Die Zombie! Die!

It’s been proven by Mythbusters (who I trust in matters of this sort) that a Baseball Bat wielded with intent and expertise is just as effective as a 20 Gauge on incoming Zombie Hordes. The rule is that only gore-splattering Head Shots are fatal while other wounds are ineffective (they’re already dead Jim) or disabling (broken arms and legs are what they are, ask the Black Knight if it’s a flesh wound).

Shotguns are good at range (10s of yards) but are slow on the reload where your Bat shifts targets in 10ths of a second. Swords are fast but more a disabling than a kill weapon (Zombie Head Soccer is fun, but only with steel toed boots, they keep biting).

Should you be inclined to visit your local Sports Authority or Modell’s I’d recommend staying away from the Aluminum ones (not enough heft for one thing and then there’s that wimpy ping they make) and the Maple models (solid and hard but they transmit the shock of impact to your hands, wrists, and arms which makes them tiring if you have a large enough Horde). Go with the traditional Ash which has just enough flex. In any event I advise you spring for a good set of Batting Gloves (you’ll thank me later).

Obama Promises Lame-Duck TPP Push Despite Uproar Over Pro-Corporate Provisions
by Zaid Jilani, The Intercept
Sep. 8 2016, 12:06 p.m.

A provision that would let foreign corporations challenge new American laws and regulations has become the latest flashpoint in the battle over the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement, even as President Obama on Tuesday said he will renew his push for its passage in the lame-duck session of Congress.

“We’re in a political season now and it’s always difficult to get things done,” Obama said at a town hall meeting in Laos. “So after the election, I think people can refocus attention on why this is so important.” He sounded confident: “I believe that we’ll get it done.”

The latest salvo from opponents of the deal came in the form of a letter to Congress signed by hundreds of law professors and economists – including Laurence Tribe, who taught Obama at Harvard – protesting the inclusion of “Investor State Dispute Settlement” (ISDS) provisions in the TPP agreement.

The ISDS provisions would empower corporations who object to U.S. laws and regulations that cut into their profits to sue the United States before an international arbitration panel. The signatories to the letter write that this “system undermines the important roles of our domestic and democratic institutions, threatens domestic sovereignty, and weakens the rule of law.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a leading critic of the ISDS provisions, introduced the letter on a conference call hosted Wednesday by the advocacy group Public Citizen.

“It’s about leverage,” Warren said. “Leverage for big companies to threaten an intimidate governments who might dare take action that threatens their profits.”

She cited the example of Canada being successfully sued under ISDS rules contained in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by a U.S.-based company that was denied a permit for an open-pit mining project.
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The Obama administration has pushed back at critics of the ISDS provisions, saying that it is a routine system that exists in thousands of other international agreements, including 50 that the United States is currently a party to.

But that routine system has undermined domestic laws in some countries.

Buzzfeed’s Chris Hamby recently reviewed dozens of ISDS rulings, documenting how corporations used these international arbitration panels to avoid the reach of domestic courts.

For instance, following the ouster of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, the country sentenced Dubai-based real estate mogul Hussain Sajwani to five years in prison for corruption charges related to a sweetheart land deal between his company Damac Properties and the country’s Mubarak-era tourism minister.

Within a week of his conviction, Damac decided to sue Egypt using the World Bank’s arbitration process – arguing that because the previous regime had agreed to the terms, the deal was not criminal.

As Sajwani enlisted the help of some of the world’s top ISDS lawyers to argue his case in a court in Paris, Egypt decided to settle. The terms of the settlement are confidential, but we do know that Sajwani’s prison sentence was completely eliminated.

That set a precedent for a wave of ISDS claims. More and more firms used the ISDS process to avoid penalties handed down from Egypt’s courts.

Under the TPP, the U.S. would be exposed to a larger number of potential ISDS claims.

“If these provisions are included in TPP, the number of foreign investors who’d be empowered to use this mechanism would double from what we currently have in our 50 agreements already,” said Melinda St. Louis, international campaigns director at Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.

In all, Public Citizen estimates that passage of the TPP would newly empower over 10,000 U.S. subsidiaries owned by foreign corporations to launch investor-state cases against the American government.

Corporations from six countries that do not currently have the ability to bring ISDS claims against the United States — Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Brunei – would gain that right under the TPP.

As The Intercept has previously reported, banks and other financial institutions would be able to use TPP provisions to sue over virtually any change in financial regulations affecting future profits in an extra-judicial tribunal.

The United States has not yet lost an ISDS case, but is facing a major claim from TransCanada. The company is using arbitration under NAFTA to seek $15 billion after the Obama Administration decided not to approve its Keystone XL Pipeline project.

The case for how TPP, with fixes, could happen
By Megan Cassella, Politico
09/08/16 10:00 AM EDT

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared to take TPP off the table for the time being when he said during summer recess that it would not come up for a vote this year. But some of his colleagues in Republican leadership are singing a slightly more optimistic tune.

Sen. John Thune, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, and Majority Whip John Cornyn both said having two major-party presidential candidates opposed to the deal make its passage more difficult. But Thune acknowledged that the administration could take steps to appease Sen. Orrin Hatch or other groups like tobacco state lawmakers that would help move it along.

“If the administration wanted to come up here and actually — and I’ve told them that — sit down with Sen. Hatch, and there are some tobacco issues in Kentucky and North Carolina, then I think we could probably get to a point where it might create a better pathway for its passage,” Thune told Morning Trade after the weekly Senate caucus lunches on Wednesday.

“If we have that handful of 10 to 12 Democrats that normally vote for trade, and we can deliver most Republicans, it’s not outside the realm of possibility,” he added. “But I’d say the odds aren’t good.”

Cornyn cautioned, however, that more than just Republicans would still likely have to get on board for the deal to have a chance. Fixes on biologics or tobacco, he said, “would help, but you’d still need to get enough Democrats on board. … Sadly, I’m not too optimistic.”
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Hatch, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said Wednesday that progress has been made between the administration and Congress on the biologics issue, Bloomberg BNA reported. Hatch, who has staked his opposition to TPP on the length of intellectual property rights protections for biologics drugs, would not provide details to reporters at the Capitol — but he noted that other TPP countries must commit to a 12-year term, possibly through a binding side agreement.

So you’re saying there’s a chance? President Barack Obama certainly still thinks so, and he said as much at a Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative town hall event in Laos on Wednesday. Asked whether ASEAN nations should believe that the TPP will ultimately be ratified, Obama responded that he believes it will be “because it’s the right thing to do.”

“It’s always going to be hard,” Obama added. “Nothing is easy in the U.S. Congress right now. Maybe there was a time when it was, but I haven’t seen it. It sure hasn’t been easy since I’ve been president. But eventually we’ll get it done.”
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Longtime TPP opponent Sen. Elizabeth Warren lent her voice and attack-dog tactics on Wednesday to the chorus of those against the TPP because of its Investor-State Dispute Settlement clause, a provision she described as a system of “rigged pseudo-courts.” Warren, who has focused on ISDS in her opposition to the trade deal, told reporters on a conference call Wednesday that the tribunal system poses a unique threat and that any attempts the Obama administration has made to improve the provision are simply “window dressing.”

“Giving foreign corporations special rights to challenge laws outside of the legal system is a bad deal to everyone except those corporations,” Warren said on the call, organized by the anti-TPP activist group Public Citizen. Justifications in support of the provision, she added, “don’t make sense anymore — if they ever did.” Pros can read the full story here.

But debate over the merits of the ISDS provision is heated. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative says it has upgraded and improved the ISDS provision in TPP from previous trade agreements, including by using clearer language and stronger safeguards to raise standards. The National Association of Manufacturers, for its part, said the press call and letter from the anti-TPP sector was “more smoke and mirrors, but nothing new.”

And while the Warren press call was held to announce that more than 200 law and economics professors sent Congress a letter calling on lawmakers to oppose TPP because of ISDS, a group of more than 40 academics, primarily experts in international law, sent a letter of their own to Congress last year in support of the tribunal system.

The shortcomings of the Obama administration’s latest pitch on the TPP
By Jared Bernstein, Washington Post
August 31

As I read their arguments, they’ve largely punted on the economic case for the deal. I and many others have written that such a case was always shaky — these deals do little for overall growth or jobs (meaning a pox on both the TPP as “job-killer” and “job-savior” houses). They are instead a sweeping set of technical rules that determine whose interests are elevated in international trade, and those interests have long tilted toward investors and multinational corporations as opposed to workers. It would thus be discordant for Team Obama to try to sell the deal on the benefits of trade, which are substantial, in the midst of an election where the damage from global competition to significant groups of workers and their communities, which is also substantial, is so front and center.

Instead, the administration has shifted its emphasis to the geopolitical advantages of the deal, or more precisely, the geopolitical costs of a potential failure to ratify the 12-nation agreement. Their warnings come in two flavors, with the second more convincing than the first.

First, the administration argues that after years of difficult, complex, multilateral negotiations, if Congress fails to approve the TPP, it will be a sign to our allies that the United States can’t be trusted. Politically, this seems stunningly naive. Surely negotiators, both ours and theirs, knew that Congress would never rubber-stamp a deal like this. I’ve longed watched and even participated in such dealmaking and those involved are constantly recalibrating the odds of passage. Our negotiators would never have guaranteed passage; to the contrary, it is far more likely they were presenting a realistic assessment to their counterparts, who, of course, would have been doing their own homework on this as well.

So we should seriously discount this claim. If the TPP flames out, our partners will know what they already know — what anyone with access to this newspaper knows: American politics is in a highly fractious, dysfunctional state.

The second claim — that failure to pass the TPP will empower China and hurt the United States — is more serious.
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Yes, it is in America’s interests to try to reduce China’s global influence. But passing the TPP will be ineffectual in that regard. Regardless of the deal’s outcome, the United States will maintain its already sizable presence in East and Southeast Asia, while both we and China will continue trying to influence trade regimes.

That’s just globalization in action. Given the extent of existing and ever-increasing global ties between China and countries throughout Asia, the idea that we’re somehow going to wrest regional influence from China in their own back yard is not credible. For all their arguments to the contrary, both the U.S. government and our businesses recognize this, as they are increasingly ramping up their integration with China through direct investment by our multinational corporations and yes, bilateral trade deals (the U.S./China Bilateral Investment Treaty).

To call China a “threat” in this regard is misleading. What they are is an aggressive competitor for market share, and yes, they are gaining influence through their own bilateral trade agreements (many with TPP countries), foreign investment and financial ties with other nations. So we need a China strategy.

But that’s not at all what we’re talking about here. The TPP is a 12-nation agreement that consists of 6,000 pages of rules of origin for traded goods (which, not incidentally, are actually too kind to China for even my comfort), dispute settlement methods to protect investors (which a. damagingly put our skin in the game vs. that of investors themselves, and b. are now the source of financial speculation), extended patents for biologic drugs and intellectual property rights (not exactly “free trade”), and more. (And they still managed to leave out enforceable rules against currency manipulation!)

The deal’s proponents are down-weighting the costs of such a corporate-centric deal to workers and consumers here and abroad, including unenforced labor, environmental improvements and extended patents, and thus higher prices on critical medications. In this context, it’s hard to take their geopolitical calculus seriously. As Chas Freeman, a former international diplomat, recently put it: “Somehow — it’s not explained how — persuading Asians to adopt the intellectual property practices favored by Hollywood, BigPharma, and patent-trolling American lawyers will keep China at bay.”

What’s so frustrating about the administration’s sales pitch is its implication that we are somehow unable to write trade deals whose sale is not predicated on trading off workers’ and consumers’ well-being for geopolitical security. Is such a trade-off truly unavoidable?

I’m sure it’s not, and that we’re stuck here — we can have a deal that helps workers or a deal that protects our security, but not both — is another piece of evidence that our trade-negotiating regime is broken. We can and should write new rules of the road for globalization that place workers’ interests at the heart of any deal.
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Globalization won’t stop if the TPP goes down. Container ships won’t weigh anchors; trade volumes will not cease to grow. Neither will countries stop seeking geopolitical advantages, blocking potential adversaries or strengthening ties with allies. My hope is that they’ll just have to do so, for now, without a trade deal that would have made economic life harder for a group of workers and communities for whom economic life is hard enough already.