Canada Claims It Will Back Out of TPP to Protect Its Sovereignty

[n2doc]

The Obama administration isn’t happy with Canada’s reluctance to sacrifice its poultry market on the altar of membership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

On July 16, the Globe and Mail reported:

American officials including chief U.S. negotiator Michael Froman have repeatedly publicly prodded Canada to produce a “meaningful offer” and disclose to the U.S. what kind of agriculture concessions it will make. Trade ministers from 12 countries are preparing to gather in Hawaii shortly for what some describe as a final push for a TPP deal.

Canada’s Trade Minister Ed Fast dismisses these challenges from Washington, telling The Globe and Mail last week that “the Americans prefer to negotiate this agreement through the media” and he won’t.

Sources say as far as the U.S. is concerned, Canada promised that “things that weren’t addressed in the North American free-trade agreement — poultry and dairy — were going to be addressed” in the Pacific Rim talks.

“That was very clear; that was agreed upon,” a source familiar with the trade talks said.


more
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/21270-canada-claims-it-will-back-out-of-tpp-to-protect-its-sovereignty

[Hoyt]

1. Yeah, Canada does not want to have to label its poultry/meats as to country of origin.

Last edited Sat Jul 18, 2015, 02:29 AM - Edit history (1)

[Recursion]

4. Honestly we gave away too much in the Agreement on Rules of Origin

And Canada keeps trying to claw back the little bits they gave us. Still, I'm willing to bet this is bluster on both sides...

[Marr]

5. You must receive automated alerts when this deal needs defending, I swear. /nt

Last edited Sat Jul 18, 2015, 07:44 PM - Edit history (1)

Kind of like the bat signal, but for neoliberal trade policy.

[Hoyt]

6. You ought to learn how to scan for key words. Guess you don't have to

read a lot of stuff.

[treestar]

12. Pot calls kettle black

since we know where we stand, what's the point of criticizing the other person for posting at all? Same could be said of you. Geez.

[Rex]

24. Considering the replies, you nailed it.

Now look at them foam for getting called out.

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. Why would that even be an issue?

Poultry and beef standards are essentially identical in the US and Canada (and both allow for things that are banned in other countries, like use of growth hormones).

[Hoyt]

10. It actually just became an issue a few months ago. Canada was going to

place tariffs on some of our products if we required them to label beef.

The WTO essentially ruled Canada could place tariffs on some of our products, so our Congress changed labeling laws. Of course, what people who try to use this as proof NAFTA, TPP are bad fail to realize is that without trade laws Canada could do that anyway. In fact, all countries would be doing that, to all our detriment.

[Recursion]

23. That was pretty much the reason the WTO ruled against our labeling laws

The WTO's finding was that the country-of-origin labeling laws in the US weren't actually to inform consumers (since the standards are essentially the same) but were instead to encourage purchase of US beef over Canadian beef.

[hedda_foil]

2. Oh Canada!

[artislife]

34. That was beautiful nt

[Recursion]

3. Canada's ag has been a sticking point for all our trade deals

Though if I had to guess, I'd say this is just blustering on both sides.

[Bluenorthwest]

11. So how do you and O'Malley rationalize legitimizing Brunei and their human rights abuses?

'It's ok that they kill their gay people because......' you tell me.
Would you have entered such agreements with Apartheid South Africa? If not, then why Brunei?

[treestar]

13. Is it legitimating all a country does

to have any dealings with it?

Are we legitimizing NK for the way they treat their people when we attempt to negotiate on their nukes or give them food for the people they starve?

We should close the embassies in all Muslim countries I guess. That'll make them see the light.

[Bluenorthwest]

18. So you would like to see NK be given most favored nation status? And you equate having a diplomatic

office in a country to entering a favored nations accord with that country? It's all the same thing? Giving aid to famine relief in NK is the same as enriching the bloody Sultan of Brunei with cushy protections he does not even accord to his own people?

[treestar]

28. not the same on that score, I mean

your idea that we have to cut off ties or communications with any entity wrong on gay rights and that's the only right thing to do. But will it work? Has progress made to date resulted from that type of action? If we cut off all ties with all Islamic nations because of their majority's views on gay rights, would that improve the situation for gay people of those countries?

[Recursion]

14. AFAIK O'Malley is against the TPP; I'm certainly not "for" it at this point

Has he changed that position?

I have to read the damn thing before I have an opinion on it, personally.

As far as Brunei, we have a current trade agreement with them, so I'll have to see if the TPP is better or worse than that. Unless you're saying that human rights violation mean we freeze current trade policies in place permanently?

[Romulox]

15. LOL. You're silly. nt

[Recursion]

16. How so? I've never said I want the TPP to pass

DU gets really lazy about pigeonholing people's views.

[Romulox]

19. You're a classic "neo-liberal". Your views are by-the-book. Quit feigning indignation

based on the (shock!) fact that people can recall what you've previously posted.

[Rex]

25. Are you kidding me!? He and his tiny group are amusing the rest of us!

Why would they drop the act!? It is LOL funny!

[Bluenorthwest]

21. You do realize that Brunei is establishing harsh laws in order to 'protect their people from the

forces of globalization' while Brunei actively seeks to join those forces more fully, correct? So they are going to execute gay people as an insulation from the TPP, which the Sultan wants. His reason for the repressive laws is that globalization is a threat, but he has sought that globalization. To be party to such actions is not to merely enter a trade agreement, it is to enter a trade agreement with someone who is saying 'we can make this work by repressing our people even unto death by stoning'.

Do you have any sort of limits to the universe of possible favored partners? The US has been known to impose sanctions in trade and should be doing so with Brunei.
Would you support favored nations deals with countries that were engaged in race based genocide? What about a country that said 'we want this deal, but first we have to kill all the minorities who don't like it, so give us a year and we're in'? Is that still a glorious deal worth doing? Trade at any price?

[Recursion]

22. I'd rather cut off trade with Brunei, myself

But then I also want to yank MFN from China and India. (Strictly neither has full MFN, but I'd rather have a much more robust tariff policy against them.)

The question remains whether TPP will be better or worse than our current trade arrangement with Brunei, even though I'd rather not trade at all.

[msongs]

7. corporate whores in both countries are having a slight tiff, temporarily postponing the

final outcome

[Doctor_J]

8. What do they know? They have universal healthcare. They haven't grasped the

wonderfulness of corporate supremacy.

[Octafish]

17. What's the matter, Col. Sanders?

Chicken?

[Rex]

27. Awww DU neo-liberals have a cryz over Canada. No doubt it is a Bad Place now.

Since their entire life exists in binary.

[Octafish]

30. Before Greece, the neo-Libs outta Chicago liberated Chile...

The following you know, Rex, but it is important to remind gentle reader of DU that these people are dead serious gangsters, before Greece there was Chile:

"The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom's Awful Toll"

Orlando Letelier
August 28, 1976

It would seem to be a common-sensical sort of observation that economic policies are conditioned by and at the same time modify the social and political situation where they are put into practice. Economic policies, therefore, are introduced in order to alter social structures.

If I dwell on these considerations, therefore, it is because the necessary connection between economic policy and its sociopolitical setting appears to be absent from many analyses of the current situation in Chile. To put it briefly, the violation of human rights, the system of institutionalized brutality, the drastic control and suppression of every form of meaningful dissent is discussed (and often condemned) as a phenomenon only indirectly linked, or indeed entirely unrelated, to the classical unrestrained free market policies that have been enforced by the military junta. This failure to connect has been particularly characteristic of private and public financial institutions, which have publicly praised and supported the economic policies adopted by the Pinochet government, while regretting the bad international image the junta has gained from its incomprehensible persistence in torturing, jailing and persecuting all its critics. A recent World Bank decision to grant a $33 million loan to the junta was justified by its President, Robert McNamara, as based on purely technical criteria, implying no particular relationship to the present political and social conditions in the country. The same line of justification has been followed by American private banks which, in the words of a spokesman for a business consulting firm, have been falling all over one another to make loans. (See Ann Crittenden: 'Loans from Abroad Flow to Chile's Rightist Junta', (The New York Times, February 20.) But probably no one has expressed this attitude better than the US Secretary of the Treasury. After a visit to Chile, during which he discussed human rights violations by the military government, William Simon congratulated Pinochet for bringing economic freedom to the Chilean people (The Times, May 17). This particularly convenient concept of a social system in which economic freedom and political terror coexist without touching each other, allows these financial spokesmen to support their concept of freedom while exercising their verbal muscles in defense of human rights.

The usefulness of the distinction has been particularly appreciated by those who have generated the economic policies now being carried out in Chile. In Newsweek of June 14, Milton Friedman, who is the intellectual architect and unofficial adviser for the team of economists now running the Chilean economy, stated: In spite of my profound disagreement with the authoritarian political system of Chile, I do not consider it as evil for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean Government, any more than I would regard it as evil for a physician to give technical medical advice to the Chilean Government to help end a medical plague.

It is curious that the man who wrote a book, Capitalism and Freedom, to drive home the argument that only classical economic liberalism can support political democracy can now so easily disentangle economics from politics when the economic theories he advocates coincide with an absolute restriction of every type of democratic freedom. One would logically expect that if those who curtail private enterprise are held responsible for the effects of their measures in the political sphere, those who impose unrestrained economic freedom would also be held responsible when the imposition of this policy is inevitably accompanied by massive repression, hunger, unemployment and the permanence of a brutal police state.

SNIP...

An International Monetary Fund Report of May 1976 points out: The process of returning to the private sector the vast majority of the enterprises which over the previous fifteen years, but especially in 1971-73, had become part of the public sector continued (during 1975) ... At the end of 1973 the Public Development Corporation (CORFO) had a total of 492 enterprises, including eighteen commercial banks ... Of this total, 253 enterprises ... have been returned to their former owners. Among the other 239 enterprises ... 104 (among them ten banks) have been sold; sixteen (including two banks) have already been adjudicated, with the completion of the transfer procedure being a matter of weeks; the sale of another twenty-one is being negotiated bilaterally with groups of potential buyers... Competitive bidding is still to be solicited for the remaining enterprises. Obviously the buyers are always a small number of powerful economic interests who have been adding these enterprises to the monopolistic or oligopolistic structures within which they operate. At the same time, a considerable number of industries have been sold to transnational corporations, among them the national tire industry (INSA), bought by Firestone for an undisclosed sum, and one of the main paper pulp industries (Celulosa Forestal Arauco), bought by Parsons & Whittemore.

SNIP...

Although the economic policies have more mercilessly affected the working classes, the general debacle has significantly touched the middle class as well. At the same time, medium-size national enterprises have had their expectations destroyed by the reduction in demand, and have been engulfed and destroyed by the monopolies against which they were supposed to compete. Because of the collapse of the automobile industry, hundreds of machine shops and small industries which acted as subcontractors have faced bankruptcy. Three major textile firms (FIAD, Tomé Oveja and Bellavista) are working three days a week; several shoe companies, among them Calzados Bata, have had to close. Ferriloza, one of the main producers of consumer durables, recently declared itself bankrupt. Facing this situation, Raul Sahli, the new president of the Chilean Industrialists' Association and himself linked to big monopolies, declared earlier in the year: The social market economy should be applied in all its breadth. If there are industrialists who complain because of this, let them go to hell. I won't defend them. He is so quoted by André Gunder Frank in a Second Open Letter to Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, April 1976.

The nature of the economic prescription and its results can be most vividly stated by citing the pattern of domestic income distribution. In 1972, the Popular Unity Government employees and workers received 62.9% of the total national income; 37.1% went to the propertied sector. By 1974 the share of the wage earners had been reduced to 38.2%, while the participation of property had increased to 61.8%. During 1975, 16 average real wages are estimated to have declined by almost 8%, according to the International Monetary Fund. lt is probable that these regressive trends in income distribution have continued during 1976. What it means is that during the last three years several billions of dollars were taken from the pockets of wage earners and placed in those of capitalists and landowners. These are the economic results of the application in Chile of the prescription proposed by Friedman and his group.

CONTINUED...

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/letelierchicagoboys.html

Less than a month after this is published, Orlando Letelier is assassinated on the orders of the Chilean secret police.

Yeah, see? All your stuff belongs to us, see? Yeah!



FWIW: Poppy Bush knew all about Operation Condor and didn't stop them killing Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit. He even told Ed Koch, "Sorry if you get killed. Nothing we can do."

[MineralMan]

20. The New American is a John Birch Society organ.

From http://www.thenewamerican.com/about

In addition to political topics, The New American also publishes articles about economics (from a free-enterprise perspective of course!), culture, and history. It is published by American Opinion Publishing, a wholly owned subsidiary of The John Birch Society.

Why am I reading from a RWNJ website on Democratic Underground? Can you please explain?

[pampango]

33. JBS worries a lot about government "sovereignty" and nationalism. That is typical of the far-right.

Posting JBS articles on DU, other than to criticize or ridicule them, is hard to imagine.

[Rex]

26. And of course the neo-liberals on DU cry outrage! How dare they! All without supporting the TPP.

You cannot get a more wishy washy group of people then DUs tiny neo-liberal group - so pathetic watching them pretend they are not really for the TPP, when all they do is endorse it all day long. But not really.

[MisterP]

29. heck, even Mulroney jets up from FL whenever he has a sprain or a sniffle

Harper hasn't QUITE managed to recreate the GOP up north (heck, Stockwell Day got laughed out *by their right wing*)

[Zorra]

31. Go Canada! nt

[colsohlibgal]

32. Prudent Move Canada

Obama had already disappointed me but him moving Heaven and Earth to move that bill tops all.

[Puzzledtraveller]

35. Globalism

Fuck it!