www.dailycorinthian.com
Reece Terry, publisher
Opinion
Mark Boehler, editor
4 • Thursday, June 4, 2015
Corinth, Miss.
TPP not about trade BY DICK MORRIS AND EILEEN MCGANN Columnists
The Trans-Pacific Partnership has nothing to do with trade. While it officially embraces 12 countries plus the U.S., 76 percent of our trade with the 12 is with Mexico and Canada, already covered by NAFTA. Any growth exports is likely to have been already covered by NAFTA, making the TPP irrelevant to our trade relations. TPP is nothing but an effort by the globalists to circumvent American sovereignty, transferring a host of issues from the control of the U.S. Congress and the various state legislatures to international trade courts. Start with the fact that nobody knows what is in the TPP. President Obama will not let anyone see it. Indeed, many of the provisions are said to be aspirational, setting policy goals and leaving it to the trade courts to sort out. Any assurance that the treaty curbs currency manipulation is fanciful. The courts can interpret it any way they want. Indeed, the IMF now does so, abjuring any effort to restrict Chinese manipulation despite overwhelming evidence that it is happening. But the main impact of TPP is to create legal obstacles in the way of American attempts to regulate access to our market. Do American or state laws restrict genetically modified food? TPP won’t permit it. Does the U.S. Congress impose limitations on the “free flow of labor” between America and Mexico? TPP can stop them. Will Congress refuse to take action to restrict greenhouse gas emissions? They can be required under the environmental provisions of TPP. President Obama has labored long and hard to strip Congress of its authority over immigration, emissions and the environment, food regulations and energy policy. Congress, in turn has worked to take away state power over insurance regulation and banking. Now comes the coup de grace — a treaty taking many of these powers away from the United States — both executive and legislative branches — and state government. The long-term goal of the globalists is an international rule of law unaccompanied by democracy. Since there is no global forum for the manifestation of worldwide popular will, this formula leads to rule by bureaucrats -- those who know best. It is government by a new aristocracy of civil servants and technicians. Why are they so eager to preempt the power of elected bodies? Steeped in the traditions of opposition to democracy, they regard the will of the people as unpredictable and subject to demagoguery. Multinational corporations find bureaucrats easy to control, subject as they are to the influences of the revolving door between regulators and those they regulate. Coming from industry or planning to return there, the supposedly disinterested bureaucrats are anything but impartial. What is incomprehensible is why normally trustworthy Republican Senators and Congressmen are falling in line behind Obama. Hasn’t this president stripped our nation of enough power? Has he not tipped the system of checks and balances all out of kilter? Are we to trust him with more power? Are the Republicans to vote him more power? Under fast-track authority, he can negotiate anything he wants, put it in a treaty, jam it through Congress and make it the law of the land, permanently. Don’t Republicans see what they are doing in handing him this kind of power? In the hands of other presidents, fast track made sense. Before the development of the World Trade Organization, free trade deals were the only way to stop a world of tariffs and prosperity-killing regulations. But now, the era of tariffs is over and trade deals are really about sovereignty and power. Don’t hand over more of American sovereignty, particularly under this president. (Dick Morris, former advisor to the Clinton administration, is a commentator and writer. He is also a columnist for the New York Post and The Hill. His wife, Eileen McGann is an attorney and consultant.)
Prayer for today Gracious Lord, I pray that I may have reverence for that which is pure and holy, and that my soul may delight in the presence of the good. Help me to so live that I may have the memory of precious deeds, and that I may not have to depend on the service of others to supply contentment for my closing days. Amen.
A verse to share “Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward.” — Isaiah 1:4
Baltimore is paying the price Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets, but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves, in order to curry favor with local voters. Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double what they were in May last year, and higher than in any May in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the number of arrests is down by more than 50 percent. Various other communities across the country are experiencing very similar explosions of crime and reductions of arrests, in the wake of anti-police mob rampages from coast to coast that the media sanitize as “protests.” None of this should be surprising. In her carefully researched 2010 book, “Are Cops Racist?” Heather Mac Donald pointed out that, after anti-police campaigns, cops tended to do less policing and criminals tended to commit more crimes. If all this has been known for years, why do the same mistakes keep getting made? Mainly because it is not a mistake for those people who are looking out for their own political careers. Critics who accuse the mayor of Bal-
timore and the Maryland prosecutor of incompetence, for their irresponsible Thomas words and Sowell actions, are ignoring the Columnist p o s s i b i l ity that these two elected officials are protecting and promoting their own chances of remaining in office or of moving on up to higher offices. Racial demagoguery gains votes for politicians, money for race hustling lawyers and a combination of money, power and notoriety for armies of professional activists, ideologues and shakedown artists. So let’s not be so quick to say that people are incompetent when they say things that make no sense to us. Attacking the police makes sense in terms of politicians’ personal interests, and often in terms of the media’s personal interests or ideological leanings, even if what they say bears little or no resemblance to the facts. Of course, all these benefits have costs. There is no free lunch. But the costs are paid by others, including men, women and children who are paying with their lives in
ghettos around the country, as politicians think of ever more ways they can restrict or scapegoat the police. The Obama administration’s Department of Justice has been leading the charge, when it comes to presuming the police to be guilty – not only until proven innocent, but even after grand juries have gone over all the facts and acquitted the police. Not only Attorney General Holder, but President Obama himself, has repeatedly come out with public statements against the police in racial cases, long before the full facts were known. Nor have they confined their intervention to inflammatory words. The Department of Justice has threatened various local police departments with lawsuits unless they adopt the federal government’s ideas about how police work should be done. The high cost of lawsuits virtually guarantees that the local police department is going to have to settle the case by bowing to the Justice Department’s demands – not on the merits, but because the federal government has a lot more money than a local police department, and can litigate the case until the local police department runs out of the money needed to do their work.
By and large, what the federal government imposes on local police departments may be summarized as kinder, gentler policing. This is not a new idea, nor an idea that has not been tested in practice. It was tested in New York under Mayor David Dinkins more than 20 years ago. The opposite approach was also tested when Dinkins was succeeded as mayor by Rudolph Giuliani, who imposed tough policing policies – which brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it had been under Dinkins. Unfortunately, when some people experience years of safety, they assume that means that there are no dangers. That is why New York’s current mayor is moving back in the direction of Mayor Dinkins. It is also the politically expedient thing to do. And innocent men, women and children – most of them black – will pay with their lives in New York, as they have in Baltimore and elsewhere. (Daily Corinthian columnist Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com.)
Something new to regulate OXFORD — Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s ... something to regulate! It’s a story as old as the nation. Fear of misuse tracks technology like a bloodhound. Got to have some new rules! State Rep. Ken Morgan, R-Morgantown, threw House Bill 347 into the hopper in January. Its short title was “Drone Prohibition Act” and its purpose was to ban taking pictures from any aircraft that did not have a pilot aboard. “Why?” you might ask. Who knows? “Privacy” was cited. But Mississippi, like most states, already has abundant protections of personal privacy. The federal government has even more. Anyone who intrudes on another’s space or information can be sued, fined, or, in extreme circumstances, jailed. Don’t fault Rep. Morgan for the bill. It was “standardized.” Every year interest groups of every type draft model laws. Drafts are given to like-minded lawmakers. Drone photos of people on public land would be OK under HB 347. That was one of many exemptions. But what about a dam break on private land? Or a fire at a mall? No. Sorry. Those photos would be illegal.
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In Florida, a drone ban passed. In Mississippi, it died in committee. But it will be Charlie back. Mitchell Because drones are Columnist new. And largely because drones are new. Never mind that the same images could be shot from airplanes, helicopters, scissor-lifts, ladders or cameras on TV towers. If taken from drones they would be illegal. The last development to attract such a flurry was the cell phone camera. The cameras caused consternation for police — when justified and especially when not justified. Today, it’s a universal reality: Blue lights on, cell phones out. I saw a driver whip out her phone — and almost cause a wreck — as she approached a state trooper who had stopped another motorist down the road. Some locales — none in Mississippi — reacted by making it illegal to take pictures of police officers at work. Most of the ordinances and statutes that did pass ran headlong into the First Amendment and were invalidated. In sum, the crucial provision in our soci-
ety that says anything in a public place can be photographed was vindicated. Besides, as with the drone situation, there are plenty of longstanding and well-enforced laws on the subject. One is interference with a law enforcement officer in the performance of his or her duty. Another is failure to obey a lawful order of a first responder. Anyone who impedes the job of a policeman or gets in the way of paramedics in order to take a picture needs to be hauled off to jail. Existing law covers that. Back to drones. The wrinkle with Mississippi (or Florida) weighing in is that the Federal Aviation Administration has the big stick when it comes to anything flown in America’s airspace. The FAA calls drones — which are becoming more powerful and versatile — by the acronym UAS for Unmanned Aircraft Systems. The FAA correctly sees the potential of UAS being “weaponized” as well as interfering with passenger aircraft, or both. Likewise, however, there are a lot of “good” uses. For instance, spot spraying pesticides where needed in farm fields instead of broadcasting. Mississippi State University has been funded as the national cen-
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ter for research into any and all positive applications. It’s a big feather in Mississippi’s cap. Generally, though, the FAA is still wondering what the rules should be. A rather silly situation under today’s rules is that a TV station may show unsolicited drone video of an approaching storm or flood if shot by a hobbyist, but may not operate a station-owned drone to capture the same pictures. The best to hope for is that everyone remember: 1. Just as with cell phone cameras, existing laws already cover a lot of “dangers” that drones are believed to pose. (Banning commercial use of drones is like banning cars because bank robbers use them for getaways.) 2. States really don’t have a dog in the regulatory hunt. 3. The FAA’s purpose is to promote and assure safety in the air, period. Any use of a drone that threatens air travel, such as near an airport, would correctly be banned. Otherwise, just because something is new does not mean a sledgehammer response from government is required. (Charlie Mitchell is a Mississippi journalist. Write to him at cmitchell43@yahoo. com.)
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