Posted on 05/14/2009 8:21:08 AM PDT by 1rudeboy
I’m certainly not against a profit.
What I’m against is becoming indebted to communists. In what sane universe does the United States want Communists being our bankers?
The Code Pinkos would love the idea that the US has sold out to the PRC.... if only they could put down their bongs long enough to understand it.
The Code Pinkos, however, would find living in China for a year quite enlightening. There is no social safety net such as ours in China. None. There is only a state-commanded mercantile authoritarian government, with quotas for production.
Yes, if we said “free-er” markets and “free-er” trade, I’d be on board.
The move to de-reserve the US currency would not happen if the US were not in so much debt. The ONLY way the huge trade and current account deficits would not happen is if we did not have a huge trade imbalance, and the only way that trade will be brought back into balance is to ditch the stupid free trade agreements as they’re currently defined - in particular, the one with China first, and Japan second.
Once the US dollar loses reserve status, the US consumer is going to see a period of rapid inflation, because we currently enjoy a price stability in our trade accounts that other nations do not - because world trade has been settled in dollars. Look at what happened to the UK post-WWII for an example of what happens when a nation’s accounts are settled in a currency that once was a reserve currency.
There is no lack of interference in US trade currently. We’ve just sold out to extra-national outfits like the WTO. The idea that the current trade scheme is “free” is the stuff of myth and propaganda. Why do we need to negotiate these trade agreements through some extra-national trade organization? The US government has all the powers needed to make trade agreements with any nation we so choose. Why go into nonsense like Doha, where it is either “everyone on board, or nothing is agreed to?” That’s stupid.
There’s no reason why we should be allowing the French obsession with ag subsidies to muck up US trade agreements with South American countries - but that is exactly what we’re doing right now due to the “free trade” dogma that the GOP has bought into, hook, line and sinker.
I hate to break it to you, but we don't have free trade agreements with China or Japan.
Not only do we not have FTA’s with China and Japan, I can’t get a handle on what AIG has to do with all of this. As far as I can tell, the commielibs are simply using it as a political football.
One other thing: let’s figure that U.S. goods exports to Panama have fallen by 50% due to the recent downturn (not an unreasonable amount to assume). We’re still talking about $2 billion of goods . . . .
Yeah, right... cuz only a commie or a lib would be concerned about money laundering and corruption. /s
Sheesh!
Huh? What? Where have you been, Mr. van Winkle?
Yea, we do. Again, they’re through the extra-national agreements first brought to fruition during the late 80’s and especially during the 90’s.
For Japan, go look up the “Uruguay Round” during the Clinton administration.
WRT China, first, we have accorded them MFN (now called “NTR”), and then China is a member of the WTO as of late 2001.
Go look at the extra-national trade agreements and treaties. WTO, and the previous GATT, etc. When we agree to these things, and then some other country agrees to join in the “round” (as in Uruguay Round, or Doha Round) of negotiations, we’re allowing those extra-national trade organizations to set our trade policy - without any further enabling legislation necessary on our part.
When other countries who are members of the WTO don’t like how we’re conducting ourselves WRT to economic trade policy, they can bring a case against us to the WTO and get penalties assessed against our trade until such time as we take corrective action.
Huh? What? Where have you been, Mr. van Winkle? Yea, we do.
I know when the FTA with Mexico and Canada passed Congress, I know when the FTA with El Salvador passed, I even know when the FTA with Morocco passed.
Maybe you can show me when the FTA with China or Japan passed. Take your time.
OK, I’ll amend that:
We don’t have a bi-lateral “Free Trade Agreement” as we do with, say, Canada with China or Japan, that has the words “Free Trade Agreement” in the title. Mea culpa for not differentiating between the legal term and the trade fetish that is so popular, ie, the libertarian nonsense of “free trade.”
We do have a “free trade policy” (as the WTO bureaucrats liked to tell us farmers) with both countries in that they’re both accorded MFN status and we have lowered our trade barriers to them as part of the multi-lateral WTO agreements.
When one is actually in the business of exporting, the US bureaucrats like to tell producers “We have an agreement, and we have to abide by it!” and such poppyrot.
What they never explain is why the Japanese are allowed to turn back ag products on a whim, while we have to accept melamine from China, and all concerned are part of the same global “free trade” agreement.
There’s nothing that gets farmers madder than this “free trade” nonsense on the issue of food safety. We get the black eye and the price competition at the same time we end up with countries turning back our products on the slightest whim (eg, the EU and their ban on GMO foodstuffs for years...)
See next posting - they crossed in time.
We don’t have a bi-lateral “Free Trade Agreement” as we do with, say, Canada with China or Japan,
Excellent.
Mea culpa for not differentiating between the legal term and the trade fetish
Yeah, sorry for giving you a hard time for being so totally wrong.
We do have a “free trade policy”
Government rules mean we don't have free trade.
while we have to accept melamine from China
We have an agreement that says that? Could you cut and paste that section? Or will you be amending that statement too?
Only the ones using it as a convenient excuse, which should lead to the question, why are they (Ralph Nader, Arianna Huffington, Joe Conason, etc.) leading you by the nose?
Nope.
The way food importation works goes like this: if you can’t produce a test to show that there’s a regulatory non-compliance in the imported foodstuff, animal feed, etc, you have no reason to push back on the importer. The regulation allows for us to cause a hold at the port of entry, destruction in situ or re-exportation of goods that fail to meet our regulations — but you must inspect and/or test at the port of entry to enforce these regulations.
Congress has never funded (and will never fund) APHIS or the FDA to perform enough testing of imported foodstuffs or feed - regardless of what particular foodstuff, feed, or material we’re talking about to pre-emptively sample and test prior to a shipment being accepted into the US. Less than 1% of foodstuffs coming into the US are inspected, and the stuff from China got inspected only after farmers started getting their livestock product kicked back from processing plants because domestic animals fed feedstuffs from China were kicked back. It took US producers crawling back up the chain to get any import enforcement out of the USDA/FDA, just as it took people’s pets dying to get any action on dog food imports.
This is diametrically opposed to how Japan handles feed/food imports. When we hay farmers out of Nevada would ship racehorse hay to Japan, it was required to be inspected here in the US first (by Japanese inspectors), at the exporter (inspections were per Japanese regs).
Then when it would get to the dock in Japan, they’d have a whole bunch of guys sampling and examining the hay being unloaded from the conex - one picture we had was of a dozen guys inspecting hay. Think of it like the DOT here in the US — four guys doing the actual work, one supervising and the rest standing around with their thumbs up their buttocks. But EVERY container with hay is inspected. There are no gaps.
And if they didn’t like it? If they found anything out of compliance with their animal feed regs?
The hay was shoved back in the container, buttoned up and sent back to the US - at the US producer’s expense.
We have nothing like that going on here, and will likely never have it.
Unless you can show at the point of importation that it is failing regulatory compliance, you have to accept it.
And as I’ve mentioned previously, “free trade” and “free markets” are the sort of mental masturbation in which libertarians love to engage. They don’t exist.
When I'd ask them if the subsidies (again, or whatever) they collect were really necessary, the universal response was always a shrug and a comment along the lines of, "the other guy (farmer) gets his, I'm just shooting myself in the foot if I don't." I wouldn't really press the issue, because these were neighbors and acquaintances.
I just don't see how it is sound public policy to set up a program (that costs money to administer, obviously) that makes the users participate "because they get hurt if they don't." It seems to me that it would be far better for the government to allow these farmers find as many outlets for their products as possible. So you have (pick one) the protectionist Japanese making it hard for American farmers to sell their goods . . . it doesn't make any sense to shut those farmers out of Panama for it.
Farmers are indeed an interesting lot. And there are ‘liberal’ farmers, for some values of ‘liberal.’
There are probably no 60’s style ‘liberal’ (ie, flag-burning war protestors) farmers out there unless they’re the type that can call themselves farmers because they inherited land which they lease out to others who do the actual farming. But I do know several liberal farmers and many more who are Democrats, but more of the Truman-style Democrats (remember Harry was a farmer who spent a lot of time looking at the rear end of a horse...)
That said, the majority of farmers don’t take subsidies in the “big six” commodity crops. They support for “Freedom to Farm” in 1996 was pretty good throughout the ag community - the trouble was, the GOP didn’t hold fast to the idea of weening the big agri-businesses off their continued [ab]use of the subsidy programs. I can get into that at another time. It is a long story of huge, missed opportunities by the GOP - again, because they don’t have anyone in their ranks who really understands the issues.
Farmers, however, have been early supporters of “free trade” as a concept - only to see it blow up in their faces. I’d say that if you asked most farmers today “do you support ‘free trade’?” you’ll get a question in return “What do you mean by ‘free trade’?” - you won’t get a “Why golly, YES, sign me right up!” sort of cheerleader response. Back in the 1990’s, farmers were very much in support of “free trade.” Now they’ve learned - the hard way - to ask what do bureaucrats and politicians mean by “free trade?”
I’ll give you a couple examples:
We sign a Free Trade Agreement (which I’ll capitalize, so Toddster and I are on the same page) with Canada back in the 80’s, and then we get into NAFTA (which was another Free Trade Agreement (nb the caps again) with Canada and Mexico in the 90’s. Now we have co-mingling of the ag crop markets in the US and Canada. We no longer talk of “Canadian beef prices” and “US beef prices.” We talk pretty much of “What is the price of beef in Chicago?”
So, from the farmers’ perspective, what has been the result?
Well, here we go:
1. We were able to export more corn and beans to Mexico... but...
2. We got huge quantities of wheat dumped on us by the CWB (Canadian Wheat Board - a subject I can opine about at another time if necessary).
3. We got cattle dumped on us from Canada... which included BSE, ie ‘Mad Cow’ - which has been a PR disaster for the US beef industry, which has resulted in...
4. Japan, S. Korea and others putting restrictions on US beef because we (the US) did not catch the BSE coming over our northern border in time to prevent the cattle from getting into the US beef supply - not infecting US herds, but raising the very real possibility that US-labeled beef (ie, slaughtered and packed in the US, with a “US” label on it) that were originally from Canada and might have been “finished” (ie, fed the last month in the US) and “processed” (ie, slaughtered and turned into “box cuts” and ground beef) had BSE.
The first Canadian cow found with BSE in Washington is now known in beef producer circles as “The cow that stole Christmas” — because going into that late December, beef prices were fair to good - but they went limit-down for at least two days after the news of that cow hit.
Guess when a lot of producers ship their calves? That’s right - from October to December, depending on where you are.
5. As a result of (4), the USDA is now trying to ram down farmers’ and ranchers’ throats a birth-to-death animal tracking system. Get this: the US government refuses to find and deport illegal aliens, but under the USDA’s wet dream, you’ll be able to know EVERYTHING about US-produced beef - where it was born, what it ate, what was the vaccination program for said animal, where it was sold, how many times, to whom, where processed, where shipped to the consumer.
Literally cradle-to-grave tracking of all meat animals is what the USDA wants. It is known as “NAID” (National Animal ID) among farmers/ranchers.
Oh, and who will get to pay for this? The livestock producers, of course - because when it comes down to it, unless we force import meat producers to abide by the same regulations, the US consumer will naturally pick up the cheaper product in the store, leaving the US producer at a price disadvantage in the retail chains, which means that to comply with the USDA proposed regs, the producer pays.
There was never any need for animal ID until we started down this road to “free trade.” There wasn’t any BSE in the US animal herd. But because our trade partners want this to insure to them that we have the BSE problem under control (which never was “our” problem - it was a problem we imported from Canada), we’re going to bend over and pay again.
Why has there been so many cases of BSE found in Canadian cows (they’re up to 15 now)? Because they imported animal feed from the UK when the UK banned the sale of bloodmeal and bonemeal feeds after their wave of BSE. The Canadian producers clearly are feeding banned feed after the “use or destroy by” dates, because at least one of the animals found here in the US with BSE was younger than the feed ban - and was found to have been fed banned feed in Canada before being shipped down here.
This of “free trade” in ag a little like “free love” — it isn’t just who you sleep with. You’re effectively sleeping with everyone who your partner slept with in the past. Same deal in ag WRT pests, diseases and so on.
6. So why didn’t US beef producers protest the importation of Canadian cattle? They did. Loudly. The bigger powers in DC ignored the protests. They don’t care, they’re for “free trade uber alles” in DC. And the US beef producers wanted the border shut to untested cattle when only 3 cases had been found in Canada. The next 12 cases found in Canada have only served to reinforce the point of US cattle producers - the Canadians have a serious problem and they’re clearly NOT on top of it.
And yet, I can watch truckload after truckload of steers come south out of Canada, headed for feedlots in Nebraska and eastern Wyoming - every day.
Another example of “free trade” in the ag sector: South American countries ripping off GMO technology. The EU banned GMO soybean imports from the US some years back, so they started importing more beans from South America. Ahhhh... but the South Americans liked Roundup Ready beans - it makes cleaning up a field of beans so much easier than other weed elimination programs. These South American producers were “seed saving” — ie, they’d harvest some of their beans late and keep them for seeding next year’s crop, in direct violation of the Monsanto seed licensing agreement/contract.
Because these producers of course wanted to claim (with a straight face) that their beans were NOT Roundup Ready, the EU allowed them in while keeping US Roundup Ready beans out.
BTW — when the EU came down with this policy, a whole lot of farmers lost their shirts. It was late in the season and many farmers had already started or were well into harvesting. Suddenly the exporters said to farmers “Hey, you can’t export RR beans to the EU — so you need to certify that the beans you’re bringing to our elevators are non-GMO - and if we test your load and find out that they are RR beans, we’re docking you the difference in price, plus the penalty for spoiling whatever was in the elevator.”
So now farmers who had only a minority of their crop be RR beans were screwed - because they had co-mingled their non-RR and RR bean crops in their own grain bins, it was now as if the entire crop was RR. Again, “free trade” was such a triumph for American ag producers.
The US producers finally had to go to a really bizarre route of getting the South American countries to respect US “intellectual property” of the RR seed by a) testing beans being exported out of SA countries, b) showing that a very large proportion of those beans were RR, c) showing a lack of agreements with producers in SA countries relative to the amount of RR beans being exported, and d) then getting the WTO to allow the US to levy a license fee on beans being imported to the EU. The EU, remember, all this time had a restriction against importing RR beans from the US - at the same time they were importing RR beans that were being sold as conventional beans from SA.
Once the EU had to start paying up for RR beans, then they started testing the beans from SA, and the EU then had to make a decision: would they continue to ban RR beans from importation, or admit that it was a policy enacted specifically against the US?
This was a great example of why the WTO-style agreement is broken and why we should have bilateral agreements, where we could have sent someone over to the EU or France (where the real problem was) and said “Look, we either get this hashed out or we’re enacting a retaliatory measure...”)
“free trade” is a great talking point - until you’re a producer of a tangible product here in the US and you’re trying to comply with the export regs that change at an international level — and US producers as individuals have almost no input to these negotiations or issues at all. There’s no other way to get a voice into this process without a powerful lobby.
Economists talk as if there’s nothing but blue sky from “free trade” as a concept, but there are very real costs for the US, especially in food production, becoming even larger costs to consumers in terms of their health and safety.
I'm just not up on the details in agriculture, hence I don't post on the subject (unlike a few)
I admit I've never been rich enough to go into agriculture .... so shoot me eh?
No one has to be an expert on everything, but non-experts must not be smug about it.
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