One politician’s view of the new “trade” agreements, TTP and TTIP

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Quotation:  “Our so-called free trade policies have been a disaster for the United States ever since NAFTA was enacted. Before NAFTA went into effect 20 years ago, we never had had a trade deficit of more than $135 billion. Every single year since then, for 20 years in a row, our trade deficit has been over $135 billion. Our last 14 trade deficits have been the 14 largest trade deficits not only in our history, but in the history of the entire world. And the result of that is that we’ve gone from $2 trillion in surplus with our trade to $11 trillion in debt. And we’ve lost five million manufacturing jobs and roughly 15 million other jobs in the last 20 years. So we’ve lost twice: We’ve lost the jobs, and we’ve also gone deeper and deeper into debt.

What’s happening is not that we’re buying goods and services from foreigners and they’re buying an equal amount of goods and services from us-that’s the way free trade is supposed to work. What’s actually happening is that we’re buying our goods and services from foreigners, and they are taking the money that we give to them for that, and buying our assets.

That has all sorts of consequences for our economy. First we lose those jobs. Secondly, it makes American income and wealth more and more unequal. The reason why we have the fourth most unequal distribution of wealth in the world is because of fake trade. The reason why we have a bizarre, and at this point unprecedented, “quantitative easing” [monetary] policy, where the government uses the cash in our pockets to buy up assets and drive those asset prices up further and further, is because of fake trade. The reason why we have a federal deficit is because we have a trade deficit. The TPP, “fast-track,” the Transatlantic version of TPP, these dramatically increase the amount of countries with whom we have this relationship – they quadruple them – and they put us on a fast track to Hell, where America is nothing but cheap labor and debt slavery. . . .”  (Representative Alan Grayson, Democrat, Florida)

Editor’s note: Grayson is standing for the US Congress.

 

Feeling you have less and less in common with some others?

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12% of 16- to 24-year-old Brits think honey is produced by farmers squeezing bees. A fifth think fish fingers are made from the fingers of fish. 15% don’t know that lamb comes from sheep. 9% think potatoes grow on trees.    (Rowse/Daily Mirror)

And now 52% of their elders want to leave the EU.  Good arguments for retirement into an Epicurean garden .

Terrorism and the complicity of the gun advocates

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Where can terrorists buy guns? Why, the United States! Federal law prohibits felons, fugitives, drug addicts and domestic abusers from purchasing firearms, but it excludes anyone on an FBI watchlist.  From 2004  to 2014 suspected terrorists tried to buy guns 2,233 times, according to the Washington Post, and 91% of the time they succeeded.

Apparently, this is an important source of weaponry for plotters in Europe and for all we know it was American guns that caused the mayhem in Paris!  Shouldn’t we take a grown- up view and stop suspects from buying arms?  Seems to me that if you come over to the US as a EU citizen on a special visa and you are found buying a gun, it is reasonable to add 2 to 2 and draw the reasonable conclusion that the answer is 4.   But the NRA and its friends won’t have  it, of course, I presume on the basis that, if you do that, you infringe on the constitutional right of Gun owners to shoot wherever they wish.

Ataraxia – peace of mind – grows more distant with every innocent life taken by guns in America.

Samuel Johnson and colonialism

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To The Guardian
If Edward Said “could find no objections to colonialism and imperialism in English literature”, he was quite wrong. Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was a fierce critic of colonial wars. In his Life of Mr Richard Savage, he attacked “the enormous wickedness of making war upon barbarous natives, because they cannot resist, and of invading countries, because they are fruitful” .   He drank a toast in front of horrified fellow diners at an Oxford college to the “success of the next negro revolt in the West Indies”, and was against American independence from Great Britain because “these yelpers for liberty are drivers of negroes”. He called the seven years’ war over territories in India and the Americas between Britain and France a “fight among robbers”.
Barry Winkleman, London

Epicurus might have observed that such as colonial wars and the imposition of Western rule on those unused to it, are always eventually bound to rebound on the colonisers.  It was too easy to begin with and too difficult, and often unprofitable into the bargain, to continue. The stupid mis-steps by France and Britain in Mesopotamia and Palestine after World War One are a prime example.

Spoiling children

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“If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things”.  (Novelist Norman Douglas, quoted on Forbes.com)

Bon mot.  Some children are showered with gifts of all kinds, and, by the way, are seldom made to even text a “thank you”, let alone write a letter.  I have noticed that the spoiled kids are generally the most grumpy and the least happy.  Mankind needs things to work for, a sense of schievment, however small.  Age is irrelevant to this general rule.

Sensible parents are sparing with their gifts, and make special privileges dependent on carrying out jobs in the house, or anything that indicates reward for effort.  They don’t have to excel, just be conscientious and reliable. When they are teenagers they might be encouraged to deliver newspapers or something similar, to give them an idea what it it is like working for money.  Simply giving it in return for nothing  is actually damaging.