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| | May 15, 2015 | |
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| | Saturday Morning Post: The Weekly View from Washington President Obama's trade agenda survived its surprisingly rocky debut in the Senate this week. The upper chamber now is primed to approve handing Obama the extra clout he needs to finalize the massive Pacific Rim trade pact. But the big test still looms in a hostile House. We penciled out the House math here earlier this month, and it hasn't meaningfully budged. To understand why, consider Adam Smith, a ten-term Democrat representing a largely residential chunk of Seattle and some surrounding suburbs. On paper, Smith's support should be a slam-dunk. He's one of 63 House Democrats who voted on the last fast-track bill, back in 2002, and one of only two from that group who supported it. He hails from a trade-dependent state with a heavy concentration of corporate giants rallying for the deal (the headquarters of Amazon, Costco, Microsoft, and Starbucks, among others, surround his district). And in Congress, beyond that 2002 vote, he's distinguished himself as a pragmatist, including a stint in the leadership of the business-friendly New Democrat Coalition. Yet Smith remains uncommitted to granting Obama the authority he helped secure for George W. Bush. His skepticism in fact reflects a decade-long drift tracking the national party's growing wariness of trade accords. Republicans have ousted the staunchest pro-trade Democrats from Southern and border states, while redistricting has pushed survivors elsewhere into more liberal warrens. Smith started registering doubts in 2005, when he opposed the Central American Free Trade Agreement for what he called its insufficient labor protections. Pressure at home has only reinforced the position: His once-centrist district, redrawn in 2012, now leans heavily left. Smith last month sounded like somebody the White House shouldn't even bother trying to convince. "To our average person out there, [the Trans Pacific Partnership] is another example of how corporations are for the super rich and not average people," he told the Puget Sound Business Journal. "Does it make sense for CEOs to be making $40 to $50 million a year, when you have people working for you who don't have health care?" Say what you will about that logic. But if Obama's trade push unravels, part of the blame will lie with the administration's failure to extricate it from the surging populist animus in his own party.
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| | Top News | |
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| | • Clintons Have Made $30 Million Since January 2014 From the "Nice Work If You Can Get It" file, the Clintons have pulled in at least $30 million in little more than a year from speaking fees and book royalties. You'll recall that Bill Clinton recently insisted he'll keep giving paid speeches because he's "gotta pay the bills." Considering the presidency comes with free government housing, full benefits, and a $400,000 salary, it begs the question: What kind of cable package does Bill have out in Chappaqua? Reuters • Export-Import Bank: Dead Bank Walking? Lest anybody forget the Obama administration's trade agenda is in fact imperiled on two fronts, Export-Import bank chief Fred Hochberg is raising the alarm that his export credit agency could well fold up for good at the end of next month. Its charter is due to expire, and Tea Party-affiliated Congressional Republicans are targeting it as a corrupt bastion of crony capitalism. Hochberg argues that would amount to unilateral disarmament in a competition with other industrialized countries that happily support their own versions of the facility. The Hill • The Kremlin Is Pumping Money Into Washington Maybe finish your breakfast before you read this one. The Russian government and allied industries are investing heavily in building a Washington influence machine - stuffed with former U.S. Senators - to try to bend American policymaking in their favor. Bloomberg | |
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| | Around the Water Cooler | |
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| | • Jeb Wants to Replace Obamacare with Apple Watches That's likely oversimplifying it a bit. But it does seem to be what the still-not-quite-yet-declared Republican presidential hopeful suggested Thursday when he mused about a future in which smart watches chastise diabetics for eating butterscotch sundaes. For how, precisely, apps will render access to affordable healthcare coverage obsolete, maybe stay tuned for a white paper from his any-day-now official campaign. Fortune
• The SEC Doesn't Care that It's Enabling the Avon Stock Scam Scammers are using the SEC's disclosure database to game Avon's stock price, and the SEC's response essentially amounts to a deep shrug. In what was meant to be a defense of the agency's approach, a spokesman explained, "It is a repository for what is filed, not what is accurate." Fortune
• WWDDD? (What Would Don Draper Do?) With AMC's Mad Men wrapping up its eight-year run with a series finale on Sunday, long-time fans of the show will find themselves suddenly bereft of the world-weary wisdom from the suits at Sterling Cooper. So Fortune checked in with the lead writers on the show to see what kind of financial advice their long-suffering protagonist Don Draper would dispense. Take with a grain of salt. Or bourbon and a Lucky Strike. Or however you like. Fortune | |
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