Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label trade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trade. Show all posts

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Who's Foolin' Who?

Made in China: 85% of Walmart's goods
Made in China: 70% of Target's goods
Made in China: 100% of Dollar Tree's goods
Made In China: 50% of medications & vaccines
Made in China: 60-70% of Apple products
Made in China: 100% of Trump merchandise

45* says we don't need China and he's fixin' to "win" his trade war by borrowing more money from them - kinda like what he's done his whole worthless fucking life.


He thinks he can just go on borrowing and either threatening to default or defaulting in fact, and eventually he'll be "in control" of his debtors because they won't be able to afford to be mean to him.

But we're talking about the lives of 325,000,000 million Americans, plus however many millions more around the world who're going to be fucked over completely if we don't put a stop to this bullshit.



Saturday, July 27, 2019

Spotted Friendly Foot - Shot Same.

Right now, the only thing the Repubs think they have going for them (they're flacking the shit out of it anyway) is an economy that they portray as being the best ever and the reason you should all run out and vote for rich white people to get richer and even more purebred-white-bread.

So what does 45* do?

BBC News:

US President Donald Trump has accused French President Emmanuel Macron of "foolishness" over a digital services tax, and hinted that he would tax French wine in retaliation.

Mr Trump voiced his anger in a Tweet on Friday, in response to French plans to tax multinational firms like Google.

French authorities argue that the firms pay little or no corporate tax in countries where they are not based.

The Trump administration has said the tax unfairly targets US tech giants.

"France just put a digital tax on our great American technology companies. If anybody taxes them, it should be their home Country, the US," Mr Trump wrote on Twitter. 

"We will announce a substantial reciprocal action on Macron's foolishness shortly. I've always said American wine is better than French wine!"

Asked about the issue in the Oval Office later, Mr Trump, who is teetotal, said: "I've always liked American wines better than French wines. Even though I don't drink wine. I just like the way they look."

45*'s tariffs so far have cost us in the 100s of billions of dollars in trade, plus the nearly $30 billion he's throwing at American farmers to buy their continued support, plus the fact that the slowdown in international trade has created an additional drag on GDP growth, which was already slowing, and is set to come in at a rather anemic 2.1% for 2019 - on top of the fears that we tip into full blown recession by this time 2020.

All of which makes 45*'s "promise" of 3 or even 4% growth pretty much another great example of a guy trying to convince me the 1985 Yugo is a great car at a great price.


Because Trump always makes things worse for Trump (thanks, Bob Cesca).

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Overheard

A president who knows practically nothing about economics started a trade war - because they're "easy to win" - which made it nearly impossible for farmers to sell their goods, so he put them on welfare, paying them money our government has to borrow from the countries he started the war with.

Instead of profiting from the sale of American food to China, 45*'s trade policy has us paying interest to China while our farmers have become dependent on government handouts because they can't sell their crops to China.

And still, this makes enough sense to the rubes that they go right on supporting him.

hat tip = @Mikel_Jollett

Monday, December 03, 2018

Today's Tweet



Wonder how much he thinks they can get for beans and wheat that's mostly slime by now.


And how much suffering are the rubes willing to endure just so they can avoid having to admit they're getting played?

Thursday, August 03, 2017

You Don't Get One Without The Other

Zeeshan Aleem at Vox:

Democrats, not Donald Trump, are the real populists on trade in Washington. 

That’s the major takeaway from the Democrats’ bold new trade platform that they unveiled on Wednesday morning, the second rollout of their “Better Deal” messaging agenda in the runup to midterm elections in 2018. 

It's a collection of proposals aimed at protecting American workers from foreign competition — and it’s designed to edge out Trump's own messaging on how he's going to transform US trade to help bring back jobs to America.
The first 34 items on the 2016 Democratic Party Platform are all about helping everyday American Workin' Folk get a better chance to participate (to a slightly greater degree) in a system that actually fucking depends on their participation.

Don't gimme no shit about how the Dems fucked up by not addressing the problems of middle America.

If people missed it, then they weren't listening, cuz Hillary and Bernie and Tim all hit it plenty hard every time they stepped into the box last fall.

And maybe this had something to do with how we've been missing the point for 30 years:

The idea of evaluating foreign investment to ensure it doesn’t pose a threat to American jobs is bound to be incredibly controversial in Washington.

-snip-

That kind of scrutiny and interference with foreign investment would be unprecedented for the United States, says Edward Alden, a trade expert and senior fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations. “The US has had a very open stance on foreign investment — it’s only restricted if it’s considered a national security threat,” he told me. (*)
'Scuse me, Mr Alden - the health of our economy kinda depends on Americans having jobs that pay them enough to live on, so it seems pretty important to ask, "When did you decide a fucked up US Economy was somehow disconnected from a threat to US National Security?"

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

The Coming War(s)

Trade Wars that is. 

I've spent a lot of time and effort playing Snarky McFreak-Out since 11-8-16, and I'll continue in that vein for as long as I can (because it's pretty fun), but I have to get back to my semi-wonk self and start looking at the specifics behind what I think is obviously gonna be a whole series of clusterfucks as Trump Drains The Swamp Into His Cabinet So They Can Funnel Tax Dollars Into Their Pockets.

And we might as well start with trade.

Brookings Institution:
The aim of these policies, as stated by Trump, are to address harms to U.S. workers from trade and to improve trade deals he sees as not being in the U.S. interests. These are certainly worthwhile goals. The problem is that Trump’s current trade proposals will work against each other, threatening to cancel out any gains, and likely inflicting additional costs on the very people he has pledged to help. And, as the U.S. is approaching full employment, the key challenge is less about more jobs but rather about getting at the concentrated losses in particular communities.
And holy fuck, right outa the chute, there's something I missed because I wasn't really paying attention the way I shoulda done.
For instance, Trump has stated that he plans to renegotiate NAFTA —the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. Mexico and Canada are the U.S.’s largest export markets, together buying more U.S. goods and services than any other country. President Obama also proposed renegotiating NAFTA in 2008 and the TPP was his response. So from one perspective the TPP already achieves this goal.
But should Trump withdraw from the TPP and then seek to renegotiate NAFTA, any concessions on the part of Canada and Mexico will also require concessions by the U.S., i.e., lower tariffs and other trade barriers.
So I still (obviously) don't know all I need to know, but I gotta say Brookings is a decent thing to follow. They tackle some of the big stuff and explain it in a bite-sized-chunks kinda way. I think I'm learning.

Monday, September 12, 2016

A Razor Blade In The Apple

Buzzfeed:
The secretive private legal system written into many international trade treaties is the epitome of a “rigged game,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told BuzzFeed News. But it is not set in stone, she said. In an interview in her office on Capitol Hill, she outlined three steps that could get rid of it entirely.
This legal system, which empowers foreign businesses to sue entire countries for hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, was the subject of an 18-month investigation by BuzzFeed News published last week. Among the findings: Executives convicted of crimes have used the system to avoid punishment, and companies have used the mere threat of a lawsuit to gut a country’s laws.
Warren described a case, highlighted in the investigation, that she said “really jumped out in front and put the human face on what this obscure clause can actually do”: A court in El Salvador found that a factory had poisoned a village with lead, failing for years to take government-ordered steps to prevent the pollution. But by threatening to take the matter to this global super court, lawyers for the company helped it avoid a criminal conviction and the responsibility for cleaning up the community and providing needed medical care.
“The company that damaged so many people just gets to slip away,” Warren said of the case. “This is a reminder how the game is rigged.”
If there's something like "the other side" of this one, I haven't heard much of it yet. My main thing is that the ISDS thing wreaks of privatization and corporatocracy.  Too much power in too few hands.

Hillary has made some noise about swinging around in opposition to TPP, even tho' her buddy, Virginia Gov Terry McCauliffe says she'll swing right back once she's been sworn in - so we just don't know.

All the more reason to find out as much as possible about any given candidate's leanings on something like "Free" Trade.  Guess it's time to email Jane Dittmar on this one.

It might be nice if a Press Poodle or two got up on their hind legs and started asking real questions, specific to things like ISDS.

PS) Elizabeth Warren - please come to my house so I can hold you and pet you and call you George...

Friday, April 24, 2015

It Don't Come Easy

Hillary has some 'splainin' to do.

Alternet:
There are likely a number of factors for why Clinton went from a critic of these corporate-written trade agreements to a supporter while in the Obama administration to more or less neutral today. But one very important factor for voters to know about is the role her own personal wealth might have played in the matter.
Because spousal income is shared, cabinet officials are required to report not only their own personal financial data but also incoming income their spouse receives. While Clinton was Secretary of State, her husband continued his lucrative corporate speaking tour, receiving millions of dollars from both foreign and domestic corporations.
I'd like to hold out just a tiny glimmer of hope that this one thing would spark an open and honest discussion about what these trade deals are all about, but I think we all know by now that it's much more likely to be politics-as-usual, and we'll have to hack our way thru all the media/consultancy/advocacy bullshit first, which means we'll run outa time way before we get to learn anything of substance, which means 100 million Americans will vote for somebody whose position on this fairly important policy will be almost complete unknown.

And that's not to mention the shitty little feeling everybody has that there's a buncha stuff in TPP that has nothing to do with trade.

We might get a good look at how adept Hillary has become.  I'm not giving her a lotta props yet because she still sounds pretty clunky to me, but if she can manage a turn-around on this one and make something good for herself out of it, I'm willing to lay off a little.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

The More Things Change

I was all for NAFTA back in the day because I was all for Bill Clinton, because Clinton was my kinda Republican, and he was doin' it right for the right reasons, and blah bah blah.

I was a fuckin' idiot for it.



(hat tip = Democratic Underground)

Ya think Crime-nibus was bad?  Ya think Defense Authorization was bad?  Ya think any of it was good?  Hold on to your hats.

Now maybe I'm just being paranoid (I hope so, actually), but because we've heard for the last few years about how the number of American manufacturing jobs has been going up (aka: Happy Talk; aka: Smoke Up Yer Skirt; aka: Bullshit), plus the fact that we're gearing up for this Trans-Pacific Partnership thingie; I think there's room to speculate on some possible connections.

Obama can strong-arm Wall Street a little by telling them he'll stop defending them against the obvious fact popular sentiment that they're all crooks, ie: "you guys have to make a good show of it by putting up some jobs in key places and key sectors; then we can invite the inference that NAFTA wasn't all that bad, and we can link the not-so-bad canard to TPP; we can leave certain sections of the tax codes unenforced; and then once TPP is approved, you can hit the tax-goodies-buffet again by writing off all the costs of those USA jobs, and get another break when you outsource those jobs to Vietnam.  It's a pretty good deal, and all you need to do is funnel enough Campaign 'Donations' in to the right races so we can make it look close and interesting so the Press Poodles can keep talking about it in breathless tones of anticipation and drama, which makes for some very good Advertising Revenue, which makes for a nice kickback scheme for more nice fat campaign contributions; all of which we must perpetuate so we can go on pretending we live in a democracy".  And that ain't all - not by half.

BTW - the Bureau of Labor Statistics (beginning Feb 2015) will start parsing out Jobs-For-Asians numbers and Jobs-For-Latinos numbers in its monthly report.  I wonder if there's any potential for shenanigans in that(?)

I really do hope I'm wrong here, but I'll be adding a goodly amount of Olestra to my diet just so I'm greased up and ready for the reaming we're about to get.

Like the man said - Pessimism is the best default position because you're always either proved right or pleasantly surprised.

Monday, January 27, 2014

A New Way Of Doing The Same Old Thing

...which is to say, "Fuckin' us over".

From truthout:
Here's food for thought: Fast-tracking could become the model for a new and profoundly subversive model of governance – one in which elected government becomes little more than an afterthought to corporate-backed deal-making. It's not hard to imagine a dystopian future where this becomes the norm.
In the right hands it might make a good science-fiction novel: a world in which individual governments, treaty organizations and even the United Nations have been replaced by a new governing body comprised entirely of corporate representatives. Think of it as a World Financial Parliament or a Global House of Corporate Lords, where the only "voting" the rest of us do happens when we watch a movie, play a video game, or take a prescription medication.
And even when we do, we don't really have much of a choice at all.
Back in the 90s, I tho't NAFTA was a great idea.  I was wrong.  See how that works?  You take a look at the effects of a given policy after it's been in place for a while, and you learn a little something about how maybe we shouldn't have done what we did, and then you do that most horriblest thing that anybody could possibly do - ya change your mind.

ed note:  it grates on my soul to think I agree with Ross Perot, but hey - even a blind hog roots up an acorn now and again.

Free trade is great.  Free trade is a good way to break down some really stupid artificial barriers and get people to work together instead of blowin' shit up.  Unfortunately, if that free trade isn't fair trade, and it ends up slamming millions of rock-solid Americans so hard they practically drop out of the labor pool completely, then it's just a matter of time before people get hip to these tricks, and we're right back to blowin' shit up again anyway.

Things like TPP and KeystoneXL are great deals for (almost literally) a handful of people who don't feel the need to wash their hands before they pee.  But it's a really lousy deal for anybody who actually works for a living, and for whoever thinks we should figure these things out together instead of leaving it up to a few guys in $800 suits.

Call your Congress Critter.