rampant.

This is the "expertise" of Fareed Zakaria - the Very Important Person who helps dictate the terms of debate on international economic issues. And this is why that debate is so divorced from reality.