Trump defends Putin, says TPP "a disaster" - "I will bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan ... We owe China $1.3 trillion. We owe Japan more" (1) Trump calls TPP "a disaster" (2) Sanders: TPP Must Be Defeated (3) The Trans-Pacific Free Trade Charade - Joseph Stiglitz & Adam Hersh (4) TPP Power Grab: World Bank, Goldman Sachs, CFR (5) Urugay rejects Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) (6) TISA: Yet another Leaked Treaty you've never heard of - Jeremy Malcolm (7) Discussion with Jeremy Malcolm about TISA (8) Trump: "I will bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan ... We owe China $1.3 trillion. We owe Japan more than that." (9) The Deindustrialization Of America - by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog (10) Manufacturing in the USA: How U.S. Trade Policy Offshores Jobs (11) Thatcher & Reagan hollowed out Industrial base, created asset bubbles - Eamonn Fingleton (12) Japan's non-tariff barriers - Eamonn Fingleton (13) President Trump will declare US bankruptcy (14) Trump says Putin has every right to support, defend and protect Assad (15) Trump: let Russia fight Islamist extremists (16) Trump praises Putin; would be friends with him, if elected (17) Trump supports Russian efforts to tackle Isis in Syria (1) Trump calls TPP "a disaster" http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/business/pacific-trade-deal-talks-resume-under-fire-from-us-presidential-hopefuls.html Pacific Trade Deal Talks Resume, Under Fire From U.S. Presidential Hopefuls By JACKIE CALMES September 30, 2015 WASHINGTON — Trade ministers for the United States and 11 other Pacific nations gathered in Atlanta on Wednesday to try to reach agreement on the largest regional free-trade pact ever. But knotty differences persist, and antitrade blasts from American presidential candidates have not eased prospects for any deal. The talks in a downtown Atlanta hotel are picking up where ministers left off two months ago after deadlocking at a Maui resort, at odds over trade in pharmaceutical drugs, autos, sugar and dairy goods, among other matters. United States negotiators said last week that enough progress had been made in recent contacts to justify hosting another, perhaps final round. For President Obama, who cited the potential agreement during his address this week to the United Nations, success in a negotiating effort as old as his administration would be a legacy achievement. The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership would liberalize trade and open markets among a dozen nations on both sides of the Pacific, from Canada to Chile and Japan to Australia, that account for about two-fifths of the world’s economic output. Failure would be just as big a defeat for Mr. Obama, and upset his long-troubled foreign policy initiative to reorient American engagement toward fast-growing Asia and away from the violent morass of the Middle East and North Africa. Yet if the Atlanta talks yield no agreement by the weekend, the Americans are unlikely to declare failure. Time is not the president’s friend, however. Even if agreement is reached this week, Congress will not debate and vote on it until late winter — in the heat of the states’ presidential nominating contests — because by law Mr. Obama cannot sign the deal without giving lawmakers 90 days’ notice. He will need bipartisan support, given the resistance of many Democrats and union allies to such trade accords. But presidential candidates in both parties have already registered strong opposition. The Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, the billionaire who boasts of his own deal-making prowess, has called the emerging trans-Pacific agreement "a disaster." While some Republican rivals also are critical, it is the rhetoric of Mr. Trump, given his celebrity appeal, that has Republican leaders more worried that a toxic trade debate could threaten vulnerable Republicans in 2016. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, supports a Pacific accord but nonetheless wants to protect his narrow Republican majority — and deny Mr. Obama an achievement. On the Democratic side, where unions, progressive groups and many members of Congress oppose an agreement, Hillary Rodham Clinton has not taken a stand, though she repeatedly promoted the Pacific accord as secretary of state. In June, Mrs. Clinton told an Iowa audience "there should be no deal" if congressional Democrats’ concerns for workers were not addressed, and many in the party, including administration officials, expect she ultimately would oppose a deal, like her rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The United States trade representative, Michael B. Froman, said before heading to Atlanta, "The president has made clear that he will only accept a T.P.P. agreement that delivers for middle-class families, supports American jobs and furthers our national security." "The substance of the negotiations will drive the timeline for completion," Mr. Froman added, "not the other way around." Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has not ruled out a bid for president, showed at the United Nations that they were pressing hard to get an agreement. The president affirmed his support in private meetings with several world leaders, according to administration officials. In his address to the United Nations, Mr. Obama told foreign leaders the accord would be a model for the world, "an agreement that will open markets, while protecting the rights of workers and protecting the environment that enables development to be sustained." Should a deal come together, central to the White House campaign to sell the agreement to Congress would be the argument that setting economic, labor and environmental standards in the Pacific region would counter China’s influence, officials said. Late Tuesday, Mr. Biden brought Mr. Froman to a Manhattan meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, who has made an agreement central to his own economic platform. The Obama administration has pressed for the Pacific accord for six years, picking up the idea from the George W. Bush administration. Many issues have been all but settled, but nothing is final until everything is decided. That progress, including tentative agreements on ending tariffs, setting labor and environmental standards, and opening certain markets, has sustained the negotiations despite setbacks. But several issues continue to block a deal. Dairy market rules divide the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; this has been especially troublesome for Canada’s team, since the nation will hold elections this month. Also divisive are provisions over auto exports, including requirements that autos have a certain percentage of parts made in countries that are parties to the agreement. Japan has sought a lower percentage of parts in the "rules of origin," with some support from Americans, to allow the export of autos with Chinese parts, while Mexico and Canada demand stricter rules. Perhaps most contentious are negotiations related to protections for pharmaceutical companies’ drugs, especially cutting-edge biologics that are made from living organisms and considered promising against cancer, among other ailments. Several countries, especially Australia, have opposed the United States and its pharmaceutical industry for insisting that companies’ drug data be protected for 12 years to create financial incentives to innovate. Critics say this keeps lower-cost generic drugs and "biosimilars" off the market for too long. Here, too, the presidential contest has injected a wild card: Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders each have accused drug makers of price gouging. While there is talk of an eight-year compromise, for many opponents that is too long. Judit Rius Sanjuan, a manager of a campaign by Doctors Without Borders to hasten access to lower-priced drugs and vaccines, said she met with American negotiators last week in Washington, "and they gave me zero indication that they are going to be more flexible on this issue." Andrew Spiegel, executive director of the Global Colon Cancer Association, said drug makers needed the incentives of strong protections for their intellectual property to encourage their research. He did not offer an answer to the question dividing negotiators: how many years the drug makers’ data monopoly should last. "I leave it to them to pick the magic number," Mr. Spiegel said. Last week, 156 members of Congress, mostly Democrats, wrote the administration to complain that some parties to the talks, like Vietnam, Singapore and Japan, manipulate their currency values to underprice their products. While discussions are continuing, the administration is counting on reaching a currency deal with the Asian nations that would be a side agreement to any trade pact. (2) Sanders: TPP Must Be Defeated http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/the-tpp-must-be-defeated_b_7352166.html The TPP Must Be Defeated Posted: 22/05/2015 00:29 AEST Updated: 22/05/2015 00:59 AEST Congress is now debating fast track legislation that will pave the way for the disastrous Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) unfettered free trade agreement. At a time when our middle class is disappearing and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, this anti-worker legislation must be defeated. Here are four reasons why. First, the TPP follows in the footsteps of failed trade agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA, Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China, and the South Korea Free Trade agreement. Over and over again, supporters of these agreements told us that they would create jobs. Over and over again, they have been proven dead wrong. Since 2001, nearly 60,000 manufacturing plants in this country have been shut down and we have lost over 4.7 million decent paying manufacturing jobs. NAFTA has led to the loss of nearly 700,000 jobs. PNTR with China has led to the loss of 2.7 million jobs. Our trade agreement with South Korea has led to the loss of about 75,000 jobs. While bad trade agreements are not the only reason why manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have declined, they are an important factor. The TPP continues an approach towards trade which forces Americans to compete against workers in Vietnam where the minimum wage is 56 cents an hour, independent labor unions are banned, and people are thrown in jail for expressing their political beliefs. This is not "free trade." This is the race to the bottom. While we must help poor people around the world improve their standard of living, we can do that without destroying the American middle class. Secondly, when we are talking about the TPP it's important to know who is for it and who is against it. Large, multi-national corporations that have outsourced millions of good paying American jobs to China, Mexico, Vietnam, India and other low-wage countries think the TPP is a great idea. They understand that this legislation will allow them to accelerate efforts to hire cheap labor abroad. The TPP is also strongly supported by Wall Street and large pharmaceutical companies who believe their global profits will increase if this agreement is passed. On the other hand, every union in this country, representing millions of American workers, is in opposition to this agreement because they understand that the TPP will lead to the loss of decent-paying jobs and will depress wages. Virtually every major environmental organization, including the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and 350.org[350.org], among many others, also oppose this legislation. They understand that the TPP will make it easier for multi-national corporations to pollute and degrade the global environment. Major religious groups such as the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. and the United Methodist Church, also oppose this legislation because of what it could do to the poorest people on earth. Whose views should we trust on this legislation? Wall Street and corporate America or organizations that represent working families, the environment and the religious community? Third, the TPP would also undermine democracy by giving multi-national corporations the right to challenge any law that could reduce their "expected future profits" through what is known as the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system. Under existing trade agreements, Phillip Morris is using this process to sue Australia and Uruguay for passing laws designed to prevent the children in those countries from smoking. These countries should be rewarded for taking action to protect the public health of their citizens. Instead, they are being taken to an international court because their laws are hurting the bottom line of one of the largest tobacco companies in the world. Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, has used this process to sue Germany for $5 billion over its decision to phase out nuclear power. Should the people of Germany have the right to make energy choices on their own or should these decisions be left in the hands of an unelected international tribunal? A French waste management firm, Veolia, used this process to sue Egypt for $110 million because Egypt increased its minimum wage and improved its labor laws. In other words, Egypt's "crime" is trying to improve life for their low-wage workers. Do we really want to tell governments all around the world, including the U.S., that if they pass legislation protecting the well-being of their citizens they could pay substantial fines to multi-national corporations because of the loss of future profits? What an incredible undermining of democracy! But that's exactly what will happen if the TPP goes into effect. Fourth, this legislation, strongly supported by the major drug companies, would substantially raise the prices of medicine in some of the poorest countries on earth. The drug companies are doing everything they can to prevent countries from moving to lower cost generics, even if it means that thousands will die because they cannot afford higher prices for the drugs they need. That is unacceptable. Doctors Without Borders has stated: "The TPP agreement is on track to become the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines in developing countries." Enough is enough. If we are serious about rebuilding the middle class and creating the millions of good paying jobs we desperately need, we must fundamentally rewrite our trade policies. NO to fast track, and NO to the TPP. (3) The Trans-Pacific Free Trade Charade - Joseph Stiglitz & Adam Hersh From: Iskandar Masih <iskandar38@hotmail.com> Subject: The Trans-Pacific Free Trade Charade [Joseph Stiglitz, Adam Hersh] Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2015 05:51:30 +0500 The Trans-Pacific Free Trade Charade by Joseph Stiglitz & Adam Hersh http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/10/02/trans-pacific-free-trade-charade Published on Friday, October 02, 2015 Project Syndicate NEW YORK – As negotiators and ministers from the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries meet in Atlanta in an effort to finalize the details of the sweeping new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), some sober analysis is warranted. The biggest regional trade and investment agreement in history is not what it seems. You will hear much about the importance of the TPP for "free trade." The reality is that this is an agreement to manage its members’ trade and investment relations – and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies. Make no mistake: It is evident from the main outstanding issues, over which negotiators are still haggling, that the TPP is not about "free" trade. New Zealand has threatened to walk away from the agreement over the way Canada and the US manage trade in dairy products. Australia is not happy with how the US and Mexico manage trade in sugar. And the US is not happy with how Japan manages trade in rice. These industries are backed by significant voting blocs in their respective countries. And they represent just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the TPP would advance an agenda that actually runs counter to free trade. For starters, consider what the agreement would do to expand intellectual property rights for big pharmaceutical companies, as we learned from leaked versions of the negotiating text. Economic research clearly shows the argument that such intellectual property rights promote research to be weak at best. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary: When the Supreme Court invalidated Myriad’s patent on the BRCA gene, it led to a burst of innovation that resulted in better tests at lower costs. Indeed, provisions in the TPP would restrain open competition and raise prices for consumers in the US and around the world – anathema to free trade. The TPP would manage trade in pharmaceuticals through a variety of seemingly arcane rule changes on issues such as "patent linkage," "data exclusivity," and "biologics." The upshot is that pharmaceutical companies would effectively be allowed to extend – sometimes almost indefinitely – their monopolies on patented medicines, keep cheaper generics off the market, and block "biosimilar" competitors from introducing new medicines for years. That is how the TPP will manage trade for the pharmaceutical industry if the US gets its way. Similarly, consider how the US hopes to use the TPP to manage trade for the tobacco industry. For decades, US-based tobacco companies have used foreign investor adjudication mechanisms created by agreements like the TPP to fight regulations intended to curb the public-health scourge of smoking. Under these investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) systems, foreign investors gain new rights to sue national governments in binding private arbitration for regulations they see as diminishing the expected profitability of their investments. International corporate interests tout ISDS as necessary to protect property rights where the rule of law and credible courts are lacking. But that argument is nonsense. The US is seeking the same mechanism in a similar mega-deal with the European Union, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, even though there is little question about the quality of Europe’s legal and judicial systems. To be sure, investors – wherever they call home – deserve protection from expropriation or discriminatory regulations. But ISDS goes much further: The obligation to compensate investors for losses of expected profits can and has been applied even where rules are nondiscriminatory and profits are made from causing public harm. The corporation formerly known as Philip Morris is currently prosecuting such cases against Australia and Uruguay (not a TPP partner) for requiring cigarettes to carry warning labels. Canada, under threat of a similar suit, backed down from introducing a similarly effective warning label a few years back. Given the veil of secrecy surrounding the TPP negotiations, it is not clear whether tobacco will be excluded from some aspects of ISDS. Either way, the broader issue remains: Such provisions make it hard for governments to conduct their basic functions – protecting their citizens’ health and safety, ensuring economic stability, and safeguarding the environment. Imagine what would have happened if these provisions had been in place when the lethal effects of asbestos were discovered. Rather than shutting down manufacturers and forcing them to compensate those who had been harmed, under ISDS, governments would have had to pay the manufacturers not to kill their citizens. Taxpayers would have been hit twice – first to pay for the health damage caused by asbestos, and then to compensate manufacturers for their lost profits when the government stepped in to regulate a dangerous product. It should surprise no one that America’s international agreements produce managed rather than free trade. That is what happens when the policymaking process is closed to non-business stakeholders – not to mention the people’s elected representatives in Congress. (4) TPP Power Grab: World Bank, Goldman Sachs, CFR http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/20589-tpp-power-grab-world-bank-goldman-sachs-cfr Written by William F. Jasper Wednesday, 01 April 2015 The recently leaked Chapter 2 of the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), as we reported here on March 31, proposes transferring enormous judicial powers to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a branch of the corrupt, world-government-promoting World Bank. The TPP draft text proposes creating tribunals (courts) that could overrule the decisions of our state and federal courts, as well as our local, state and federal laws — and our state and national constitutions. This is already occurring under similar tribunals established by the NAFTA and WTO agreements. The international tribunals proposed in the TPP would be presided over by arbitrators (judges) appointed by the Secretary-General of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), an institution of the World Bank Group. The general counsel of the World Bank, Aron Broches, drew up the convention establishing the ICSID. The ICSID is housed at the World Bank’s headquarters complex in Washington, D.C. The ICSID receives its funding from the World Bank and the ICSID’s governing Council is chaired by the president of the World Bank. So the proposed TPP tribunals are, in essence, a means for transferring judicial authority over vast areas of domestic law to "arbitrators" picked by the World Bank — and the central bankers and the giant commercial/investment bankers that run the World Bank. Robert Zoellick, who stepped down as 11th president of the World Bank in 2012, quickly stepped into a number of high-profile positions at "prestigious" organizations, perhaps the most notable being his appointment as "chairman of international advisors" to Goldman Sachs, the global investment banking goliath infamously known as the "Vampire Squid." Zoellick is a Goldman alum; intermingled with his "government service" — as U.S. trade representative, deputy secretary of state, under secretary of state, etc. — Zoellich served as international vice chairman at Goldman Sachs. Zoellich is also a longtime member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the key "Establishment" organization that has been most responsible for guiding our nation on the globalist path toward world government for much of the past century. Zoellich, together with other former and current colleagues at Goldman Sachs, the CFR, and World Bank, is prominent player in the "free trade" power lobby that is now urgently pushing the TPP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Trade Promotion Authority (TPA, aka Fast Track). He authored, for instance, an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal entitled, "Leading from the Front on Free Trade," which carried this subtitle: "Republicans should make the case for Trade Promotion Authority, not fear giving it to President Obama." Zoellick’s WSJ op-ed was a full-throated cheer for TPP/TTIP/TPA. This was hardly surprising, since, as U.S. trade representative, Zoellick was a key facilitator/architect of these and other "trade" agreements. Now that he has gone through the revolving door from Washington back to Wall Street, he is hoping to soon reap the private rewards of the global deals he helped craft while in "public" service. However, Robert Zoellick is emblematic of a huge cohort of fellow banksters of the Goldman Sachs/CFR stripe currently involved in public and private capacities in the current push for the TPP, which certainly qualifies in the "deal of the century" category. Since its creation at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, in 1944, the World Bank has been a servile creature and tool of the CFR/Wall Street globalists who created it. Of the 12 men who have held the World Bank presidency, nine have been members of the CFR. Here is the list: Eugene Meyer (June 1946 – December 1946) CFR John J. McCloy (March 1947 – June 1949) CFR Eugene R. Black, Sr. (1949–1963) CFR George D. Woods (January 1963 – March 1968) Robert McNamara (April 1968 – June 1981) CFR Alden W. Clausen (July 1981 – June 1986) Barber Conable (July 1986 – August 1991) CFR Lewis T. Preston (September 1991 – May 1995) CFR James Wolfensohn (May 1995 – 30 June 2005) CFR Paul Wolfowitz (1 July 2005 – 30 June 2007) CFR Robert Zoellick (1 July 2007 – 30 June 2012) CFR Jim Yong Kim (1 July 2012 – ) The older World Bank presidents that were not CFR members — George D. Woods and A.W. Clausen — were, nevertheless, supportive globalists who promoted the one-world cause. The current president, Jim Yong Kim, likewise, while not a CFR member, toes the globalist party line. This is evident, for example, in his appearance as the honored speaker at the CFR’s special program on December 8, 2014, entitled, "World Bank President Jim Yong Kim on Economic Development and the Paris Climate Agreement." The World Bank and the CFR, for years, have been in the forefront of the global propaganda effort to empower the United Nations, national governments, and other entities with vast new powers for the supposed purpose of dealing with the "crisis" of human-caused global warming. Goldman Sachs, of course, (led by CFR member Lloyd C. Blankfein) is a big promoter of both the TPP/TTIP agenda as well as the Global Warming/Climate Change Agenda. Why has the Obama administration kept the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement text secret from Congress and the American people? Among the many obvious features of the TPP that they want to keep in darkest secrecy is the World Bank-Goldman Sachs-CFR web that has been confirmed in the latest WikiLeaks release. (5) Uruguay rejects Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) http://wolfstreet.com/2015/09/22/uruguay-does-unthinkable-rejects-global-corporatocracy-tisa/ Uruguay Does Unthinkable, Rejects Global Corporatocracy By Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET. September 22, 2015 Often referred to as the Switzerland of South America, Uruguay is long accustomed to doing things its own way. It was the first nation in Latin America to establish a welfare state. It also has an unusually large middle class for the region and unlike its giant neighbors to the north and west, Brazil and Argentina, is largely free of serious income inequality. Two years ago, during José Mujica’s presidency, Uruguay became the first nation to legalize marijuana in Latin America, a continent that is being ripped apart by drug trafficking and its associated violence and corruption of state institutions. Now Uruguay has done something that no other semi-aligned nation on this planet has dared to do: it has rejected the advances of the global corporatocracy. Earlier this month Uruguay’s government decided to end its participation in the secret negotiations of the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). After months of intense pressure led by unions and other grassroots movements that culminated in a national general strike on the issue – the first of its kind around the globe – the Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez bowed to public opinion and left the US-led trade agreement. Despite – or more likely because of – its symbolic importance, Uruguay’s historic decision has been met by a wall of silence. Beyond the country’s borders, mainstream media has refused to cover the story. This is hardly a surprise given that the global public is not supposed to even know about TiSA’s existence, despite – or again because of – the fact that it’s arguably the most important of the new generation of global trade agreements. According to WikiLeaks, it "is the largest component of the United States’ strategic ‘trade’ treaty triumvirate," which also includes the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP). TiSA involves more countries than TTIP and TPP combined: The United States and all 28 members of the European Union, Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey. Together, these 52 nations form the charmingly named "Really Good Friends of Services" group, which represents almost 70% of all trade in services worldwide. Until its government’s recent u-turn Uruguay was supposed to be the 53rd Good Friend of Services. TiSA has spent the last two years taking shape behind the hermetically sealed doors of highly secure locations around the world. According to the agreement’s provisional text, the document is supposed to remain confidential and concealed from public view for at least five years after being signed. Even the World Trade Organization has been sidelined from negotiations. But thanks to whistle blowing sites like WikiLeaks, the Associated Whistleblowing Press and Filtrala, crucial details have seeped to the surface. Here’s a brief outline of what is known to date (for more specifics click here, here and here): 1.TiSA would "lock in" the privatization of services – even in cases where private service delivery has failed – meaning governments can never return water, energy, health, education or other services to public hands. 2.TiSA would restrict signatory governments’ right to regulate stronger standards in the public’s interest. For example, it will affect environmental regulations, licensing of health facilities and laboratories, waste disposal centres, power plants, school and university accreditation and broadcast licenses. 3.TiSA would limit the ability of governments to regulate the financial services industry, at a time when the global economy is still struggling to recover from a crisis caused primarily by financial deregulation. More specifically, if signed the trade agreement would:     * Restrict the ability of governments to place limits on the trading of derivative contracts — the largely unregulated weapons of mass financial destruction that helped trigger the 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis.     * Bar new financial regulations that do not conform to deregulatory rules. Signatory governments will essentially agree not to apply new financial policy measures which in any way contradict the agreement’s emphasis on deregulatory measures.     * Prohibit national governments from using capital controls to prevent or mitigate financial crises. The leaked texts prohibit restrictions on financial inflows – used to prevent rapid currency appreciation, asset bubbles and other macroeconomic problems – and financial outflows, used to prevent sudden capital flight in times of crisis.     * Require acceptance of financial products not yet invented. Despite the pivotal role that new, complex financial products played in the Financial Crisis, TISA would require governments to allow all new financial products and services, including ones not yet invented, to be sold within their territories. 4. TiSA would ban any restrictions on cross-border information flows and localization requirements for ICT service providers. A provision proposed by US negotiators would rule out any conditions for the transfer of personal data to third countries that are currently in place in EU data protection law. In other words, multinational corporations will have carte blanche to pry into just about every facet of the working and personal lives of the inhabitants of roughly a quarter of the world’s 200-or-so nations. As I wrote in LEAKED: Secret Negotiations to Let Big Brother Go Global, if TiSA is signed in its current form – and we will not know exactly what that form is until at least five years down the line – our personal data will be freely bought and sold on the open market place without our knowledge; companies and governments will be able to store it for as long as they desire and use it for just about any purpose. 5) Finally, TiSA, together with its sister treaties TPP and TTIP, would establish a new global enclosure system, one that seeks to impose on all 52 signatory governments a rigid framework of international corporate law designed to exclusively protect the interests of corporations, relieving them of financial risk and social and environmental responsibility. In short, it would hammer the final nail in the already bedraggled coffin of national sovereignty. A Dangerous Precedent Given its small size (population: 3.4 million) and limited geopolitical or geo-economic clout, Uruguay’s withdrawal from TiSA is unlikely to upset the treaty’s advancement. The governments of the major trading nations will continue their talks behind closed doors and away from the prying eyes of the people they are supposed to represent. The U.S. Congress has already agreed to grant the Obama administration fast-track approval on trade agreements like TiSA while the European Commission can be expected to do whatever the corporatocracy demands. However, as the technology writer Glyn Moody notes, Uruguay’s defection – like the people of Iceland’s refusal to assume all the debts of its rogue banks – possesses a tremendous symbolic importance: It says that, yes, it is possible to withdraw from global negotiations, and that the apparently irreversible trade deal ratchet can actually be turned back. It sets an important precedent that other nations with growing doubts about TISA – or perhaps TPP – can look to and maybe even follow. Naturally, the representatives of Uruguay’s largest corporations would agree to disagree. The government’s move was one of its biggest mistakes of recent years, according to Gabriel Oddone, an analyst with the financial consultancy firm CPA Ferrere. It was based on a "superficial discussion of the treaty’s implications." What Oddone conveniently fails to mention is that Uruguay is the only nation on the planet that has had any kind of public discussion, superficial or not, about TiSA and its potentially game-changing implications. Perhaps it’s time that changed. (6) TISA: Yet another Leaked Treaty you've never heard of - Jeremy Malcolm Date: Sunday, 31 May, 2015 Subject: TISA Treaty Author: Jeremy Malcolm MAY 27, 2015 TISA: Yet Another Leaked Treaty You've Never Heard Of Makes Secret Rules for the Internet Jeremy Malcolm A February 2015 draft of the secret Trade In Services Agreement (TISA) was leaked again last week, revealing a more extensive and more recent text than that of portions from an April 2014 leak that we covered last year. Together with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and theTrans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), TISA completes a trifecta of trade agreements that the administration could sign under Fast Track without full congressional oversight. Although it is the least well-known of those agreements, it is the broadest in terms of membership. As far as we know, it presently includes twenty countries plus Europe (but notably excluding the major emerging world economies of the BRICS bloc), who, with disdainful levity, have adopted the mantle "the Really Good Friends of Services". Like its sister agreements, TISA will enact global rules that impact the Internet, bypassing the transparency and accountability of national parliaments. The only difference is that its focus is on services, not goods. In our previous analysis, we focused our attention on two points from the leaked text. The first was a provision that would prohibit democratically-elected parliaments from enacting limits on the "free flow of information" to protect the privacy of their citizens—limits that, we argued, should be debated publicly, not behind closed doors. The second was text on net neutrality, that would lock in a particular set of global rules on net neutrality, including an open-ended exception for "reasonable network management" that could become a loophole for exploitation. Those provisions remain in the new leaked draft. But the latest leak has revealed more. The agreement would also prohibit countries from enacting free and open source software mandates. Although "software used for critical infrastructure" is already carved out from this prohibition (and so is software that is not "mass market software", whatever that means), there are other circumstances in which a country might legitimately require suppliers to disclose their source code. For example, one step that might be considered to improve the dire state of security of consumer routers might be to require that they be supplied with source code, so that their security could be more broadly reviewed, and third parties could contribute patches for critical vulnerabilities. Although that may sound radical, this is already required for many routers because they are based on software covered by the GNU General Public License. TISA would prohibit any such national initiative. As in the TPP, and expanding on the earlier leaked draft, TISA also includes a prohibition on laws that require service providers to host data locally, which some countries have used to protect sensitive personal information, such as health data, from being snooped upon on foreign soil. There are arguments for and against such laws, and it is inappropriate that a secretive international agreement such as TISA should preempt these important debates. The agreement would also require countries to introduce anti-spam laws. Although spam is bad, that doesn't necessarily make anti-spam laws good. In practice such laws have generally been ineffective at best, and ripe for abuse at worst. As such, we believe that it would be a legitimate choice for a country to decide not to tackle this blight through legislation—a choice that TISA would remove from them. These examples only scratch the surface of TISA, yet they are enough to demonstrate a common problem that also affects the TPP and TTIP—that they are locking in a very specific rules for the Internet that the member countries may regret later. Locking in national laws through international law is something to be done sparingly. If it is done at all, then it should be through a transparent process that allows for users to have a voice—a process at least as open as that by which WIPO concluded the Marrakesh Treaty for the Blind. What we have here is the very antithesis of that. The closed-door TISA negotiations are designed to set some very technologically-specific rules in stone—rules that will bind signatory countries for decades to come. Users and other stakeholders are completely excised from this process, and even our democratically elected representatives are being kept in the dark. Activism around TISA is still very diffuse and limited, but there's one campaign that you can help us fight now, and it's the same action that we're taking to battle the TPP—it's opposing the Fast Track bill. The U.S. administration is relying on Fast Track not only to streamline its accession to the TPP, but its future ratification of TISA as well. Even if you're on the fence about the TPP, TISA is a further reason for you to call on your representative to oppose Fast Track today. (7) Discussion with Jeremy Malcolm about TISA  From Peter Myers To Jeremy Malcolm <jmalcolm@eff.org>, John Herman <hermann@chariot.net.au> Jeremy,  > TISA also includes a prohibition on laws that require  > service providers to host data locally I draw your attention to the following article in the UK Telegraph. It says US Prosecutors can prosecute FIFA over corruption or anything else, if FIFA stores its emails on a US server or uses an American bank account. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/international/11632230/Fifa-about-to-learn-a-stern-lesson-about-the-vigour-of-American-prosecution.html> The US is targeting FIFA, because Blatter refused to take the 2018 World Cup away from Russia. The Corruption charge is merely an excuse. The point is that FIFA is subject to US Law even if it only stores its emails on a US server. Yet the TISA would bar countries from insisting on a local server. This means that TISA members forfeit their sovereignty to the US. Peter Re: TISA members subject to US law Inbox  Jeremy Malcolm<jmalcolm@eff.org> 3 June 2015 at 03:22 To: Peter Myers <myerspeterg@gmail.com> Yes, pretty much. They can't force you to host in the US, but the intent of these provisions is that that's what you will probably end up doing... and once you do, you're at the mercy of the US legal system. -- Jeremy Malcolm Senior Global Policy Analyst Electronic Frontier Foundation https://eff.org jmalcolm@eff.org (8) Trump: "I will bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan ... We owe China $1.3 trillion. We owe Japan more than that." http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4304342.htm Republican candidates reveal their vision for China and the Asia Pacific Australian Broadcasting Corporation Broadcast: 01/09/2015 Reporter: Emma Alberici [...] DONALD TRUMP: I will bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I will bring back our jobs and I will bring back our money. Right now, think of this: we owe China $1.3 trillion. We owe Japan more than that. So they come in, they take our jobs, they take our money and then they loan us back the money and we pay them in interest. And then the dollar goes up, so their deal's even better. How stupid are our leaders? How stupid are these politicians to allow this to happen? How stupid are they? TRUMP SUPPORTERS (chanting): We want Trump! (9) The Deindustrialization Of America - by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-04/shocking-truth-about-deindustrialization-america-everyone-should-know The Shocking Truth About The Deindustrialization Of America That Everyone Should Know Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/04/2014 21:03 -0400 Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog, How long can America continue to burn up wealth? How long can this nation continue to consume far more wealth than it produces? The trade deficit is one of the biggest reasons for the steady decline of the U.S. economy, but many Americans don't even understand what it is. Basically, we are buying far more stuff from the rest of the world than they are buying from us. That means that far more money is constantly leaving the country than is coming into the country. In order to keep the game going, we have to go to the people that we bought all of that stuff from and ask them to lend our money back to us. Or lately, we just have the Federal Reserve create new money out of thin air. This is called "quantitative easing". Our current debt-fueled lifestyle is dependent on this cycle continuing. In order to live like we do, we must consume far more wealth than we produce. If someday we are forced to only live on the wealth that we create, it will require a massive adjustment in our standard of living. We have become great at consuming wealth but not so great at creating it. But as a result of running gigantic trade deficits year after year, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions upon millions of jobs, and America is being deindustrialized at a staggering pace. Most Americans won't even notice, but the latest monthly trade deficit increased to 42.3 billion dollars... The U.S. trade deficit climbed to the highest level in five months in February as demand for American exports fell while imports increased slightly. The deficit increased to $42.3 billion, which was 7.7% above the January imbalance of $39.3 billion, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. When the trade deficit increases, it means that even more wealth, even more jobs and even more businesses have left the United States. In essence, we have gotten poorer as a nation. Have you ever wondered how China has gotten so wealthy? Just a few decades ago, they were basically a joke economically. So how in the world did they get so powerful? Well, one of the primary ways that they did it was by selling us far more stuff than we sold to them. If we had refused to do business with communist China, they never would have become what they have become today. It was our decisions that allowed China to become an economic powerhouse. Last year, we sold 122 billion dollars of stuff to China. That sounds like a lot until you learn that China sold 440 billion dollars of stuff to us. We fill up our shopping carts with lots of cheap plastic trinkets that are "made in China", and they pile up gigantic mountains of our money which we beg them to lend back to us so that we can pay our bills. Who is winning that game and who is losing that game? Below, I have posted our yearly trade deficits with China since 1990. Let's see if you can spot the trend... 1990: 10 billion dollars 1991: 12 billion dollars 1992: 18 billion dollars 1993: 22 billion dollars 1994: 29 billion dollars 1995: 33 billion dollars 1996: 39 billion dollars 1997: 49 billion dollars 1998: 56 billion dollars 1999: 68 billion dollars 2000: 83 billion dollars 2001: 83 billion dollars 2002: 103 billion dollars 2003: 124 billion dollars 2004: 162 billion dollars 2005: 202 billion dollars 2006: 234 billion dollars 2007: 258 billion dollars 2008: 268 billion dollars 2009: 226 billion dollars 2010: 273 billion dollars 2011: 295 billion dollars 2012: 315 billion dollars 2013: 318 billion dollars Yikes! It has been estimated that the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every 1 billion dollars of goods that are imported from overseas, and according to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing about half a million jobs to China every single year. Considering the high level of unemployment that we now have in this country, can we really afford to be doing that? Overall, the United States has accumulated a total trade deficit with the rest of the world of more than 8 trillion dollars since 1975. As a result, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and our economic infrastructure has been absolutely gutted. Just look at what has happened to manufacturing jobs in America. Back in the 1980s, more than 20 percent of the jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only about 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs. And we have fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than we did in 1950 even though our population has more than doubled since then... Many people find this statistic hard to believe, but the United States has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001. Millions of good paying jobs have been lost. As a result, the middle class is shriveling up, and at this point 9 out of the top 10 occupations in America pay less than $35,000 a year. For a long time, U.S. consumers attempted to keep up their middle class lifestyles by going into constantly increasing amounts of debt, but now it is becoming increasingly apparent that middle class consumers are tapped out. In response, major retailers are closing thousands of stores in poor and middle class neighborhoods all over the country. You can see some amazing photos of America's abandoned shopping malls right here. If we could start reducing the size of our trade deficit, that would go a long way toward getting the United States back on the right economic path. Unfortunately, Barack Obama has been negotiating a treaty in secret which is going to send the deindustrialization of America into overdrive. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is being called the "NAFTA of the Pacific", and it is going to result in millions more good jobs being sent to the other side of the planet where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue. So what will this country look like when we lose tens of millions more jobs than we already have? U.S. workers are being merged into a giant global labor pool where they must compete directly for jobs with people making less than a dollar an hour with no benefits. Obama tells us that globalization is good for us and that Americans need to be ready to adjust to a "level playing field". The quality of our jobs has already been declining for decades, and if we continue down this path the quality of our jobs is going to get a whole lot worse and our economic infrastructure will continue to be absolutely gutted. At one time, the city of Detroit was the greatest manufacturing city on the entire planet and it had the highest per capita income in the United States. But today, it is a rotting, decaying hellhole that the rest of the world laughs at. In the end, the rest of the nation is going to suffer the same fate as Detroit unless Americans are willing to stand up and fight for their economy while they still can. (10) Manufacturing in the USA: How U.S. Trade Policy Offshores Jobs http://www.cnbc.com/id/44625759 Sen. Casey: US Trade Policies Hurt American Workers Lori Ann LaRocco Thursday, 22 Sep 2011 | 11:23 AM ET CNBC.com While the buzz word on the hill is taxes, you can also add trade. This week Congress has the three pending trade agreements before them- Panama, Columbia and Korea. Just like taxes, there are two sides to the trade issue. While Myron Brilliant, senior vice president for International Affairs at the U.S. Chamber, supports the agreements, saying they will be a jobs generator, others disagree. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, recently chaired a hearing titled, "Manufacturing in the USA: How U.S. Trade Policy Offshores Jobs". The Committee examined the impact the country's current trade policy has on the U.S. economy and the manufacturing sector. Senator Casey addresses the Chamber's positive endorsement and warns of the unintended consequences of such agreements. LL: How many jobs do you think are in the balance of being off shored? Sen. Casey: We've already lost over 5 million manufacturing jobs since 2001. And it's not just manufacturing jobs that are being offshored - we know that legal services and information service jobs are moving overseas. Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University has estimated that 22 to 29 percent of all US jobs will be offshored or will be offshorable over the next 2 decades - adding up to 30 to 40 million additional U.S. jobs lost. LL: What do you think of the three pending NAFTA-style agreements on the table right now? Sen. Casey: Since NAFTA's passage, U.S. trade policies have steadily chipped away at Pennsylvania's manufacturing sector. From 1997-2010, manufacturing went from 16.4 percent of Pennsylvania's Gross State Product to 12.1 percent. In total, Pennsylvania has lost nearly 300,000 manufacturing jobs. Despite these alarming statistics, advocates for trade deals promise significant economic benefits. From exploding export potential to direct job creation, proponents argue a significant net positive from these agreements every time they are considered. In reality, instead of creating opportunities for Pennsylvania, our trade policies do little more than off-shore good-paying jobs while giving our trading partners unlimited access to our market. LL: Which industries would be hurt the most? Sen. Casey: Broadly, free trade agreements have not had a beneficial impact on US jobs. The year after NAFTA passed, the US saw its trade deficit with Canada explode and its trade surplus with Mexico turn into a trade deficit. The NAFTA model provides a strong incentive for all producers to move out of the US and export back home. LL: What do you say to the Chamber of Commerce who is in favor of such agreements? Sen. Casey: Taken in the whole, free trade agreements have not been good for Pennsylvania, having offshored hundreds of thousands of jobs. LL: We had another company (General Motors) announced they will be expanding its relationship with China-based SAIC Motor Corp. What to you think of this expansion? While it may be good for the American Taxpayer who bailed them out? How many jobs could the American workforce be losing? Sen. Casey: I am is opposed to companies expanding partnerships with explicitly state-owned companies. We should not be rewarding China's policy of grooming national champions. LL: What strategies do you think need to be employed to encourage China to adjust its exchange rate? Sen. Casey: In my travels around Pennsylvania, business owners and workers take every opportunity to tell me about how China's policies have created an uneven playing field. One basic step that should be taken immediately is to pass legislation to force action against China's currency manipulation. The Senate will soon take up currency manipulation legislation that should be quickly passed, signed into law and implemented. LL: What are the benefits of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program? Sen. Casey: American workers have taken it on the chin as a result of unfair, unbalanced trade policy that benefits countries like China and India and results in the loss of American jobs. The Trade Adjustment Assistance program helps workers get back on their feet by providing the necessary training to help them compete in today's global economy. (11) Thatcher & Reagan hollowed out Industrial base, created asset bubbles - Eamonn Fingleton http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2013/04/14/thatchers-last-wish-another-clunker-from-the-iron-lady/ Thatcher's Last Wish: Another Clunker From The Iron Lady Eamonn Fingleton 4/14/2013 @ 10:46AM [...] The voters who elected Thatcher in 1979 were motivated powerfully by humiliation at the UK economy’s constant loss of position in global competition since the early 1950s. By the late 1970s, the labor unions had come to be widely blamed as the fundamental problem. In reality, however, in taking a meat cleaver to the unions, Thatcher was tackling the symptoms not the disease. The unions were certainly far more obstreperous than they had been in the 1950s but this reflected an exogenous political reality, in that other nations, most notably Japan, had taken over the UK’s former imperial markets. The pattern was particularly obvious in the car industry: although the famous Austin Mini of 1959 , for instance, was a far better car than the tinny little Japanese three-wheelers of the day, the Tokyo government’s superior trade diplomacy ensured that these latter enjoyed privileged access to former British markets in East and South Asia, whereas Austin was increasingly shut out. The resulting layoffs in British industry poisoned labor relations for decades. So how well did Thatcher do in reversing the trend and what in particular did she do to improve the UK’s trade position? The eulogizers are quiet on the subject. Advisedly so. The fact is that under Thatcherism the UK’s trade position went from the merely weak to the totally disastrous. The UK ran a current account surplus of 0.6 percent of GDP in 1978, the last full year before Thatcher came to office. As of 1989, the last full year before she was ousted by her own party in May of 1990, the current account DEFICIT had reached an appalling 3.9 percent of GDP. In the meantime Thatcher presided over a savage program to destroy the UK’s core exporting industries and, with wholesale financial deregulation, laid the groundwork for the catastrophic financial bubbles of more recent times. She was smitten by the erroneous notion that advanced nations should leave "rust bucket" industries behind and move to a postindustrial model. Not a view shared by Germany, which has now long eclipsed the UK as Europe’s premier economy. This view is not shared either in any of the most successful East Asian nations (though they are delighted if the English-speaking world continues to believe in postindustrialism). For what it is worth, I have consistently attacked the postindustrialist fallacy since the 1980s and indeed I devoted a whole book to it in 1999 (In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity). The book’s main point is that an economy without a strong export sector is like a car without an engine: services in general do little or no exporting, so if you allow your manufacturing industries to decline, you lose your ability to pay your way in the world. My book has now been vindicated on its analysis of finance: my message was summed up in the heading of the relevant chapter, "Finance: A Cuckoo in the Economy’s Nest." My point about manufacturing will take longer to become generally obvious but in the end Thatcher’s true believers will discover the hard way that there is no such thing as a free lunch. [...] Although it is not yet apparent to most Americans, General Electric has played a starring role in the enfeeblement of the United States. A key charge is that GE has led corporate America in the torching of America’s once peerless industrial base on the funeral pyre of globalism. It has done this principally by transferring many of America’s most advanced production technologies, including aerospace technologies, to foreign production partners. These partners, located mainly in East Asia, have undertaken to low-ball their prices and have thereby boosted GE’s quarterly earnings, but at the cost of hollowing out the American industrial base. You may not have seen much written about this subject in recent years but the trend is acutely apparent in U.S. trade figures. With its industrial base almost gone, America has consistently in recent years run a current account deficit of 4 to 6 percent of GDP – the weakest trade performance of any major nation in history. The geopolitical consequences could hardly be more disastrous as the United States has come increasingly to depend on funding from such creditor nations as China and Japan. It is not an exaggeration to say that America’s role now has been reduced to borrowing from China to save the world from China. [...] (12) Japan's non-tariff barriers - Eamonn Fingleton http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/04/20/whats-japans-guiltiest-secret-hint-its-not-the-comfort-women/ Eamonn Fingleton, Contributor What's Japan's Guiltiest Secret?: (Hint) It's Not The Comfort Women For anyone who follows East Asia, here's a question: what is Japan's guiltiest secret? The "comfort women" scandal? The Nanking massacre? Official homage to war criminals at the Yasukuni shrine? No, no, and no. If by a guilty secret we mean something that Japan really, really wants to sweep under the rug, none of the above comes even close. Japan actually often goes out of its way to publicize these issues: click here for the official Japanese news agency's account of today's carefully timed visit by Keiji Furuya to Yasukuni. With Kyodo's help and the fact that Easter Sunday is, of course, a particularly slow news day in the West, this relative nonentity has made headlines everywhere from the South China Morning Post to the BBC World Service. We will look more closely at Japan's attitude to such controversies in a moment. For now let's note that Japan does have secrets and big ones - secrets it strives with unique ingenuity and success to keep out of the Western media. Top of the list is something that - at least for those of us who know Japan - is hidden in plain sight: the Japanese auto market. Fifty years after the Tokyo authorities ostensibly began opening to free trade, the Japanese auto market remains one of the world's most closed. I don't mean just that Detroit-made cars don't get a look in. These are, with few exceptions, unsuitable for Japanese roads. But the Detroit Big Three's subsidiaries in Europe make plenty of cars that - in a fair world - should do well in Japan. After all such cars compete, and in many cases compete strongly, against Japanese competition across Europe. They don't have a prayer against Japan's non-tariff barriers. Even more tellingly Volkswagen is a tiny also-ran in Japan, with just 1 percent of the market. Yet Volkswagen is no slouch in other markets and in fact ranks broadly equal to Toyota as the world's largest auto-maker (the days when that title seemed to be General Motors's by birthright are gone). Then there is Renault, which is supposedly (at least if you believe the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) the senior partner in an alliance with Japan's second largest automaker Nissan. For more than a decade now Renault chief Carlos Ghosn has been trying to get Renault cars into Nissan showrooms. The last I heard he was even living much of his time in the posh Tokyo district of Azabu in one of the world's more expensive rental apartments. He has remarkably little to show for his efforts: to the extent that the Renault has established any presence in Japan it is as a make of bicycles. Made under license in Taiwan, Renault bicycles have captured, on an optimistic count, perhaps 1 percent of the Japanese bicycle market! The Yasukuni Shrine: always in the news but at least no one is talking about the car market. Photo credit: Wikipedia) Of course, umpteen times over the years the problem of Japan's closed market has been declared solved. Nobuhiko Ushiba, who served as Japan's ambassador to Washington in the early 1970s, once told reporters: "There is no example in recent history of a nation liberalizing trade policy as fast as Japan." Meanwhile in 1982, Japanese foreign minister Yoshio Sakurauchi assured a meeting of the GATT that Japan "is one of the most open markets in the world." A particularly impressive-sounding assurance came from President Bill Clinton in 1995. Speaking in the White House Briefing Room, with Japanese Trade Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto looking on impassively, Clinton announced that Japan had agreed "to truly open its auto and auto parts markets to American companies." He added: "This agreement is specific. It is measurable. It will achieve real, concrete results ... we finally have an agreement that will move cars and parts both ways between the United States and Japan. This breakthrough is a major step toward free trade throughout the world." It was all empty rhetoric, of course, as Clinton surely knew. The interesting thing is that the American press has never revisited the record, not even the reliably anti-Clinton Wall Street Journal. Anyone who knows the Tokyo news business knows why. The Japanese authorities keep the foreign press on a remarkably tight leash and, with virtually no exceptions, foreign correspondents are induced to censor themselves. As a practical matter, Tokyo wields a panoply of carrots and sticks in controlling what Japan-based foreigners say to the outside world and most long-term foreign residents are overt or covert agents for Japan's public relations agenda. Foreign correspondents are no exception. Don't believe me? Do a Google search. The most important single fact about the Japanese auto market is that for decades the share of all foreign brands combined has been kept to just 4 percent. When did you last read that in the New York Times? It is also worth searching for a statement put out last July by the American Automotive Policy Council itemizing some of the most blatant of Japan's non-tariff barriers. It received virtually no coverage in the U.S. press. Yet it is hard to exaggerate the consequences for the global economy. Thanks to assiduous protectionism, the Japanese domestic auto market remains a high-price sanctuary. The huge profits earned there enable Japanese auto makers to invest at a super-fast rate in ever more efficient production technology, all the while pricing aggressively in foreign markets. Nor is the global auto market a small prize. The fact is that autos and auto parts are by far the largest single manufacturing category in world trade. Now let's consider the comfort women scandal and other widely publicized manifestations of Japan's "failure to come to terms with its past." The first thing to note is that no one alive today had any responsibility for the war, thus everyone has an alibi. For a nation with some real skeletons in its closet, controversy over the war-time past is actually a safe issue and if things become a little too heated the Prime Minister or Emperor can always step in with another apology, thus putting the issue to bed until further notice. Seen in this light there is no point in Tokyo covering up such issues. Quite the contrary. While the foreign press busies itself with the often completely contrived issues of the war-time past, it has less time and energy to delve into issues on which the Tokyo authorities really want to maintain radio silence. The most obvious indicator that Tokyo has no interest in suppressing the controversies is the behavior of the Japan Times, a semi-official English language newspaper that the Dutch Japanologist Karel van Wolferen has characterized as the Tokyo Foreign Ministry's megaphone. What is clear is that as most American and British correspondents in Tokyo don't read Japanese, the Japan Times is the unstated source of many of their reports. A closely related matter is the role of Kyodo, the official news agency whose English-language service follows the same editorial policy as the Japan Times. On issues that the authorities really want to sweep under the rug, the Japan Times and Kyodo cooperate fully. Besides the auto market issue, another key issue that has traditionally been censored in Tokyo is Japan's stonewalling on compensation to war victims. In sharp contrast to Germany, Japan has paid virtually nothing to victims of its war crimes - a fact that for decades was kept almost completely sub-rosa in the Western press. (Things have been liberalized somewhat in the last few years, now that most of the victims are dead.) (13) President Trump will declare US bankruptcy http://ellenbrown.com/2015/08/18/trumping-the-federal-debt-without-playing-the-default-card/ Trumping the Federal Debt Without Playing the Default Card Posted on August 18, 2015 by Ellen Brown "The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default." — Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan on Meet the Press, August 2011 In a post on "Sovereign Man" dated August 14th, Simon Black argued that Donald Trump may be the right man for the presidency: [T]here’s one thing that really sets him apart, that, in my opinion, makes him the most qualified person for the job: Donald Trump is an expert at declaring bankruptcy. When the going gets tough, Trump stiffs his creditors. He’s done it four times! Candidly, this is precisely what the Land of the Free needs right now: someone who can stop beating around the bush and just get on with it already. Black says the country is officially bankrupt, with the government’s financial statements showing a negative net worth of $17.7 trillion: Nations that pass the economic point of no return can’t rebuild until they hit rock bottom. And the US is way past that point. So let’s get on with it already and hit the reset button. Black recommends doing this by defaulting, preferably on Social Security and Medicare. But that is unlikely to suit this leading Republican candidate. As Trump said on Meet the Press on August 16: I want people to be taken care of from a healthcare standpoint.… I want to save Social Security without cuts. I want … a strong country with very little debt. How can the country remain strong with very little debt, without defaulting on Social Security, Medicare, or the federal debt itself? There is a way. The government can reduce the debt by buying it – and ripping it up. The debt can be bought either with debt-free US Notes of the sort issued during the Civil War, or with US dollars issued by the Federal Reserve in the form of "quantitative easing." The vast majority of the money supply today is created by banks when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged. Banks create money by "monetizing" debt, turning loans into the digital deposits that make up most of the circulating money supply. The government could push the reset button by monetizing its own debt, turning it into what it should have been all along – debt-free, interest-free dollars. As Thomas Edison observed in 1921: If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. . . . It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People. That is not just a quaint idea from the 1920s. Credible authorities are making that argument today. In November 2010, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, wrote in response to the debt ceiling crisis: There is no reason that the Fed can’t just buy this debt (as it is largely doing) and hold it indefinitely. If the Fed holds the debt, there is no interest burden for future taxpayers. The Fed refunds its interest earnings to the Treasury every year. Last year the Fed refunded almost $80 billion in interest to the Treasury, nearly 40 percent of the country’s net interest burden. And the Fed has other tools to ensure that the expansion of the monetary base required to purchase the debt does not lead to inflation. In 2011, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul proposed dealing with the debt ceiling by simply voiding out the $1.7 trillion in federal securities then held by the Fed. As Stephen Gandel explained Paul’s solution in Time Magazine, the Treasury pays interest on the securities to the Fed, which returns 90% of these payments to the Treasury. Despite this shell game of payments, the $1.7 trillion in US bonds owned by the Fed is still counted toward the debt ceiling. Paul’s plan: Get the Fed and the Treasury to rip up that debt. It’s fake debt anyway. And the Fed is legally allowed to return the debt to the Treasury to be destroyed. Congressman Alan Grayson, a Democrat, also endorsed this proposal. In February 2015, financial author Richard Duncan made a strong case for going further than monetizing existing debt. He argued that under current market conditions, the US could rebuild its collapsing infrastructure with quantitative easing without causing price inflation. Prices go up when demand (money) exceeds supply (goods and services); and with automation and the availability of cheap labor in vast global markets today, supply (productivity) can keep up with demand for decades to come. Duncan observed: Quantitative Easing has only been possible because it has occurred at a time when Globalization is driving down the price of labor and industrial goods. The combination of fiat money and Globalization creates a unique moment in history where the governments of the developed economies can print money on an aggressive scale without causing inflation. They should take advantage of this once-in-history opportunity to borrow more in order to invest in new industries and technologies, to restructure their economies and to retrain and educate their workforce at the post-graduate level. If they do, they could not only end the global economic crisis, but also ensure that the standard of living in the developed world continues to improve, rather than sinking down to third world levels. Abraham Lincoln revived the colonial system of government-issued money when he endorsed the printing of $450 million in US Notes or "greenbacks" during the Civil War. The greenbacks not only helped the Union win the war but triggered a period of robust national growth and saved the taxpayers about $14 billion in interest payments (figuring an average of $300 million in outstanding US Notes over 150 years, at an average real interest rate of 2.6% compounded annually). The US federal debt has been growing ever since 1835, when President Andrew Jackson last paid it off and closed down the Second US Bank. If judicious use of US Notes had continued to the present, there might now be no federal debt at all. The Inflation Snag In short, the sovereign debt crisis can be solved by issuing sovereign money. But is there really such a thing as a free lunch? Wouldn’t buying up the debt with newly-issued money lead to a hyperinflationary disaster?That was the fear when the Federal Reserve began its QE program in 2008. But the Fed has now monetized $4.5 trillion in QE ($2.7 trillion of which consisted of buying back federal securities, and these fears have not materialized. The stock market has gone up, but not apparently from an increased money supply. More likely it is from very low interest rates, making bonds unattractive and facilitating stock buybacks and borrowing to invest. The cost of produce has gone up, but it is largely because of drought in California, which supplies nearly half the country’s fruits, vegetables and nuts; and because speculators have moved into foodstuffs. Despite all that, the overall inflation rate remains at manageable levels. Why didn’t $4.5 trillion in QE drive prices into the stratosphere? As financial writer Matthew Kerkhoff explained in a November 2013 article, quantitative easing is just an asset swap: When the Fed creates $85 billion, it uses this money to buy bonds . . . . When the Fed creates and gives $85 billion in reserves to its member banks, it removes $85 billion worth of assets (bonds) from the balance sheets of those same member banks. The result is that no new net financial assets enter the economy. . . . It’s much more accurate to think of the Fed’s QE program as an asset swap. In fact it’s even more accurate to think of it as a liquidity swap. . . . In this context liquidity refers to the ease with which money can be used. Bonds are more cumbersome to spend than cash, but they still represent purchasing power. Government securities that can be quickly converted into cash or that are near maturity are considered a form of "near money". When the Fed buys the bonds, it is simply converting this less-liquid money back into more-liquid money. As Warren Mosler and John Carney explain on CNBC.com: Quantitative easing is about the Fed buying Treasury securities. When you (voluntarily) sell them to the Fed, at current market prices, the Fed just shifts your dollars from your securities account to your bank’s reserve account, all at the Fed. So why should that do anything to the economy? You have the same amount of dollars, and you could have shifted them in the same market place any time you wanted in any case. The QE liquidity swap does not increase the circulating money supply. The money supply increased when the bonds were issued – when the debt was incurred and the government spent the funds. Adding to the federal debt beyond its current level (i.e. by funding infrastructure with new QE that is not repaid with taxes) would increase the money competing for goods and services. But the economy actually needs that increased "demand" in order to promote full employment (one of the Fed’s mandates). Demand (money) precedes supply (goods and services). The money has to be out there searching for goods and services before employers will add more workers to create this increased supply. Money can be added to the point of full productive capacity (full use of workers, supplies and machines) before adding more will drive up prices. And as Richard Duncan observes, we are a long way from full productive capacity now. Whether full productive capacity would exhaust the earth’s resources is another question, but there are many ways to put people to work that either don’t use physical resources (e.g. education, art, social service, environmental cleanup) or that actually make resource use more efficient (investment in improved infrastructure, sustainable energy, research and development). Time to Reset Back to Donald Trump. Besides his experience with bankruptcy, Trump, along with Bernie Sanders on the left, is unique in not being beholden to big money. Sanders does not take it, and Trump does not need it. If either candidate makes it to the White House, he will be in a position to stand up to Wall Street and do what is right for the country. And that includes restoring the power to issue the national money supply to the people of the nation through their representative government. (14) Trump says Putin has every right to support, defend and protect Assad http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/10/02/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-gets-an-a-for-leadership/ Donald Trump: Vladimir Putin Gets an A for Leadership By Jonas E. Alexis on October 2, 2015 Donald Trump has surprised some people a few days ago. He said that Putin is certainly getting an A for his leadership. Not only that, Trump said that Putin has every right to support, defend and protect Assad in Syria.[1] Trump made another good point by saying that taking in Syrian refugees in the U.S. can backfire because you never know if they are really refugees.[2] "They could be Isis," he said, and "they are all strong."[3] The refugee crisis in the Middle East, he added, could be "one of the great tactical ploys of all time."[4] Well, Mr. Trump, welcome to the club. We have been saying that the refugee crisis is indeed one of the most covert "tactical ploys" in the history of psychological warfare. But those "tactical ploys" did not come out of thin air. NWO agents and Satan worshipers used those "tactical ploys" to beat Europe over the head and to literally destroy nations, families, decent people, and indeed Western civilization. Of course, Trump did not get great accolades by NWO agents and Satan worshipers for saying some of these things. Matt Stone, the Jewish co-creator of South Park, one of the most disgusting animated sitcoms in America, portrayed Trump being raped and murdered [...] It got worse. Another Jew by the name of Sarah Levy from Oregon collected her own menstrual blood in a Diva cup and used it to paint an image of Donald Trump.[7] This is no joke: Andres Jauregui, Huffington Post editor, entitled one of his articles: "This Handsome Donald Trump Menstrual Blood Portrait Will Help Immigrants."[8] Hopefully this guys was not being serious. [...] [1] Chris, Spargo, "Donald Trump calls Putin better leader than Obama and admits he has to grow up to get Republican nomination after he ends his week long self-imposed exile from Fox News," Daily Mail, September 30, 2015; "Donald Trump supports Russian efforts to tackle Isis in Syria," The Independent, September 29, 2015. [2] Ben Jacobs and Tom McCarthy, "’They could be Isis.’ Donald Trump warns against taking Syrian refugees," Guardian, October 1, 2015. [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid. [5] Quoted in Brian C. Anderson, South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias (Washington DC: Regnery, 2005), 74-75. [6] Quoted in Heather Havrilesky, "Puppet masters," Guardian, October 12, 2004. [7] "Portland artist uses period blood for Trump portrait," USA Today, September 16, 2015; Carly Stern, "Artist uses her menstrual blood and a tampon to paint a portrait of Donald Trump in protest at the presidential candidate’s ‘outrageous’ and ‘sexist’ comments," Daily Mail, September 16, 2015. [8] Andres Jauregui, "This Handsome Donald Trump Menstrual Blood Portrait Will Help Immigrants," Huffington Post, September 14, 2015. [...] (15) Trump: let Russia fight Islamist extremists http://sputniknews.com/us/20150924/1027433298.html 02:33 24.09.2015 (updated 02:45 24.09.2015) Donald Trump urged the White House to let Russia fight ISIL because the Russians want to prevent terrorists from entering their country. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — US presidential candidate Donald Trump urged the White House during a campaign speech on Wednesday evening to let Russia fight ISIL because the Russians want to prevent terrorists from entering their country. "You have Russia wanting to fight ISIS [ISIL]," Trump said at a town hall meeting in South Carolina. "Let Russia fight ISIS - they don’t want ISIS coming into Russia." The Obama administration has been critical of Russia’s support for Syrian President Bashar Assad in the fight against ISIL. Moscow has urged the US-led coalition against the Islamic State to join forces with the Syrian government in its fight against the violent Islamist extremists. On Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that Washington was prepared to immediately begin a dialogue with Russia on the war in Syria. On Sunday, Kerry stated he would meet with Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov to discuss the Syrian civil war at the upcoming UN General Assembly meetings in New York. Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, garnering more than 30 percent of likely voter support in recent polling. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump got 38 and 31 percent of support respectively in a Bloomberg poll released on Wednesday. (16) Trump praises Putin; would be friends with him, if elected http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3254412/Donald-Trump-calls-Putin-better-leader-Obama-admits-grow-Republican-nomination-ends-week-long-self-imposed-exile-Fox-News.html Donald Trump calls Putin better leader than Obama and admits he has to grow up to get Republican nomination after he ends his week long self-imposed exile from Fox News Donald Trump appeared on The O'Reilly Factor Thursday night a week after his self-imposed exile from Fox News     Trump praised Vladmir Putin and his leadership on the program, saying he was far better than President Obama    He also acknowledged that he will need to mature to secure the Republican nomination next     Trump then made an apology for calling fellow candidate Marco Rubio a 'clown' By Chris Spargo For Dailymail.com Published: 16:08 EST, 30 September 2015 | Updated: 18:21 EST, 30 September 2015 Donald Trump praised Vladmir Putin and even gave himself some critiques as he appeared on Fox News Tuesday night after exiling himself from the network - for a week. The Republican hopeful appeared on The O'Reilly Factor where he told host Bill O'Reilly that Putin is a much better leader than President Obama and that he had to 'mature' before he can get the nomination from his party. ... Speaking about Putin he said that if he were elected he would be able to be friends with the Russian leader, and then praised his skills. 'I will tell you that, in terms of leadership, he's getting an "A" and our president is not doing so well,' he said. 'They did not look good together,' he added, referring to their recent tense meeting at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. He also said he agreed with Putin on his backing of Syrian President Bashar Assad. (17) Trump supports Russian efforts to tackle Isis in Syria http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/donald-trump-supports-russian-efforts-to-tackle-isis-in-syria-a6671941.html Donald Trump supports Russian efforts to tackle Isis in Syria Tycoon said supporting Putin was better option than being 'jealous' Andrew Buncombe New York Tuesday 29 September 2015 13:57 BST Leading Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump on Tuesday said he supported Russian efforts to fight Isis militants in the Middle East, including Syria. Asked whether he backed those like Russia who supported Syrian President Bashar al Assad, or those who see him as the source of Syria's current crisis, Mr Trump told NBC: "I side with the group that says if Russia wants to go and fight ISIS, you should let them as opposed to saying were jealous we don't want you to do that." Reuters reported that the 69-year-old Mr Trump, who is leading public opinion polls among those seeking the Republican Party's bid to win the White House in the 2016 election, said the United States should support those who want to destroy the militant group that has taken over large parts of Syria, as well as neighbouring Iraq. Republicans have criticised Democratic US President Barack Obama's foreign policy in Syria, which has been mired in civil war for four years and has seen an influx of Islamic State militants. Asked about whether Mr Assad was the source of the country's ills, Mr Trump said it was not clear and questioned who would replace him if he were ousted. "The people that want to come in and replace Assad, nobody knows who they are and they could end up being worse," he said. "We're constantly going out and siding with people and they turn out to be worse than the people who were there before." -- Peter Myers Australia website: http://mailstar.net/index.html |
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