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Title: Wall Street titans who crashed global economy in 2008 go big for TPP
Source:
Intellihub
URL Source: https://intellihub.com/wall-street- ... conomy-in-2008-go-big-for-tpp/
Published: May 6, 2015
Author: Jon Queally
Post Date: 2015-05-08 07:45:58 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 3696
Comments: 11
As billionaire class and financial elites push corporate-friendly pact, new data shows empty promises and ‘job-killing’ reality of previous agreements
By Jon Queally 
Executives from the financial institutions who received TARP funds, (L-R) Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase & Co Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, The Bank of New York Mellon CEO Robert P. Kelly, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis and State Street Corporation CEO and Chairman Ronald Logue testify before the House Financial Services Committee February 11, 2009 in Washington, DC.
Even as millions and millions of Americans—represented by thousands of labor, environmental, family farm, consumer, faith, Internet freedom and other advocacy organizations—continue to stand firmly in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, those backing the TPP, including President Obama and a large majority of the Republican caucus, still have two dedicated demographic groups pledging their allegiance to the cause and arguing the so-called “free trade agreement (FTA)” would be good for average workers and the economy overall: billionaires and Wall Street titans.
As Zach Carter of the Huffington Post reports:
Last week, dozens of New York City’s power elite signed a letter to the state’s congressional delegation, urging lawmakers to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership now in negotiations. Democrats in Congress largely oppose the TPP, and Republican leaders have said they don’t have the votes needed to pass it without Democratic support.
But while Obama has struggled to win over members of his own party — he has been publicly feuding with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — wealthy CEOs probably aren’t the ideal pitchmen to skeptical Democrats. Even if their letter hails the TPP as “a catalyst for creating new jobs in the United States” that will benefit “American workers in a broad range of industries.”
Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch signed the letter. So did Steven Schwarzman, who once compared the prospect of raising taxes on private equity magnates like himself to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. John Paulson, the Republican mega-donor who made a fortune betting against the housing market with Goldman Sachs, is also a signee. So is vulture investor Wilbur Ross, who spent six figures to support GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012 and has backed such conservative hardliners as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.).
Other signatories include real estate billionaire Jerry Speyer, who recently attended a $100,000-per-person fundraiser to bolster former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s White House hopes. The host of that event, private equity kingpin Henry Kravis, also signed.
News of the letter, which can be read in full here, came on the same day as new trade data released by the U.S. Census Bureau, covering the full first three years of the bilateral trade deal between the U.S. and South Korea, revealed that the U.S. goods trade deficit with that country has more than doubled since the agreement, first signed in 2007 and amended in 2010, was implemented.
What the new data shows, according to the advocacy group Public Citizen, is economic outcomes that are the opposite of the Obama administration’s “more exports, more jobs” promise used to push through that deal, which are the same promises the administration and those supporting TPP are now using as they attempt to persuade Congress to approve Fast Track authority and ram it through Congress without debate or amendment.
The new economic statistics, explains Public Citizen, offer a damning indictment of the promises on which such deals are sold:
U.S. goods exports to Korea have dropped 6 percent, or $2.7 billion, under the Korea FTA’s first three years, while goods imports from Korea have surged 19 percent, or $11.3 billion (comparing the deal’s third year to the year before implementation). As a result, the U.S. goods trade deficit with Korea has swelled 104 percent, or more than $14 billion. The trade deficit increase equates to the loss of more than 93,000 American jobs in the first three years of the Korea FTA, counting both exports and imports, according to the trade-jobs ratio that the Obama administration used to project gains from the deal.” [...]
Record-breaking U.S. trade deficits with Korea have become the new normal under the FTA – in 35 of the 36 months since the Korea FTA took effect, the U.S. goods trade deficit with Korea has exceeded the average monthly trade deficit seen in the three years before the deal. In January 2015, the monthly U.S. goods trade deficit with Korea topped $3 billion – the highest level on record.
The administration has tried to deflect attention from the failure of its Korea FTA by claiming that its poor performance has been caused by economic stagnation in Korea. However, Korea’s economy has grown during each year of the Korea FTA, while U.S. exports to Korea have not.
Despite those figures and the collapse of the U.S. manufacturing sector in the age of neoliberal globalization, the repeated line from TPP supporters is that these deals are ‘job creators.’ As the letter from the billionaire elites to the New York Congressional Delegation stated, “TPP would be a catalyst for creating new jobs in the United States, attracting more foreign investment to this country, and benefitting American workers in a broad range of industries.”
But that’s simply not what the evidence from past FTAs shows, said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, in a statement on Tuesday.
“Who’s going to buy the argument about Fast Track and the TPP creating ‘more exports, more jobs’ when Obama’s only major trade deal, used as the TPP template, was sold under that very slogan and yet has done the opposite?”
And Dave Johnson, from the Campaign for America’s Future, explained in a Tuesday post how none of this “just happened” by accident, but that corporate-friendly trade policies have created these ‘job-killing’ conditions:
Globalization is not some kind of inevitable natural process of history that has caught up with us. This was and is the result of intentional policy choices, designed to force deindustrialization, break unions, drive down wages and benefits and increase inequality as that pay differential is pocketed by a few. This is the result of the “free market, free trade” ideology that rose up in the late 70s. Free trade policy was and is designed to give a few plutocrats and their giant corporations — “the 1 percent” — increased power over governments.
Dean Baker, in “Globalization Was Policy, Not Something That Happened,” explained, “… inequality, like the path of globalization, is not something that happened. It was and is the result of conscious policy. We won’t be able to deal with it effectively until we acknowledge this simple fact.”
In his reporting for Huffington Post, Carter makes it clear that it wasn’t only billionaires who signed the letter urging for Fast Track and TPP approval. Some, he told his readers, were “merely millionaire CEOs” like Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein, Kenneth Chenault of American Express, and JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon.
This article originally appeared on Common Dreams. (1 image)
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In his reporting for Huffington Post, Carter makes it clear that it wasn’t only billionaires who signed the letter urging for Fast Track and TPP approval. Some, he told his readers, were “merely millionaire CEOs” like Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein, Kenneth Chenault of American Express, and JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon.
Who is surprised by this?
And who are they all supporting for prez? Hitlery.
#2. To: Deckard (#0)
"Even as millions and millions of Americans ... continue to stand firmly in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership ..."
Shit. Those millions and millions don't even know what the Trans-Pacific Partnership is.
And if Democrats, labor groups and environmentalists oppose it, that just makes me like it more. Whatever "it" is.
#3. To: misterwhite (#2)
And if Democrats, labor groups and environmentalists oppose it, that just makes me like it more. Whatever "it" is.
You will eat rat poison then. Cool.
#4. To: A Pole (#3)
"You will eat rat poison then. Cool."
Does your mom know that you're using her computer?
#5. To: Deckard (#0) (Edited)
Wall Street titans...
Today I saw a New Jersey license plate that read:
"BUYSTOX".
Yes, it was on a (EDIT) 'new' Mercedes.
#6. To: misterwhite, A Pole (#2)
And if Democrats, labor groups and environmentalists oppose it, that just makes me like it more.
Proud to be a Republican bobby, as you cheer the final nail being driven into America's coffin?
Republicans Open to Giving Obama 'Fast-Track' Trade Authority
Both sides of the Capitol were witness to an unusual scene Tuesday, as Republicans praised the efforts of a member of the Obama administration while Democrats looked on with skepticism.
U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman testified before the Senate Finance Committee in the morning before crossing the rotunda to face questioning in front of the House Ways and Means Committee on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal involving 12 countries that has been under negotiation since 2005.
Republican majorities in both committees sounded amenable to granting President Barack Obama the trade promotion agreement he pushed for during the State of the Union address last week — an approval considered essential to reaching a deal.
Under the so-called “fast-track” authority, Congress can set the terms under which the U.S. negotiates but would strip the legislative branch of the ability to either filibuster or amend a trade agreement and require lawmakers to take an up-or-down vote.
Bet you cheered for NAFTA as well.
Guess that's no surprise since you believe that United Nations treaties and pacts can supersede American laws.
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” - Ron Paul
Americans who have no experience with, or knowledge of, tyranny believe that only terrorists will experience the unchecked power of the state. They will believe this until it happens to them, or their children, or their friends.
Paul Craig Roberts#7. To: TooConservative (#1)
And who are they all supporting for prez? Hitlery.
For obvious reasons, the article omits this connection.
"For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb.” (Psalm 139:13)
#8. To: TooConservative (#1) (Edited)
Who is surprised by this?And who are they all supporting for prez? Hitlery.
Seems to me that some the Republican's big money donors are the guys who are on-board with Obama on this.
Globalist swine like these guys don't care who is elected as long as their NWO agenda is advanced.
Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch signed the letter. So did Steven Schwarzman, who once compared the prospect of raising taxes on private equity magnates like himself to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. John Paulson, the Republican mega-donor who made a fortune betting against the housing market with Goldman Sachs, is also a signee. So is vulture investor Wilbur Ross, who spent six figures to support GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012 and has backed such conservative hardliners as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and former Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.).
Other signatories include real estate billionaire Jerry Speyer, who recently attended a $100,000-per-person fundraiser to bolster former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s White House hopes. The host of that event, private equity kingpin Henry Kravis, also signed.
Sheldon Adelson apparently hasn't weighed in yet.
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” - Ron Paul
Americans who have no experience with, or knowledge of, tyranny believe that only terrorists will experience the unchecked power of the state. They will believe this until it happens to them, or their children, or their friends.
Paul Craig Roberts#9. To: misterwhite, Deckard (#2)
And if Democrats, labor groups and environmentalists oppose it, that just makes me like it more. Whatever "it" is.
Congratulations Booby...er...misterwhite. This is precisely the kind of "thinking" that has got us all to where we are today- a country that can't even make shoes anymore. Don't look now but you've been played for a fool.
O'Liar is at Nike today, explaining how the TPP will benefit billionaires who have shoes made by slave labor and then import them to sell to dumbed down Americans.
By any chance do you remember how O'liar lied to the audience about NAFTA at the AFL-CIO debate in 2007? Probably not, your memory isn't that good
It would be a shame if some of your relatives (you have relatives, don't you?) lost their jobs to a bunch of Vietnamese who will work for 14 cents an hour, wouldn't it.
#10. To: Deckard (#8)
Seems to me that some the Republican's big money donors are the guys who are on-board with Obama on this.
Even the little twit Rand (Rand is NOT RON) Paul not only supports the TPP he supports Fast Track of the TPP.
Rand Paul to Obama: Finish TPP Trade Deal“Instead of just talking about a so-called ‘pivot to Asia,’ the Obama administration should prioritize negotiating the” TPP.
http://thediplomat.com/2014/10/rand-paul-to-obama-finish-tpp-trade-deal/
Rand is going to completely erase his daddy's legacy if someone doesn't stop him. Right now Bernie Sanders is the New Ron Paul. At least he's not afraid to confront O'Liar on his latest ripoff of the American People.
#11. To: Operation 40 (#10)
Even the little twit Rand (Rand is NOT RON) Paul not only supports the TPP he supports Fast Track of the TPP.
Somehow, that doesn't surprise me.
Rand has shown that he is nothing but another pandering politician with no core values, willing to prostitute himself to get elected.
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” - Ron Paul
Americans who have no experience with, or knowledge of, tyranny believe that only terrorists will experience the unchecked power of the state. They will believe this until it happens to them, or their children, or their friends.
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