September 29, 2015
By CBC News
...Tomorrow, (click here) International Trade Minister Ed Fast will join the Canadian delegation in Atlanta for two days of talks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Conservatives hope to close the deal that would establish the world's biggest free-trade zone just weeks before the Oct. 19 federal election....
...CBC News reported Friday that Canadian negotiators are prepared to concede a share of Canada's domestic dairy market to reach an agreement. American negotiators have demanded 10 per cent access to Canada's dairy markets under the TPP, but Canada rejected that proposal during talks in Hawaii in July.
Farmers brought placards, cattle and tractors to Parliament Hill Tuesday to protest any changes that could harm their industry....
No one will find this, the TPP, on the American media, but, you can always find the culture of fear and worry about Islamic extremists.
September 27, 2015
By Michael McCarthy
...Evidently (click here) the buildings were originally built for offices and light manufacturing, supporting tens of thousands of well-paying blue-collar jobs. In the 1970s President Richard Nixon, scraping the bottom of the polls, decided to reinvent himself as a global statesman. He signed a trade deal with a formerly hated enemy, the Communist People’s Republic of China. Immediately U.S. corporations rushed to “offshore” jobs to China where labour costs were minimal. Factory gulags sprung up like mushrooms.
The AFL-CIO estimates that repression of labour rights in China by the Communist government lowered US manufacturing costs up to 86 per cent as part of this deal. According to the Economic Policy Institute, since 2001 when China entered the World Trade Organization, the trade deal with China has cost the U.S. 3.2 million jobs, and three quarters of those jobs were in light manufacturing. Another report by Working America shows manufacturing employment collapsed from a high of 19.5 million workers in June 1979 to 11.5 workers in December 2009, a drop of 8 million workers over 30 years. Between August 2000 and February 2004, American manufacturing jobs were lost to China for 43 consecutive months, the longest such stretch since the Great Depression.
Everything you buy now is marked “made in China.” China has become rich and American corporations have thrived from lower expenses and higher profits, but the average working stiff has not. You can see thousands of these stiffs, now old and decrepit, wandering the streets of downtown L.A., wondering what happened.
U.S. 3.2 million jobs gone. Puff and it was all over. Then people wonder what happened to the USA economy. Well, dah. How is your neighbor doing? What are your house values like? How are those two extra houses you bought during the years of Bush turned out? Make you a millionaire yet?
There are very few allies, if any, that are happy about this TPP mess.
September 29, 2015
By Patricia Ranaid
Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Ministers' (click here) talks between the US, Australia, Japan and nine other Pacific Rim countries are set to resume on September 30 in Atlanta, Georgia in a final attempt to complete the deal before the Canadian elections in mid-October and the intensification of the US presidential race. The TPP is so unpopular that these governments want it signed before elections take place, without further public debate.
The last TPP Ministerial talks collapsed at the end of July, because the US and Japan could not agree about market access to their own agricultural and vehicle markets, and so could not make market access offers to others. Market access talks between the US, Japan, Mexico and Canada, and between those countries, Australia and others have continued. Trade Ministers will meet to seal the deal with final trade-offs only if market access issues are resolved.
The TPP is promoted as a huge trade deal covering 40 per cent of the global economy. Australia has little to gain because it already has free trade agreements with nine of the 12 countries, but could lose much. The US is driving the agenda on behalf of its pharmaceutical, media and tobacco industries, which want rules which suit their needs, but would tie the hands of future governments....
I've always said, what the world needs is the export of lung cancer. I mean it. It is perfect. Export lung cancer and call in Big Pharma, what could be better?
Wikileaks - TPP (click here)
