Trade is for losers!

In this post in May of last year, I attempted to be funny when I wrote, "When I read or hear TPP, my mind thinks about TP and pee."  Now, I can update the "pee" with "golden showers."  If not for the demagogue getting elected, I might never have known anything about "golden showers" and I would have been much better off!

My concerns about the TPP were not because I was against trade.  Not at all.  I was primarily unhappy about the lack of transparency in the negotiations.

My suspicious mind is always inclined to worry about any agreement or bill when the material is classified.  What are they trying to hide from you and me?  How much of a secret is the text?

It is one thing for a private enterprise to be secretive.  It is entirely understandable when national security matters are not fully disclosed.  But, a trade negotiation between governments?

Well, I don't have to ask for transparency anymore:

President Trump upended America’s traditional, bipartisan trade policy on Monday as he formally abandoned the ambitious, 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership brokered by his predecessor and declared an end to the era of multinational trade agreements that defined global economics for decades.

It is more than merely about the TPP itself about which this demagogue is making a statement:

With the stroke of a pen on his first full weekday in office, Mr. Trump signaled that he plans to follow through on promises to take a more aggressive stance against foreign competitors as part of his “America First” approach. In doing so, he demonstrated that he would not follow old rules, effectively discarding longstanding Republican orthodoxy that expanding global trade was good for the world and America — and that the United States should help write the rules of international commerce.

I suppose not only the demagogue's minions but even the Berniacs will be dancing on the streets over the abandonment of expanding global trade.  I don't easily forget that when it came to trade, both the demagogue and Sanders were engaging in similar rhetoric.  In addition to those, add the loyal GOP voters who made fun of Sanders but are now delighted with the trickle that runs down from the demagogue's golden showers!

If I--a typically left of the center guy--find it shocking and depressing that the demagogue and the GOP-controlled Congress has engaged in such an economic blitzkrieg, I don't even have to imagine how ticked off the long-time reader/commenter (well, the only commenter in this post-election era) is.

Even more, ahem, "pissed" are the hardcore right-wing libertarians:

Trump declared that this was a "great thing for the American worker." He didn't mention that American consumers – aka "importers" – on the other hand would be "raped" (to use his own description for the ill-fated treaty).
Particularly hard hit will be low income households – you know those poor white working-class schlubs that this election was all about – who purchase foreign shoes and apparel at WalMart given that the agreement would have phased out U.S. tariffs most steeply on such items. But it will also affect manufacturers looking for cheap raw material, subverting Trump's core goal of rebuilding American manufacturing, while also limiting their ability to sell abroad given that the deal would have immediately eliminated all tariffs on US non-agricultural goods, and almost all agricultural goods.

Oh yeah, the Midwest farmers are unhappy with Trump's position on trade.  I tweeted with nothing but sarcasm about that one!

Back to the libertarians:

In short, he wants to build not just a physical wall around America but also a tariff wall, basically ending America's decades-long championship of global free trade -- not to mention mark a stunning turn for the Grand Old Party to the Grand Old Protectionist party.
That is a total shame

"Shame" is a gross understatement.  Let us see if the GOP voters laugh anymore at this video that makes fun of Bernie Sanders's economic nationalism!

You will always have the poor among you?

Remember those guilt-tripping commercials in which Sally Struthers hugged poor kids and asked us to open up our hearts and our wallets?  Which then provided enough materials for comedians, like in this one?  The world is keen on putting all of them out of business, it seems!  Consider this:

The number of extremely poor people (defined as those earning less than $1 or $1.25 a day, depending on who’s counting) rose inexorably until the middle of the 20th century, then roughly stabilized for a few decades. Since the 1990s, the number of poor has plummeted.
In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5; this toll has since dropped by more than half.
More kids than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the 1980s, only half of girls in developing countries completed elementary school; now, 80 percent do.

Global poverty is in decline.  A huge decline.  How huge, you ask?

On Sunday, the World Bank announced that this year, for the first time on record, the percentage of the earth’s population that is living in extreme poverty is likely to fall below ten per cent. As recently as 1990, the proportion was more than a third. 

You want details, right?

In 1990, 60.8 per cent of the population in the East Asia and Pacific region, which includes China, lived below the extreme poverty line. By 2012, that figure had fallen to 7.2 per cent, and this year it will be 4.1 per cent, according to the bank’s projections. For the South Asia region, which includes India, the trend is similar, if a bit less dramatic. In 1990, 50.6 per cent of the population lived in extreme poverty; by 2012 the figure had fallen to 18.8 per cent, and this year it will be 13.5 per cent.

You perhaps noticed that it was the data for "extreme poverty" and you think that there is now a huge increase in moderate poverty.  It is not an increase, but, yes, there is moderate poverty,:

In the poorest forty per cent of countries, according to the bank’s own figures, about half the population is still in “moderate poverty,” which it defines as existing on less than four dollars a day of income.

Poverty reduction is a huge story that should be in the front pages of every newspaper, and should be the lead story of every television news program.  But, of course, who cares about the good news when it is bad news and sex that sell!

While we celebrate it, the new global economy raises new problems:

in many developed countries the poor and near-poor are actually falling further behind. One way to see this is to look at how households in the bottom forty per cent of the income distribution are doing. When the bank’s researchers did this, they found that in seventeen of thirty-six advanced countries, per-capita income in such households has fallen since 1990.
That figure doesn’t easily jibe with the upbeat story of mutually reinforcing prosperity that trade economists used to tell. It reflects the reality of a world transformed, with globalization creating winners and losers in a manner that defies easy description. Globalization reduces some inequities, such as the scourge of extreme poverty, while accentuating others, and everywhere it causes political tensions.

The problem in dealing with all those trends is this: it takes responsible political leaders to understand such trends and then to exercise leadership in order to create a new social contract that will reflect the changing fortunes.  It will take an informed and interested electorate to think about such trends and to elect responsible and thoughtful leaders. The Economist notes about a golden era of policymaking, though it was in a completely different context of foreign policy:

What did it take to make the country act in such enlightened self-interest? According to “The Wise Men”, a history by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas published in 1986, the magic ingredients included a rarefied East Coast foreign-policy elite who could easily glide between Wall Street and high office; responsible media; a thoughtful Congress capable of bipartisanship; a public that could be united against a common ideological enemy with which America had few economic links; and a president, Harry Truman, who was a war hero.

"enlightened self-interest" seems so impossible now!

Toilet Paper and Pee, aka, the TPP

Sometimes--ok, more often than not--I wonder why I think I am qualified to write about whatever it is that I write about.  Egomania? Egotism?

But then I tell myself that I write about very, very, very few topics at all.  I have never, for instance, blogged about art history, or Mendelssohn, or rocketry.  I know enough to know that I don't know a damn thing about most things.  I stick to what I know and what I can understand at least a little bit.  What a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of knowledge this is--so tiny it would not even blip in the knowledge screen.

Klout even tells me what its algorithms think about my expertise!

Well, enough about you; let's talk about me! ;)

Back when NAFTA was being debated, I remember being conflicted about it.  There are very few things in life that I am certain about, and two decades ago I was a cautious and doubtful supporter of the trade deal.  But then I am almost always suspicious of anything the suits put forward!

Now, it is the TPP, which doesn't have a neat aural effect as NAFTA.  TPP doesn't easily roll off the tongue.  When I read or hear TPP, my mind thinks about TP and pee.  Maybe it is my problem.  Well, enough about you; let's talk about me! ;)

Anyway, about the TPP, John Cassidy at the New Yorker, writes:

Many moderate Democratic senators have been put off by the secrecy surrounding the putative agreement, which has been in negotiations since 2010 and whose provisional text is classified

My suspicious mind is always inclined to worry about any agreement or bill when the material is classified.  What are they trying to hide from you and me?  How much of a secret is the text?

When Senator Barbara Boxer went to inspect it in a secure room at the Capitol, a guard told her she couldn’t take notes.

Pause for a moment and think about it.  TPP is not any national security document from which we can find out how much the government has been spying on you and me.  It is a freaking trade deal. What are they trying to hide from you and me?

A number of legal experts, however, including Yale’s Judith Resnik and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, have raised similar concerns to the ones Warren expressed, warning that the T.P.P. could allow corporations and investors to challenge the laws and policies of member countries, including the United States, outside the scope of their existing legal system. In a recent letter to congressional leaders, the experts referred to a known provision of the T.P.P., which would see disputes resolved not by the courts but by a new conflict-resolution panel, the prospective makeup of which is far from clear. This panel “risks undermining democratic norms because laws and regulations enacted by democratically elected officials are put at risk in a process insulated from democratic input,” they warned.

But then an idiot like me wants an example of these concerns.  Which is what Joseph Stiglitz does in his commentary:

The real intent of these provisions is to impede health, environmental, safety, and, yes, even financial regulations meant to protect America’s own economy and citizens. Companies can sue governments for full compensation for any reduction in their future expected profits resulting from regulatory changes.
This is not just a theoretical possibility. Philip Morris is suing Uruguay and Australia for requiring warning labels on cigarettes. Admittedly, both countries went a little further than the US, mandating the inclusion of graphic images showing the consequences of cigarette smoking.
The labeling is working. It is discouraging smoking. So now Philip Morris is demanding to be compensated for lost profits.

Pause for a moment and think about it.  We know really well that cigarettes are not dietary supplements and that they kill.  So, we have laws restricting it even while allowing the sale to be legal.  The manufacturer then turns around and sues for the compensation that it "loses"?  This surely merits a WTF!

Stiglitz writes:

The proceedings are so expensive that Uruguay has had to turn to Michael Bloomberg and other wealthy Americans committed to health to defend itself against Philip Morris. And, though corporations can bring suit, others cannot. If there is a violation of other commitments – on labor and environmental standards, for example – citizens, unions, and civil-society groups have no recourse.
If there ever was a one-sided dispute-resolution mechanism that violates basic principles, this is it. That is why I joined leading US legal experts, including from Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley, in writing a letter to President Barack Obama explaining how damaging to our system of justice these agreements are.

This egomaniac has nothing else to say, other than quoting Elizabeth Warren and Rose DeLauro:

Congress should refuse to vote for any expedited procedures to approve the TPP before the trade agreement is made public. And Congress certainly shouldn’t vote for expedited procedures to enact trade deals that don’t yet even exist.

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