A victory on the human right to water and sanitation

Whether or not you called UN Ambassador Susan Rice in response to the alert in our July e-news, you'll be happy to know that despite lack of support from the US, the UN General Assembly has voted in favor of the Bolivian resolution to recognize access to water and sanitation as human rights.

As we blogged here, the resolution opened fault lines between the water-rich, or just plain rich, countries, and developing nations of the global South. Despite concerns that the US and other developed countries would try to defeat the resolution, it passed by a wide margin, with 124 countries voting yea, no "no" votes, and 41 abstentions, including the US.

One positive note: despite Britain, the US, and Canada's abstentions, a few European countries, and twelve of the G20 nations voted in favor of the resolution, including France, Germany, Italy, the Russian Federation, South Africa, China, Brazil, and India. You can see the full list here.

Establishing a global human right to water is not only a victory for public health, but opens some interesting ground in the fight against climate change, and for environmental sustainability as well. You can make a strong case that people don't merely have a right to tap water, but also to rainfall and to the viability of winter snowpack, if that's a source of drinking and agricultural water, as well as free-running streams and rivers if they have traditionally been used for irrigation and fisheries.

Here's an interview with Maude Barlow, of The Council of Canadians/Le conseil des canadians and co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, from today's edition of Democracy Now!. She offers some good analysis of the vote, and the clip also features footage of Pablo Solon, Bolivian UN Ambassador, explaining the massive toll taken on children in the developing world by the lack of access to clean water.

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Californians! Call today to tell state legislators to repeal the water bond!

Californians, we're asking you to take a few minutes and call your state legislators to tell them to scrap Proposition 18, a wasteful plan that would drain $800 million a year from funding for state services while giving corporate interests even more control of California's water. With that money, California could hire back 12,000 teachers laid off this year.

And that's just the beginning. Over 30 years, this bond will cost $22 billion. For more information, and the new "Spit Out Prop 18" video, go to nowaterbond.com.

A vote is coming up fast--perhaps as early as mid August--on whether to postpone Prop 18 to 2012. But there's no reason to postpone a bad idea! California needs to scrap Proposition 18, and work on programs that keep water clean and accessible for both the state's environment and the state's people. Let's get the corporate interests--and Proposition 18--off the table.

Blue ribbon action!
A short call to your legislators will help a lot! The message is short and sweet--just identify yourself and where you're calling from, and tell your senator or Assembly member to vote to repeal the bond, not just postpone it to 2012.

Second place!
No time to call? Send an email here!



Thanks for speaking out! Tell fellow Californians to do the same!

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Action Alert: UN voting 7/28 on Right to Water--US is watering down the resolution

Call Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., today!

An historic UN General Assembly resolution titled "The Human Right to Water and Sanitation" has been officially tabled by at least 23 co-sponsoring member states and the government of Bolivia. The United States is not yet co-sponsoring.

The date set for UN member states to consider this resolution is Wednesday, July 28th.
We need this resolution to pass with a strong majority so we need to act quickly and collectively!

Calls are needed this week, the International Week of Action on the Right to Water and Sanitation. The UN must hear our calls from around the world.

Call the U.S. Delegation’s Opinion & Comment line: 212-415-4062 and leave a message for Ambassador Rice.

Tell her that the right to safe drinking water and sanitation is fundamental to human rights and to the health of every person on the planet. Yet 1.2 billion people are without access to clean water and 2.6 billion are without access to basic sanitation. Climate change will make the global water crisis far worse. Passing this resolution is a critical step toward making access to water and sanitation recognized as a fundamental human right by the UN.

For current text of the Resolution and more details see www.blueplanetproject.net/RightToWater.

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The Great Decoupling of Corporate Profits From Jobs

Can the US corporate elite bankroll a recovery by keeping unemployment high and inflating share prices? How will the US economy, dependent on consumer spending, pull itself up when US corporations would rather not hire US workers--even when US workers' taxes bailed out US banks and the auto industry? It doesn't hurt the corporate elite to lose the middle class, especially if they can convince nervous voters that tax cuts are the answer to a stagnant economy.

by Robert Reich, posted on his blog Monday July 26

Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they’re making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost.

So with all this money and profit, they’ll start hiring again, right? Wrong – for three reasons.

First, lots of their profits are coming from their overseas operations. So that’s where they’re investing and expanding production.

GM now sells more cars in China than it does in the US, but makes most of them there. The company now employs 32,000 hourly workers in China. But only 52,000 GM hourly workers remain in the United States – down from 468,000 in 1970.
GM isn’t just hiring low-tech assembly workers in China. Last week the firm broke ground there on a $250 million advanced technology center to develop batteries and other alternative energy sources.

You and I and other American taxpayers still own over 60 percent of GM. We bought GM to save GM jobs, remember?

GM officials say no American taxpayer money is being used to expand in China. But money is fungible. Because of our generosity, GM can now use the dollars it doesn’t have to spend in the United States meeting its American payrolls and repaying its creditors, for new investments in China.

Second, big U.S. businesses are investing their cash in labor-saving technologies. This boosts their productivity, but not their payrolls.

Last Friday, for example, Ford reported a $2.6 billion second-quarter profit. The firm is already more than two-thirds the way to equaling its record 1999 profits. But due to labor-saving technologies, Ford now has half as many employees as it did a decade ago.

Wall Street analysts are happy with Ford’s “commitment to keeping capacity in check,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Ford shares rose 5.2 percent Friday. “Keeping capacity in check” is the Street’s way of saying “no new hiring.” In fact, the Street is advising investors to sell the stocks of companies that talk openly of expanding capacity.

Finally, corporations are using their pile of money to pay dividends to their shareholders and buy back their own stock – thereby pushing up share prices.

Last Friday, GE announced it would raise its dividend by 20 percent and reinstate its share-buyback plan. It’s GE’s first dividend increase since the company cut its dividend in early 2009. As a result, GE shares are up more than 5% in the past few days.
Bottom line: Higher corporate profits no longer lead to higher employment. We’re witnessing a great decoupling of company profits from jobs.

The next supply-side economist who tells you companies need more incentive (i.e. lower taxes) before they’ll hire is living on another planet.

The reality is this: Big American companies may never rehire large numbers of workers. And they won’t even begin to think about hiring until they know American consumers will buy their products. The problem is, American consumers won’t start buying against until they know they have reliable paychecks. 

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July 26-28: National call-in days to oppose war funding

A coalition of peace, political, labor, and faith groups are asking constituents to make a call to their representatives over the next three days to ask that they oppose a White House request for an addition $33.5 billion in funding for the war in Afghanistan. For more info, see the UFPJ website.

The toll-free call-in number is 1-888-493-5443.

The latest funding request comes without a time-table for withdrawal or a coherent strategy for success. Meanwhile, leaked war logs (best reporting here), detail the costs on the ground, to civilians and military personnel alike, shattering the illusion of "a good war" and an easy victory.

We're gaining ground in getting Congress to change its view on the war, as well. Three weeks ago, 162 House members supported a time table for withdrawal, and 100 members supported Rep. Barbara Lee's amendment to use war funds for security only and to begin troop withdrawal. If your rep was one of the supporters, a call is a good time to say thanks, and urge him or her to hold the line through the upcoming election season.

Be part of the mobilization. Make the call, turn up the volume, and end the war.

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Action Alert: Protect Consumers not the Big Banks! Support Elizabeth Warren for Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

The newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau needs strong leadership. That's Elizabeth Warren. As chair of the five-person Congressional oversight panel for the $700 billion bailout fund (TARP), Elizabeth Warren has proven she has the intellectual understanding and fortitude to call the shots as she sees them with the government's bailout of the big banks. She proposed the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Now the Bureau has been created by Congress as part of the banking reform bill and she is the most qualified candidate to be chair.

So what's the problem? As the New York Times put it in an editorial calling for her appointment, "The banks don’t oppose Ms. Warren because she doesn’t get it. They oppose her because she does." And it's not just the banks. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is lukewarm about Warren because she is much harder on the financial industry than he is. Some say he is actively opposing her appointment.

President Obama will make the appointment in the very near future. Then the Senate must confirm it. To counter Geithner's influence in the administration, we need key Senate chairs to tell the President they want Elizabeth Warren appointed as chair.

The Blue Ribbon Action:
Please call the Senate offices of key committee chairs and tell them you want Elizabeth Warren appointed.
a. Senator Chris Dodd, Chair of the Banking Committee, (202) 224-2823
b. Senator Max Baucus, Chair of the Finance Committee, (202) 224-2651

Or if you don't have time to call...
Sign our online petition here (and please tell friends you signed!) We'll send the signatures to both senators' offices at the end of this week.

You are welcome to call and sign! Let's make some noise!

For more background, see this article on the AtlanticWire website.

Make the calls and sign on to the petition--let's get bureau leadership that works for the people, not Wall Street insiders. Thank you!

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AfD joins in opposing Korean FTA

Alliance for Democracy has joined more than 110 organizations in signing a letter to President Obama urging renegotiation of the Korean Free Trade Act.

The letter campaign was organized by Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, and encourages Obama to consider the TRADE Act (Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act). You can read the letter by clicking on the "read more" link below.

Dear President Obama:

We, the undersigned faith, family farm, environmental, labor, consumer protection and civil society organizations, are among the many that support your campaign commitments to create a new American trade agreement model that works for more people, and strongly oppose the Bush-negotiated Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA).

Signed by President Bush over three years ago, the Korea FTA represents a throwback to a failed trade policy, not the promised change. Our members strongly oppose more of these same job-killing, community destroying trade policies.

We urge you to renegotiate the Korea FTA text. Doing so offers an opportunity to begin to unify Americans in favor of new trade rules that create American jobs.

This Korea FTA, signed before the financial crisis, includes financial service deregulation terms that typify Bush's FTAs, but contradict efforts to restore stability to the global economy. The pact's labor chapter includes the Bush administration's explicit ban on reference to the International Labor Organization's core Conventions. Yet the Conventions and related jurisprudence are the fundamental platform of international labor rights. This limitation was imposed by the previous administration in 2007 when various FTAs' labor chapters were being modified.

This FTA also includes extreme foreign investor rights and their private investor-state enforcement that you rightly criticized during the campaign. These terms pose special threats because there are many Korean firms operating here that would be newly empowered to attack U.S. environmental, financial, health and other policies in foreign tribunals. Canadian firms have used NAFTA, the only other pact with a major capital exporting country that includes these terms, to bring a series of cases which have cost millions in government legal costs even when we successfully defend against the attacks. Implementing the Korea FTA as written would newly expose the U.S. government and taxpayers to expansive financial liabilities related to compensation demands in foreign tribunals from Korean firms operating within our borders.

These are problems of equal importance to the barriers to the Korean market that were left unaddressed with respect to numerous U.S. industries such as the auto and beef sectors. As you recall, the International Trade Commission's 2007 study of the Korea FTA concluded that it would result in the growth of the U.S. global trade deficit, an outcome that would undermine the goal of creating two million new American jobs through export expansion.

Both the problems with the FTA's rules and with meaningful market access for U.S. exports must be addressed in a manner that incorporates needed improvements into the agreement's legally-binding, enforceable terms.

Moving forward with another job-killing FTA is contrary to what our organizations' millions of members want, and, as polling demonstrates, what the overwhelming majority of Americans want. Public demand for a new American trade model was high even before millions of Americans lost their jobs to the worst economic debacle since the Great Depression. Now, given the level of unemployment and economic insecurity plaguing many Americans, implementing another NAFTA-style trade pact is especially unwise.

As a roadmap for renegotiating the most problematic provisions of the Korea FTA text, we encourage you to consider the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (TRADE) Act, which has the support of over 150 members of Congress, including a majority of House Democrats.

We strongly agree with your statements that America needs a new trade agreement model that works for the majority, not just the special interests. We cannot support outdated trade agreements, such as Bush's Korea FTA, that benefit serial offshoring multinational corporations at the expense of America's small businesses, workers and farmers and the environmental, health and public interest laws on which all Americans rely. We hope that you will renegotiate the most damaging aspects of the Korea FTA. If it is brought before Congress without the needed changes, we will work to defeat it.

Sincerely,

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How much should you tip your Congressperson?

Find out which oil and gas companies are giving to which Congress members at Oil Change International's "Follow the Oil Money" site. There are "relationship maps" for the House and Senate showing what entities are giving what to whom, and you can search for top donors and recipients--info comes from research done by OpenSecrets.org.

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"Tenther" philosophy means a giant step backwards for American society

Ultraconservatives invoke the Tenth Amendment to deem reforms as simple and accepted as child labor laws an unconstitutional imposition on the right (of the elite) to be left alone to pursue profit (by any means necessary). Here's a look at how "Tenthers" have warped constitutional history in the name of judicial activism.

by Ian Millheiser. Posted by Center for American Progress July 19.

Spend a week listening to the right, and you’ll think the founders were all modern-day Tea Partiers. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) thinks the Constitution forbids Congress to spend federal money on programs he personally disapproves of. Justice Clarence Thomas thinks that the minimum wage, child labor laws, and the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters all violate the Constitution. And of course, everyone on the right thinks that health reform is unconstitutional.

It’s enough to make you think they’re just making it up as they go along. It clearly can’t be the case that every single law cherished by progressives just happens to be unconstitutional.

Yet the reality is even worse. When the right’s view of the Constitution was ascendant 75 years ago, basic protections such as a restriction on child labor were declared unconstitutional; laws banning discrimination were unthinkable; and Social Security was widely viewed as next in line for the Supreme Court’s chopping block.

America’s right now wants nothing more than to revive this discredited theory of the Constitution. These conservatives are over-reading the Tenth Amendment, a provision of the Constitution that provides Congress’s power is not unlimited. So-called “tenther” conservatives are determined to use their twisted reinterpretation to shrink national leaders’ power to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub. They must not be allowed to succeed for three reasons:

1. Tentherism is dangerous. Monopolists seized control of entire industries during tentherism’s last period of ascendance. Workers were denied the most basic protections, while management happily invoked the long arm of the law when a labor dispute arose. Worst of all, Congress was powerless against this effort. And the Court swiftly declared congressional action unconstitutional when elected officials took even the most modest steps to protect workers or limit corporate power.

2. Tentherism has no basis in constitutional text or history. Nothing in the Constitution supports tenther arguments. And tenther claims are nothing new. Each of them was raised as early as the Washington administration, and each was rejected by George Washington himself.

3. Tentherism is authoritarian. Health reform, Social Security, and the Civil Rights Act all exist because the people’s representatives said they should exist. The tenthers express goal is to make the Supreme Court strip these elected representatives of power and impose a conservative agenda upon the nation.

The right’s quizzical lawsuits challenging health reform are just the tip of the tenther iceberg. If these lawsuits succeed, much of America’s most cherished laws could be next against the wall.

The tenther agenda
In its strongest form, tentherism would eliminate most of the progress of the last century. It asserts that the federal minimum wage is a crime against state sovereignty, child labor laws exceed Congress’s limited powers, and the federal ban on workplace discrimination and whites-only lunch counters is an unlawful encroachment on local businesses. Many tenthers even oppose cherished programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Tenthers divine all this from the brief language of the 10th Amendment, which provides that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In layman's terms, this simply means that the Constitution contains an itemized list of federal powers—such as the power to regulate interstate commerce or establish post offices or make war on foreign nations—and anything not contained in that list is beyond Congress’s authority.

The tenther constitution reads each of these powers very narrowly—too narrowly, it turns out, to permit much of the progress of the last century. As the nation emerges from the worst economic downturn in three generations, the tenthers would strip away the very reforms and economic regulations that beat back the Great Depression, and they would hamstring any attempt to enact new progressive legislation.

Killing health care
Congress’s authority is limited to the itemized list of powers contained in the text of the Constitution, and the right falsely claims that health reform does not make the list. Although Congress’s power is not limitless, it clearly permits national leaders to regulate the national health insurance market.

A provision of the Constitution known as the “commerce clause” gives Congress power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” There is a long line of cases holding that this provision gives Congress broad power to enact laws that substantially affect prices, marketplaces, commercial transactions, and other economic activity. And a law requiring all Americans to hold health insurance does all of these things.

Health reform opponents, faced with such a daunting case against their position, urge the courts to invent an entirely new limit on the commerce power. They believe the Constitution only permits Congress to regulate people who are already engaged in a particular kind of commerce. It does not permit Congress to require individuals to engage in economic activity they would not otherwise engage in, such as requiring uninsured Americans to carry insurance.

One searches the Constitution in vain for any language supporting such a novel theory, but the right’s anti-health care argument has another problem. It proves entirely too much.

Segregationists in the Jim Crow South explicitly demanded the right to not engage in commerce. Lunch counter operators wanted to not do business with black patrons. Employers wanted the right to not hire black workers. Realtors demanded the right to not sell certain homes to African Americans. If tenthers’ anti-health care arguments prevail, it’s unclear how the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters survives the purge.

For some tenthers, that may be the point. Indeed, some of the right’s leading jurists have long felt that laws such as the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act are unconstitutional.

Rolling back civil rights
Tentherism may be relatively dormant today, but tenthers dominated the Supreme Court from the late 1800s until 1937, when a majority of the Court finally recognized that national leaders must be empowered to solve a national economic crisis like the Great Depression.

Modern Supreme Court precedent dictates that the commerce clause gives Congress full authority to regulate the roads and railways used to transport goods in interstate commerce, as well as the goods themselves and the vehicles that transport them. The commerce clause also gives Congress the power to regulate activities that “substantially affect interstate commerce.” This “substantial effects” power is the basis of Congress’s authority to ban discrimination throughout the country.

Yet Justice Thomas claimed in three separate cases—U.S. v. Lopez, U.S. v. Morrison, and Gonzales v. Raich—that this “substantial effects” test is “at odds with the constitutional design.” It’s difficult to count how many laws would simply cease to exist if Thomas’s view of the Constitution ever prevailed, but a short list includes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, much of the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the most basic worker protections such as the minimum wage, overtime laws, and the regulation of child labor.

Many of the right’s most celebrated jurists share Thomas’s views. President Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Douglas Ginsburg to the Supreme Court in 1987—although Reagan was forced to withdraw the nomination after NPR reported that Ginsburg had a history of drug use. Ginsburg is most famous for describing tentherism as a “constitution in exile,” and for wanting to put that rightfully exiled monarch back on America’s throne.

But Judge Janice Rogers Brown may be the judiciary’s proudest tenther. She once compared liberalism to “slavery” and Social Security to a “socialist revolution.” And it was Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) who brokered the deal that elevated Brown to the federal bench—feeding the widespread belief that McCain would have nominated her to the Supreme Court if he had been elected president.

Making elections irrelevant
The Constitution gives Congress broad authority to “to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” This means that elected congressional representatives—not judges—are allowed to decide what is in the federal budget. Yet tenthers believe that the Supreme Court should seize control of the budget and eliminate spending programs that they happen to disapprove of.

The fullest articulation of this vision by an elected official occurred during Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) urged the Supreme Court during those hearings to begin “some reining in of Congress in terms of the general welfare clause,” a reference to Congress’s authority to spend money to promote the general welfare.

Coburn’s plan to wrest control of the federal budget away from Congress and give it to the Supreme Court, would not only be completely unprecedented—it is also a terrible idea. There is nothing in the Constitution to guide the Court in determining which portions of the federal budget to strike down, so the justices own personal political views would inevitably drive the budgeting process.

The Constitution already has a mechanism to allow the people to reverse spending decisions they disapprove of: elections. Conservatives are simply wrong to claim that we should shift control of America’s massive economy over to unelected judges.

Tentherism is undoubtedly a terrible idea, but it is hardly unprecedented. America has seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well.
America was not founded by tenthers

Contrary to the right’s claims, tentherism has no basis in the Constitution or its history. President George Washington himself rejected tentherism early in American history, and this radical view of the Constitution gained no traction at all until fairly late in American history.

Clarence Thomas versus George Washington
Justice Thomas is probably the leading proponent of tentherism on the federal bench, but the founding generation would actually be quite shocked by his narrow view of Congress’s power to regulate commerce. Indeed, the framers viewed this power more expansively than a majority of the justices on today’s Supreme Court in many ways.

The Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Morrison, for example, struck down part of the Violence Against Women Act. The Court acknowledged that Congress has broad authority over economic matters, but rejected Congress’s authority over “noneconomic, violent criminal conduct based solely on that conduct’s aggregate effect on interstate commerce.” In other words, Morrison eliminates much of Congress’s power to regulate violent activity. But Morrison would probably render a law signed by George Washington unconstitutional.

President Washington signed “An Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes,” which the First United States Congress had passed pursuant to its commerce power. The 1790 act reached far beyond economic matters, prohibiting “any crime upon, or trespass against, the person or property of any peaceable and friendly Indian or Indians,” including wholly noneconomic crimes such as assault or murder. Washington’s decision to sign this bill demonstrates his expansive view of the commerce power—a view that in no way resembles tentherism.

Many tenthers claim that local businesses that serve only in-state consumers are immune from laws enacted under the commerce power because the commerce clause permits economic regulation “among the several states,” This view was also rejected early in American history.

A New York steamboat owner argued in the 1824 case called Gibbons v. Ogden that Congress lacked the power to regulate New York’s internal waters. Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice John Marshall rejected this claim.

In Marshall’s view, “Commerce among the States, cannot stop at the external boundary line of each State, but may be introduced into the interior” Congress can therefore regulate “commerce which concerns more States than one,” and only those rare economic activities that have no impact on other states’ economies are beyond Congress’s reach.

Washington and Marshall’s expansive view of the Commerce power remained largely unquestioned for most of the Constitution’s first century. Indeed, the Supreme Court did not strike down a single law as exceeding Congress’s Commerce power until 1870. So tenthers like Justice Thomas will find little comfort in the early history of the United States.

Tom Coburn versus George Washington
Senator Coburn’s claim that the Supreme Court can seize control of the federal budget would also shock the founding generation. There was vigorous debate among the founders regarding the proper scope of Congress’s power to spend money, but this debate was resolved very early in the Constitution’s history, and the courts have never since questioned that Congress has broad authority over the national purse.

Recall that the Constitution gives Congress broad authority to “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” This language denotes few, if any, substantive limits on Congress’s spending power, but James Madison argued during the Washington administration that they had a hidden meaning. Madison’s early vision of the spending power dictates that federal spending is only permitted when it advances one of Congress’s other enumerated powers, such as by building a post office or funding a war.

Madison’s chief rival in the founders' debate over the spending power’s scope was Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first treasury secretary and a co-author of Madison’s Federalist Papers. Hamilton believed that Congress’s spending authority extends over a “vast variety of particulars, which are susceptible neither of specification nor of definition.”

The debate between Madison and Hamilton came to a tee in 1791, when Congress passed a bill that would spend money to create the First Bank of the United States. Madison protested that the bill was unconstitutional, but President Washington sided with Hamilton and signed the bill into law.

Significantly, Madison appeared to abandon his narrow view of the spending clause by the time he entered the White House in 1809. Madison signed legislation when he was president establishing the Second Bank of the United States. Madison also appointed Justice Joseph Story to the Supreme Court, one of the strongest defenders of the Hamiltonian view of the spending clause.

The debate over the spending clause’s proper scope largely laid dormant until 1936 when the Court unanimously endorsed Hamilton’s view of the spending clause in U.S. v. Butler, a case challenging a New Deal agricultural program. Even Justice James McReynolds joined his brethren in siding with Hamilton over Madison—a telling decision since McReynolds was an archconservative who voted twice to hold Social Security unconstitutional and who liked to call President Franklin Roosevelt a “crippled son-of-a-bitch.”

Tenthers like Coburn are apparently radical even by McReynolds’ standards. Moreover, as Hamilton’s early triumph over Madison indicates, the founding generation firmly rejected the tenther view of Congress’s spending power very early in American history.

The Supreme Court’s failed experiment with tentherism
The Supreme Court briefly embraced some of the tenthers views in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, despite the founding generation’s decisive verdict against them. The Court drastically cut back on Congress’s power to regulate commerce during this period, although it has never embraced a tenther view of the spending clause. Monopolies thrived as a result. Management was largely free to engage in the most abhorrent labor practices, and national leaders were powerless to stop them.

The Court’s brief flirtation with tentherism began with its 1888 decision in Kidd v. Pearson. Because the commerce clause permits regulation of commerce “among the several states,” Kidd determined that Congress cannot regulate activities that occur entirely within a single state’s borders, even if those activities are part of an interstate industry or otherwise impact other states’ economies.

Imagine, for example, that a Wisconsin baker imports flour from Iowa, bakes bread in Wisconsin, and then ships the bread to Minnesota. Kidd would allow Congress to regulate the act of importing the flour and shipping the bread since these activities cross state lines, but not the actual act of baking the bread. The Court explained this distinction saying that Congress could regulate transportation or even sales of products across state lines, but not “manufacturing.”

It didn’t take long after Kidd was decided for industry to figure out that it had been given a gift. A sugar monopoly claimed in 1895, for example, that it was immune from federal antitrust law, even though it had “acquired nearly complete control of the manufacture of refined sugar within the United States.” The justices happily agreed because, in their view, manufacturing sugar had nothing to do with selling sugar.

Congress quickly adapted to losing its power to directly regulate the production of goods and services by simply forbidding unwanted products from being transported, and the Supreme Court permitted Congress to do so—at least when such bans were enacted to achieve socially conservative ends.

The Court upheld a law in Champion v. Ames preventing the transportation of lottery tickets. It permitted Congress to ban the transportation of prostitutes in Hoke v. United States. And Congress was allowed to ban alcohol from interstate transit in Clark Distilling Co. v. Western Maryland Railway.

The Court’s 1918 decision in Hammer v. Dagenhart, however, revealed the justices’ distinction between regulating manufacturing and regulating transportation to be nothing more than an ideological charade. The case struck down Congress’s decision to regulate the interstate transport of products produced by child labor. In dissent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes slammed the Court for imposing their own conservative values upon the Constitution: “It is not for this Court . . . to say that [regulation] is permissible as against strong drink but not as against the product of ruined lives.”

Hammer was hardly the only example of tenther justices applying a double standard in order to achieve conservative results. These justices repeatedly upheld laws protecting management while striking down laws benefiting labor.

Tenther justices engaged in a decades-long war against labor unions beginning with the Court’s 1908 decision in Adair v. U.S. Adair struck down a law forbidding employment discrimination against union members because, in the justices’ view, union membership had nothing to do with commerce. When Congress attempted to improve working conditions for mining workers, the Court held in Carter v. Carter Coal that mining—like “manufacturing”—is beyond Congress’s power to regulate.

Yet when mine owners sued a mining union to prevent the union from using cutthroat tactics to organize mine workers, the Court in United Mine Workers v. Coronado Coal decided that Congress should be allowed to regulate mining workers after all.

The Court applied a similar double standard in two cases involving the meat and poultry industry. The Court upheld Congress’s power to regulate stockyards where livestock was kept prior to sales in Stafford v. Wallace. But the minute Congress attempted to improve the working conditions in poultry slaughterhouses, the Court held such improvements unconstitutional in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry v. U.S.

The Supreme Court’s much-repeated claim that Congress has the authority to regulate interstate transportation also broke down when Congress invoked this power to protect workers. The Court struck down a federal pension system for railroad workers in Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton Railroad even though it is difficult to imagine a line of work more closely connected to interstate transportation.

It’s easy to mock tenther justices as purely driven by ideology, and such mockery is justified. There’s no way to defend cases that allow Congress to protect management but not workers, or that shield monopolists but punish unions. But another, equally important lesson emerges from this age of discredited jurisprudence: judges are very bad at overseeing economic regulation.

The distinction between manufacturing and transportation may seem simple enough, but it proved completely unworkable in practice. The confusion that ensued from trying to draw a rigid line between two intimately connected activities made it very easy for tenther justices to resolve cases according to their own personal political beliefs. Fine constitutional decisions invite activist judging entirely because there are plausible arguments on both sides of the questions these distinctions raise.

This is why modern commerce clause doctrine abandoned such fine distinctions, granting Congress broad discretion over economic regulation. Indeed, our democratic Constitution demands such an approach because it is simply undemocratic to turn America’s economic policy over to unelected judges who are guided by little more than their own discretion.

This is the vision Chief Justice Marshall embraced in Gibbons when he wrote that the “wisdom and the discretion of Congress, their identity with the people, and the influence which their constituents posses at elections” are the most robust limits on Congress’s commerce power. If national leaders want to cast aside the minimum wage, allow poor children to toil in sweatshops, and eliminate Social Security and Medicare, than they have that right. But the American people must also have the power to swiftly cast such fools out of office.

Conclusion
Democracy is not easy, and American democracy has seen more than its share of hard fought battles. Today’s progressives stared down defeat time and time again to ensure affordable health care for all Americans. Civil rights era progressives combated filibusters, racism, and lynchings to ensure that America’s promise would extend to all Americans. And New Deal progressives went up against a deeply activist Court in order to give us Social Security and the most basic workplace protections.

All of these are powerful, lasting victories—the kind of victories that elected officials do not overturn if they plan on keeping their jobs.

Tenthers understand this. They understand that the American people will not stand for an agenda that would kill Social Security, civil rights, and health reform. Sadly, that is why they want to strip the American people of their power to make such decisions and give it to a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives.

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Water as a human right threatens to split global north and south, rich and poor nations

The human right to water, based in morality if not yet in law, is not being met for more than a billion people, but passing a UN resolution defending that right is dividing the water wealth "haves" from the have nots in the developing world.

by Thalif Deen. Posted on CommonDreams.org July 16

UNITED NATIONS - A long outstanding proposal to recognize the right to water as a basic universal human right is threatening to split the world's rich and poor nations.

A long outstanding proposal to recognize the right to water as a basic universal human right is threatening to split the world's rich and poor nations.

Opposition to the proposal is coming mostly from Western nations, says Maude Barlow, a global water advocate and a founder of the Canada-based Blue Planet Project.

"Canada is the worst. But Australia, the United States and Great Britain are also holding up the process," she said.

"I am loath to see this as a North-South issue, but it is beginning to look like it," Barlow told Inter Press Service.

If the draft resolution is eventually adopted by the 192-member U.N. General Assembly, "it would be one of the most important things the United Nations has done since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," she said.

The two-page draft, described as "historic", recognizes "the human right to water and sanitation," and is being initiated by Bolivia.

A final text of the draft, currently under discussions, is expected to be presented to the president of the General Assembly, Ali Abdussalam Treki, by the end of July - if it clears the political hurdles.

Speaking off-the-record, a diplomatic source told IPS: "This is something very dear to developing countries."

It is true that there is actually no legal basis for declaring the right to water and sanitation as a basic universal human right, and issues like definitions and scope have to be worked out. He said the argument being made is there is already an ongoing process in Geneva that is meant to work on this, and that the General Assembly "is jumping the gun".

"Overall, water and sanitation are such critical issues that we must work towards consensus on this resolution. Anything less than consensus would undermine the very importance we attach to them," he warned.

Barlow pointed out that nearly two billion people live in water-stressed areas of the world and three billion have no running water within a kilometer of their homes.

In a letter sent to all 192 U.N. ambassadors, she said that when the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights was written, no one could foresee a day when water would be a contested area.

"But in 2010, it is not an exaggeration to say that the lack of access to clean water is the greatest human rights violation in the world," said Barlow, who once served as Senior Adviser on Water to the 63rd President of the U.N. General Assembly in 2008-2009.

She said Canada has blocked even the most modest steps toward international recognition of the right to water and has worked behind the scenes to derail advancement toward a binding instrument.

Government officials have not explained their position except to say that such a convention might force Canada to share its water with the United States.

However, this is a complete "red herring" and the Stephen Harper government knows it, she added.

The truth is that a right to water convention at the U.N. would act as a counterweight to those who want to sell Canada's water for profit and is a more likely explanation of Canada's continued opposition, Barlow said.

Ann-Mari Karlsson of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) told IPS her organization supports the human right to water and sanitation.

"But we concur with the views of the U.N. independent expert that the right to water and sanitation are components of the rights to an adequate standard of living and that these rights are protected under Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights," Karlsson said.

She said it is important that a U.N. resolution on the right to water and sanitation should state this clearly, "which as far as we can see, the current draft does not".

What is more, the importance of sanitation in this context cannot be underestimated.

Karlsson said water and sanitation are closely linked, and the world is more off track to reach the Millennium Development Goals on access to sanitation than it is for access to water.

"There should be an adequate reflection of this in the resolution," she added.

Anil Naidoo, also of the Blue Planet Project, has already briefed China and the 130-member Group of 77 developing countries in promoting the draft resolution.

"International and local community groups fighting for water justice have long been calling for leadership from the U.N. in clearly recognizing that water and sanitation are human rights," said Naidoo.

"As this moves forward we are demanding that the language of the resolution remain strong and leave no doubt that water and sanitation are human rights," he added.

Andersson of SIWI told IPS: "We are not against privatization on principle. Our main concern is that the state should take its responsibility to regulate and monitor activities by private actors so that everyone has access to affordable drinking and household water and sanitation."

Whether the provision of water and sanitation is carried out by public or private actors is not relevant to the status of water and sanitation as a human right, she declared.

Meanwhile, a coalition of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the Council of Canadians, Food and Water Europe, Corporate Europe Observatory and the Blue Planet Project, has appealed to members of the European Parliament seeking their political support.

"In light of the European Union's recognition of water as a human right, it will be crucial that the EU play a key role in promoting this key resolution at the United Nations," says the letter.

Copyright © 2010 IPS-Inter Press Service

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Video of Laird and Robin Monahan speaking for Move to Amend in Denver, Colorado

Free Speech TV shot this interview with Laird and Robin Monahan at the State Capitol building in Denver; the brothers made a detour up to the city to join Move to Amend Colorado for a rally calling for a Constitutional amendment to take personhood rights back from corporations and to end the legal definition of money as equivalent to speech.



The brothers have been walking across country down Route 50 since June to support the amendment campaign and Move to Amend; they've been blogging here. As they head east they can use homestays, financial support, and opportunities to speak to media and community groups--contact them through their website. You can also follow their walk at the Move to Amend site.

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Good news on OREP!

Portland's Alliance for Democracy is excited that, in part because of our efforts and the efforts of the AfD sponsored program, Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policies (OREP), Oregon is now the first state to have a statewide Feed-In Tariff program.

Alliance for Democracy's sponsored advocacy group, Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy, has been involved in this effort to "democratize the grid" for the past year and a half, first working with the Oregon legislature and then with the Public Utility Commission (PUC). 

In the media, The Oregonian noted the involvement of OREP in the process and included our Judy Barnes with a quote in the front page article announcing the program beginning. An AfD supporter and a key activist working with Judy, Mark Pengilly, was quoted in the next day's business page article, which noted that by day two all of the program, all of the openings for phase 1 had been filled.

Our efforts have been to develop a program which would allow average people to develop renewable energy on our rooftops and in our neighborhoods where the energy will be used instead of on large remote sites requiring the building of additional expensive grid capacity. Up to this point, those big projects have benefited large multinational corporations while leaving the average Joe outside looking in.  Now we can get be involved in our own clean energy future. 

While we are happy that the program is up and running, much more needs to be done to make it truly a real feed-in tariff program.  Judy and Mark and Teddy and the rest of us here at Alliance for Democracy, Portland are going to continue working on this until the state of Oregon gets it completely right. 

Please visit the Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy website for more details on this project. And watch the video below, with Jim Lockhart interviewing Judy Barnes on the topic of feed-in tariffs.  This interview was conducted before the Oregon PUC rules were released and before the release of the program to the public. If you'd like more information, please email Judy at jbarnes@hevanet.com.

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On the march for independence from corporate rule!

AfD member and clean election activist Carole Luteness was one of several AfD'ers who took to the streets on Independence Day to raise awareness of corporate personhood, corporate rule, and the need to get big money out of politics.

Carole writes, "Our Santa Clarita Fair Elections committee joined forces with our local Democrats to march in the Santa Clarita 4th of July parade...About 500 AfD bookmarks calling for the end of Corporate Personhood were handed out. Santa Clarita is a VERY conservative community but you would be surprised how many people were very responsive to our message, "abolish Corporate Personhood, restore Democracy to the people. Big Corporations have captured both parties" as the fliers were distributed.

"We are taking two Resolutions to the CA Dem Party E-Bd in July calling for a 1.A Constitutional amendment identifying constitutional rights are reserved only to human persons (which was passed recently by the Los Angeles County Democratic Party), and 2. A resolution calling for rescinding BP’s Corporate Charter and seizing its assets because of repeated felonious behavior.
I will keep you posted about our efforts."

Connecting with the crowd along the parade route.








Democracy and clean elections people joined forces with local Democratic party supporters to decorate a car for the parade.

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New York's new deputy mayor is Indianapolis's former "king of privatization"

Jack and Stevie Smith coordinated the Indianapolis chapter of the Alliance for Democracy and helped develop the "So You Want to Move to Indy" website, which exposed city government giveaways to corporations. Recently, Jack gave reporter Neil deMause some background info on former Indy mayor Steve Goldsmith, the man he describes as "the king of privatization." In addition to the article below, check out this article Jack wrote for The Progressive.

by Neil deMause. Posted June 30 on City Limits

When Mayor Bloomberg tapped former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith in April to replace longtime aide Ed Skyler as the city's new deputy mayor for operations, all the talk was about the new hire's credentials as an innovator at remaking government through privatization. The Times called Goldsmith, a former two-term mayor of Indianapolis who officially started work at City Hall on June 1, "a national leader in the movement to introduce corporate-style accountability and cost-cutting into government bureaucracy." Bloomberg enthused about his new hire, "Lots of people talk about reinventing government; I think it's fair to say Steve has actually done that."

According to some of those who saw Goldsmith's work firsthand in Indianapolis, however, his record is mixed. The Indianapolis miracle, say many community and labor leaders, was less an indicator of the magic of privatization than of its limits.
Goldsmith was elected mayor in 1991 on a platform of privatizing city services, and immediately set out to put his plan into action. Goldsmith appointed a "Service, Efficiency, and Lower Taxes for Indianapolis Commission" (SELTIC), led by private business leaders, to examine every facet of city government for possible privatization. The core of his philosophy was what in his 1997 book "The 21st Century City" Goldsmith called the "Yellow Pages test": "If the phone book lists three companies that provide a certain service," he wrote, "the city probably should not be in that business."

Despite declaring that "my goal is not to lay off city workers," Goldsmith immediately announced a series of layoffs, as a part of a massive reorganization of city departments, particularly those overseeing construction and public works. Agencies involved in regulatory oversight were a favorite Goldsmith target. The city's Equal Opportunity Division lost 14 of its 21 employees; the department responsible for buildings code inspections dropped from more than 400 workers to 341. At one point, Goldsmith directed the city's Health and Hospital Corporation to use health and safety regulations "only after other alternative measures, including market-based environmental protection, are sufficiently explored." His predecessor as mayor, William Hudnut, later reported that Goldsmith's deputy mayor declared the new administration's motto to be: "If it ain't broke, break it and then fix it."

An all-out war
The response of the municipal unions "was predictable," recalls Steve Fantauzzo, an American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees official who was head of the AFSCME district council in Indianapolis during Goldsmith's time as mayor. "The first eight to ten months of his administration was an all-out war."

When Goldsmith moved from layoffs to actually privatizing services, his initiatives featured a common theme: City services would be farmed out to a private firm, which would then hike fees. If this raised issues of fairness for low-income residents who couldn't afford the new rates, the fiscal results weren't much more promising. After Goldsmith contracted out operations at three public swimming pools, for example, fees soared (more than quadrupling at one especially popular pool), while attendance fell by 30 percent; after three years, the city ended the experiment and returned the pools to city control.

Goldsmith also privatized the city's golf courses, approving a no-bid contract to turn them over to the golf pros who'd previously run them (for a flat fee), on the argument that they could raise more revenue. According to Indiana Alliance for Democracy president Jack Miller, writing in the 2001 anthology "To Market, To Market: Reinventing Indianapolis," revenues indeed went up, but only for the private partners: Since the new contracts provided that all capital improvements would be paid for by the city, while virtually all revenues would go to the new private managers, the pros simply hiked greens fees and kept the windfall profits for themselves.

Prior to privatization, the golf courses had been turning an annual $3 million a year profit for the city. Since then, according to longtime Indianapolis community activist Pat Andrews, currently active with the Marion County Alliance of Neighborhood Associations, "parks funding has been very difficult." SELTIC also tried to get neighborhood groups to take over responsibility for maintenance of the city's parks--a plan that drew jeers for expecting citizens to mow the grass, and ended with not a single one of the city's 135 parks turned over to neighborhood control.

At the same time, critics began alleging that rather that truly leveling the playing field for private contractors seeking to bid on public services, Goldsmith was favoring campaign donors and political allies. One of Goldsmith's biggest contracts went to Oscar Robertson Smoot, a newly formed consortium led by former NBA great and Indianapolis native Oscar Robertson that would go on to give $42,000 to Goldsmith's election campaigns. In a no-bid contract issued with no prior public debate, ORS was given control over the city's $530 million infrastructure building and repair program, according to Miller.

The result, according to city internal audits reviewed by Miller, was shoddy work, cost overruns, and construction delays. In one case, ORS put down sidewalks before sewer lines had been laid. In another, after the company failed to complete parks renovation work on time, it farmed out the work to a subcontractor and billed it to the city under a different contract; even after a third contractor was eventually hired on, the work was never completed. Asked in 1996 about the benefits of using ORS to do construction work in the city's parks, Goldsmith's parks director Leon Younger replied: "Oh, I wouldn't say there was a savings ... It's strictly a business decision based on our ability to get it out of our operating budget and over to our capital improvement side."?

Financing questions
Indeed, to some of his Indiana critics, Goldsmith's greatest flaw was his reliance on debt financing. "One of the things they did was keep refinancing bonds and never paying them down," says Andrews. The "poster child" for this, she says, was the Hoosier Dome, the home of the Colts football team: Originally financed with $50 million in bonds in 1984, multiple refinancings by Goldsmith and his successor Bart Peterson left it with $70 million in debt by the time it was demolished in 2008. At the same time, Goldsmith renegotiated the Colts' lease to give them an out clause, one they ended up leveraging into a new $687 million stadium, 90 percent of which was paid for by taxpayers. (Goldsmith was also responsible for the city's lease with the Pacers basketball team for the taxpayer-built Conseco Fieldhouse, in which the team pays just $1 a year in rent, while keeping all revenues from events there.)

Neither Goldsmith nor his former aides responded to interview requests for this article.

Privatization was, of course, only part of Goldsmith's record as mayor. Bloomberg's office says that before Goldsmith's tenure, "downtown Indianapolis suffered from years of urban decay, with disinvestment, population flight and difficulties with crime" and City Hall credits Goldsmith as "the leading force behind the rebirth of downtown Indianapolis, rebuilding long-neglected neighborhoods and spurring major investment."

Fantauzzo, at least, says that Goldsmith eventually backed off of his harshest privatization efforts. "His folks approached us, and wanted to discuss a change in their position away from privatization," he says, instead setting up a system that would allow existing city workers to bid against private firms for contracts. "The numbers showed what we knew all along: The problem wasn't that we had too many front-line workers. We had too many middle managers and bureaucratic bloat. For every two guys we had filling a pothole we had two guys watching them." The end result, he says, is that Indianapolis ended up with fewer middle managers but a larger union workforce after Goldsmith's tenure in City Hall.

Still, by the end of his eight years in office, Goldsmith could brag that he had successfully reduced city worker headcount in departments other than police and fire services by 40 percent. The result, he claimed, was $190 million in savings. But according to Miller, there were no independent audits made of these claims. His own research of city fiscal records found that any savings were offset by nearly $300 million in extra spending on private services.

New city, new landscape
It's not clear precisely what Goldsmith's New York agenda will be. As deputy mayor for operations, he's been charged with direct oversight of police, fire, transportation, sanitation, buildings and environmental protection. While Goldsmith's rhetoric certainly shows signs of having been tempered by his Indianapolis experience--when he recently visited Memphis to promote privatizing sanitation services there, he made a point of selling it as a way to cut bureaucratic overhead, not union jobs--he remains an unabashed advocate of the beneficial powers of market-based competition.

Fantauzzo insists that Goldsmith is flexible enough to adapt to new situations. "New York is not Indianapolis," notes Fantauzzo. "The challenge for Steve will be figuring out how to engage frontline workers in an honest discussion about how the work can be done better. And then engaging top departmental leaders in how to effectuate some of those changes. It's an easy philosophy, but much easier to say than do."

Andrews is less optimistic. "If he moves into privatization with the same style as he moved here," she warns, "you could be in for a rocky run."

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Who's in the oil industry's pocket?

A rundown on political bribery by the oil and gas industry from Power Without Petroleum, on Facebook here.

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