The first round of discussions are underway for the renegotiation of the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA. Many are expecting thorny bargaining to take place between Canada, Mexico, and…
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The first round of discussions are underway for the renegotiation of the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA. Many are expecting thorny bargaining to take place between Canada, Mexico, and a newly “economic nationalist” United States imbued with President Trump’s “America First” outlook promising stringent protectionist measures.
Meant to do away with trade barriers and expedite the free circulation of goods and services between the countries, the 1994 pact reconfigured the countries’ economies toward regional integration – a task critics doubt the Trump administration is willing to advance.
In Mexico, agrarian organizations and popular movements have criticized NAFTA for devastating the country’s small producers and hurting Mexico’s overall food sovereignty, turning the country into an exporter of raw materials and an importer of processed products. Meanwhile, industrial jobs in the U.S. were offshored to Canada and low-cost manufacturing hubs in Mexico.
The negotiators – U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo – will each come to the table with different sets of proposals representing the interests of their own respective business sectors.
There are no signs that demands by labor are being heeded or taken into account, according to Manuel Perez-Rocha, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all. … The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor.” —Helen Keller
Most people shy away from the simple question; do those who are paid the most in our society deserve to be compensated like that? If a particular individual was the driving force behind a cure for all cancer, or instrumental in significantly increasing the human life span, I think most everyone would agree that their value to society would be such that they’d be entitled to millions, even billions of dollars. But the world’s wealthiest individuals do not, in fact, seem to have contributed in such a way that they have earned a distinction placing them above the masses, garnering more money in less than a year than what virtually everyone else earns in a lifetime. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which ranks the world’s richest three hundred people, these incredibly wealthy elite saw their net worth jump by $52.4 billion in 2013. On July 21, 2016, Bloomberg would recount how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had surpassed Warren Buffet as the third richest person in the world, thanks to a tidy increase of $5.4 billion in his personal fortune in 2016. Meanwhile, the vast majority of workers, who desperately need a significant pay raise, are simply not getting one.
Corporate lobbying groups linked to Goldman Sachs have directly lobbied the White House’s National Economic Council headed by Goldman’s immediate past president Gary Cohn, according to federal records reviewed by International Business Times. Cohn previously pledged to recuse himself from any Goldman-related matter, but there is no indication he recused himself from the matters that the Goldman-linked groups were lobbying his council on.
Along with directly lobbying lawmakers, major corporations often lobby the government through industry trade associations. Those groups marshal the collective political power of whole industries — and can also allow individual companies to shroud their influence-peddling activities under the veneer of a larger organization. In the case of Goldman Sachs, the company itself has not directly lobbied the NEC this year. However, IBT identified at least three groups linked to the bank that lobbied the council in the first half of 2017. Those groups have spent more than $3.6 million on lobbying the government this year.
On the same day a bombing by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan reportedly killed 11 Afghan civilians, including women and children, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) offered up his proposal for “winning” the 16-year-long war in Afghanistan on Thursday by essentially calling for it to continue endlessly.
The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who denounced the Trump administration for offering “no strategy at all” for the war thus far, is putting forth his proposal as an amendment to 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. It includes increasing the number of combat troops, cementing “a long-term, open-ended” U.S. presence in the country, and affording the U.S. military broader authority to target extremist groups.
Among the details, as noted in McCain’s press statement:
North Korea says it’s preparing a plan to launch missiles toward the U.S. territory of Guam, if ordered to do so by leader Kim Jong Un. That announcement has drawn condemnation from Tokyo and South Korea, and comes amid rising tensions between North Korea and the United States.
Here & Now‘s Meghna Chakrabarti talks with John Feffer (@johnfeffer), co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, about North Korea’s tumultuous history with the U.S. and the world.
The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are investigating a bombing that took place on Saturday at the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in suburban Minneapolis while worshipers were performing their morning prayers.
The FBI confirmed that the blast was caused by an improvised explosive device, or IED, that destroyed the imam’s office, shattered windows and smoked up the entire building. Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton called the bombing an “act of terrorism” when he met with local leaders at the mosque on Sunday. No one was injured in the blast and authorities are unsure of the motive or culprit behind it.
What is for certain is that this is not an isolated incident. The mosque was a frequent target for menacing voicemails, hateful emails and threatening anti-Muslim letters. On Aug. 1, vandals attacked the local Muslim Cemetery Al Magfirah in Castle Rock Township in Minnesota. The cemetery was riddled with spray-painted swastikas, cuss words and a message that said, “Leave, you r dead,” alongside damaged furniture and equipment.
Is the world facing the President in 2017 on fire, as many argue, with the chance of major war greater than in decades or are present challenges exaggerated and sensationalized distractions from fundamentally positive trends in the arc of world affairs?
How should history grade President Obama in his management of national security matters? What will be the understanding by both historians and in popular and world culture, of the foreign policy of Barack Obama?
Guests: Zack Beauchamp, World Correspondent for Vox.com Trudy Rubin, Worldview columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer Thomas Wright, Fellow and project director, Brookings Institution Phyllis Bennis, Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies
Pervasive and growing inequality is corroding American democracy, and only ambitious solutions—including healthcare for all, a living wage, and the elimination of corporate money from the political process—will be sufficient to remedy the crisis.
That is the conclusion of a new report published Monday by the Next System Project and the Institute for Policy Studies. Their analysis makes overwhelmingly clear that despite the Trump administration’s self-serving celebrations of the stock market boom and recent monthly job data, the vast majority of Americans remain locked out of America’s tremendous wealth.
Building on the research of economists Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, and Emmanuel Saez—who recently found that the bottom half of the income distribution has been “completely shut off from economic growth” for the past several decades—the new report highlights the systemic causes of America’s vast inequities, including the concentration of political power at the very top, systemic racism, and the dwindling power of organized labor in the face of sustained corporate attacks.
All of these factors, combined with the changes wrought by globalization and technological change, have converged to produce inequities that are vast and ultimately unsustainable.
On the heels of a unanimous vote by the United Nations Security Council to impose new sanctions on North Korea following a series of ballistic missile tests, Pyongyang charged on Monday that the punitive measures are a “violent infringement” of the nation’s sovereignty and vowed “thousands-fold” revenge.
“My hope is that the Trump administration recognizes that, okay, tighter economic sanctions is one possibility, but frankly, we’ve tried that, and it hasn’t really worked.”
—John Feffer, Foreign Policy In FocusThe retaliatory threats were issued by the Kim Jong-un regime and broadcast by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley hailed the sanctions as “the single largest economic sanctions package ever leveled against the North Korean regime,” a message echoed by President Donald Trump.
“It’s a wild idea to think the [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] will be shaken and change its position due to this kind of new sanctions formulated by hostile forces,” Pyongyang said in response. The regime also warned that there is “no bigger mistake than the United States believing that its land is safe across the ocean.”
THE POLITICAL BURLESQUE show running at the White House seems to consume the overwhelming majority of attention among cable news pundits and personalities. Such attention is not entirely unfounded given the potential for criminal indictments to hit members of Donald Trump’s family and inner circle. Any issue or scandal with potential to challenge the viability or very existence of the current presidency deserves intense scrutiny. But the rest of the world still exists and U.S. military involvement in an array of wars and conflicts also demands far more coverage than it receives. This has always been true, including under President Barack Obama, but under Trump, the stakes have been raised dramatically.
Trump has exhibited a disturbing pattern of reckless spontaneity, usually expressed publicly through his Twitter feed, when announcing what could rightly be construed as new U.S. policies. Indeed, when Trump’s senior adviser Sebastian Gorka was asked on Fox News what leverage Trump has left to pressure China to do more to contain potential threats from North Korea, Gorka shot back: “We have, you know, the president’s Twitter feed.”
