Every election year, the two parties choose the agendas and issues to highlight and ballyhoo. Often it feels as though we citizens have little power to turn the conversation to the issues we want addressed.

But that’s not as true as it seems. Conversations around the water cooler or over the picket fence reverberate through society, amplified by social media that can make all of us into little newscasters. Campaigns like the petition drive launched by the League of Conservation Voters to demand that Jim Lehrer bring up climate change during the presidential debates show additional ways that citizens can set the agenda.

With that said, here are five issues we at YES! believe should be at the center of this election, and one that should be off the table.

1. Rebuild the economy, starting with the middle class and poor, not Wall Street and CEOs.

Although the Great Recession is officially over, the middle class and poor are still struggling. One in four working families is spending more than half its income just to keep a roof over their heads. There are more than half a million Americans who are homeless on any given night, and one in three families headed by a single mother is going hungry at least part of the year.

To get the economy moving again, we need to start by putting more earning and spending power in the hands of the poor and middle class, starting with a higher minimum wage and progressive tax policies. Only then can businesses invest, knowing they will have customers.

We need small and medium-sized businesses that are rooted in their ...

Fake outrage is a little like pornography — hard to narrowly define, but you know it when you see it. It is the television pundit railing on the supposed "War on Christmas" or the radio host calling a woman a "slut" for the alleged crime of discussing contraception. It is the Democratic partisan pretending to be offended by John McCain's expensive shoes, or the Republican partisan taking umbrage at President Obama for daring to repeat the truism that "if you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help." And when it comes to the 2012 Olympics, it is the typical congressional leader criticizing American athletes' uniforms for being made in China.

This has been the big story in the lead-up to the games, as top lawmakers from both parties are pretending to be upset that Team USA's clothing was manufactured far away from home. The operative word, though, is "pretending."

A look at the record shows that many of these lawmakers supported (and continue to support) the tariff-free trade policies that eviscerated the domestic textile industry — aka the industry that should be making the uniforms. And yet, these same lawmakers preen before the cameras, clad in suits made in factories their votes helped offshore. Gold medalists in fake outrage, they breast beat about jobs and American pride, correctly betting that few reporters will highlight their phony indignation's inherent deceit.

Of course, while Washington's purported outrage over the uniforms is entirely fake, the underlying questions about offshoring and domestically sourced products are very real — and very troubling.

Since the mid-1990s, when multinational corporations began convincing both parties to vaporize the trade and tariff policies that built this nation's economy, the United States has lost almost 1,300 textile mills, according to the ...

In a surprise move this week, the United States says it is pushing for limitations to international copyright norms currently under negotiation surrounding the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the massive free trade agreement that could go into effect by the end of the year.

Observers have expressed cautious optimism at the move, but much will still come down to the exact wording of any eventual agreement. For this reason, some are suggesting that long-criticised secrecy surrounding the talks could lead to a weakening of any progressive new stance on copyright.

“We are concerned that, depending on the actual text and its scope and interpretation, the provision in the TPP will restrict fair use and other copyright exceptions and limitations crucial for the progress and access of culture, science, education, and innovation,” five U.S. groups focused on intellectual property rights warned in a release on Tuesday.

Related IPS Articles

• Next Round of Pacific Trade Pact Talks to Be Lengthy, Secretive
• Trans-Pacific Trade Pact Reveals U.S.’s Unbridled Corporate Agenda

In a blog post on its website on Tuesday, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) announced, “For the first time in any U.S. trade agreement, the United States in proposing a new provision … that will obligate Parties to seek to achieve an appropriate balance in their copyright systems in providing copyright exemptions and limitations.”

Such limits, long urged by scholars and ...

On June 12, a leaked copy of the investment chapter for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was made public. This copy was analyzed by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and has been verified as authentic.  This agreement has been negotiated IN SECRET for 2-1/2 years and no information has ever been released until this leak. So why have the details of this negotiation been so secret? This agreement has been framed as a “free trade” agreement and yet out of 26 chapters only two have anything to do with trade. The other 24 chapters grant new corporate privileges and rights, while limiting governments and protective regulations.

If implemented, this agreement will hard code corporate dominance over sovereign governments into international law that will supercede any federal, state, or local laws of any member country. This TPP agreement  alone should set alarm bells ringing, but if one steps back and looks at the larger picture, the future ramifications look even more ominous. After completing this reading, see what your conclusions are.

This video is a must see for anyone who wishes to more fully understand the implications of this secretly negotiated agreement. This article will also show how if this agreement is considered in the context of other recently passed legislation and developments, and the “dots are connected”, the results would be total corporate global governance with an accompanying police state. In this new system the role of elected  governments would be to serve as subservient agents for the transnational corporations, while the armies, police, and courts would serve the interests of these transnational corporations. The  status of the member states would be locked-in,  similar to ...

With recent revelations about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, it is now safe to say that President Obama has surpassed George W. Bush as a champion of the flawed and offensive ideology of corporate globalization.

This argument requires some explanation. Here’s the backstory: As the Bush administration commenced in the early 2000s, many argued that his foreign policy represented a continuation of the Clinton-era approach to promoting “free trade” neoliberalism overseas. However, I contended that, especially after the launch of the Iraq war in 2003, the unilateralist bullying of the neocons represented a split from past practice.

No doubt, big arms and big oil had their needs met by the Bush agenda. But his administration was wary of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, which were central instruments of U.S. policy under Clinton. The Bush approach relied on our-way-or-the-highway, coalition-of-the-willing hard power. This made a significant portion of corporate America uncomfortable, especially businesses trying to navigate and expand in foreign markets. It also left the soft-power agenda of “free trade” in an uncertain state.

This was essentially the thesis of my 2008 book, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy. Around the time the book came out, I wrote:

In October 2007...the Wall Street Journal reported that the [Republican] party could be facing a brand crisis as “[s]ome business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don’t share.”

 

When it comes to corporate responses to [Bush’s] Global War on ...

The Doha Round, the latest phase of multilateral trade negotiations, failed in November 2011, after ten years of talks, despite official efforts by many countries, including the United Kingdom and Germany, and by nearly all eminent trade scholars today. While trade officials in the United States and the European Union blamed the G-22 developing countries’ excessive demands for the failure of earlier negotiations in Cancún in 2003, there is general agreement that this time it was the US whose unwarranted (and unyielding) demands killed the talks. So, now what?The failure to achieve multilateral trade liberalization by concluding the Doha Round means that the world lost the gains from trade that a successful treaty would have brought. But that is hardly the end of the matter: the failure of Doha will virtually halt multilateral trade liberalization for years to come.

Of course, multilateral trade negotiations are only one of three legs on which the World Trade Organization stands. But breaking that leg adversely affects the functioning of the other two: the WTO’s rule-making authority and its dispute-settlement mechanism. The costs here may also be large.

Until now, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) among small groups of countries co-existed with multilateral, non-discriminatory trade-liberalization rounds. As a result, the rules that govern trade, such as anti-dumping duties and countervailing duties to offset illegal subsidies, were in the domain of both the WTO and the PTAs. But, when there was a conflict, WTO rules prevailed, because they conferred enforceable rights that extended to all WTO members, whereas PTA-defined rights extended only to the PTA’s few members.

Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or