Being a United States Senator from Vermont is a difficult job, but it pales in comparison to being President of the United States. As the junior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders has far more leeway in the positions that he can take than President Obama does. He’s not just a senator from a single state, he’s a senator (along with Patrick Leahy) from perhaps the most progressive state in the union.

When it comes to assessing the wisdom or advisability of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, Sanders is under far less pressure from entrenched powers than the President is. There are zero (count ‘em, none) Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Vermont. Vermont accounts for only 0.2% of exports from the United States. Take these two factors, and you put a representative in a position to truly look out for the well-being of individual workers and small businesses.

Doing so is not necessarily a slam-dunk. Vermont’s neighbor, New Hampshire, also is home to zero Fortune 500 companies and accounts for only 0.3% of American exports. Yet Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire has a voting record that is more conservative than that of Richard Shelby of Alabama or Thad Cochran of Mississippi.

All of which is to say that a treaty of the magnitude of the TPP should not be considered cavalierly by the United States Senate. Yet this is precisely what President Barack Obama proposed and what the Senate came close to doing. Fortunately, on May 12, 2015, a sufficient number of Democrats joined with anti-Obama Republicans to forestall the Fast-Track consideration of the partnership. It appears that now the Senate will assume its normal responsibility when it comes to ratifying treaties; it will provide its advice and consent.

The stakes in the treaty are just too high for any other approach. This is a treaty that presumably spans the Pacific Ocean, but does not include a country as large as and with as much international trade as China. One of the goals of the treaty is to strengthen relations between the United States and selected Pacific countries, but there is apparently little in the proposed agreement to ensure that China is not left on the outside looking in. I say “apparently” because part of the Fast Track approach has been to limit access to the actual text of the treaty. This includes Members of Congress.

In Senator Sanders’ words:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a disastrous trade agreement designed to protect the interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American democracy. It will also negatively impact some of the poorest people in the world.

The TPP is a treaty that has been written behind closed doors by the corporate world. Incredibly, while Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry and major media companies have full knowledge as to what is in this treaty, the American people and members of Congress do not. They have been locked out of the process.

Sanders states that the agreement would be at the expense of workers, consumers and the environment. Supporters of these three interests represent a large piece of the pie that twice elected Barack Obama. It may be difficult to understand that the President is risking their ire and discounting their support, but the forces in the United States behind the treaty are vast and powerful. They include bankers, manufacturers of good and services that are exported, and a host of other business on America’s Pacific coast that profit from trade. These forces are doing what they would be expected to do, promoting their own economic self-interestd. Such is the nature of capitalism. And when we broaden our view to the relationship between monied interests and politics, it is no surprise that these are among the top financial backers that the President has had in his campaigns.

As to why Senator Ayotte of New Hampshire looks at this and many other issues quite differently from Bernie Sanders, all we need to do is to look at her primary contributors. In many ways, they read as a group similar to the Presidents big-time contributors. Senator Sanders takes no contributions from Wall Street. In contrast, nineteen of Senator Sanders’ twenty largest contributors are labor unions.

We are most fortunate to have a senator and now presidential candidate like Bernie Sanders who is not allowing the country’s largest economic interests to guide his position on an issue as important as the TPP. It’s likely that President Obama will continue to slug it out for the treaty for the remainder of his term. As with so many mysteries about his distance from progressive positions on key issues, we can only hope that when he writes his memoirs, he will let us know if he truly embraced the TPP, or if he felt that he owed it to certain interests to support it. Maybe he’ll write his memoirs during the administration of President Bernie Sanders.

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In the 19^th Century, the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle coined the phrase “dismal science” for the field of economics. With the help of new insights and the world of computing power, it has become more accurate, like a physical science. However, there are still vast realms of uncertainty, and that certainly is true as we consider the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. Some call the TPP “NAFTA on steroids,” and if you like NAFTA, this must be good, and if you don’t then we have a problem.

The chief American proponent for the agreement is President Obama, but by listening to him you would hardly know it. He seems to speak about it only in secrecy, which is interesting because that is the way in which he wanted the U.S. Senate to consider the terms of the Partnership. The Senate complied last week by putting it on a “fast-track” for consideration, thereby forbidding amendments or filibuster. Debate and discussion will be quick and without nuance, resulting in an expeditious up or down vote. While that might be desirable in the case of a presidential nomination, it hardly seems appropriate for a complicated economic pact laced with unintended consequences.

Supporters and opponents of the Partnership agree that it will be a bonanza for multi-national corporations. If you believe in top-down or trickle-down economics, then “what’s good for business is good for the United States” (and by extension, the world). If you’re somewhat suspicious of the motives and practices of large multi-national corporations, then you have plenty of reason to pause in offering support for the Partnership.

For those who are not direct beneficiaries of the largesse of big business, there are two key questions to initially ask, (1) would the loss of wage gains of American workers be worth the savings for American consumers, and (2) on an ethical level, are we comfortable with American workers losing economic power while laborers in developing countries see their wages, and hence purchasing, power rise? There are other important considerations, such as what impact the TPP would have on American and global environmental issues, how would labor safety and working conditions be affected, and is the establishment of “private courts” really a fair way to settle international disputes?

Let’s take issue one, the loss and gains for American workers and consumers. The TPP should result in lower prices for American consumers, because it will make it easier for companies to produce goods and services and overseas, distant from prevailing American wages and salaries.

Should we be concerned about the prices that American consumers are paying? Below is a chart representing changes in the Consumer Price Index over the past three years, as calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In only one month over the past three years has inflation reached 3 percent, and this past February, we actually had deflation, prices falling.

The concerns of the American middle class and the poor have not been about high prices, rather about job opportunities, job security, and salaries that provide the necessary income to support a family. As shown so clearly by the Economic Policy Institute,

The pay of American workers was increasing along with productivity until the late 1970s. Since then, wages have essentially remained stagnant, while productivity has more than doubled. In other words, corporations are increasing their earnings at the expense of the sweat and intellectual prowess of their employees. More and more households now have two wage-earners, and in some cases, families are worse off now with two wage-earners than they were a generation ago with one. If one of the fundamental questions in considering the merits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is whether to look for ways to benefit the American worker rather than the American consumer, the evidence seems to be clear that consumers are doing well-enough, and workers are struggling. Workers need the help, and the TPP would not be good for them.

The second question is whether the increase in wages for workers in developing countries is more important than increasing wages for American workers. From a global and non-biased point of view, it may be better in the short run to favor the benefits that workers in developing countries would accrue with passage of the TPP. However, in virtually every developing country, it would be better to put laborers to work on projects needed in their countries, such as infrastructure, housing, schools, and health facilities. With the TPP, most of the products that they would produce would be for the benefit of foreigners. At the present time, it is fair to argue that helping American workers close the gap between their incomes and those of the wealthy is of greater importance. The United States still has a long way to go in creating more economic and political equality, and that should be our first order of business. As the U.S. does that, it can play a fundamental role in helping the economies of developing countries by providing them with the capital and skills to make their economies more self-reliant. Once that is done, they can participate more in international trade in a way that benefits their citizens as both workers and consumers.

The TPP is not an easy issue, but considering how it will furtively be considered by the U.S. Senate (and American people) and the damage that it will do to American workers, it seems that the prudent position would be to oppose the TPP. It’s a shame that, in this case, President Obama favors action that can be so detrimental to American workers.

For a quick, visual explanation of the problems with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, what this animation offered by  former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

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If you are a progressive, you might say that in recent months (perhaps recent years), President Obama has been in a slump. The magic that was part of his elections no longer shines so brightly, and the legislative victories–such as passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010–are truly a distant memory. The president has been floundering of late, and seemingly he is not getting that “little bit of help from his friends” that a man living on an island needs.

What will not be a surprise is that many of his problems emanate from two sources: (a) the sea of indebtedness that he created by successfully raising so much money for his own campaigns and (b) the apparent choke-hold that the military and intelligence agencies have on him as our troop withdrawal from the Middle East has now become one step forward and two back.

If you like President Obama, you have to ask yourself the question, “Could he have been elected without his successful efforts to raise more money than any other candidate in history?” Regrettably, the likely answer is no. It would have been wonderful to have “Barack Obama – unplugged” as president. But that wasn’t to be, and because of the system, we could only have a seriously compromised Obama. It’s difficult, but we need to frequently remind ourselves of this.

Every time that I get frustrated with how the military appears to be controlling the president like a puppet, I have to remember that since Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, it’s virtually impossible to find a president who isn’t scared shitless of the military.

President Obama, who never served in the military, must have been defensive at the least when he first sat down with military and intelligence officials to assess the world. I can hear their top officials saying, “Young man, now that you’re president you have to live in the real world. There are people out there who want to nuke us; others that want to sabotage our nation; others that want to invade our shores; others who want to entirely get rid of Pax Americana. You have to say, ‘Not on my watch.’ ”

When the president goes to mix it up, he needs to make sure that he is selecting issues that are both clear and within the capability of the American people to understand. Immigration has always been a difficult issue because there are so many variables and contingencies. Let me take a paragraph from the President’s November 20, 2014 address to the nation on immigration. The president said:

Had the House of Representatives allowed that kind of bill a simple yes or no vote, it would have passed with support from both parties. And today it would be the law. But for a year and a half now Republican leaders in the House have refused to allow that simple vote. Now I continue to believe that the best way to solve this problem is by working together to pass that kind of common sense law. But until that happens, there are actions I have the legal authority to take as president, the same kinds of actions taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me, that will help make our immigration system more fair and more just.

The president moved from stating that he wanted an up or down vote on his immigration bill by the House to justifying why he took unilateral action. What he did not do was to pound home the fact that the Republican leaders of the House of Representatives were failing to allow a vote on a measure that the majority of the members wanted.

The issue of immigration is complex. The issue of majority rule is simple. It is a fundamental tenet of our democracy. Whoever has more votes wins. Anyone who interferes with the will of the majority is undermining democracy. That is exactly what John Boehner and Eric Cantor have done for the past four years.

Perhaps the president and some Democrats accept it because the rules in both the House and the Senate are often designed to thwart the will of the majority. They become immune to it.

It is always to the advantage of the citizenry for good government to work. More often than not, good government is also simple to understand. A need exists. and we as a country need to address it. What President Obama has been facing with immigration legislation is the House of Representatives simply not functioning as a democratic institution. That is enough to launch a call to action by the American people.

The Republican strategy often involves delay and subterfuge. The president and other Democrats need to challenge that at every opportunity. Democrats may find that fighting simple procedural battles will be simple enough for the American people to understand and will help them build back their public support. That’s where the President can receive a little help from his friends.

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Sometimes progressives don’t agree with conservatives, and the gist of the differences are about policy issues. Other times, one or perhaps both sides of a disagreement have a visceral dislike for the other side. In such situations, rationality seems to be thrown out the window in favor of demonizing the other side.

There is a third way to look at the disagreement: for either the “combatants” or an outside observer to try to figure out what’s going on psychologically. More and more “neutral” observers see Democrats as fairly reasonable and with a healthy dose of compassion. It is Republicans who are difficult to understand. It’s come to a point where we now have a cottage industry studying the Republican brain.

Chris Mooney, who studies science in politics, has written a book on “The Republican Brain.” Among other things, he contends that many Republicans have difficulty dealing with science as well as the use of logic to process facts. While some are kind in their personal lives, they seem to have almost complete disdain for compassion in the public arena.

There is a Calvinistic thread running through many Republicans in which the rich are rich because they deserve to be so, and the poor are poor because they are not among the “elected.” Very few Republicans are theological Calvinists, but psychologically, they are comfortable with the division of the “deserving rich” and the “depraved poor.”

In a recent letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled “The pope, the president, and the Post-Dispatch,” Paul E. Schroeder of Maryland Heights, MO writes:

Barack Obama, Pope Francis and the Post-Dispatch have dropped their faked compassion for the downtrodden and revealed what we already knew. They are the progressive socialist elite who know what’s best for each of us.

Pope Francis’ distortion of Scripture is only surpassed by Barack Obama’s corruption of the Constitution. Both men describe a world in which mankind would be wards of the state, relegated to only what the state allowed. Men and women would no longer be in charge of their own destinies because they are not capable of making the right choices.

The history of man and the history of our country do not align with anything of what either of these two arrogant leaders proclaim. The travesty that Pope Francis foists upon the faithful in the Catholic Church goes beyond misinterpretation. Jesus never suggested that the government mandate compassion. The essence of mankind is the freedom of conscience to freely make decisions — to be compassionate or not. There is no love if there is no choice.

Pope Francis would have all Catholics throw their wallets into the offering plate and then by his supreme judgment decide who should receive what. Similarly, Barack Obama would heavily tax those who have been successful and with those confiscated funds, redistribute others’ wealth to his cronies, with a few crumbs possibly left over for the needy.

God endowed every man and woman with certain inalienable rights that no pope nor president can steal from them. The socialist agenda of this president, this pope and this newspaper will certainly leave its scar upon this community and this nation.

The good news is our forefathers foresaw the possibilities of corruption, even at the highest levels of leadership. We will survive this ordeal via future elections, but our children will now bear the enormous weight of intentional fiscal sabotage and social delusion designed to make families irrelevant.

In his first sentence, Mr. Schroeder condemns President Barack Obama, the Pope and the Post-Dispatch for their “faked compassion” for the downtrodden. I’m not quite sure what he means. What is “faked compassion?” Perhaps it is “talking the talk” of compassion but not “walking the walk.” But President Obama has not only spoken about income inequality in the U.S. and around the world, he has consistently proposed legislation to help those who economically deprived. Pope Francis has literally walked with the poor (something President Obama also did as a community organizer). The Post-Dispatch is generally guided by the words of founder Joseph Pulitzer, who in 1907 wrote that the Post-Dispatch will always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor.

Schroeder goes on to say, “God endowed every man and woman with certain inalienable rights that no pope nor president can steal from them.” But those rights lose marginal value if someone cannot put food in his or her mouth or provide shelter for his or her family.

So what can we do about conservatives who seem to demonize public compassion and shroud their opinions in a cloak of certainty that sometimes in frightening? The answer is not that we can do nothing. You can look in The Republican Brain for some answers, and I’ll just propose one here. Let our schools be much more compassionate, with far less homework and testing. Let them being settings where students and teachers  can enjoy learning and seek ways to use it to better serve themselves as well as society at large. It’s not the whole answer, but it’s a good place to start.

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This just in: Serco Inc. will be hiring and training 600 new workers for its new Wentzville, Missouri location. Bright, shiny new jobs.

The Post-Dispatch has the scoop:

Obamacare may be controversial, but it’s about to bring hundreds of jobs to Wentzville.

A Virginia-based government contractor is planning to hire 600 people over the next three months to staff a processing center in the St. Charles County suburb, to handle applications for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

Better yet, these jobs will not be low-wage or lacking benefits.

The new jobs will start at $12 an hour, though higher-skilled positions will pay more, and all the jobs include benefits. Serco is planning to hold a job fair the week of Sept. 23, but it has already started advertising jobs on its website.

This is not only a much-needed boost to the local economy, these jobs will be an opportunity for many entry-level applicants to earn something close to a living wage. With benefits to boot. And Wentzville isn’t the only area to get an employment and revenue boost.

Serco is one of several local companies that are expanding in the region to handle an expected surge in business from the implementation of Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act has been dubbed.

In July, for example, public relations firm FleishmanHillard won a $35 million contract to promote Illinois’ health insurance exchange. Equifax Workforce Solutions also received a contract worth up to $329.4 million to verify incomes of people who apply for federal subsidies through the program.

Whether you are for, against, or still on the fence about the ACA, there is no question that the president’s most hotly debated pieces of legislation is doing some real good for people. I look forward to seeing what the state’s anti-Obamacare legislators have to say about these newly acquired jobs, particularly since many have supposedly put job creation at the top of their state legislative agenda.

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Alfred McCoy over at TomDispatch.com has taken the time to provide us with a brief, sordid history of the U.S. surveillance state and proven, to me at least, that there is still much to learn about where we are and how we got here. I was surprised, for example, to discover that the path to an Orwellian future began in the late 19th century with our presence in the Philippines.

McCoy writes (and elaborates later in the piece):

In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a colonial land. The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I.  A half-century later, as protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the foundations of that old security structure, launched large-scale illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar activists, while President Richard Nixon’s White House created its own surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies.

Perhaps the most damaging [domestically speaking] interference via illegal government surveillance took place during the civil rights movement and amidst heavy war opposition.

In response to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, the FBI deployed its COINTELPRO operation, using what Senator Frank Church’s famous investigative committee later called “unsavory and vicious tactics… including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

In assessing COINTELPRO’s 2,370 actions from 1960 to 1974, the Church Committee branded them a “sophisticated vigilante operation” that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity.” Significantly, even this aggressive Senate investigation did not probe Director Hoover’s notorious “private files” on the peccadilloes of leading politicians that had insulated his Bureau from any oversight for more than 30 years.

After New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh exposed illegal CIA surveillance of American antiwar activists in 1974, Senator Church’s committee and a presidential commission under Nelson Rockefeller investigated the Agency’s “Operation Chaos,” a program to conduct massive illegal surveillance of the antiwar protest movement, discovering a database with 300,000 names.  These investigations also exposed the excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, forcing the Bureau to reform.

To prevent future abuses, President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, creating a special court to approve all national security wiretaps.  In a bitter irony, Carter’s supposed reform ended up plunging the judiciary into the secret world of the surveillance managers where, after 9/11, it became a rubberstamp institution for every kind of state intrusion on domestic privacy.

It’s not all bleak. It turns out that Republicans of the early 20th century were actually a force of opposition to government sponsored violations of privacy.

In the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against secret surveillance.  Republican privacy advocates abolished much of President Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during the 1920s, and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the 1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon’s illegal domestic wiretapping.

The two leading parties have, at times, agreed that unchecked government surveillance is a danger to all and took steps to prevent the massive levels of information gathering that we have today. For all the good it did, right? Unfortunately, public consent is a pretty large part of this history lesson. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have participated (and still do), perhaps misguidedly, in the surveilling of anti-war protesters, dissidents, and suspected terrorists. In the 20th century, remember, it was suspected communists and/or spies.

Just one example, as follows:

After the U.S. entered World War I in 1917 without an intelligence service of any sort, Colonel Van Deman brought his Philippine experience to bear, creating the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) and so laying the institutional foundations for a future internal security state.

In collaboration with the FBI, he also expanded the MID’s reach through a civilian auxiliary organization, the American Protective League, whose 350,000 citizen-operatives amassed more than a million pages of surveillance reports on German-Americans in just 14 months, arguably the world’s most intensive feat of domestic surveillance ever.

This brief history is at turns horrifying and breathtaking. It seems to me the missing ingredient is a massive popular uprising against such illegal violations of our amendment and human rights. Much of what we have seen these past decades is apathy, as Mark Twain predicted.

During the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined history of twentieth-century America.  In it, he predicted that a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American] Republic,” because  “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”

It’s true, sadly. Under President Obama, we have seen an unprecedented and largely unopposed prosecution of whistleblowers using the Espionage Act. There have been seven prosecutions thus far under Obama, preceded by only three since the law’s 1917 origins. As Linda Greene wrote back in 2011, proving once again the utter disconnect between what the president says to us and what he and those he appointed actually do:

When campaigning in 2008, Obama promised to protect whistleblowers, saying their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled,” ABC News’ Megan Chuchmach and Rhonda Schwartz reported on Aug. 4, 2009.

Regrettably, Campaign Obama is not around to protect the likes of Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning from either the media persecution or from government prosecution. It is difficult for an uniformed public to protest something they are unaware of, such as the NSA’s PRISM program. But it seems to me that when we allow the imprisonment and prosecution of those whistleblowers who seek to inform and empower us, we are granting the government permission to carry on with illegal acts of surveillance against us.

The people’s unspoken permission also sets the stage for our own possible imprisonment. When everything you say or do is subject to secret recordings and filed away in vast government-owned digital storage facilities, anything you have said or done can be used against you by a government with a history of “unsavory and vicious tactics… including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths.”

At the very least, the mere possibility of such is an effective tool of suppression and submission, perhaps most starkly proven by how easy it was for the NSA to obtain near-total corporate complicity in illegal information gathering. And as McCoy’s history lesson teaches us, this is not just an American fear. U.S. surveillance is of global concern; it is a much-used weapon in our war chest, as it is with some foreign governments.

Perhaps it is time to learn from our history, both distant and recent past, and act upon what we learn…in large, unimpeachable bipartisan numbers.

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