GOP's false talking point: Jones Act blocks Gulf help
From former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to Arizona Sen. John McCain to junior members of the House of Representatives, conservative Republicans have accused President Barack Obama of failing to do all he can to help clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill because he hasn't waived a U.S. maritime law called the Jones Act.I've read some right-wing web sites supposed rebuttals - such as Right Wing News - and they offer exactly zero evidence to support heir claims. They seem unaware of the rules of evidence. Linking to one's own blog in which the same "opinions" were expressed are not evidence. Linking to other fringe right-wing sites that hate President Obama, is not evidence.
That statute, established in 1920, requires that all goods transported between U.S. ports be carried on U.S.-flagged, U.S.-built and U.S.-owned ships crewed by U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Critics say that's needlessly excluded foreign-flagged vessels that could have helped.
"It's a little shocking to me that a president that has such a multinational orientation as this president didn't immediately see the benefits of waiving the Jones Act and allowing all of these resources to come in," former House Majority Leader Richard Armey, R-Texas, said in remarks to Newsmax.com, a conservative website.
Armey and the other Republican critics are wrong. Maritime law experts, government officials and independent researchers say that the claim is false. The Jones Act isn't an impediment at all, they say, and it hasn't blocked anything.
"Totally not true," said Mark Ruge, counsel to the Maritime Cabotage Task Force, a coalition of U.S. shipbuilders, operators and labor unions. "It is simply an urban myth that the Jones Act is the problem."
In a news briefing last week, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said he'd received "no requests for Jones Act waivers" from foreign vessels or countries. "If the vessels are operating outside state waters, which is three miles and beyond, they don't require a waiver," he said.
On Tuesday the State Department announced that new offers of aid would be accepted from 12 foreign countries and international organizations, but spokesman P.J. Crowley noted that booms donated by Mexico, Norway and Brazil had been in use since May 11,and that 24 foreign vessels from nine foreign countries already have been helping with the cleanup.
FactCheck.org, a nonprofit website operated by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, analyzed claims that failure to waive the Jones Act is blocking foreign-flagged vessels from assisting in the Gulf. It concluded last week that "In reality, the Jones Act has yet to be an issue in the response efforts."
The Deepwater Horizon response team reported in a news release June 15 that 15 foreign-flagged ships were participating in the oil spill cleanup, FactCheck.org said. "None of them needed a waiver because the Jones Act does not apply," it said.
That hasn't stopped conservatives from making the act a talking point to criticize Obama. James Carafano, a foreign policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy-research center, suggested on Fox News that labor unions are pressuring the Obama administration not to waive the act.
"They hate it when the Jones Act gets waived, and they pound politicians when they do that," Carafano said. "So is this a question of we're giving in to unions and not doing everything we can or is there some kind of impediment we don't know about?"
Michael Sacco, the president of the 80,000-member Seafarers International Union, called claims of organized-labor interference in the cleanup efforts "ridiculous."
"It is offensive for anyone to suggest that American maritime labor would hinder cleanup operations in the Gulf, in any way, shape or form," Sacco said in a statement on the union's website. "Speaking with one voice, U.S maritime labor and management have said that we wouldn't try to stand in the way of using foreign-flag assistance if no qualified, viable American-flag tonnage was available."
Some Democrats and union officials say that Republicans are trying to use the Gulf spill to kill what conservatives consider a protectionist law that hurts businesses. McCain introduced a bill last week to repeal the Jones Act, noting the emergency in the Gulf. He also touted the economic benefits of doing away with the act.
"The best course of action is to permanently repeal the Jones Act in order to boost the economy, saving consumers hundreds of millions of dollars," McCain said. "I hope my colleagues will join me in this effort to repeal this unnecessary, antiquated legislation in order to spur job creation and promote free trade."
Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, said the attacks on the Jones Act smacked more of "pushing a political agenda than any genuine interest in helping Gulf coast communities with their cleanup. We are already at the mercy of foreign competitors when it comes to oil; we should not add shipping to that list," he said two weeks ago.
"We are...Beck State!" Introducing Beck U. (seriously)
Republicans Declare War on Working Class Americans
The plight of today's long-term unemployed -- 1.2 million of whom have already missed checks because of the Senate's inability to pass this legislation since the end of May -- is less compelling, Republicans argue, than the plight of future generations dealing with a massive public debt burden.
"It's a class warfare issue," said McDermott in an interview with HuffPost after the House vote. McDermott, chairman of the Ways and Means Income Security and Family Support Subcommittee, lamented the fact that congressional deficit hawks squawked little during two wars and when Congress authorized a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry.
"Wall Street is saying to them, 'These deficits, they're making problems, we need to get this deficit down,'" McDermott said. "So the very people who took the money and were stabilized because we created deficits are now turning around and biting the hand that feeds them, that is, the taxpayers. It's unconscionable."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told HuffPost last week that there is a debate within the caucus over whether, for the first time in history, to use tax hikes or spending cuts to offset the cost of federally-funded extended unemployment benefits, which have routinely been put in place as emergency spending to protect the economy during periods of recession. Republicans have offered several alternative bills to pay for unemployment benefits by cutting other programs.
McDermott said, essentially, that caving to such demands would be caving to an assault on the New Deal.
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"The Social Security Act of 1935 made these entitlements, Social Security and unemployment insurance and welfare," he said. "The Republicans have been after all three of those programs ever since 1935. They got welfare a few years ago, because that's poor people. They could jump on them. But unemployment and Social Security is middle-class people -- they haven't been able to get them, but it isn't because they're not willing to try."
It would start with offsetting the cost of benefits for the first time: "If you say that you can't feed people because you don't have the money right now, that is a real new precedent."
Offsetting benefits would be an unprecedented step, and so too would letting them lapse for good. According to the National Employment Law Project, since the 1950s Congress has not allowed extended jobless aid to expire when the national unemployment rate is above 7.2 percent. In 1973, extended benefits remained in place until unemployment sank to 5 percent. The current national rate is 9.7 percent, and it's not expected to go down in Friday's jobs report for the month of June.
