Author Archives: NorbertoXPF

Why Trump’s Antitrust Pick Is Great News for Pesticide Companies

by NorbertoXPF Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Trump administration appears ready to bless a pair of megamergers that will dramatically reshape the markets for seeds and pesticides. First, before he even took office, the president met with the CEOs of German chemical giant Bayer and US seed titan Monsanto, and boasted of the flimsy jobs plan they promised if their proposed merger goes through. Trump has also had chummy relations with chemical giant Dow, in the middle of its pending merger with erstwhile rival DuPont. This week, Trump announced his choice to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust division: a lawyer/lobbyist who, for nearly three decades, has been shuffling through the revolving door between large corporations and the government agencies that shape and execute merger policy.

Makan Delrahim now serves as deputy counsel to Trump, helping shepherd the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch through the Senate. He moved to the White House from his perch as a partner at lobbying powerhouse Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. There, his recent clients include pharma giant Pfizer, the tobacco and real estate conglomerate Vector group, and casino player Caesars Entertainment. As International Business Times‘ David Sirota reported last week, Delrahim also recently lobbied on behalf of heath insurer Anthem as the company beseeched the Justice Department to approve its now-stalled proposal to merge with erstwhile rival Cigna. (If he’s confirmed, Delrahim will lead the very office he lobbied on retainer for Anthem—though he’ll likely have to recuse himself from any decision involving Anthem.)

Before his stint as a lobbyist, Delrahim served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division under President George W. Bush in the early 2000s, and of Bush’s Antitrust Modernization Commission until 2007.

Delrahim is by all accounts a devoted conservative who jumped on the Trump train relatively early. In a March 2016 New York Post, he noted that Trump was not his first choice for president, but urged voters to “coalesce” around Trump as he began to dominate the Republican primaries. “I’m willing to take my chances with The Donald,” he declared, citing the death of right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the need for a like-minded replacement.

Like Scalia, Delrahim is widely viewed as friendly to mergers. In a memorandum to clients, the corporate law firm Davis Polk characterized him as “in line with previous Republican-appointed” DOJ antitrust enforcers, hewing to a “pragmatic, economically based approach to antitrust enforcement,” wary of “over-zealous enforcers and courts,” and attuned to the “need to promote and preserve efficiency-maximizing collaborations” among corporations. Such views mark a “significant shift from the view expressed” by President Barack Obama’s antitrust enforcers, who, the law firm noted, expressed skepticism about “proclaimed benefits and efficiencies” of mergers.

Over the next several months, the Trump DOJ will have to vet a slew of proposed corporate megamergers, including two that involve the agribusiness space: the planned marriage of two US chemical behemoths, and the German chemical giant Bayer’s takeover of US seed titan Monsanto.

The ag deals Delrahim will be charged with vetting—Dow-DuPont and Bayer-Monsanto—have been shrouded in regulatory uncertainty since they were first announced, because they would lead to an extraordinary concentration in seeds, genetically modified traits, and pesticides. If the deals go through, three companies—Dow-DuPont, Bayer-Monsanto, plus Syngenta (itself recently taken over by a Chinese chemical conglomerate)—would sell about 59 percent of the entire globe’s seeds and 64 percent of its pesticides. Here in the United States, the consolidation would be even more severe. Bayer-Monsanto alone would own nearly 60 percent of the US cottonseed market; between them, Bayer-Monsanto and Dow-DuPont would sell 75 percent of the corn seeds planted by US farmers and 64 percent of soybean seeds.

As I noted here, these companies are all hotly marketing “precision agriculture” services, where they crunch data picked up from farmers’ field equipment and provide them with advice on what seed varieties to plant and pesticides to apply. Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant laid out the strategy in a conference call with investors a few months before the Bayer deal. Monsanto, he said, is pursuing an “integrated solution strategy” that creates a one-stop shop for “seeds, traits, chemistry, and data science tools to farmers around the world.” Dow, DuPont, and Syngenta have all rolled out their own, similarly closed-loop precision-ag arms. These arrangements give the tiny field of players even incentive to create, say, crop varieties that work only with one of their own proprietary pesticides.

One possibility is that the Department of Justice could approve the deals, on condition that the companies sell off overlapping business segments. The European Union recently signed off on the Dow-DuPont merger, after the companies agreed to what Bloomberg called “hefty concessions, including the sale of large parts of DuPont’s global pesticide business.” But such divestitures don’t automatically reduce consolidation. German chemical titan BASF, itself a large player in pesticides, has “expressed interest in snapping up some of the companies’ divested assets,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, if Bayer and Monsanto are forced to sell off some business lines to push their deal through, both BASF and Syngenta are ready to pounce on those juicy morsels, Bloomberg reports.

Also, such sell-offs don’t address the fact if the deals go through, what had been four R&D programs will be reduced to two, giving “short shrift to innovation competition,” says Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute. Moss argues that such hyperconsolidation limits farmers’ choices in the seed and chemical markets, driving up prices. Eventually, higher costs for these vital farm inputs will be passed on to consumers.

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Why Trump’s Antitrust Pick Is Great News for Pesticide Companies

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Supreme Court Rules That Judges Can’t Hit You Up For Donations

by NorbertoXPF Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a ruling that might surprise those who’ve watched recent Supreme Court’s rulings on campaign finance issues, the high court ruled today that states can ban judges from directly soliciting campaign donations.

The case, Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar, was a First Amendment challenge to a Florida rule that barred judicial candidates from personally asking donors for money. Lanelle Williams-Yulee unsuccessfully ran to become a county judge in 2009. During her campaign, she signed a letter asking for campaign contributions. The Florida Supreme Court later found that she had violated state rules on judicial campaigns. Williams-Yulee challenged that decision but lost.

Among the 39 states hold judicial elections, 30 have bans on judges personally asking for campaign money. As Mother Jones reported last year, judicial elections have quietly become a major battleground in American politics over the last decade. State judicial candidates raised a combined $83 million in the 1990s, a total that was surpassed by roughly $30 million in the 2011-12 election cycle. More than $200 million has been donated to state supreme court candidates since 2000, and independent (and often unaccountable) spending on state judicial races has increased nearly sevenfold in that same time. Sue Bell Cobb, the retired chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, recently likened judicial elections to “legalized extortion.”

Justice At Stake, a nonpartisan watchdog group that often speaks out against big money in judicial elections, applauded the Supreme Court’s decision. “Today’s decision helps judges, by saving them from the compromising job of raising cash from people whose cases they will decide,” the group’s executive director, Bert Brandenberg said in a statement. ” It helps our court system, by shoring up its ability to be fair and impartial. And it helps the public, by reassuring them that they will not find themselves in court before a judge who has received a check directly from the opposing party in their case.”

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberal justices in the 5-4 decision. “Judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot,” he wrote. “And a State’s decision to elect its judiciary does not compel it to treat judicial candidates like campaigners for political office. A State may assure its people that judges will apply the law without fear or favor—and without having personally asked anyone for money.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the minority, called the court’s decision a “wildly disproportionate restriction upon speech.”

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Supreme Court Rules That Judges Can’t Hit You Up For Donations

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The Case for Making Fun of ISIS

by NorbertoXPF Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last weekend, Dakota Johnson starred in a Saturday Night Live skit in which she played a young woman being dropped off by her father for her first foray into independent living. She was not going off to college or a new job, but rather to a waiting truckload of ISIS fighters. “Dad, it’s just ISIS,” she explained, with the typical exasperation of an adolescent facing a parent’s lack of imagination.

The skit aired shortly before news broke that approximately 60 young British women joined ISIS in Syria, and it provoked heated responses. Viewers immediately criticized the bit over social media, prompting CNN to ask, “Did ‘SNL’ skit cross a line?” Fox News charged SNL with being “insensitive,” and Fox & Friends host Elisabeth Hasselbeck observed, “I don’t think there is anything funny about ISIS.”

Yet throughout the Middle East, ISIS is routinely ridiculed on television shows, within plays, and by cartoons. For many entertainers and satirists in the region, comedy is a way to fight ISIS’s often effective propaganda and to counter the murderous group’s narrative. “These people are not a true representation of Islam and so by mocking them, it is a way to show that we are against them,” Nabil Assaf, a producer of a satirical show now airing in Lebanon, told the Associated Press.

In Iraq, a state-funded television channel, Al Iraqiya, funneled an unprecedented $600,000 into producing Dawlat al-Khurafa, a satirical Iraqi show that features comical songs and skits acted out by a cast who satirize ISIS members living in a mythical Iraqi town. One recent song was about ISIS’s ban on adultery; it noted the ban is ignored when it comes to ISIS fighters and the women they enslave. Al Iraqiya also hosts an animated show called Dashawi, which chronicles the pratfalls and failures of a group of bumbling and hypocritical ISIS fighters who have set up base in Iraq. In the cartoon series, one young militant attempts to fire a rocket launcher and drops it on his commander’s foot, while ISIS’s go-to drunkard is tasked with enforcing an alcohol ban. The show is a mix of Looney Tunes and South Park. Al Iraqiya is the most successful and most accessible of domestic and foreign news networks in Iraq; it reaches 93 percent of Iraqis. Dawlat al-Khurafa’s theme song even went viral in Iraq, racking up more than 200,000 times on YouTube. Many viewers find the show funny, and share and comment on the videos online.

In Lebanon, the Ktir Salbe Show, a comedy series that airs on a local station north of Beirut, produces short skits that depict extremist Islamists not living by their own premodern rules as they talk on cellphones and ride in cabs. ISIS’s regional terrorism and hypocrisy are recurring themes on the Palestinian satirical TV show Watan ala Wata. A Jordanian play lampooning ISIS is touring theaters. In October, a group of Iraqi Kurds made their own SNL-style musical parody video of ISIS, in which a group of militants play air guitar with rifles and juggle with human skulls. Most of these videos are available on YouTube. One Palestinian ISIS parody video has almost 800,000 views.

A group of Iraqi Kurds pretend to be a band of ISIS members. KurdSat TV/The Middle East Media Research Institute

Satirical poetry and performances are a centuries-long tradition in the Middle Eastern countries. Cartoonists and satirists in the region were a major force during the Arab Spring uprisings of late 2010 through 2012. Bassem Youssef, dubbed “the Jon Stewart of Egypt” by viewers and the media, hosted a satirical news show that spent most of its time criticizing Egyptian political regimes prior to and during the Arab Spring. He canceled his show last summer, fearing retribution from the Egyptian government.

Middle Eastern television representatives insist that satire is an important weapon against ISIS, whose team of graphic designers, media spokespeople, and artists craft the sophisticated videos and messaging that lure in foreign recruits. As Ala’a Al Majedi, who works on Al Iraqiya’s satirical shows, said in an interview with the Middle Eastern news site Al Arabiya, “Comedy is one way to raise awareness” about the opposition to ISIS and other terrorist organizations.

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The Case for Making Fun of ISIS

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Republicans Will Never Allow Guantánamo To Be Closed

by NorbertoXPF Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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I guess you can add this to the list of President Obama’s executive actions designed to circumvent an unhelpful Republican Congress:

In a series of secret nighttime flights in the last two months, the Obama administration made more progress toward the president’s goal of emptying the military prison at Guantánamo Bay…Now 127 prisoners remain at Guantánamo, down from 680 in 2003, and the Pentagon is ready to release two more groups of prisoners in the next two weeks; officials will not provide a specific number.

President Obama’s goal in the last two years of his presidency is to deplete the Guantánamo prison to the point where it houses 60 to 80 people and keeping it open no longer makes economic sense.

Hmmm. Will Republicans be willing to close Guantánamo if it no longer makes economic sense to keep it open? Color me skeptical. This is a tough-on-terrorism issue, not a budget issue. If I had to guess, I’d say that Republicans would refuse to close Guantánamo if there were even a single prisoner left there. If it becomes a US version of Spandau, well, that’s just fine. Closing it is for appeasing, weak-kneed, liberals, not rock-jawed severe conservatives.

In fact, I could easily see this becoming a stock question during the Republican primaries. “Would you ever close Guantánamo?” The candidates will then take turns trying to top each other with ever more absurdly hawkish answers, the same way they did with immigration in 2012. Like this:

Candidate 1: I will never close Guantánamo. These are the most dangerous people in the world.

Candidate 2: Not only wouldn’t I close it, I’d expand it.

Candidate 3: Expand it and make it more secure. I’d build a moat.

Candidate 4: And an electrified fence.

Candidate 5: I’d take away their Obamacare!

At that, everyone would look admiringly at Candidate 5 and silently give him the victory.

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Republicans Will Never Allow Guantánamo To Be Closed

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