Too Bad These Visas Were Not Revoked:
Mohamed Atta Abdulaziz al-Omari Wail al-Shehri
Waleed al-Shehri Satam al-Suqami Marwan al-Shehhi Fayez Banihammad Mohand al-Shehri Hamza al-Ghamdi Ahmed al-Ghamdi Khalid al-Mihdhar
Majed Moqed Nawaf al-Hazmi Salem al-Hazmi
Ziad Jarrah Ahmed al-Haznawi Ahmed al-Nami Saeed al-Ghamdi
Monday, January 30, 2017
Sunday, January 29, 2017
"Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers: We cannot allow this horror to continue!" - Trump Tweet this morning
 |
| You can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies. — Oscar Wilde. |
TIME MACHINE:
Ted Nugent: President Trump ‘would kick ass and take names’
BY NEETZAN ZIMMERMAN - 07/31/15 03:59 PM EDT
Consider hard rocker and conservative firebrand Ted Nugent Donald Trump’s number one fan.
Nugent, famous for his outspoken views on hunting and immigration, has already called for Trump to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but in a new interview airing this Sunday, the NRA board member is calling for the real estate mogul to be awarded the presidency as well.
“I think Donald Trump, if he stays on course, he’s gonna be the next President of the United States,” Nugent told "The Rita Cosby Show."
Asked by the host what he liked about Trump, Nugent underlined the businessman’s "bold, brazen, courageous, unapologetic politics in his stance,” adding that, “his campaign, is just what the working-hard, playing-hard American families have been waiting for.”
Pressed on whether he thought Trump would make a good president, Nugent didn’t wait for Cosby to finish her question.
“Yes!” he said, cutting the host off. "He would kick ass and take names, and that's what America needs right now."
Friday, January 27, 2017
NAFTA and Mexico is a Trojan Horse for China
Most studies conclude that NAFTA has had only a modest positive impact on U.S. GDP.
WHARTON School U of P
Supporters of NAFTA estimate that some 14 million jobs rely on trade with Canada and Mexico combined, and the nearly 200,000 export-related jobs created annually by NAFTA pay an average salary of 15% to 20% more than the jobs that were lost, according to a PIIE study. Furthermore, the study found that only about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to NAFTA. “On our reckoning, since NAFTA’s enactment, fewer than 5% of U.S. workers who have lost jobs from sizable layoffs (such as when large plants close down) can be attributed to rising imports from Mexico,” wrote its authors, PIIE senior fellow Gary Clyde Hufbauer and research analyst Cathleen Cimino-Isaacs. For the roughly 200,000 out of 4 million people who lose their jobs annually under these circumstances, the job losses can be attributed to rising imports from Mexico, they wrote, but “almost the same number of new jobs has been created annually by rising U.S. exports to Mexico.” Moreover, “For every net job lost in this definition, the gains to the U.S. economy were about $450,000, owing to enhanced productivity of the workforce, a broader range of goods and services, and lower prices at the checkout counter for households.”
Trade specialists agree that it has proven difficult to separate the deal’s direct effects on trade and investment from other factors, including rapid improvements in technology, expanded trade with other countries such as China and unrelated domestic developments in each of the countries.
When President Bill Clinton signed the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in December 1993, he predicted that “NAFTA will tear down trade barriers between our three nations, create the world’s largest trade zone, and create 200,000 jobs in [the U.S.] by 1995 alone. The environmental and labor side agreements negotiated by our administration will make this agreement a force for social progress as well as economic growth.” Twenty-three years later, scholars and policy makers often disagree about the impact that NAFTA has had on economic growth and job generation in the U.S. That impact, they say, is not always easy to disentangle from other economic, social and political factors that have influenced U.S. growth.
On the positive side, overall trade between the three NAFTA partners — the U.S., Canada and Mexico — has increased sharply over the pact’s history, from roughly $290 billion in 1993 to more than $1.1 trillion in 2016. Cross-border investment has also surged during those years, as the stock of U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) in Mexico rose from $15 billion to more than $107.8 billion in 2014. As for job growth, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, six million U.S. jobs depend on U.S. trade with Mexico, a flow that has been greatly facilitated by NAFTA, which has helped eliminate costly tariff and non-tariff barriers. NAFTA has also facilitated a multi-layered integration of the U.S., Mexican and Canadian supply chains. According to the Wilson Center, twenty-five cents out of every dollar of goods that are imported from Canada to the U.S. is actually “Made in USA” content, as are 40 cents out of every dollar for goods imported into the U.S. from Mexico.
Geronimo Gutierrez, managing director of the North American Development Bank (NADB), notes that trade between the United States and Mexico reached over $500 billion in 2015, a five-fold increase since 1992, when NAFTA negotiations concluded. Thus, he explains, Mexico imports more from the U.S. these days than do all of the so-called BRIC nations combined – Brazil, Russia, India and China. (The NADB acts as a binational catalyst in helping communities along the U.S.-Mexico border develop affordable, long-term infrastructure.)
Gutierrez adds that there are lesser-known benefits of NAFTA. By promoting the tight integration of North American industrial supply chains, “NAFTA is creating partners and not competitors among its member countries. As for Mexico’s interest in this bilateral relationship, it can be summarized in two facts: about 80% of Mexico’s exports go to the U.S., while 50% of the accumulated foreign direct investment received between 2000 and 2011 comes from the U.S. Moreover, NAFTA has been the fundamental anchor for reforms that make Mexico a more modern economy and open society.”
A Modest Impact
For all that, most studies conclude that NAFTA has had only a modest positive impact on U.S. GDP. For example, according to a 2014 report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), the United States has been $127 billion richer each year thanks to “extra” trade growth fostered by NAFTA. For the United States, with its population of 320 million at the time of that study, the pure economic payoff was thus only $400 per person, while per capita GDP was close to $50,000. And while the costs of NAFTA are highly concentrated in specific industries like auto manufacturing — where job losses may be significant for specific firms — the benefits of the trade pact (such as lower prices for imported electronics or clothing) are distributed widely across the U.S., as they are in the case of any trade pact worldwide.
TIME MACHINE 2007
Most studies conclude that NAFTA has had only a modest positive impact on U.S. GDP.
Supporters of NAFTA estimate that some 14 million jobs rely on trade with Canada and Mexico combined, and the nearly 200,000 export-related jobs created annually by NAFTA pay an average salary of 15% to 20% more than the jobs that were lost, according to a PIIE study. Furthermore, the study found that only about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to NAFTA. “On our reckoning, since NAFTA’s enactment, fewer than 5% of U.S. workers who have lost jobs from sizable layoffs (such as when large plants close down) can be attributed to rising imports from Mexico,” wrote its authors, PIIE senior fellow Gary Clyde Hufbauer and research analyst Cathleen Cimino-Isaacs. For the roughly 200,000 out of 4 million people who lose their jobs annually under these circumstances, the job losses can be attributed to rising imports from Mexico, they wrote, but “almost the same number of new jobs has been created annually by rising U.S. exports to Mexico.” Moreover, “For every net job lost in this definition, the gains to the U.S. economy were about $450,000, owing to enhanced productivity of the workforce, a broader range of goods and services, and lower prices at the checkout counter for households.”
Trade specialists agree that it has proven difficult to separate the deal’s direct effects on trade and investment from other factors, including rapid improvements in technology, expanded trade with other countries such as China and unrelated domestic developments in each of the countries.
Walter Kemmsies, managing director, economist and chief strategist at JLL Ports Airports and Global Infrastructure, notes that that many of the job losses that are popularly blamed on NAFTA would likely have taken place even in the absence of NAFTA, in part because of growing competition from China-based manufacturers, many of which have taken advantage of currency manipulation by the Chinese government that has rendered China-made products more price-competitive in the U.S. Likewise, Mauro Guillen, head of Wharton’s Lauder Institute, agrees that without NAFTA, many American jobs that were lost over this period would probably have gone to China or elsewhere. “Perhaps NAFTA accelerated the process, but it did not make a huge difference.”
“A lot of instant experts on NAFTA don’t really understand trade and what drives trade,” said Kemmsies. “And so they get confused between NAFTA and the globalization of the world’s economy. The fact is, with or without NAFTA, we would have done a lot more trade with Mexico anyway. I’m not sure that NAFTA has even fostered any growth of trade between the U.S. and Mexico. Look at Mexico and forget about everything else for a second: What is the single-biggest trade-flow corridor in the world? It’s East-West — Asia to Europe to North America. Mexico happens to sit right smack in the middle of the East-West trade flow…. Here is Mexico, with 120 million people, and all of these abilities to draw raw materials…. You have a cheap labor force, a global geographic advantage, a rising middle class. It’s a good place to make stuff.”
For a long time, because of a lack of investment, Mexico’s infrastructure was well below par, including its ports, which were made to process raw materials, rather than handle industrial goods. In that respect, NAFTA has had a positive impact on Mexico’s economic development, and it has encouraged foreign investors to trust that Mexico, whose governments were long protectionist and populist, would follow the rule of international law. International trade specialists M. Angeles Villarreal and Ian F. Fergusson of the Congressional Research Service wrote in a recent report: “While Mexico’s unilateral trade and investment liberalization measures in the 1980s and early 1990s contributed to the increase of U.S. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Mexico, NAFTA provisions on foreign investment may have helped to lock in Mexico’s reforms and increase investor confidence [in Mexico.]” Nearly half of total FDI investment in Mexico is in its booming manufacturing sector.
Job Losses and Lower Wages
Some critics argue that NAFTA is to blame for job losses and wage stagnation in the U.S., because competition from Mexican firms has forced many U.S. firms to relocate to Mexico. Between 1993 and 2014, the U.S.-Mexico trade balance swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus to a $54 billion deficit. Economists such as Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Robert Scott, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, argue that the consequent surge of imports from Mexico into the U.S. coincided with the loss of up to 600,000 U.S. jobs over two decades, although they admit that some of that import growth would likely have happened even without NAFTA.
“A lot of instant experts on NAFTA don’t really understand trade and what drives trade.” –Walter Kemmsies
While conceding that many U.S. high-wage manufacturing jobs were relocated to Mexico, China and other foreign locations as a result of NAFTA, Morris Cohen, Wharton professor of operations and information management, argues that NAFTA has, on balance, been a good thing for the U.S. economy and U.S. corporations. “The sucking sound that Ross Perot predicted did not occur; many jobs were created in Canada and Mexico, and [the resulting] economic activity created a somewhat seamless supply chain — a North American supply chain that allowed North American auto companies to be more profitable and more competitive.”
Moreover, in their 2015 study published by Congressional Research Service, Villarreal and Fergusson noted, “The overall economic impact of NAFTA is difficult to measure since trade and investment trends are influenced by numerous other economic variables, such as economic growth, inflation, and currency fluctuations. The agreement may have accelerated the trade liberalization that was already taking place, but many of these changes may have taken place with or without an agreement.”
Some of its harshest critics concede that NAFTA should not be held entirely responsible for the recent loss of U.S. industrial jobs. According to Scott of the Economic Policy Institute, “Over the past two decades, currency manipulation by about 20 countries, led by China, has inflated U.S. trade deficits, which [in combination with the lingering effects of the Great Recession] is largely responsible for the loss of more than five million U.S. manufacturing jobs.” Scott argues that while NAFTA and other trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership are bad for American workers, the fundamental problem is not that they are “free trade” pacts, but that they “are designed to create a separate, global set of rules to protect foreign investors and encourage the outsourcing of production from the United States to other countries.”
Unlike the earliest generation of “free-trade agreements” – which focused on reducing or eliminating tariffs and duties that stifled trade — these newer pacts are more comprehensive. As Scott explains, they “contain 30 or more chapters providing special protections for foreign investors; extending patents and copyrights; privatizing markets for public services such as education, health, and public utilities; and ‘harmonizing’ regulations in ways that limit or prevent governments from protecting the public health or environment.” When critics of the TPP conflate their criticism of that pact with their criticism of “free trade,” they miss an essential element of the TPP that has disaffected many otherwise loyal supporters of earlier-generation agreements that truly focus on deregulation of “trade” per se, he notes.
The Role of China
Two decades ago, when NAFTA was born, China had only a faint presence in the global economy, and was not yet even a member of the World Trade Organization. However, the share of U.S. spending on Chinese goods rose nearly eight-fold between 1991 and 2007. By 2015, U.S. trade in goods and services with China totaled $659 billion— with the U.S. importing $336 billion more than it exported. China has become the U.S.’s top trading partner for goods — a development never anticipated at the signing of NAFTA. And yet, NAFTA continues to attract the lion’s share of the blame among U.S. critics of globalization, despite the fact that the U.S. and China have yet to sign any bilateral free-trade treaty.
“NAFTA did foster greater U.S.-Mexican integration and helped transform Mexico into a major exporter of manufactured goods.” –Robert Blecker
How is that possible? In a recent study that de-emphasized the impact of NAFTA on the U.S. economy, economists David Autor (MIT), David Dorn (University of Zurich) and Gordon Hanson (University of California, San Diego) stress the role of China’s emergence on job growth and wages in the U.S. In the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, they write: “China’s emergence as a great economic power has induced an epochal shift in patterns of world trade. Simultaneously, it has challenged much of the received empirical wisdom about how labor markets adjust to trade shocks. Alongside the heralded consumer benefits of expanded trade are substantial adjustment costs and distributional consequences…. Exposed workers experience greater job churning and reduced lifetime income. At the national level, employment has fallen in U.S. industries more exposed to import competition, as expected, but offsetting employment gains in other industries have yet to materialize. Better understanding when and where trade is costly, and how and why it may be beneficial, are key items on the research agenda for trade and labor economists.”
As Robert Blecker, an economist at American University, notes, “Contrary to the promises of the leaders who promoted it, NAFTA did not make Mexico converge to the United States in per capita income, nor did it solve Mexico’s employment problems or stem the flow of migration.” However, “NAFTA did foster greater U.S.-Mexican integration and helped transform Mexico into a major exporter of manufactured goods.”
The benefits for the Mexican economy were attenuated, however, by heavy dependence on imported intermediate inputs in export production, as well as by Chinese competition in the U.S. market and domestically. The long-run increase in manufacturing employment in Mexico (about 400,000 jobs) was small and disappointing, while U.S. manufacturing plummeted by 5 million — but more because of Chinese imports than imports from Mexico. In both Mexico and the United States, real wages have stagnated while productivity has continued to increase, leading to higher profit shares and a tendency toward greater inequality.”
Blaming NAFTA for all of these disturbing problems may make some NAFTA critics feel good, but as trade researchers have learned in recent years, the growing complexity of today’s economic challenges defies any simplistic explanations.
WHARTON School U of P
Supporters of NAFTA estimate that some 14 million jobs rely on trade with Canada and Mexico combined, and the nearly 200,000 export-related jobs created annually by NAFTA pay an average salary of 15% to 20% more than the jobs that were lost, according to a PIIE study. Furthermore, the study found that only about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to NAFTA. “On our reckoning, since NAFTA’s enactment, fewer than 5% of U.S. workers who have lost jobs from sizable layoffs (such as when large plants close down) can be attributed to rising imports from Mexico,” wrote its authors, PIIE senior fellow Gary Clyde Hufbauer and research analyst Cathleen Cimino-Isaacs. For the roughly 200,000 out of 4 million people who lose their jobs annually under these circumstances, the job losses can be attributed to rising imports from Mexico, they wrote, but “almost the same number of new jobs has been created annually by rising U.S. exports to Mexico.” Moreover, “For every net job lost in this definition, the gains to the U.S. economy were about $450,000, owing to enhanced productivity of the workforce, a broader range of goods and services, and lower prices at the checkout counter for households.”
Trade specialists agree that it has proven difficult to separate the deal’s direct effects on trade and investment from other factors, including rapid improvements in technology, expanded trade with other countries such as China and unrelated domestic developments in each of the countries.
When President Bill Clinton signed the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in December 1993, he predicted that “NAFTA will tear down trade barriers between our three nations, create the world’s largest trade zone, and create 200,000 jobs in [the U.S.] by 1995 alone. The environmental and labor side agreements negotiated by our administration will make this agreement a force for social progress as well as economic growth.” Twenty-three years later, scholars and policy makers often disagree about the impact that NAFTA has had on economic growth and job generation in the U.S. That impact, they say, is not always easy to disentangle from other economic, social and political factors that have influenced U.S. growth.
On the positive side, overall trade between the three NAFTA partners — the U.S., Canada and Mexico — has increased sharply over the pact’s history, from roughly $290 billion in 1993 to more than $1.1 trillion in 2016. Cross-border investment has also surged during those years, as the stock of U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) in Mexico rose from $15 billion to more than $107.8 billion in 2014. As for job growth, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, six million U.S. jobs depend on U.S. trade with Mexico, a flow that has been greatly facilitated by NAFTA, which has helped eliminate costly tariff and non-tariff barriers. NAFTA has also facilitated a multi-layered integration of the U.S., Mexican and Canadian supply chains. According to the Wilson Center, twenty-five cents out of every dollar of goods that are imported from Canada to the U.S. is actually “Made in USA” content, as are 40 cents out of every dollar for goods imported into the U.S. from Mexico.
Geronimo Gutierrez, managing director of the North American Development Bank (NADB), notes that trade between the United States and Mexico reached over $500 billion in 2015, a five-fold increase since 1992, when NAFTA negotiations concluded. Thus, he explains, Mexico imports more from the U.S. these days than do all of the so-called BRIC nations combined – Brazil, Russia, India and China. (The NADB acts as a binational catalyst in helping communities along the U.S.-Mexico border develop affordable, long-term infrastructure.)
Gutierrez adds that there are lesser-known benefits of NAFTA. By promoting the tight integration of North American industrial supply chains, “NAFTA is creating partners and not competitors among its member countries. As for Mexico’s interest in this bilateral relationship, it can be summarized in two facts: about 80% of Mexico’s exports go to the U.S., while 50% of the accumulated foreign direct investment received between 2000 and 2011 comes from the U.S. Moreover, NAFTA has been the fundamental anchor for reforms that make Mexico a more modern economy and open society.”
A Modest Impact
For all that, most studies conclude that NAFTA has had only a modest positive impact on U.S. GDP. For example, according to a 2014 report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), the United States has been $127 billion richer each year thanks to “extra” trade growth fostered by NAFTA. For the United States, with its population of 320 million at the time of that study, the pure economic payoff was thus only $400 per person, while per capita GDP was close to $50,000. And while the costs of NAFTA are highly concentrated in specific industries like auto manufacturing — where job losses may be significant for specific firms — the benefits of the trade pact (such as lower prices for imported electronics or clothing) are distributed widely across the U.S., as they are in the case of any trade pact worldwide.
TIME MACHINE 2007
Most studies conclude that NAFTA has had only a modest positive impact on U.S. GDP.
Supporters of NAFTA estimate that some 14 million jobs rely on trade with Canada and Mexico combined, and the nearly 200,000 export-related jobs created annually by NAFTA pay an average salary of 15% to 20% more than the jobs that were lost, according to a PIIE study. Furthermore, the study found that only about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to NAFTA. “On our reckoning, since NAFTA’s enactment, fewer than 5% of U.S. workers who have lost jobs from sizable layoffs (such as when large plants close down) can be attributed to rising imports from Mexico,” wrote its authors, PIIE senior fellow Gary Clyde Hufbauer and research analyst Cathleen Cimino-Isaacs. For the roughly 200,000 out of 4 million people who lose their jobs annually under these circumstances, the job losses can be attributed to rising imports from Mexico, they wrote, but “almost the same number of new jobs has been created annually by rising U.S. exports to Mexico.” Moreover, “For every net job lost in this definition, the gains to the U.S. economy were about $450,000, owing to enhanced productivity of the workforce, a broader range of goods and services, and lower prices at the checkout counter for households.”
Trade specialists agree that it has proven difficult to separate the deal’s direct effects on trade and investment from other factors, including rapid improvements in technology, expanded trade with other countries such as China and unrelated domestic developments in each of the countries.
Walter Kemmsies, managing director, economist and chief strategist at JLL Ports Airports and Global Infrastructure, notes that that many of the job losses that are popularly blamed on NAFTA would likely have taken place even in the absence of NAFTA, in part because of growing competition from China-based manufacturers, many of which have taken advantage of currency manipulation by the Chinese government that has rendered China-made products more price-competitive in the U.S. Likewise, Mauro Guillen, head of Wharton’s Lauder Institute, agrees that without NAFTA, many American jobs that were lost over this period would probably have gone to China or elsewhere. “Perhaps NAFTA accelerated the process, but it did not make a huge difference.”
“A lot of instant experts on NAFTA don’t really understand trade and what drives trade,” said Kemmsies. “And so they get confused between NAFTA and the globalization of the world’s economy. The fact is, with or without NAFTA, we would have done a lot more trade with Mexico anyway. I’m not sure that NAFTA has even fostered any growth of trade between the U.S. and Mexico. Look at Mexico and forget about everything else for a second: What is the single-biggest trade-flow corridor in the world? It’s East-West — Asia to Europe to North America. Mexico happens to sit right smack in the middle of the East-West trade flow…. Here is Mexico, with 120 million people, and all of these abilities to draw raw materials…. You have a cheap labor force, a global geographic advantage, a rising middle class. It’s a good place to make stuff.”
For a long time, because of a lack of investment, Mexico’s infrastructure was well below par, including its ports, which were made to process raw materials, rather than handle industrial goods. In that respect, NAFTA has had a positive impact on Mexico’s economic development, and it has encouraged foreign investors to trust that Mexico, whose governments were long protectionist and populist, would follow the rule of international law. International trade specialists M. Angeles Villarreal and Ian F. Fergusson of the Congressional Research Service wrote in a recent report: “While Mexico’s unilateral trade and investment liberalization measures in the 1980s and early 1990s contributed to the increase of U.S. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Mexico, NAFTA provisions on foreign investment may have helped to lock in Mexico’s reforms and increase investor confidence [in Mexico.]” Nearly half of total FDI investment in Mexico is in its booming manufacturing sector.
Job Losses and Lower Wages
Some critics argue that NAFTA is to blame for job losses and wage stagnation in the U.S., because competition from Mexican firms has forced many U.S. firms to relocate to Mexico. Between 1993 and 2014, the U.S.-Mexico trade balance swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus to a $54 billion deficit. Economists such as Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Robert Scott, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, argue that the consequent surge of imports from Mexico into the U.S. coincided with the loss of up to 600,000 U.S. jobs over two decades, although they admit that some of that import growth would likely have happened even without NAFTA.
“A lot of instant experts on NAFTA don’t really understand trade and what drives trade.” –Walter Kemmsies
While conceding that many U.S. high-wage manufacturing jobs were relocated to Mexico, China and other foreign locations as a result of NAFTA, Morris Cohen, Wharton professor of operations and information management, argues that NAFTA has, on balance, been a good thing for the U.S. economy and U.S. corporations. “The sucking sound that Ross Perot predicted did not occur; many jobs were created in Canada and Mexico, and [the resulting] economic activity created a somewhat seamless supply chain — a North American supply chain that allowed North American auto companies to be more profitable and more competitive.”
Moreover, in their 2015 study published by Congressional Research Service, Villarreal and Fergusson noted, “The overall economic impact of NAFTA is difficult to measure since trade and investment trends are influenced by numerous other economic variables, such as economic growth, inflation, and currency fluctuations. The agreement may have accelerated the trade liberalization that was already taking place, but many of these changes may have taken place with or without an agreement.”
Some of its harshest critics concede that NAFTA should not be held entirely responsible for the recent loss of U.S. industrial jobs. According to Scott of the Economic Policy Institute, “Over the past two decades, currency manipulation by about 20 countries, led by China, has inflated U.S. trade deficits, which [in combination with the lingering effects of the Great Recession] is largely responsible for the loss of more than five million U.S. manufacturing jobs.” Scott argues that while NAFTA and other trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership are bad for American workers, the fundamental problem is not that they are “free trade” pacts, but that they “are designed to create a separate, global set of rules to protect foreign investors and encourage the outsourcing of production from the United States to other countries.”
Unlike the earliest generation of “free-trade agreements” – which focused on reducing or eliminating tariffs and duties that stifled trade — these newer pacts are more comprehensive. As Scott explains, they “contain 30 or more chapters providing special protections for foreign investors; extending patents and copyrights; privatizing markets for public services such as education, health, and public utilities; and ‘harmonizing’ regulations in ways that limit or prevent governments from protecting the public health or environment.” When critics of the TPP conflate their criticism of that pact with their criticism of “free trade,” they miss an essential element of the TPP that has disaffected many otherwise loyal supporters of earlier-generation agreements that truly focus on deregulation of “trade” per se, he notes.
The Role of China
Two decades ago, when NAFTA was born, China had only a faint presence in the global economy, and was not yet even a member of the World Trade Organization. However, the share of U.S. spending on Chinese goods rose nearly eight-fold between 1991 and 2007. By 2015, U.S. trade in goods and services with China totaled $659 billion— with the U.S. importing $336 billion more than it exported. China has become the U.S.’s top trading partner for goods — a development never anticipated at the signing of NAFTA. And yet, NAFTA continues to attract the lion’s share of the blame among U.S. critics of globalization, despite the fact that the U.S. and China have yet to sign any bilateral free-trade treaty.
“NAFTA did foster greater U.S.-Mexican integration and helped transform Mexico into a major exporter of manufactured goods.” –Robert Blecker
How is that possible? In a recent study that de-emphasized the impact of NAFTA on the U.S. economy, economists David Autor (MIT), David Dorn (University of Zurich) and Gordon Hanson (University of California, San Diego) stress the role of China’s emergence on job growth and wages in the U.S. In the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, they write: “China’s emergence as a great economic power has induced an epochal shift in patterns of world trade. Simultaneously, it has challenged much of the received empirical wisdom about how labor markets adjust to trade shocks. Alongside the heralded consumer benefits of expanded trade are substantial adjustment costs and distributional consequences…. Exposed workers experience greater job churning and reduced lifetime income. At the national level, employment has fallen in U.S. industries more exposed to import competition, as expected, but offsetting employment gains in other industries have yet to materialize. Better understanding when and where trade is costly, and how and why it may be beneficial, are key items on the research agenda for trade and labor economists.”
As Robert Blecker, an economist at American University, notes, “Contrary to the promises of the leaders who promoted it, NAFTA did not make Mexico converge to the United States in per capita income, nor did it solve Mexico’s employment problems or stem the flow of migration.” However, “NAFTA did foster greater U.S.-Mexican integration and helped transform Mexico into a major exporter of manufactured goods.”
The benefits for the Mexican economy were attenuated, however, by heavy dependence on imported intermediate inputs in export production, as well as by Chinese competition in the U.S. market and domestically. The long-run increase in manufacturing employment in Mexico (about 400,000 jobs) was small and disappointing, while U.S. manufacturing plummeted by 5 million — but more because of Chinese imports than imports from Mexico. In both Mexico and the United States, real wages have stagnated while productivity has continued to increase, leading to higher profit shares and a tendency toward greater inequality.”
Blaming NAFTA for all of these disturbing problems may make some NAFTA critics feel good, but as trade researchers have learned in recent years, the growing complexity of today’s economic challenges defies any simplistic explanations.
Thursday, January 26, 2017
Why Would We Not Want to Know if Voter Fraud Exists?
Voter fraud, lawlessness and emails getting lost under Obama and the Democrats - Remember When:
How to prove rampant voter fraud in U.S.
Experts say federal investigation could verify Trump's claim
Published: 8 hours ago
WND EXCLUSIVE
WASHINGTON – President Trump has called the establishment media’s bluff on voter fraud, and, judging by the evidence, as well as comments from a pair of the nation’s leading experts on the subject, he may just hold a winning hand.
Reporters incessantly badgered White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Tuesday over the president’s comments in a private meeting that he believed 3 to 5 million illegal votes were cast in the election.Hillary Clinton garnered 2.9 million more votes nationwide than Trump, while the Republican won the Electoral College vote, 304-227.Reporters repeatedly demanded Spicer tell them, if Trump was so sure about widespread voter fraud, why he didn’t order an investigation?So, on Wednesday, Trump announced he would do just that.
He unleashed a pair of tweets that read: “I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and. even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!” The reporters’ brazenness could well have been prompted by articles from mainstream media outlets, such as the New York Times, insisting there was no evidence of voter fraud. But that’s not true. Ample evidence has been published indicating widespread voter fraud, as WND and other media outlets have reported over the years. What do YOU think? How big of a national problem is voter fraud? Sound off in today’s WND poll!
The problem with Trump’s claims, according to two experts who have studied the issue in depth, is “we don’t really know to what extent they are true.” John Fund is the national affairs columnist for National Review. Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. They are the authors of “Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.”
Both have commented extensively to WND on voter fraud in the past, and they generously allowed WND to use quotes from the draft of an op-ed they submitted for publication, titled, “Trump’s probe of voter fraud long overdue. No one should oppose collecting the data Obama’s administration has been hiding.”
Perhaps their most consequential insight is that if all the past indicators are true and there likely has been rampant voter fraud, it may not be all that difficult to prove, particularly now that there is a will to look for it.
“Conducting an investigation that will help resolve the size of the voter fraud problem is straightforward,” asserted Fund and von Spakovsky.
“The Department of Homeland Security should cooperate with states wanting to check the citizenship status of voters on their rolls. The Justice Department should put pressure on or sue counties and states that refuse to clean up their rolls.”
That could weed out dead voters and those who cast multiple ballots. What about identifying illegal voters, those who are not citizens?
“The IRS has issued 11 million Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, most of them to illegal immigrants so they can file taxes,” noted the authors.
“Privacy rules allow the IRS to share information for some law enforcement purposes, but not in a way that results in deportations. Those rules could be tweaked to allow states to compare the names of illegal immigrants the IRS has with their voter records.”
The results of such an investigation could be stunning, even a major scandal for Democrats, if past studies prove correct.
Fund and von Spakovsky cited “a 2012 study from the Pew Center on the States estimating that one out of every eight voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date or a duplicate.”
“About 2.8 million people are registered in more than one state, according to the study, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead. In most places it’s easy to vote under the names of such people with little risk of detection.”
Additionally, a 2014 study in the Electoral Studies Journal shows illegals may have cast as many as 2.8 million votes in 2008 and 2010.
In an editorial on the study by Investors Business Daily on Nov. 28, titled “Trump is right — Millions of illegals probably did vote in 2016,” the paper noted: “And when you consider the population of illegal inhabitants has only grown since then, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that their vote has, too.
“Remember, a low-ball estimate says there are at least 11 million to 12 million illegals in the U.S., but that’s based on faulty Census data. More likely estimates put the number at 20 million to 30 million.”
The study has been criticized, but the objection made by a Harvard team in 2015 that “the likely percent of noncitizen voters in recent U.S. elections is 0” not only seems dubious, even Democrats disagree.
Fund and von Spakovsky observed: “The Washington Post conducted a poll last October using the Polfish firm that found 84% of Republicans believe that a ‘meaningful amount’ of voter fraud occurs in U.S. elections, along with 75 percent of independents. A majority of Democrats – 52 percent – also believed there was meaningful voter fraud.”
A quarter of Democrats believed illegal immigrants were voting.
Fund and von Spakovsky also reported: “A postelection survey conducted by Americas Majority Foundation found that 2.1% of noncitizens voted in the Nov. 8 election. In the battleground states of Michigan and Ohio, 2.5% and 2.1%, respectively, of noncitizens reported voting.”
Other evidence of the strong potential for voter fraud includes what Gateway Pundit dug up and WND reported in October, that 12 states and the District of Columbia allow driver’s licenses to be given to illegal immigrants, and almost half of California’s driver’s licenses went to illegal aliens last year.
And Democrats seem more than well-aware how that works to their advantage, as evidenced in an email revealed by WikiLeaks in October, sent by Clinton campaign manager John Podesta on Feb. 3, 2015, indicating he is not troubled by voter fraud.
Podesta wrote, “On the picture ID, the one thing I have thought of in that space is that if you show up on Election Day with a drivers license with a picture, attest that you are a citizen, you have a right to vote in Federal elections.”
WND also reported a Democratic Party activist told undercover investigators for Project Veritas that his party has been rigging elections “for 50 years.”
“You know what? We’ve been busing people in to deal with you f—ing a—–es for 50 years, and we’re not going to stop now,” said Scott Foval, the national field director for Americans United for Change.
So if there are so many indication of voter fraud, possibly on a massive scale, why hasn’t it been proven so far?
Because the federal government holds the key. And the fraud would have benefited Democrats. And Democrats have held the White House for eight years.
As Investors observed: “A Rasmussen Reports poll earlier this year found that 53% of the Democratic Party supports letting illegals vote, even though it’s against the law. It’s pretty clear why.”
“Leftist get-out-the-vote groups openly urge noncitizens to vote during election time, and the registration process is notoriously loose,” Investors added.
Fund and von Spakovsky went even further, charging, “The Obama administration did everything it could to avoid complying with requests from states to verify voter registration records against federal records of legal noncitizens and illegal immigrants who have been detained by law enforcement to find noncitizens who have illegally registered and voted.”
They noted former Justice Department attorney Christian Adams testified under oath that he attended a November 2009 meeting at which then-deputy assistant attorney general Julie Fernandes told DOJ prosecutors that administration would not be enforcing the federal law that requires local officials to purge illegitimate names from their voter rolls.
The authors state, “The Justice Department has also opposed every effort by states – such as Kansas, Arizona, Alabama and Georgia –to implement laws that require individuals registering to vote to provide proof of citizenship.
“This despite evidence that noncitizens are indeed registering and casting ballots. In 2015, one Kansas county began offering voter registration at naturalization ceremonies. Election officials soon discovered about a dozen new Americans who were already registered – and who had voted as noncitizens in multiple elections.”
Fund and von Spakovsky conclude, “These blatant attempts to prevent states from learning if they have a real problem with illegal votes makes it impossible to learn if significant numbers of noncitizens and others are indeed voting illegally, perhaps enough to make up the margin in some close elections.”
So, with a change in administrations, the bottom line in discovering whether there really is massive voter fraud may be as simple as, where there’s a will, there’s a way.
And President Trump certainly has announced he has the will.
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
Trump Putting our Former Lords and Masters to Heel
Trump clamps down on federal agencies
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 01/24/17 08:09 PM EST
The Trump administration is clamping down on public communications by agencies as it seeks to assert control over the federal bureaucracy.
New restrictions on social media use and interaction with press and lawmakers at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the departments of Commerce, Health and Human Services, Agriculture and the Interior have sparked concerns of a President Trump-backed effort to silence dissenting views.
The Trump administration’s newly imposed communications rules vary at different agencies.
At the EPA, staffers were ordered to stop issuing press releases, blog updates and social media posts, according to a memo to employees. The Agriculture Department’s research arm was reportedly told by its chief of staff to stop issuing news releases, photos and other “public-facing” documents — although the agency disavowed the order late Tuesday, saying that new guidance would replace it.
The new prohibitions come as Trump seeks to reverse many of former President Barack Obama’s policies, which requires the cooperation of a federal workforce that is broadly perceived to be hostile to him.
It’s not unusual for incoming administrations to seek control over agency communications, especially at the outset, when Cabinet secretaries aren’t in place.
But experts on the federal workforce say they have never seen a White House take the type of steps Trump’s administration has to curb public communications.
Green groups worry the moves could signal Trump wants to cut off the public from government information on climate change and other issues.
Liz Perera, climate policy director at the Sierra Club, said the moves “should be a major red flag for all Americans.”
“These actions don’t just threaten scientists — they threaten everyone in the country who breathes air, drinks water and eats food,” said Andrew Rosenberg, an official at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The EPA restriction caught the attention of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who tweeted Tuesday afternoon that the ban on social media and contact with reporters was “very troubling —and honestly, anti-democratic.”
In an apparent act of defiance, the official Twitter account for Badlands National Park in South Dakota on Tuesday afternoon posted information about climate change.
The tweets were later deleted.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters he didn’t know the reason behind the moves but denied it was a concerted effort to silence federal employees.
“I don’t think it’s any surprise that when there’s an administration turnover, that we’re going to review the policies,” he said.
The White House did not respond to a request for further comment, nor did the EPA.
Doug Ericksen, chief spokesman for the EPA’s beachhead team, which is working to transition the agency to its new leadership, also downplayed the changes.
“We’re temporarily dimming some of the communication aspects of the department while we get it under control, to shape the message towards what the new administration would like to be talking about,” Ericksen said.
The spokesman added the changes are likely to be lifted by the end of the week.
“We’ve got 10 regions at EPA, so we’re bringing them in the house for a little bit, then we’ll build them up again,” he said.
The moves come after Trump was reportedly infuriated over reporting on the turnout at his inauguration, which included a viral photo comparison showing Friday’s crowd next to the one that attended Obama’s 2009 swearing-in. The tweet was retweeted by the National Park Service (NPS).
The Interior Department, which oversees the park service, was ordered last Friday to shut down its social media operations. Its accounts were quickly revived over the weekend.
NPS spokesman Thomas Crosson told The Washington Post the tweets were “inconsistent with the agency’s approach to engaging the public through social media.”
Asked to explain the decision, Spicer said, “My understanding is, is that because they had inappropriately violated their own social media policies, there was guidance that was put out to the department to act in compliance with the rules that were set forth.”
The moves have compounded existing tensions between Trump and federal workers. It came as Trump announced a broad federal hiring freeze aimed at reducing the size of the bureaucracy through attrition.
Many rank-and-file federal employees, likewise, are not enamored with their new boss. They preferred Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over Trump by a 2-1 margin, according to a recent Government Business Council/GovExec.com poll.
Twenty-eight percent said they would even consider leaving the federal workforce entirely now that Trump is president.
Activists are concerned that Trump could be looking to limit information that he doesn’t agree with.
The administration also barred EPA staff from awarding new contracts and grants and temporarily suspended new work orders to contractors, the report said, all of which could have a significant impact on the agency’s activities.
Trump has previously dismissed global warming as a hoax “created by and for the Chinese” to stunt U.S. manufacturing.
During the campaign, he raised the prospect of backing out of the Paris climate agreement brokered by Obama. His pick to lead the EPA, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has led lawsuits against Obama’s climate policies.
“I am, to a large extent, an environmentalist; I believe in it. But it’s out of control,” Trump told reporters Tuesday.
Ericksen, who currently serves as a Washington state senator, said the restrictions on grants and contracts is a way “to understand what money’s going out of the EPA right now, to make sure it reflects the priorities of the new administration.”
Timothy Cama contributed.
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 01/24/17 08:09 PM EST
The Trump administration is clamping down on public communications by agencies as it seeks to assert control over the federal bureaucracy.
New restrictions on social media use and interaction with press and lawmakers at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the departments of Commerce, Health and Human Services, Agriculture and the Interior have sparked concerns of a President Trump-backed effort to silence dissenting views.
The Trump administration’s newly imposed communications rules vary at different agencies.
At the EPA, staffers were ordered to stop issuing press releases, blog updates and social media posts, according to a memo to employees. The Agriculture Department’s research arm was reportedly told by its chief of staff to stop issuing news releases, photos and other “public-facing” documents — although the agency disavowed the order late Tuesday, saying that new guidance would replace it.
The new prohibitions come as Trump seeks to reverse many of former President Barack Obama’s policies, which requires the cooperation of a federal workforce that is broadly perceived to be hostile to him.
It’s not unusual for incoming administrations to seek control over agency communications, especially at the outset, when Cabinet secretaries aren’t in place.
But experts on the federal workforce say they have never seen a White House take the type of steps Trump’s administration has to curb public communications.
Green groups worry the moves could signal Trump wants to cut off the public from government information on climate change and other issues.
Liz Perera, climate policy director at the Sierra Club, said the moves “should be a major red flag for all Americans.”
“These actions don’t just threaten scientists — they threaten everyone in the country who breathes air, drinks water and eats food,” said Andrew Rosenberg, an official at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The EPA restriction caught the attention of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who tweeted Tuesday afternoon that the ban on social media and contact with reporters was “very troubling —and honestly, anti-democratic.”
In an apparent act of defiance, the official Twitter account for Badlands National Park in South Dakota on Tuesday afternoon posted information about climate change.
The tweets were later deleted.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters he didn’t know the reason behind the moves but denied it was a concerted effort to silence federal employees.
“I don’t think it’s any surprise that when there’s an administration turnover, that we’re going to review the policies,” he said.
The White House did not respond to a request for further comment, nor did the EPA.
Doug Ericksen, chief spokesman for the EPA’s beachhead team, which is working to transition the agency to its new leadership, also downplayed the changes.
“We’re temporarily dimming some of the communication aspects of the department while we get it under control, to shape the message towards what the new administration would like to be talking about,” Ericksen said.
The spokesman added the changes are likely to be lifted by the end of the week.
“We’ve got 10 regions at EPA, so we’re bringing them in the house for a little bit, then we’ll build them up again,” he said.
The moves come after Trump was reportedly infuriated over reporting on the turnout at his inauguration, which included a viral photo comparison showing Friday’s crowd next to the one that attended Obama’s 2009 swearing-in. The tweet was retweeted by the National Park Service (NPS).
The Interior Department, which oversees the park service, was ordered last Friday to shut down its social media operations. Its accounts were quickly revived over the weekend.
NPS spokesman Thomas Crosson told The Washington Post the tweets were “inconsistent with the agency’s approach to engaging the public through social media.”
Asked to explain the decision, Spicer said, “My understanding is, is that because they had inappropriately violated their own social media policies, there was guidance that was put out to the department to act in compliance with the rules that were set forth.”
The moves have compounded existing tensions between Trump and federal workers. It came as Trump announced a broad federal hiring freeze aimed at reducing the size of the bureaucracy through attrition.
Many rank-and-file federal employees, likewise, are not enamored with their new boss. They preferred Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over Trump by a 2-1 margin, according to a recent Government Business Council/GovExec.com poll.
Twenty-eight percent said they would even consider leaving the federal workforce entirely now that Trump is president.
Activists are concerned that Trump could be looking to limit information that he doesn’t agree with.
The administration also barred EPA staff from awarding new contracts and grants and temporarily suspended new work orders to contractors, the report said, all of which could have a significant impact on the agency’s activities.
Trump has previously dismissed global warming as a hoax “created by and for the Chinese” to stunt U.S. manufacturing.
During the campaign, he raised the prospect of backing out of the Paris climate agreement brokered by Obama. His pick to lead the EPA, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has led lawsuits against Obama’s climate policies.
“I am, to a large extent, an environmentalist; I believe in it. But it’s out of control,” Trump told reporters Tuesday.
Ericksen, who currently serves as a Washington state senator, said the restrictions on grants and contracts is a way “to understand what money’s going out of the EPA right now, to make sure it reflects the priorities of the new administration.”
Timothy Cama contributed.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Monday, January 23, 2017
1968...2017, Trump did not Divide America - America is Divided
Obama’s Legacy Is a Weaker and More Divided America
Hans von Spakovsky / @HvonSpakovsky / Grant Strobl / January 19, 2017 /
Americans voted in November for seismic change, but our outgoing president is still as clueless as ever about the nation he governed.
In his farewell speech-cum-lecture earlier this month, President Barack Obama proclaimed that he made America better by “almost every measure.”
The statement goes far beyond optimism, and lands squarely in the realm of delusion.
Eight years of Obama’s leadership has left America demonstrably weaker and more divided. Rather than the promised “healing”—racial and other—the Obama era frayed the ties that bind us.
It began when his Justice Department dropped an open-and-shut voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. It was essentially a declaration that his administration would use the Voting Rights Act to protect only certain races.
There followed a steady stream of false claims that America was an inherently racist society with a biased judicial and law enforcement system. Obama rekindled a racial divide that had been steadily disappearing in American society.
In fostering group identity politics for political advantage, the Obama administration only divided the American people. And the people know it.
A recent Rasmussen poll found that 60 percent of Americans felt “race relations have gotten worse since Obama’s election”—a far cry from the president’s claim of “better” race relations under his administration.
The president also boasted of controlling health care costs while bringing Americans better insurance coverage. Neither claim is true.
This year, insurance premiums skyrocketed by an average of 25 percent in states with exchanges. Deductibles are through the roof. And people shopping for more affordable insurance are finding far fewer options.
Most states this year have even fewer insurance providers participating in health care exchanges than last year.
As for “better coverage,” the vast majority of previously uninsured people now covered are enrolled in Medicaid—a troubled and increasingly stressed program that actually delivers poorer health outcomes than those of people with no insurance at all.
It’s no wonder that more Americans want to repeal the consistently unpopular law than keep it, according to a recent Kaiser Health tracking poll.
The president proudly stated that he opened a “new chapter with the Cuban people,” but it appears the new chapter for the Cuban people is one behind bars. Since Obama began “normalization,” arrests of Cuban political dissidents have escalated, with over 9,000 political arrests made in 2016.
It is no secret that the tyrannical Castro regime has a dismal human rights record. The influx of American capital blessed by normalization will only bolster the regime.
It was a huge mistake to give Havana diplomatic recognition with no conditions and no requirements to stop the oppression. In Cuban-American communities, the widespread celebrations of Fidel Castro’s death stood in stark contrast to the bitter disappointment in Obama’s failure to stand for freedom and liberty in Cuba.
Returning to domestic policy, the president ignored his real record: eight years of economic stagnation. Instead, he offered happy talk: “The good news is that today the economy is growing again.”
Really? Our economy continues to under-perform, with low increases in gross domestic product, a low labor participation rate, increased cost of living in cities, and lower-than-expected wage growth.
Rather than implement policies that encourage business creation and investment, the president fostered an environment of class warfare and instituted policies, including Obamacare and over-regulation in many other areas, which increased the barriers to entry for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
This no-regrets president remained unapologetic of his “pen and phone” approach to governance. First expressed in 2014, it reflects his belief that the limits of the Constitution on the power of the presidency do not apply to him.
Obama has engaged in more unilateral policy-making through executive fiat than almost any previous president—bending, changing, rewriting, and ignoring the law at will.
From refusing to enforce federal immigration law or welfare work requirements, to ignoring statutory deadlines, to making illegal recess appointments, Obama abused his office and his power. That is not something to be proud of.
In his typical lawyerly fashion, the president skirted around the truth of cities riddled with racial tension and soaring crime rates, small businesses ruined by rising health care costs and crushing regulations, a metastasizing national debt, and a foreign policy that seems to favor authoritarian regimes over our allies.
Perhaps all the spin worked on the reporters attending Obama’s last speech. But the broad swathes of the American people who have suffered the consequences of his misgovernance for eight long years stopped buying it months, if not years, ago.
IT COULD BE WORSE
Saturday, January 21, 2017
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