Category Archives: Profiteering

Trump Laces Into Japan With a Trade Tirade From the ’80s – The New York Times Lost in the 80s Tonight – Deja vu! Lol

“Trump’s comments on Japan remind me of the period from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, when Japan was considered a serious rival to American economic pre-eminence,” said Glen S. Fukushima, a former United States trade official who is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group. “It’s interesting that despite the two-decade stagnation of the Japanese economy, Trump is now reviving the idea of Japan as an economic rival robbing America of jobs.”

Source: Trump Laces Into Japan With a Trade Tirade From the ’80s – The New York Times

a revolution is coming | nadiaharhash

We are talking about a population that is killed every day under occupation measures from one side and witness corruption that is drowning a whole nation in its hollow holes to a level where nothing is left except a scream in a voice of a protest. People are practically starving. What the government is doing in order to find a solution is of course denying that anything is happening. For the whole month now, the teachers have been on strikes. Tens of thousands of students are not going to school. And what is the prime minister saying? It is a conspiracy against him. What solution did any of those too many policy and decision making from all directions are offering? Imposing a state of fragmentation within the society. Implementing forceful measures/ putting checkpoints. Threatening teachers. Using mosques as ways of urging people to rebel against the teachers. The ministry of education has turned into an intelligence force against teachers, where teachers are called and threatened. Replacements of teachers were suggested. Some people came out to say that the president has nothing to do with this. Of course he doesn’t have anything to do with this. The president is in another universe. I think he believes he is running another state. I completely understand him I have to say. Who wants to be a president of a stateless state? The deterioration of the situation and what is following it is a striking indicator of the failure of this government. It is of course normal, since every person comes to power and transforms the whole concept of nation building into a single building of his own throne. They create a legacy of themselves, to themselves and they behave as if the people are there to serve them. We become their inherited properties. This continuous abuse of the nation can only have a consequence as such of today. The stories that we hear about the restrictions and the threats, aside from all those grounding embarrassing statements from those who claim power are to shameful from one side and continue to prove that these people can no longer be there. There is this issue that these people are not chosen by the people. We didn’t choose this government, which is officially temporarily and with a dignified framework as a technocratic government that will ensure the elections. It came to stay forever. Exactly like everything else. I don’t know if it is worth to keep calling for the president to interfere. To do something to save the situation before it goes into more destruction. I admit that the massive protests of today gave me a breeze of hope. This nation is alive. And no measures for oppression and restrictions (and sadly I don’t refer to occupation here) can stop them.

Source: a revolution is coming | nadiaharhash

FAO – News Article: Pollinators vital to our food supply under threat

A growing number of pollinator species worldwide are being driven toward extinction by diverse pressures, many of them human-made, threatening millions of livelihoods and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of food supplies, according to the first global assessment of pollinators. However, the assessment, a two-year study conducted and released today by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), also highlights a number of ways to effectively safeguard pollinator populations. The assessment, titled Thematic Assessment of Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production and the first ever issued by IPBES, is a groundbreaking effort to better understand and manage a critical element of the global ecosystem.  It is also the first assessment of its kind that is based on the available knowledge from science and indigenous and local knowledge systems.

Source: FAO – News Article: Pollinators vital to our food supply under threat

Donald Trump to Foreign Workers for Florida Club: You’re Hired – The New York Times

Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach describes itself as “one of the most highly regarded private clubs in the world,” and it is not just the very-well-to-do who want to get in. Since 2010, nearly 300 United States residents have applied or been referred for jobs as waiters, waitresses, cooks and housekeepers there. But according to federal records, only 17 have been hired. In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries. In his quest for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Trump has stoked his crowds by promising to bring back jobs that have been snatched by illegal immigrants or outsourced by corporations, and voters worried about immigration have been his strongest backers. But he has also pursued more than 500 visas for foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago since 2010, according to the United States Department of Labor, while hundreds of domestic applicants failed to get the same jobs.

Source: Donald Trump to Foreign Workers for Florida Club: You’re Hired – The New York Times

Alfred W. McCoy: How a Pink Flower Defeated the World’s Sole Superpower – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

Long and good on analysis – very, very short on plausible solutions.

Even in troubled Afghanistan, however, there are alternatives whose sum could potentially slice through this Gordian knot of a policy problem. As a first and fundamental step, maybe it’s time to stop talking about the next sets of boots on the ground and for President Obama to complete his planned troop withdrawal. Next, investing even a small portion of all that misspent military funding in rural Afghanistan could produce economic alternatives for the millions of farmers who depend upon the opium crop for employment. Such money could help rebuild that land’s ruined orchards, ravaged flocks, wasted seed stocks, and wrecked snowmelt irrigation systems that, before these decades of war, sustained a diverse agriculture. If the international community can continue to nudge the country’s dependence on illicit opium down from the current 13% of GDP through such sustained rural development, then perhaps Afghanistan will cease to be the planet’s leading narco-state and just maybe that annual cycle can at long last be broken.

Source: Alfred W. McCoy: How a Pink Flower Defeated the World’s Sole Superpower – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

Mitch McConnell Says the Next President Should Appoint Scalia’s Successor – So much for supporting the US Constitution!

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and Republican of Kentucky, said in a statement that the next president, not President Obama, should appoint a successor to Justice Antonin Scalia.

Source: Mitch McConnell Says the Next President Should Appoint Scalia’s Successor

FAO – News Article: FAO calls for international action on antimicrobial resistance

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an emerging public health threat requiring a globally coordinated effort to counter the risks it poses to food security, FAO Deputy Director-General Helena Semedo said Wednesday.Overuse and misuse of antibiotics and other antimicrobial agents foster increasing resistance among the very microbes that cause the infections and disease they were designed to quell, threatening to reverse a century of progress in human and animal health, she said.”We have to help save live-saving drugs,” she told European ministers of health and agriculture at a conference on antimicrobial resistance in Amsterdam.Aside from the human health considerations, the emergence of microbes resistant to antibiotics and other pharmaceutical agents puts animal health at risk and consequently has an impact on rural livelihoods and food security. “AMR is a global threat that in this inter-connected world cannot be solved in Europe alone,” Semedo said.

Source: FAO – News Article: FAO calls for international action on antimicrobial resistance

Racism and immigration in Britain

In February 1968 Enoch Powell attacked Kenyan Asians who held British passports and who therefore had the automatic right of entry into Britain. In less than three weeks Labour had responded by rushing through parliament a new immigration bill aimed at removing that right unless British passport holders had a close connection with Britain. In one single move Labour rendered 150,000 Kenyan Asians effectively ‘stateless’, whilst retaining a clause for those whose grandparents were born here (ie those who were white) to continue to enjoy free entry to the UK. Far from silencing the likes of Powell, Labour’s abject capitulation merely encouraged him. Within weeks of Labour rushing through its new act, Powell made his most inflammatory speech yet, predicting that ‘rivers of blood’ would flow if immigration was not curbed further.47 When the Labour government finally fell in 1970, its supporters demoralised and disillusioned, it left behind a legacy of racism more shameful than perhaps any other in its history.Despite Labour’s fairly transparent posturing in opposition, and its protests against the Tories’ 1971 Immigration Act, little changed when it next took office. When Labour won the 1974 election it moved very quickly to tighten the rules even further.48 It was under Labour, for instance, that gynaecological examinations of women were carried out at airports supposedly to determine their virginity, and it was during the 1974-79 Labour government that hazardous X-rays were taken at airports to determine the age of prospective entrants into Britain.49 Within two years of winning the election Labour also joined the racist agitation which surrounded the expulsion of a small number of Asians from Malawi, evidenced by Bob Mellish’s claim in 1974 that people ‘cannot come here just because they have a British passport–full stop’. By now this was abundantly clear for all to see, for removing the right of British passport holders to enter the UK had, after all, been the main point of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which Bob Mellish’s own party had forced through the Commons with obscene haste.In reality, the episode surrounding the expulsion of the Malawi Asians in 1974 was one of the clearest examples yet of the way in which racist agitation for immigration controls has virtually nothing at all to do with the actual numbers of immigrants who attempt to gain entry to Britain at any one time. Only 250 Malawi Asians were being expelled from Malawi and all could easily have been incorporated into the voucher system for that year. Even so right wing Tory MPs tabled motions demanding urgent discussion on the ‘changing demographic character of Great Britain’50 (meaning of course the colour of people’s skin) and Labour’s home secretary, Roy Jenkins, responded by assuring them that Labour would maintain ‘strict immigration control’ and would ‘root out’ illegal immigrants and overstayers.51 By 1978 Labour had buried its conscience for good, a fact demonstrated by Merlin Rees’s famous television admission that all immigration controls were aimed at stopping ‘coloured’ immigration.52 Of course Labour had always accepted this basic premise, which had been recommended by its own cabinet committees during the 1950s and which was institutionalised for the first time in the 1962 Act. The only difference now was that they were prepared to openly admit it.

Source: Racism and immigration in Britain

TPP: Lessons from New Zealand | Inter Press Service

Asia-Pacific, Featured, Food & Agriculture, Globalisation, Headlines, Trade & InvestmentTPP: Lessons from New ZealandBy Jomo Kwame SundaramReprint |      | Print | Send by email |En españolJomo Kwame Sundaram was an Assistant Secretary-General responsible for analysis of economic development in the United Nations system during 2005-2015, and received the 2007 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Feb 2 2016 (IPS) – A new paper* on the implications of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement for New Zealand examines key economic issues likely to be impacted by this trade agreement. It is remarkable how little TPP brings to the table. NZ’s gross domestic product will grow by 47 per cent by 2030 without the TPP, or by 47.9 per cent with the TPP. Even that small benefit is an exaggeration, as the modelling makes dubious assumptions, and the real benefits will be even smaller. If the full costs are included, net economic benefits to the NZ economy are doubtful. The gains from tariff reductions are less than a quarter of the projected benefits according to official NZ government modelling. Although most of the projected benefits result from reducing non-tariff barriers (NTBs), the projections rely on inadequate and dubious information that does not even identify the NTBs that would be reduced by the TPP!Jomo Kwame Sundaram. Credit: FAOAgricultureThe main beneficiaries in NZ will be agricultural exporters, but modest tariff reductions of 1.3 per cent on average by 2030 are small compared to ongoing commodity price and exchange rate volatility. Extensive trade barriers to agricultural exports in the Japanese, Canadian and US food markets remain, and will be locked in under TPP. TPP has also failed to tackle agricultural subsidies that are a major trade distortion. Significant tariff barriers remain in some sectors in Japan, Canada and the US likely to be ‘locked in’ under the TPP that are almost impossible to remove in the future. TPP’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures limits on labelling may also restrict opportunities for food exporters to build high quality, differentiated niche market positions.TPP has also been used to undermine negotiations in the World Trade Organization, the only forum for removing such trade distorting subsidies.ISDSTPP’s investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions and restrictions on state-owned enterprises will deter future NZ governments from regulations and policies in the public interest, for fear of litigation by corporate interests. The threat, if not actual repercussions, are good enough to ‘discipline’ governments by causing ‘regulatory chill’. TPP is very much a charter for incumbent businesses, especially US transnational corporations. Thus, it inadvertently holds back the economic transformation the world needs. The agreement’s TPP’s benefits are likely to be asymmetric as it is more favourable to big US business practices and will deepen the disadvantages of small size and remoteness. Potential ISDS compensation payments or settlements could far outweigh the limited economic benefits of TPP. Even when cases are successfully defended, the legal costs will be very high.Value-additionTPP can both help and hinder ambitions to add value to raw materials and commodities, and to progress up value chains. However, it is likely to reinforce NZ’s position as a commodity producer and thus hinder progress up the value chain where greater economic prosperity lies. More analysis based on the actual agreement is required to ascertain the conditions for and likelihood of such progress. TPP will limit government’s ability to innovate and address national challenges and is likely to worsen rapidly escalating problems such as environmental degradation and climate change.Furthermore, TPP is projected to reduce employment and increase income inequality in NZ. In its analysis, the government has not considered the likely costs, which are probably going to be very significant, and may well outweigh economic benefits.TPP thus falls well short of being “a trade agreement for the 21st century”, as its cheerleaders claim. A more comprehensive, balanced and objective cost-benefit analysis on the basis of the October 2015 deal should be completed before ratifying the TPP.

Source: TPP: Lessons from New Zealand | Inter Press Service

Donald Trump Is the Most Dangerous Man in the World – SPIEGEL ONLINE

Trump Wants A Ruthless America”Believe me, I’ll change things. And again, we’re going to be so respected. I don’t want to use the word ‘feared,'” he told the audience. But that is precisely what Trump wants: to be feared. His bid for the White House, long ridiculed, is a fight for a ruthless, brutal America. Behind his campaign slogan “Make America great again!” is the vision of a country that no longer cares about international treaties, ethnic minorities or established standards of decency.Trump wants to attack head-first again. The 69-year-old embodies a new harshness and brutality, and both a physical and emotional crudeness. Trump has launched an uprising of the indecent, one that is now much bigger than he himself, a popular movement of white, conservative America that after eight years under Democratic President Barack Obama, yearns for a leader who will usher in the counter-revolution.

Source: Donald Trump Is the Most Dangerous Man in the World – SPIEGEL ONLINE