Khalil Muhammad: To Stop Police Killings, Transform the Political Culture That Threatens Black Lives

Protests were held from coast to coast on Tuesday in a day of action against police violence and racial profiling. The protests came as the sheriff's reserve deputy, who fatally shot Eric Harris in Oklahoma, turned himself in to authorities. Robert Bates said he thought he was using his Taser instead of his gun when he killed Harris earlier this month. Bates is a wealthy insurance executive and heavy donor to the Tulsa Police Department, who gets to volunteer on the force as a reserve. Meanwhile, the South Carolina police officer charged with murder for fatally shooting Walter Scott will probably not face the death penalty if he is convicted. Prosecutors say Michael Slager would still be eligible for a sentence of life in prison. We are joined by Khalil Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, and director of the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

A Trade Rule That Makes It Illegal to Favor Local Business? Leak Shows TPP Would Do Just That

A newly leaked document belies those claims. The Trans-Pacific Partnership's text consists of a number of chapters, among the most important of which is the one on investments. On March 25, WikiLeaks released a confidential draft of that chapter dated January 20. The draft contains instructions indicating that it will be declassified only "Four years from entry into force … or, if no agreement enters into force, four years from the close of the negotiations."

A quick reading of the leaked chapter makes it clear why TPP sponsors have gone to great lengths to keep their negotiations secret. The document substantiates claims by opponents that the TPP is a corporate-rights agreement designed to facilitate the export of US jobs, allow corporations to sue governments for enacting labor and environmental protections, make it illegal for governments to favor local businesses, and advance the colonization of national economies by global corporations and financiers.

As problematic as this chapter is, we can be thankful that it is out in the open. Now the need is to understand what all the legalese means.

The leaked document includes many technical details decipherable only by trade lawyers. Here are the Cliffs Notes in simple English.

1. Favoring Local Ownership Is Prohibited

Let's start with the Investment Chapter's section on how the TPP's member countries should treat foreign investors:

Each Party [country] shall accord to investors of another Party treatment no less favorable than that it accords, in like circumstances, to its own investors with respect to the establishment, acquisition, expansion, management, conduct, operation, and sale or other disposition of investments in its territory.

Put in plain English, the above paragraph means that signatory countries renounce their right to favor the domestic ownership and control of the lands, waters, and other productive assets and services essential to the lives and well-being of their people.

The 12 countries further renounce their right to favor locally owned businesses, corporations, cooperatives, or public enterprises devoted to serving their people with good local jobs, products, and services. They must instead give equal or better treatment to global corporations that come only to extract profits.

2. Corporations Must Be Paid to Stop Polluting

Another provision limits what member countries can do in regard to corporate investments:

No Party may expropriate or nationalize a covered investment either directly or indirectly through measures equivalent to expropriation or nationalization ("expropriation"), except: (a) for a public purpose; (b) in a nondiscriminatory manner; (c) on payment of prompt, adequate, and effective compensation [emphasis added] … ; and (d) in accordance with due process of law.

This provision may sound reasonable, until you look at the chapter's definition of "investment," which includes "the expectation of gain or profit." This odd definition means that a corporation can sue a signatory nation if the country deprives the corporation of expected profits by enacting laws that prohibit the company from selling harmful products, damaging the environment, or exploiting workers. Other language in the chapter makes it clear that this applies to actions at all levels of government.

In other words, a country in the TPP has every right to stop a foreign corporation from harming its people and the environment - but only if the country compensates the corporation for the expense of not harming them.

Similar provisions are already on the books in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). According to Public Citizen's Trade Watch,

Foreign firms have won more than $360 million in taxpayer dollars thus far in investor-state cases brought under NAFTA. Of the 11 claims currently pending under NAFTA, demanding a total of more than $12.4 billion, all relate to environmental, energy, land use, financial, public health and transportation policies - not traditional trade issues.

3. Three Lawyers Will Decide Who's Right in Secret Tribunals

The leaked chapter also describes how disagreements will be settled:

Unless the disputing parties otherwise agree, the tribunal shall comprise three arbitrators, one arbitrator appointed by each of the disputing parties and the third, who shall be the presiding arbitrator, appointed by agreement of the disputing parties.

The arbitrators are private lawyers who are not accountable to any electorate. They are empowered by the TPP to order unlimited public compensation to aggrieved investors. The proceedings and the identities of the tribunal members are secret, and the resulting decisions are not subject to review by any national judicial system.

According to The New York Times, NAFTA tribunals, on which the ones in the TPP are modeled, even have the power to overturn judgments of national courts - including the US Supreme Court. John D. Echeverria, a law professor at Georgetown University, has called this method of dispute settlement "the biggest threat to United States judicial independence that no one has heard of and even fewer people understand."

4. Speculative Money Must Remain Free

Yet another provision prohibits restrictions on movement of money from one country to another:

Each Party shall permit all transfers relating to a covered investment to be made freely and without delay into and out of its territory. …

Forms an investment may take include: (a) an enterprise; (b) shares, stock, and other forms of equity participation in an enterprise; (c) bonds, debentures, other debt instruments, and loans; (d) futures, options, and other derivatives.

Thus, the TPP guarantees the right of speculators to destabilize national economies through the manipulation of exchange rates and financial markets, without interference from national governments.

In so doing, the TPP strips national governments of the right to limit speculation in favor of investment in strong, stable, and productive national economies.

5. Corporate Interests Come Before National Ones

Another passage assures that corporations need bear no obligation to serve the interest of the people who live in the countries where they do business:

No Party may ... impose or enforce any requirement or enforce any commitment or undertaking: (a) to export a given level or percentage of goods or services; (b) to achieve a given level or percentage of domestic content;  to purchase, use or accord a preference to goods produced in its territory, or to purchase goods from persons in its territory.

The article continues on with six additional provisions, which together prohibit governments from requiring that a foreign investor be under any obligation to serve the host country's people or national interest.

Obama administration officials say these provisions are needed to level the playing field for American companies doing business abroad. This raises an important question: What is an American company?

The Institute for Policy Studies reports that US corporations and their subsidiaries currently hold $2.1 trillion in profits offshore to avoid paying taxes to the government of the United States. These include highly profitable companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, General Electric, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron. One wonders on what basis we should consider these globe-spanning, tax-dodging, job-exporting corporations to be American.

Cops Arrest Healthy Man, Hours Later He’s in ICU in a Coma with Severe Injuries

Baltimore, MD — 27-year old Freddie Gray is now hospitalized in critical condition and in induced coma, after an incident with Baltimore police Sunday morning.

An eyewitness captured video footage of Gray being restrained and hauled into the back of a police van after being chased and arrested by bike cops. What happened after that is a mystery, as Freddie Gray is now unconscious in Shock Trauma with multiple injuries.

Gray’s godbrother did not want to be identified, but he did give a statement after he left the ICU, saying “I seen police, him handcuffed, him tased while he was handcuffed. I seen the police officer bending his leg to the point where it looked like he broke it. He was completely healthy, fine being carted off aside from his leg. It’s nowhere near how he’s sitting in the ICU right now.”

According to the family, Gray has spinal injuries and is barely alive. Richard Shipley, Gray’s stepfather, told local news affiliate WJZ, “His face is swollen. He just looks really horrible. Like I said, he’s in an induced coma. We’re all praying.”

Police will not say why the bike cops arrested the fleeing Gray, or how he ended up in the hospital in an induced coma. The arrest was described by witnesses as brutal, but Baltimore Police Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said he did not see any use of force by police in the video, adding that the investigation was at an early stage.

“A number of officers made an arrest of a man who fled from them,” Rodriguez stated. “This is a very serious incident, that we are looking at thoroughly. I have been on the phone with the State’s Attorney’s Office and we are going to work jointly on this investigation.”

The officers involved in the mystery incident have been assigned to administrative duties.