A second, more fundamental question, is why anyone thinks that free trade and globalization are always win-win. In the first place, free trade and globalization are not the same thing. Globalization involves capital flows, direct foreign investment, and technology transfers that are not usually involved in plain old trade transactions. Economic theory holds that free trade is win-win, but only under certain restrictive assumptions such as that all markets are perfectly competitive, that exchange rates are fixed, that there is full utilization of resources, that there are no economies of scale, and that there are no cross border flows of capital, technology, or labor. Obviously, those assumptions hold only in very few instances in modern trade.
Turning to globalization, there is even less of a theoretical basis for arguing that it is always a win-win proposition, and that argument is usually made without making a full accounting of the costs of globalization such as those affecting the environment, dislocation of workers, capital investment losses, and skills learning. The truth is that globalization may or may not be a win-win proposition depending on a wide variety of circumstances.
The protectionism boogeyman | Prestowitz
3 FebGlobal Business Elite Go Marxist at Davos! | The Nation
3 FebBut many attendees lost their cool over Barack Obama’s State of the Union promise to introduce a minimum 30 percent income tax on millionaires. American CEOs who had followed the speech on their iPads during the three-hour drive from the airport vented their spleen during a session on the world business outlook. “They say they want to create employment, then they attack the employment creators,” complained Duncan Niederauer, CEO of the electronic stock exchange Euronext, who took home $5 million last year. “It’s wealth creation that matters, not income distribution,” chimed in Alcoa CEO Klaus Kleinfeld, whose last compensation package topped $11 million. Only John Chambers of Cisco (who took home $38 million last year) seemed to sense that the old Davos clichés of trickle-down might not work anymore. He chided Kleinfeld’s arrogance, saying, “It’s an embarrassment that US business has not found a way to combine its success with a growing middle class.”
via Global Business Elite Go Marxist at Davos! | The Nation.
Indian Point Fire Safety Plan Rejected by Regulators – NYTimes.com
2 FebThe Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday that it had rejected some of the Indian Point nuclear power plant’s procedures for assuring fire safety, noting that its two reactors lacked some equipment that was typically used to meet the commission’s regulations.
via Indian Point Fire Safety Plan Rejected by Regulators – NYTimes.com.
Democratic Individuality: Are American war crimes above the law?
2 FebSam Morison, a Department of Defense lawyer for prisoners in Guantanamo, sent the following letter about the violation of the rule of law there. Big Brother monitors the phone conversations (the only ones allowed) between lawyers and the prisoners in violation of the principle of lawyer-client confidentiality. Further, the Pentagon acts covertly to prevent the New York bar ethics committee from asserting this principle (one might also imagine that the lawyer in question is simply a sycophant – see here and here).
via Democratic Individuality: Are American war crimes above the law?.
H/T ComeHomeAmerica.
From Ron Paul, to the Reform Party, to Occupy, to a New America
2 FebWith your support, I secured a strong top-tier finish in Iowa and an historic 2nd place in New Hampshire. In Iowa, we more than doubled our vote total from 2008. We more than tripled our 2008 total in New Hampshire, and we quadrupled it in South Carolina.
—Ron Paul
People are catching on to Ron Paul’s honest, consistent, principled. and carefully planned program for combating fascism, racism, militarism and imperialism by returning to Constitutionally required and economically necessary LIMITED GOVERNMENT.
But Republicans are not catching on fast enough.
I registered as a Republican just recently, to be able to say I voted for Ron Paul in the Connecticut primary in April, but I can’t find, so far, any House or Senate candidates in this state who want to rein in the Fed and bring all the troops home, support the key Ron Paul fiscal & foreign policy proposals. Too many “military industrial complex” submarines and helicopters made in this state, I guess.
To mobilize that huge majority of Americans, mostly Independents and the 100 million alienated on the sidelines, who want honest politicians and real solutions, we’ll need to revive the Reform Party, test the Americans Elect processes, bring the genuine tax refusers from the ‘tea party’ over to the Occupy Mainstreet movement, and green the grass of the grassroots relentlessly before November 2012.
Let’s get it done this American spring, so we can hear the volume of the loud majority in the streets this summer.
Charlie Keil
Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education
1 FebMeanwhile, though Haidt still supports President Obama, he chides Democrats for a moral vision that alienates many working-class, rural, and religious voters. Though he’s an atheist, he lambasts the liberal scientists of New Atheism for focusing on what religious people believe rather than how religion binds them into communities. And he rakes his own social-psychology colleagues over the coals for being “a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering” and for making the field’s nonliberal members feel like closeted homosexuals. (See related article, Page B8.)
“Liberals need to be shaken,” Haidt tells me. They “simply misunderstand conservatives far more than the other way around.”
The Politics of Dignity – NYTimes.com
1 FebThis message, of course, plays well in the USofA too:
Dear Sirs: You may think that the situations in Egypt and Russia have nothing in common. Think again. Yes, these two countries have starkly different histories. But having visited both in recent weeks, I can tell you that they have one very big thing in common: the political eruptions in both countries were not initially driven by any particular ideology but rather by the most human of emotions — the quest for dignity and justice. Humiliation is the single most underestimated force in politics. People will absorb hardship, hunger and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars and benefits. But if you force people to live indefinitely inside a rigged game that is flaunted in their face or make them feel like cattle that can be passed by one leader to his son or one politician to another, eventually they’ll explode. These are the emotions that sparked the uprisings in Cairo and Moscow. They don’t go away easily, which is why you’re in more trouble than you think.
Newt vs. Mitt | The Nation
1 FebIt’s astonishing that a party with nearly limitless financial resources has such paltry human resources. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently wrote a column titled, “A Good Candidate is Hard to Find,” in which he did his best to come up with excuses for this sorry state of affairs: “The problem, perhaps, is that a successful presidential campaign calls on a trio of talents that only rarely overlap. Being a master politician in a mass democracy, in this sense, is a bit like being a brilliant filmmaker who’s somehow also a great economist, or a Nobel-winning scientist who writes best-selling novels on the side.” Which is, at best, a generous metaphor to use in reference to the two candidates leading the Republican pack today. It also evades the key issue, which is that the party has lurched so far to the right that a candidate like Romney, with some moderate positions on his record, must become a shape-shifter to survive the primary, leaving him badly compromised for the general election.
Can saving the Amazon save the planet? – GlobalPost – Salon.com
1 FebSome 20 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions now come from deforestation, especially in the lush, green band of tropical rainforest that circles the earth.
That is more than from global transport.
So representatives from member states involved in UN climate negotiations are attempting to hammer out a way to make it more profitable to protect forests than destroy them.
By providing cash for maintaining healthy forests, they hope to undermine the economic imperative for poor countries or individuals to cut down trees for timber, to free land for agriculture, or to make way for roads, housing and other infrastructure.
The idea, known as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, or REDD, will be included in the successor to the Kyoto protocol, which is now the only international treaty aimed at climate change.
via Can saving the Amazon save the planet? – GlobalPost – Salon.com.
Turning the ‘Buffett Rule’ Into Law – NYTimes.com
1 FebThe Congressional Research Service estimates that the Buffett Rule, requiring millionaires to pay at least the same rate as most middle-income taxpayers, would affect about a quarter of all millionaires, or 94,500 taxpayers. Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal policy group, says the bill’s 30 percent rate would bring in about $50 billion a year.
Truth and Traditions 