Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

[vt]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

Thanks for the clarification DC.

I definitely want to see clarification on this by allowing every Senator and Congressman to read it. Then hammer out a compromise.

I still believe in free trade, with compromises by business and labor.

What we don't want is protectionism and reduction of trade. I still remember Smoot hawley's impact.

Free and fair trade is important.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

Yeah - we're living in a free trade world after all. The TPP has very little to do with tariffs, though. It's less about free trade and more about give-aways to special interests. Tariffs are already very low - WTO/NAFTA levels. It's not taxation stopping trade with these countries. We already lowered or eliminated the tariff barriers. Most items are no longer subject to tariffs at all, and among those that are, the average tariff rate is now just about 1%. It's negligible. Estimated GDP gains from dropping from 1% to 0% are practically nothing. And you don't need 800 pages of BS to accomplish that either...

[jk]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

Thanks for the clarification DC.

I definitely want to see clarification on this by allowing every Senator and Congressman to read it. Then hammer out a compromise.

I still believe in free trade, with compromises by business and labor.

What we don't want is protectionism and reduction of trade. I still remember Smoot hawley's impact.

Free and fair trade is important.

hey vt. care to respond to the question/comment i posted above?

somebody please tell me that they believe that if tpp happens, the financial industry won't use the tactics warren describes. and explain why you believe that.

[LazyBoy]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

"with theatrical urgency" ?? That seems like an odd tone.


It occurs to me that a Fast-Track would mean that congress wouldn't have to be lobbied for every bit. Maybe that's congress' motive. Regardless. Assuming the TPP can stand the slow track, they now can and will be.

[jk]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

"with theatrical urgency" ?? That seems like an odd tone.

do you think now that jeff bezos owns the washington post his politics is leaking into the reportage? the wall street journal [the reporting, not the editorial page] sure changed when murdoch took over.

[lektrode]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

do you think now that jeff bezos owns the washington post his politics is leaking into the reportage? the wall street journal [the reporting, not the editorial page] sure changed when murdoch took over.

+1
ya think?
whoooo... THIS one is really starting to get juicy, brah...

[dcarrigg]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

do you think now that jeff bezos owns the washington post his politics is leaking into the reportage? the wall street journal [the reporting, not the editorial page] sure changed when murdoch took over.

I still have a copy of the last Wall Street Journal before the Murdoch era. I have a copy of the last Washington Post too. These papers will never break a big investigative story again.

The very first thing Bezos did was to fire Katherine Weymouth and install Frederick Ryan - Reagan's personal Chief of Staff starting in 89 and the personal assistant to the President in his second term - as the paper's publisher.

I don't much care if you're right or left - but hiring a President's former chief of staff to run the DC paper of record is partisan as hell and generally bad form if you ever expect it to break a big scoop. Imagine what Woodward and Bernstein would have faced if Sherman Adams was running the paper...anyways...

Then he forced out old reporters, bloggers, and columnists (bye bye Ezra Klein and Dylan Matthews), slashed pay and benefits, and hired 100 new 20-something reporters to take marching orders and replace the tried and true. And along the way he shut down local DC reporting bureaus (nobody's watching anymore), and opened up a London bureau instead.

And despite all that, they're getting a fancy new headquarters - guess where? - Right on K St, of course.

And it couldn't be complete without a new lower Manhattan office. Now the layout's happening right at the West Side HQ of a major component of a private equity firm. Lots of jobs available if you want to eat catfood and live on a couch in a crawlspace in Manhattan...

Meanwhile, the Post picked up the Volkoh Conspiracy - a right-libertarian blog that it now publishes. He also expanded the editorial board, and you can guess what the new employees' views had to be to get hired...

We're only a year in. But you can already feel the change. These things evolve over 3-5 years. By 2018, whatever shadows of the old WaPost that are left will be gone. A very different paper with a very different agenda will be in its place.

[vt]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

hey vt. care to respond to the question/comment i posted above?

somebody please tell me that they believe that if tpp happens, the financial industry won't use the tactics warren describes. and explain why you believe that.

Sure JK. Blame it on Harry Reid:

http://www.commdiginews.com/politics...c-party-15730/

When you're in the majority you can play all kinds of dominating games, but watch out if you find yourself in the minority. You reap what you sow.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

Thailand is not part of the TPP, but has suggested it might want to join a few years down the road. There are plenty of steep tariffs there. A bottle of Jacob's Creek wine is 6 dollars in the US, 20 in Thailand. The tariff on a Toyota Camry is 100%, (24,000 in the US vs. 48,000 in Thailand.) A 99$ Weber charcoal grill is 300 in Thailand.

I suspect the things that are cheap in Thailand - drugs, medical services, telecom, etc -would all become more expensive under TPP. I highly doubt the tariffs would be eliminated, but, it such a grand pig-in-a-poke, who knows? The only thing one can say for sure, is it ain't democracy.

[vt]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

The Democratic party would triangulate it's own mother:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...other-20150514

[dcarrigg]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

The Democratic party would triangulate it's own mother:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...other-20150514

I largely agree with Matt on this one.

"Centrist" is just another term for someone who would gladly mug a thousand middle class grandmothers just to buy the Manhattan jet set crew another Gulfstream.

[jk]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

The Democratic party would triangulate it's own mother:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...other-20150514

it's interesting how quiet hillary has been on this subject.

[jk]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

Senate, in Reversal, Begins Debate on Trade Authority

that didn't take long, did it?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Another "Giant Sucking Sound" ?

Senate, in Reversal, Begins Debate on Trade Authority


that didn't take long, did it?

This is a long messy road. Meanwhile, the Canucks are looking to gut the Volker rule out of Dodd-Frank on NAFTA authority. Looks like the bully boys on Bay St. can throw a punch now and again too, eh?

[Raz]

Buchanan: On a Fast Track to National Ruin



I hope he's right when he claims "that day is coming". I only wonder if we'll face total collapse before it does.

On a Fast Track to National Ruin

Buchanan.jpg

Friday - May 8, 2015

By Patrick J. Buchanan


In the first quarter of 2015, in the sixth year of the historic Obama recovery, the U.S. economy grew by two-tenths of 1 percent. And that probably sugarcoats it.

For trade deficits subtract from the growth of GDP, and the U.S. trade deficit that just came in was a monster.
As the AP’s Martin Crutsinger writes, “The U.S. trade deficit in March swelled to the highest level in more than six years, propelled by a flood of imports that may have sapped the U.S. economy of any growth in the first quarter.”

The March deficit was $51.2 billion, largest of any month since 2008. In goods alone, the trade deficit hit $64 billion.
As Crutsinger writes, a surge in imports to $239 billion in March, “reflected greater shipments of foreign-made industrial machinery, autos, mobile phones, clothing and furniture.”

What does this flood of imports of things we once made here mean for a city like, say, Baltimore?

Writes columnist Allan Brownfeld:

“Baltimore was once a city where tens of thousands of blue collar employees earned a good living in industries building cars, airplanes and making steel. … In 1970, about a third of the labor force in Baltimore was employed in manufacturing. By 2000, only 7 percent of city residents had manufacturing jobs.”

Put down blue-collar Baltimore alongside Motor City, Detroit, as another fatality of free-trade fanaticism.
For as imports substitute for U.S. production and kill U.S. jobs, trade deficits reduce a nation’s GDP. And since Bill Clinton took office, the U.S. trade deficits have totaled $11.2 trillion, an astronomical figure.

It translates not only into millions of manufacturing jobs lost and tens of thousands of factories closed, but also millions of manufacturing jobs that were never created, and tens of thousands of factories that did not open here, but did open in Mexico, China and other Asian countries.

In importing all those trillions in foreign-made goods, we exported the future of America’s young. Our political and corporate elites sold out working- and middle-class America — to enrich the monied class. And they sure succeeded.

Yet, remarkably, Republicans who wail over Obama’s budget deficits ignore the more ruinous trade deficits that leech away the industrial base upon which America’s self-reliance and military might have always depended.
Last month, the U.S. trade deficit with the People’s Republic of China reached $31.2 billion, the largest in history between two nations. Over 25 years, China has amassed $4 trillion in trade surpluses at our expense.

And where are the Republicans?

Talking tough about building new fleets of planes and ships and carriers to defend Asia from the rising threat of China, which those same Republicans did more than anyone else to create. Now this GOP Congress is preparing to vote for “fast track” and surrender its right to amend any Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that Obama brings home.

But consider that TPP. While the propaganda is all about a deal to cover 40 percent of world trade, what are we really talking about?

First, TPP will cover 37 percent of world trade. But 80 percent of that is trade between the U.S. and nations with which we already have trade deals. As for the last 20 percent, our new partners will be New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Japan.

Query: Who benefits more if we get access to Vietnam’s market, which is 1 percent of ours, while Hanoi gets access to a U.S. market that is 100 times the size of theirs?

The core of the TPP is the deal with Japan. But do decades of Japanese trade surpluses at our expense, achieved through the manipulation of Japan’s currency and hidden restrictions on U.S. imports, justify a Congressional surrender to Barack Obama of all rights to amend any Japan deal he produces?

Columnist Robert Samuelson writes that a TPP failure “could produce a historic watershed. … rejection could mean the end of an era. … So, when opponents criticize the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they need to answer a simple question: Compared to what?”

Valid points, and a fair question.

And yes, an era is ending, a post-Cold War era where the United States threw open her markets to nations all over the world, as they sheltered their own. The end of an era where America volunteered to defend nations and fight wars having nothing to do with her own vital interests or national security.

The bankruptcy of a U.S. trade and foreign policy, which has led to the transparent decline of the United States and the astonishing rise of China, is apparent now virtually everywhere.

And America is not immune to the rising tide of nationalism.

Though, like the alcoholic who does not realize his condition until he is lying face down in the gutter, it may be a while before we get out of the empire business and start looking out again, as our fathers did, for the American republic first.

But that day is coming.