Law Is Not on the US Side in GMO Corn Fight With Mexico

The United States ups the ante in its legal clash with Mexico over genetically modified (GMO) corn. Last month, a trade panel released the US’s latest legal filing. It essentially doubts the science Mexico offers and claims Mexico violates obligations from the USMCA trade pact.

This regards Mexico’s Decree from April 2023 banning GMO corn for human consumption. The ban cites harms from genetic manipulation of corn seeds and cancer risks from herbicides like glyphosate, needed by GMO farms. A USMCA panel will hold hearings on American complaints in June.

The U.S. position is not as strong as it claims—far from it. Observers analyze why Mexico’s scientific justifications are on solid ground. As a law professor, I explain how the U.S. overstates its legal case, at times severely so, when it comes to the ban on GMOs in tortillas and masa (dough).

Put simply, the U.S. gets it wrong when it comes to trade rules on food safety, called sanitary and phytosanitary measures (SPS) and covered in USMCA Chapter 9. Weaknesses regard two aspects of food safety: protection levels and health risks. In a recent journal article, I offer detailed examinations of these and other obstacles.

American faults involve established international law. The USMCA is three years old and this case raises its first SPS controversy. Fortunately, there are long-settled understandings in international law specific to SPS and trade obligations. For decades, panels have interpretated the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) SPS Agreement. This will inform the USMCA panel.

SPS Agreement obligations are central to the USMCA. In the new trade pact, the U.S., Mexico and Canada expressly agreed to affirm “rights and obligations” from the SPS Agreement. Numerous tribunals have ruled on disputes about the SPS Agreement. They’ve examined food safety measures and impacts on trade in food and agriculture, similar to gripes concerning Mexico’s Decree.

Both sides refer to panel reports from SPS cases. Reports are like court opinions. The U.S. cites over 40 reports, including 16 from the highest level, the WTO’s Appellate Body. Mexico references nearly50 and 23 from the highest level. The U.S. problem : it excludes important legal aspects from these reports.

One omission regards what is called the “appropriate level of protection” (ALOP). The USMCA uses the WTO definition for ALOP: the “level of protection deemed appropriate” by the country establishing a measure to protect human life.

The U.S. gets it wrong in terms of what this level can be and who determines it, to then say Mexico inadequately defines it. Mexico is clear that for human consumption of GMO corn, its ALOP is “zero risk.”

The U.S. may not like this, but it is legal under trade rules. This is irrefutable. In 1998, the Appellate Body found “zero risk” is permitted for an ALOP. This comes from a controversy between Australia and Canada over salmon imports. In the corn dispute, the U.S. refers to the case but not to its sections approving “zero risk” levels.

This is forgetful lawyering. Trade law treatises describe “zero risk” as a settled option and interpreted as such by later trade panels. Like legal encyclopedias, treatises summarize how legal doctrine develops, based on new rulings. Attorneys and judges use them to identify how courts and panels interpret legal rules. For ALOP, American lawyers fail with the basics.

The US underplays who actually determines the ALOP. Mexico does, according to the USMCA. Trade rules are explicit that countries in situations like Mexico have wide discretion to determine the ALOP. This is “unambiguous.”

Prior cases are clear. In 2008, the Appellate Body said a country employing a food safety measure has the “prerogative” to determine the ALOP. This involved an American challenge to European Union (EU) controls of hormones in beef.

Second, the US exaggerates requirements in evaluating food safety, called “risk assessment.” Risk assessments are “evaluation[s] of the potential for adverse effects on human health.” This definition comes from the SPS Agreement and is incorporated by the USMCA. Mexico’s assessment is titled the “Scientific Record on Glyphosate and GM Crops” published in 2020 and available since then online from the National Council of Humanities, Sciences and Technologies (CONAHCYT).

The U.S. overstates what is legally needed, to then characterize Mexico’s assessment as “incoherent and inadequate.” WTO cases find that risk assessments must only establish a “potential” for adverse effects. The Appellate Body confirmed this standard in the US’s first challenge of EU controls for hormones in beef in 1998.

The standard has staying power. Ten years later, the tribunal re-affirmed this requirement in the U.S.’s second trade case against beef hormone regulations.

The standard is a fixture of SPS doctrine. Recent treatises explain that for risks in human food, trade rules are deferential to SPS measures since “protection of public health is at stake.”

In its legal filing, the U.S. demands far more than is legally necessary. It calls for excessive proof. This includes “estimates of hazard, exposure, or risk” and “levels that can cause” adverse effects when eating corn. It faults Mexico for not proving that imported GMO corn “presents unsafe levels of glyphosate residue.” These are a few examples that veer from what international trade law actually requires.

SPS cases on risk assessments further undercut American positions. In the first beef hormone controversy, the Appellate Body explained that food safety measures must have a “rational relationship with the risk assessment” and that risk assessments must “reasonably support” this food safety measure. This U.S. must have missed these trade rules, since it asks for significantly more from Mexico.

Emotionally, the U.S. presents criticisms of GMOs as fringe and unacceptable. The filing says that scientific evidence provided by Mexico only “distract[s] from prevailing scientific opinion.” This is demeaning.

Trade rules are more based on reason. They do not require SPS measures to reflect majority scientific opinion. Lawyers for the U.S. should know this. In the first fight over beef hormones, the report explained that assessments do not need to “embody” the “view of a majority” of the scientific community. Then with a second American try, the Appellate Body added that scientific support is acceptable as long as it is “considered to be legitimate science.”

Where does this take us? With legal lapses in several areas, the U.S. should try to resolve its gripes with Mexico versus pursuing fruitless disputes. The commercial reality is U.S. corn exports to Mexico have dramatically increased since the Decree.

Be careful what you ask for, when it comes to trade rulings. It is 2024 and trade lawyers for the U.S. eerily face the same legal questions from 1998 and 2008. Then they concerned American beef exports. U.S. lawyers should re-read those rulings. Trade law is clear on ALOP and risk assessments. American farmers don’t need another trade loss, they need better legal advice.

More Dangerous to Your Dog Than Kristi Noem? Private Equity

The last time my wife took one of our pets to the vet, there was a cute little dog running around the clinic as if he owned the place. She asked about him, and it turned out that somebody had brought him in for a medical problem but then wasn’t able to pay the vet’s bill; they simply left the dog behind.

The cost of veterinary medicine has been exploding since 2020, in large part because that was the year private equity firms began buying up vet clinics across the country. Once acquired, the clinics and pet hospitals are drained of assets by some of America’s most morbidly rich individuals. The simple result: higher prices for pet care.

Most people think private equity is essentially the same as venture capital, the business/investment model you see on TV shows like Shark Tank. Venture capitalists invest their own (or their company’s) money in startup companies so the recipient company can use that money to bring a new product to market, expand operations, and generally grow the business. The venture capital investors make their return by the company growing and thus increasing the value of its stock.

Private equity, however, is an entirely different animal, borne out of Reagan era deregulation, lowering of capital gains taxes, and lobbying — facilitated by five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalizing billionaires buying legislation from members of Congress — that even created an entirely new income tax loophole called “carried interest” just for private equity managers.

In the truest sense, private equity represents capitalism run amok; what I’ve referred to in several books as “the cancer stage of capitalism.” The business model is somewhat complex, so most Americans have no idea what private equity is or how it works. I’ve tried to make it simpler with a somewhat imperfect but hopefully clarifying analogy.

Imagine this:

— Your next-door neighbor lives in a house worth a half-million dollars.
— Over his objection (in this imagination he can’t refuse), you buy the house for its half-million-dollar value, and then legally force him to borrow an additional half-million dollars.
— You then force him to give you the half-million bucks, so your investment in his house is now entirely paid off, but he is the one who’ll have to pay back the new half-million dollar mortgage.
— You also force him to pay you a “fee” of 20% of the value of the house for the “work” you did buying his house and forcing him to load himself up with debt to give to you.
— And you force him to pay you an annual management fee of, say, $50,000 a year.
— On top of that, you tell him that since you now own the house, he has to start paying you rent of $30,000 a year. But, because his name is still also on the deed, he bears all the responsibility for the place; if somebody is injured, for example, he gets sued, not you.
— As a result of the financial burden he now has (responsibility for a loan, his recurring rent, and the annual fee payments to you), he stops all maintenance on the house, lets the grass grow to weeds, and the electric and water get shut off because he can’t afford to pay them.
— You then use his failure to maintain the house as a legal excuse to force him to declare the kind of bankruptcy (Chapter 11) where all his assets are sold off and the debt is erased.
— He sells the house for a half-million, screws the bank for the $500,000 mortgage (ruining his credit, but not yours), and gives the entire half-million from the sale of the house to you, since you’re technically the owner.
— You’ve now more than doubled your money (while financially ruining him) so Republicans in Congress give you your very own special tax bracket; you don’t have to pay anything close to the capital gains or other taxes that a normal business transaction would generate.

Sounds nuts, right?

Here’s an actual example, documented by Brendan Ballou in The New York Times:

“Consider the case of the Carlyle Group and the nursing home chain HCR ManorCare. In 2007, Carlyle — a private equity firm now with $373 billion in assets under management — bought HCR ManorCare for a little over $6 billion, most of which was borrowed money that ManorCare, not Carlyle, would have to pay back.

“As the new owner, Carlyle sold nearly all of ManorCare’s real estate and quickly recovered its initial investment. This meant, however, that ManorCare was forced to pay nearly half a billion dollars a year in rent to occupy buildings it once owned. Carlyle also extracted over $80 million in transaction and advisory fees from the company it had just bought, draining ManorCare of money.

“ManorCare soon instituted various cost-cutting programs and laid off hundreds of workers. Health code violations spiked. People suffered. The daughter of one resident told The Washington Post that “my mom would call us every day crying when she was in there” and that “it was dirty — like a run-down motel. Roaches and ants all over the place.”

“In 2018, ManorCare filed for bankruptcy, with over $7 billion in debt. But that was, in a sense, immaterial to Carlyle, which had already recovered the money it invested and made millions more in fees.”

The laws that allow this were created by the very people benefiting from it: they simply bought the legislation, using the legalization of bribery brought to us by five Republicans on the Supreme Court in 1978 and 2010.

The barons of private equity have spent nearly a billion dollars ( over $900 million) buying federal lawmakers since the end of the Reagan administration, when the so-called Reagan Revolution’s deregulation frenzy legalized the practices just described.

Private equity firms have run this same scam hundreds (perhaps thousands) of times in dozens of industries. I saw it up close and personal when Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital bought Clear Channel, the national radio station chain that Air America was leasing stations from in 54 major markets. I was broadcasting my program from a Clear Channel station in Portland, KPOJ, part of a five-station “pod” that included a rightwing talk station, a sports station, and two music stations.

When I first started broadcasting from the KPOJ studios, the pod of stations shared about, as I recall, thirty employees including a robust local news operation with, as I recall, about a dozen reporters and on-air talent. Bain bought Clear Channel and then forced the network to borrow enough money to pay back Bain their investment cost, then put the squeeze on the stations themselves to pay off that new debt.

Clear Channel eventually buckled under the debt load and reinvented itself as iHeartMedia, which then declared a $10 billion bankruptcy: Mitt Romney put millions into his money bin while shutting down Air America stations just in time for the presidential election he was running in.

The Portland pod KPOJ was part of was, by then, down to a handful of employees, the news operation was gutted, and most of the on-air talent had been replaced with national programming, much of it computerized via what’s called in the industry “voice tracking” (pre-recorded DJ’s announcing songs that are then played by a computer: no humans needed).

It’s not, of course, just radio stations. The private equity industry is, as you’re reading this, actively working to buy up and drain dry mobile home parks, healthcare in our prisons, hospital Emergency Rooms, and even apartment buildings. And, of course, those veterinary offices.

The consequences of this business model can be deadly. Private equity acquisitions of nursing homes led to an estimated 20,000 premature deaths (and made private equity managers billions) by bleeding them of resources, leading to deep cuts in patient care and facility upkeep.

Because they’ve been able to buy all the legislation they need to legalize their predatory practices — thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court and Reagan’s initial deregulation of the investment and banking industries — it’s all entirely legal.

In 1996, there were about 8,000 companies listed on the various public stock exchanges; today there are around 4,000. A big part of the reason why that number has shrunk so dramatically is that private equity firms have been buying publicly traded companies, loading them with debt, stripping them for parts, and then bankrupting them when there’s no blood left to squeeze out.

Brendan Ballou’s book Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America lays out in damning detail how this has come about. He notes that just the three largest US private equity groups now control so many companies they’d collectively be the third largest employer in America behind Walmart and Amazon.

Most of the businesses they own and have saddled with debt and fees probably won’t survive the plunder over the long term, he writes:

“Consider the following: J.Crew. Neiman Marcus. Toys “R” Us. Sears. 24 Hour Fitness. Aeropostale. American Apparel. Brookstone. Charlotte Russe. Claire’s. David’s Bridal. Deadspin. Fairway. Gymboree. Hertz. KB Toys. Linens ’n Things. Mervyn’s. Mattress Firm. Musicland. Nine West. Payless ShoeSource. RadioShack. Shopko. Sports Authority. Rockport. True Religion. Wickes Furniture.
“The list goes on. All these companies went bankrupt after private equity firms bought them. Some were restructured, often by firing workers or abandoning retirees’ pension obligations. Many simply no longer exist.”

Democrats in Congress are beginning to pay attention to these modern-day pirates, and several proposals are in the works to deal with them. The first, proposed in 2019 but yet to pass either the House or Senate, is the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, put forward by Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), along with Representatives Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).

In a press release, they noted that the Act is:

“[A] comprehensive bill to fundamentally reform the private equity industry and level the playing field by forcing private equity firms to take responsibility for the outcomes of companies they take over, empowering workers, and protecting investors.”

In Ballou’s book, he suggests that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Treasury Department, and Federal Reserve all have significant abilities to regulate private equity but have all failed to exercise those powers.

The Biden administration has taken some tentative steps (the first to do so in 40 years), but even a weak proposal to end the carried interest passthrough loophole that private equity owners use to cut their own taxes was diluted to the point where it vanished in the last budget Congress passed. The provision ending that tax loophole was, instead, replaced with a new and larger tax loophole for small and medium-sized businesses owned by private equity companies, giving them a whole new range of targets for acquisitions.

The last area being targeted by progressives in a few states and discussed at the federal level is to end the immunity private equity firms have from liability for actions the companies they’ve stripped take because of budget and staffing cuts.

When a group of nursing home patients tried to sue private equity managers for the death of their relatives caused by neglect in facilities that had been looted by those private equity firms, federal courts killed the lawsuits because technically the private equity firms didn’t “own and operate” the facilities. This obscenity also reflects post-Reagan changes in federal liability law put into place by on-the-take (mostly Republican) legislators.

Back in 1966 there was a hit song by Dr. West’s Medicine Show titled The Eggplant that Ate Chicago. The opening verse lays out exactly where America is today with private equity:

“You’d better watch out for the eggplant that ate Chicago,
“For he may eat your city soon.
“You’d better watch out for the eggplant that ate Chicago,
“If he gets hungry, the whole damn country’s doomed.”

Fully one-fifth of the entire American business landscape is now largely or entirely controlled by private equity, which is draining billions out of our economy every week to stash in the money bins of its morbidly rich owners. The CEO of Blackstone, the country’s largest at over $900 billion in assets, is Stephen Schwartzman, who took home $896.7 million in pay and dividends last year and $1.26 billion in 2022. Just one guy.

And, predictably, he's a GOP mega-donor and willing to repeat Trump lies (“We’ve got open borders with 8 million people coming over!”) while trash-talking President Biden.

Because of Citizens United, he’ll be able to help Republican candidates, including Trump, in ways that are almost as unlimited as the cash he drains from the companies he oversees. Generally, the industry loves Republicans (who take their millions and love them back) and hates Democrats (who want to regulate them to protect American companies and workers).

A recent analysis found that private equity acquisitions have led to over a million job losses in America during the past decade. More come day by day.

This has gone way beyond just making it more expensive to get your dog’s rabies shot, although private equity’s role in buying up and bleeding dry vet clinics is now one of the most in-our-faces examples of how private equity screws consumers to make its owners richer than a pharaoh.

Seventy percent of Americans are pet owners, so the echoes of private equity’s latest raids are now bouncing around the US media landscape with headlines like “ Vets fret as private equity snaps up clinics, pet care,” “Why Your Vet Bill Is So High,” and “Private Equity Vets Are Coming for Your Kitten.” One could argue that the industry has caused more puppy deaths than Kristi Noem.

Private equity has grown to become one of the major forces driving income and wealth inequality in America; they are actively making it harder for small and medium sized business to start, grow, and prosper; and they corrupt our tax code via legalized bribes to mostly-Republican members of Congress.

It’s beyond time their abuses are ended.

Gilad Erdan Does World a Favor by Making Plain Israel's Doomed-to-Fail Strategy

We owe an ironic debt of gratitude to Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan for advancing the cause of the State of Palestine at the United Nations. By delivering a speech to the UN General Assembly that was so unhinged, absurd, vulgar, insulting, undignified, and undiplomatic, Erdan helped to secure a lopsided vote of 143 to 9 in favor of Palestine’s UN membership (the rest abstained or did not vote). But more than that, Erdan helped to clarify Israel’s tactical approach—and why it is doomed to fail.

Let us briefly consider the content of Erdan’s speech. Erdan claimed, in short, that Palestine equals Hamas and Hamas equals Hitler’s Nazi Reich. Erdan told the UN delegates that their nations support a state of Palestine because “so many of you are Jew-hating.” He then shredded the UN Charter at the podium, claiming that the delegates were doing the same by voting for Palestine’s UN membership. All the while, on the very same day as his speech and UN vote, Israel was amassing its forces for yet more slaughter of innocent civilians in Rafah.

Erdan’s rant rose to the level of venomous hatred and absurdity. Palestine would enter the UN as a peace-loving state, a commitment stated firmly and eloquently by the Palestinian Ambassador to the UN, Riyad Mansour (here at 23:44). “We want peace,” Ambassador Mansour declared unequivocally. Moreover, the two-state solution will of course not happen in a diplomatic vacuum. According to the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, and reaffirmed by the Arab and Islamic countries in Riyadh last November, the Arab and Islamic countries have repeatedly pledged to support peace and the normalization of relations with Israel as part of the two-state solution.

Contrary to Erdan’s slander, the governments of UN General Assembly are of course not Jew-haters. Rather, they detest the Israeli government’s assault in Gaza, a carnage so vast that Israel is in the dock at the International Court of Justice on the charge of genocide. The same false charge has been made against student protestors who aren’t anti-Jewish but rather anti-Apartheid and anti-genocide.

The question then is what Erdan was actually doing making a speech that was so over-the-top that it could only serve to bolster, not reduce, the overwhelming worldwide vote for Palestine. Of course, he was doing what all politicians do in the social media age. He was grandstanding for his adoring 157K followers on X (formerly Twitter) and for supporters in Israel’s right-wing Likud Party.

Contrary to Erdan’s slander, the governments of UN General Assembly are of course not Jew-haters. Rather, they detest the Israeli government’s assault in Gaza, a carnage so vast that Israel is in the dock at the International Court of Justice on the charge of genocide.

At first, when listening to Erdan, I simply thought that the man was deranged, suffering from post-Holocaust trauma and seeing a Hitler lurking in every shadow. Yet such a view is naïve. Erdan is a highly experienced political figure, well-educated and well trained, and was in full control of a carefully prepared speech (which included a poster and shredder as props). My initial mistake was to think he was speaking to the rest of the UN ambassadors and to viewers of the proceedings such as myself.

The great difference of broadcast-era politics of yesteryear and the social-media era politics of today is that politicians no longer speak to the broad public. They now communicate almost entirely with their base and “near base.” Each person today receives a personalized flow of “news” that is jointly constructed by individual choices (which websites we visit), networks of digital “followers,” algorithms of platforms such as Facebook, X and TikTok, and hidden forcers that include the Intelligence agencies, government propagandists, corporations, and political operatives. As a result, politicians mobilize and motivate their base, and little beyond.

Erdan the politician, and his Likud party, have been fighting against Palestinians for far longer than Hamas has dominated the politics of Gaza, indeed for longer than Hamas has existed. Erdan grew up inside the party, from its youth wing onward, in a movement that has always stood stridently against a Palestinian state and the two-state solution. In fact, Likud has long treated Hamas as a political prop, a ploy to divide the Palestinians and thereby to fend off international calls for the two-state solution. As even the Israeli media report, Likud leaders worked with Arab nations over the years to keep Hamas funded, so that it would pose a continuing competition to the Palestinian authority.

On the one side, American voters, especially young American voters, are aghast at Israel’s brutality. On the other side, America’s geopolitical position is crumbling.

What, then, is Likud’s strategy as Israel increasingly isolates itself from the rest of the world? Here too, Erdan’s own political past ploys offer a clue. Erdan has been one of the Israel’s shrewdest and most successful politicians in building Likud’s alliance not only with the wealthy America’s Jewish community but with America’s Christian Evangelical community as well. The Christian Zionists ardently back Israel’s control over the Holy Land, albeit as a prelude to their Armageddon, not exactly Likud’s longer-term agenda.

Likud’s tactical belief is that the US will always be there, thick or thin, because the Israel Lobby (Jewish and Christian Evangelical alike) and the US military-industrial complex will always be there. Likud’s bet has always worked in the past and they believe it will work in the future. Yes, Israel’s violent extremism will cost Biden the support of America’s young voters, but if so, that will just mean Trump’s election in November, so even better for Likud.

Likud’s strategy relies entirely on the U.S. for Israel’s security, as the sole blocking force in a world community that is increasingly united and aghast at Israel’s massive war crimes, and in favor of imposing the two-state solution on an utterly recalcitrant Israel. Yet U.S. core interests—economic, financial, commercial, diplomatic, and military—are at odds with becoming isolated with Israel within the international system.

The Israel lobby will be hit by a pincer movement. On the one side, American voters, especially young American voters, are aghast at Israel’s brutality. On the other side, America’s geopolitical position is crumbling. Shortly, many European countries, including Spain, Ireland, and Norway, are expected to recognize Palestine and welcome its U.N. membership. Erdan may end up at the top of the heap of the Likud party, but Likud and its extremist and violent partners in the coalition are likely soon to hit the limits of their arrogance, violence, and cruelty.

Republican Voters Against Trump/Republican Accountability PAC

A super PAC and its project originally dedicated to opposing the reelection of former President Donald Trump.

The post Republican Voters Against Trump/Republican Accountability PAC appeared first on FactCheck.org.

FactChecking Biden on Inflation, Other Claims

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the U.S. annual rate of inflation was 1.4% -- far from the 9% inflation Biden falsely said in a May 8 interview that he inherited. Inflation rose quickly in Biden's first year, but it didn't hit 9% until 17 months into his presidency.

The post FactChecking Biden on Inflation, Other Claims appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Biden Mangles Statistic About Hispanic Students

According to the Department of Education, about 28% of U.S. students are Hispanic. According to Census Bureau data, about 15% of U.S. students speak Spanish at home. And about 21% of students come from homes where at least one person speaks Spanish. President Joe Biden routinely conflates these statistics.

The post Biden Mangles Statistic About Hispanic Students appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Candidíase – Conheça as causas, sintomas e tratamentos

Cirurgia Plástica não tem idade

Com que roupa eu vou? Dicas de qual roupa usar

Cuidados com a pele – Aprenda a fazer limpeza de pele caseira

Visão embaçada e distorcida nem sempre é miopia: fique atento aos sinais do ceratocone