Dean Baker — Promoting the TPP as an Anti-China Pact: The Flavor of the Month

Since economics won't sell the TPP, the alternative is to make it a geo-political pact, with the main target being China. The NYT goes this route with an article that tweaks Donald Trump for his opposition to the TPP.

"Faced with such an enemy, one might imagine the United States would gather allies in a concerted effort to contain China’s mercantilist ambitions. Except that Mr. Trump, in one of his earliest actions, revoked American participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pact promoted by his predecessor as a means of doing precisely that. He walked away while extracting no discernible benefits from China."

Politicizing Sinophobia along with Russophobia, is not only irresponsible and craven. It is also crazy when China and Russia are the two nuclear superpowers that balance US power and contest US global hegemony aka world dominance.

WTF is wrong with theses people? Have they never heard of hubris and nemesis?

Beat the Press
Promoting the TPP as an Anti-China Pact: The Flavor of the Month
Dean Baker | Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C

Bill Mitchell — EU clones itself in West Africa and then tries to ransack the region

In a recent blog – If Africa is rich – why is it so poor? – I considered the question of why the resources that make Africa rich have not been deployed to the benefit of the indigenous people who reside there. We saw that poverty is rife in Africa, when it is obvious to all and sundry that these nations possess massive resource wealth. The answer to that paradox is that the framework of development aid and oversight put in place by the richer nations and mediated through the likes of the IMF and the World Bank can be seen more as a giant vacuum cleaner designed to suck resource and financial wealth out of the poorer nations either through legal or illegal means, whichever generates the largest flows. So while Africa is wealthy, its interaction with the world monetary and trade systems, leaves millions of its citizens in extreme poverty – unable to even purchase sufficient nutrition to live. The ‘free trade agreement’ (EPA) between the EU and the West African nations is one such ‘vacuum’-like device. In fact, the West African states are still mired in post-colonial dependency not because they lack the resources available to set out their own development path, but, rather, because of the post-colonial institutions that have been set up to maintain control by the former colonialists of those resources. Not content to ruin the prosperity in the Eurozone, the EU is pressuring some of the poorest nations in the world to adopt the same sort of failed monetary and fiscal arrangements and then go further – and sign ‘free trade’ agreements with reciprocal access. The rest of the West African states should follow Nigeria’s example and abandon these arrangements.…

Neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, and neocolonialism in Africa. Bill suggests how to employ MMT in the attempt to overcome this and set the region on a course to distributed prosperity.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
EU clones itself in West Africa and then tries to ransack the region
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Dean Baker — Does the NYT Have to Call them "Free" Trade Agreements?

More BS sophistry sold as "news."

Baker gives the Times the benefit of the doubt. I think that is overly generous considering the history.

In a professional environment, always look to motive rather than ignorance. And when professionals repeatedly make "mistakes," the presumption is that these are not actually mistakes but excuses after being called out.

Beat the Press
Does the NYT Have to Call them "Free" Trade Agreements?
Dean Baker | Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC

More lack of professionalism, this time in economics.

Adam Smith was not the originator of the "invisible hand" of supply and demand. Paul Samuelson was. Smith used the metaphor in an entirely different context with an entirely different meaning.

Adam Smith's Lost Legacy
How To Ruin a Good Piece on the History of Economic Thought
Gavin Kennedy | Professor Emeritus, Heriot Watt University

Jon Rappoport — Globalists interviewed: they admitted they controlled the government

The origin of "free trade" agreements as a key piece of neoliberal globalization?

Jon Rappoport's Blog

Globalists interviewed: they admitted they controlled the government
Jon Rappoport