Trade wars and deals

Future of World Trade Organization splits leaders at Asia-Pacific summit

Disagreement over the body that resolves global trade disputes split Asia-Pacific countries at an international economic summit, leaving the annual gathering the victim of a trade war between the world's two biggest economies.

The Liberals have been championing changes to the World Trade Organization, which has drawn the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump, organizing a meeting last month in Ottawa to start crafting a road map for reforms.

The U.S. has openly blocked the appointments of new judges to the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism, known as the appellate body — a tactic that threatens to paralyze the organization and prevent it from making decisions.

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The outcome seemed destined from the start of the summit as China and the United States used the annual forum to lay out competing visions for trade and investment at the gathering of nations, which combined represent about 60 per cent of the global economy and half of global trade.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence traded barbs Saturday in a battle for global influence. Both left the summit by early Sunday afternoon amid what reports described as tense backroom negotiations on the wording of the final communique from the summit.

..anyone feeling that gb would do better under wto rules rather than staying with eu should contemplate a re think. there are no good options.

Globalization, Inequality & the Predictable Corporate Takeover of the WTO (1/2) 

The corporate takeover of platforms like the World Trade Organization has been denounced by developing countries and activists for decades and today the denunciations are reflected in rebuttals to pro-corporate machinations like those unpacked in this series of presentations at the 2018 World Trade Organization Public Forum

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DEBORAH JAMES: We should debate what are the sources of poverty reduction in the world, that which is happening and that which is not happening. And now we’re seeing the negative impacts of globalization in high income countries such as mine, the United States, and this has in recent years contributed to political upheaval. But that globalization has been defended as if it were a great boost to millions of people throughout the world. So if we understand that this type of globalization has not benefited the majority of people in developing countries and we understand that now there’s a huge populist revolt because that same globalization model has not benefited the vast majority of people even in the developed countries. But at the same time, there’s been a huge increase in wealth creation and a huge increase in trade and investment flows. Where’s all the money going?

Well, it turns out that we have the answer in this year’s Trade and Development Report. It’s going to the top one percent of superstar vampire corporations who are sucking even more wealth out of the vast majority of people around the world in the Global North and the Global South and everywhere in between. And we would say that this corporate takeover is the predictable result of these firms using their wealth to intervene in the economy, to rewrite the rules through the WTO and also through bilateral and regional trade agreements, and through electing austerity-focused national governments.

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RICHARD KOZUL-WRIGHT: And by hyper-globalization, we basically see three distinct features from the earlier period of globalization from the end of the Second World War. Clearly, there’s an ideological component with the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant economic narrative. Neoliberalism, though, is not simply about more markets. That’s a very basic kind of philosophical failure in a lot of the discussion of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is fundamentally about creating a set of rules that allow business to do what it wants, how it wants, where it wants, unencumbered by the actions of governments and other potentially distortionary elements, democracy, trade unions, other things that might get in the way of business doing what it wants, how it wants, where it wants.

And because people like, particularly neoliberals who haven’t read him, like to go back to Adam Smith at this point as a kind of father figure of the neoliberal tradition, which he wasn’t, of course, and Smith had two very important insights about what we would call a rules-based system. Smith recognized, particularly in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that a rules-based system didn’t just depend on the details of the rules themselves, but the trust that people had in those rules and whether people trusted both the rules and the execution of those rules, that was a key feature of Smith’s understanding of a healthy political economy. And one of the things that we track, particularly since the financial crisis although there were signs of it before of course, was the removal of trust from political systems both at the national level, but I think also the international level, too.

At the national level it’s pretty obvious why this has happened. The response to the financial crisis was, essentially, how do we save the banks. And we saved the banks both by handing out very large amounts of taxpayers’ money, which is how the banking system survived and recovered after the crisis, and then shifting the burden of the consequences of that action onto the vast majority of people through policies of economic austerity. And that combination of saving the institutions that caused the problems in the first instance and then shifting the burden onto your average citizen has clearly removed most people’s sense of trust in the institutions ultimately whose job it is to provide for the welfare of its citizenry.

Guaranteed, China will retaliate!

Any Canadian business person going to China, after this arrest, may be detained in retaliation! For sure any US business person may.

Get ready for a recession Canada, thanks Justin, fuckin shit for brains worst PM this country ever had! Harper looks like Ghandi next to you assfuck!

WWWTT wrote:

Guaranteed, China will retaliate!

Any Canadian business person going to China, after this arrest, may be detained in retaliation! For sure any US business person may.

Get ready for a recession Canada, thanks Justin, fuckin shit for brains worst PM this country ever had! Harper looks like Ghandi next to you assfuck!

I doubt you're gonna see China go on a mass-arresting spree of US businessmen; not unless they want to do serious damage to their economic relations. Any retaliation would more likely be directed against missionaries, NGOs, and other economically nebulous do-gooders, eg. that Canadian family who were detained a few years ago near the North Korean border, and had already been engaged in somewhat questionable activities(eg. drawing attention to sanctions-busters on-line) prior to their arrest.

voice of the damned wrote:

WWWTT wrote:

Guaranteed, China will retaliate!

Any Canadian business person going to China, after this arrest, may be detained in retaliation! For sure any US business person may.

Get ready for a recession Canada, thanks Justin, fuckin shit for brains worst PM this country ever had! Harper looks like Ghandi next to you assfuck!

I doubt you're gonna see China go on a mass-arresting spree of US businessmen; not unless they want to do serious damage to their economic relations. Any retaliation would more likely be directed against missionaries, NGOs, and other economically nebulous do-gooders, eg. that Canadian family who were detained a few years ago near the North Korean border, and had already been engaged in somewhat questionable activities(eg. drawing attention to sanctions-busters on-line) prior to their arrest.

Possibly? But for sure China will retaliate. And not in any subtle way you have mentioned.

Stock markets are already reacting and this act is sending lots of fear among those who travel for business. Chinese tourism to Canada will be seriously impacted.

Possibly because of the Canadian dependence on the US, Canada may be sheltered, somewhat?

A vassal state could not do anything else. The US does not want Chinese cellphones flooding their market. They fear that the Chinese security forces will be able to replicate the 5 Eyes current ability to track cellphone activity in the West. Trudeau is a puppet. Since the turn of the century our financial, business and military elites have all been integrated into the US sphere, in an unprecedented way historically. We are a sovereign nation in name only.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

A vassal state could not do anything else. The US does not want Chinese cellphones flooding their market. They fear that the Chinese security forces will be able to replicate the 5 Eyes current ability to track cellphone activity in the West. Trudeau is a puppet. Since the turn of the century our financial, business and military elites have all been integrated into the US sphere, in an unprecedented way historically. We are a sovereign nation in name only.

Disagree!

First of I believe HuaWei phones are banned in the US

https://www.cnet.com/news/why-some-of-the-flashiest-huawei-android-p20-p20-pro-mate-10-pro-phones-arent-in-the-us/

Secondly, Justin can refuse the US  But I suspect that Justin was very desperate for a free trade deal and is very afraid the US will retaliate, in other words he’s a chicken shit  and in full “kiss Trumps ass” mode

kropotkin1951 wrote:

The security issue is a red herring because there is no way to protect oneself on this media from the prying eyes of spies from anywhere on the planet. What incenses me the most is that we have arrested a Chinese citizen on the basis that the US is investigating a breach of sanctions that are not UN based. I am hoping that the Judge at the extradition process slaps the government about the head and orders this business woman released.

Amen. I am not a lawyer, but once was, and I think the government may be on thin ice here legally. It has all the hallmarks of a political decision.

The laughing “jack ass” shit for brains Justin gives his view on the arrest of Meng Wan Zhou 孟晚舟

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-prepared-for-possible-chinese-cyber-retaliation-over-arrest-of/

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While I agree that this was a foolhardy and counterproductive act, I think Harper would have been even more eager than Trudeau to do Trump's bidding.

Neither Trudeau nor Harper was in office in 1999, when the Extradition Act was last revised.  That's why Canada arrested her, not because we're a subservient, compliant vassal state, or because Trudeau is a coward and a turncoat, or  whatever.

Illustration by Bruce MacKinnon

Michael Moriarity wrote:

NDPP wrote:

What is the Real Reason 5 EYES Mass Interception Partner Countries Are So Opposed to Huawei's 5G?

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1095103996480684032

"NSA leaks from 2013 show that mobile chip maker Qualcomm and Intel are secret NSA partners. Despite huge incentives, 5EYES have not revealed a hardware backdoor in Huawei."

It seems that the U.S. intelligence establishment assumes that since it puts back doors in American silicon, the Chinese will do the same with theirs. Either way, for consumers in all countries, it's privacy, schmivacy.

We either get phones we know 5Eyes can and do spy on or phones that we presume the Chinese can spy on.  Frankly the Chinese are a lot further down on my list of likely agencies that would be tracking a Canadian leftist. I rely on being a really tiny minnow in a vast and almost endless ocean of data traffic.