Mexico - NAFTA: The "Three Caballeros" meet In Mexico: "Poor Results, No Deals and Many Promisses"

NAFTA Showtime: Stephen Harper, Enrique Peña Nieto, and Barrack Obama

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation noted: "Jean Chretien famously pronounced his last G8 summit as prime minister a success. When asked why, he replied, "Because it could have been a disaster.'
'
That same logic could be applied to this past weeks meeting of the three North American leaders in Toluca, Mexico.

Even though the" three Caballeros" called NAFTA a great success - looking at the results - tells another story. .

The Financial Times wrote about NAFTA: "Treally wenty years into Nafta, Mexico has too many criminals and not enough policemen; too many workers earning low wages and not enough skilled jobs; too many false dawns and not enough economic growth.

NAFTA really is a big economic failure. From 1994 through 2003, the Mexican economy has grown by only 11 percent per person. This is less than one-fourth the rate of growth that Mexico experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the relevant economic comparison for anyone who wants to evaluate Mexico's experience with NAFTA.

Of course, the reforms embodied in NAFTA did not begin in 1994 - they started in the early 1980s. But if we take the longer view, it looks even worse: From 1980 to the present, income per person in Mexico has grown by about 19 percent. This compares to 93 percent for the 1960-1979 (somewhat shorter) period. In other words, there is no economic evidence that the NAFTA model is a success at least not for the tax paying public.

U.S. economic winners and losers under NAFTA vary with company size, type of industry or sector, and geographical location. Sectors affected positively include planes, trains and automobiles, large agri-businesses, appliance makers and energy corporations. Clearly, large multi-national companies with investment capacities, world-market savvy and capital resources have benefited from protected investment and cheap labor. These companies enhanced management performance-based compensation while putting downward pressure on production-worker wages and benefits, collective bargaining clout and available jobs, especially in manufacturing. Many view their actions as a major contributor to compensation inequality.

According to one estimate, workers in Canada and Mexico have displaced 829,280 U.S. jobs, mostly high-wage positions in manufacturing. The heaviest U.S. manufacturing-job losses were in states such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Connecticut, New Jersey, California, Indiana and Florida. 

Canada has so far experienced significant benefit from:

• U.S. investment in automotive production,
• Increases in oil exports to the U.S. and the rest of the world,
• Increases in shipment of beef, agricultural, wood and paper products to the U.S.
• Export of mineral and mining products, which have fared well in U.S. markets.

Canada has, however, also experienced some losses in narrow sectors such as specialty steel production and processed foods due to U.S. imports.

Overall the conclusion is that NAFTA has not lived up to the high expectations of its proponents. It has made many U.S. companies and investors rich - and their managements even richer. But it has also cost many U.S. manufacturing workers their livelihoods while failing to raise living standards for most Mexicans. Any major market changes not dictated by market forces usually lead to both opportunity and loss, and this has happened with NAFTA. 

EU-Digest

US Diplomacy At Work: Top U.S. Diplomat says to Europe: "Fuck The EU"

The United States’ top diplomat for European affairs appears to have been caught on tape saying “fuck the EU” in a leaked phone call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

The Kyiv Post, an English-language newspaper in Ukraine, published the tape on Thursday. The recording’s veracity has not been independently verified.

The phone call appears to show Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland discussing the political situation in Ukraine with a man who sounds to be Ambassador Geoff Pyatt and weighing the merits of different opposition leaders.

A woman who sounds like Nuland says, “I don’t think it’s a good idea” for opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko to be given a role in the government. She appears to favor the idea of having Arseniy Yatseniuk, another opposition leader, as the new prime minister, saying he has “the economic experience, the governing experience.”

She then tells a man who sounds like Pyatt that the United Nations agreed to send someone to help “glue” the deal. “And you know, fuck the EU,” Nuland says. “Exactly,” Pyatt says.

“The EU is engaged in helping the people of Ukraine through the current political crisis. We don’t comment on alleged leaked telephone conversations,” Maja Kocijancic, a spokesperson for EU foreign policy chief Cathy Ashton, told BuzzFeed.

Note EU-Digest: as the saying goes "with friends like this who needs any enemies"

Read more: Top U.S. Diplomat For Europe: "Fuck The EU"

EU-US Trade Negotiations: French senators strongly attack trade deal - What about Dutch Parliament? Asleep?

During a debate in the French Senate, all political parties harshly criticized the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), but the French government defended the potential deal, EurActiv France reports.

The minister in charge of foreign trade, Nicole Bricq, admit with regret that France was the country where the mobilisation against what they call the 'transatlantic treaty', is the strongest.

A debate, which took place in the Senate on Thursday (9 January), showed bipartisan opposition to the agreement and the government found itself somewhat isolated on the topic after facing criticism from
speakers from all political sides.

he former French interior minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, reminded that the idea for a partnership was first and foremost an American idea, as the US wished to rebalance the trade surplus that the EU had with the country and bring back jobs to their continent.

“The companies’ interests are not always those of the states," warned  a politician, who considers that the currency issue should have been settled before signing a trade agreement.

“We should have put in place a transatlantic snake in the tunnel in order to establish, softly, a real parity between the euro and the dollar. We cannot talk about free trade when the parity between euro and
dollar go from one to two in ten years only.”

In his opinion, this aspect should be included in the negotiations, but the minister Bricq replied it was not on the agenda.

André Gattolin, a Green MP, also strongly opposed the partnership project, said that Europe had its own identity and should preserve it.  He also put forward the impact it would have on inequality in different European countries.

“We are promised 0.5% growth but only some zones will take advantage of it like the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp,” the MP went on to say.

“As it is, this project is bad and we saw with the NSA scandal that the dice are loaded,” he added.

Jean Bizet from the centre-right opposition, UMP, expressed concern about the food and agriculture aspects of the deal and notably the milk file, as cheese imports increase in France and milk producing regions grow anxious at the end of milk quotas in 2015.

The sharpest remark came from a member of the government's socialist majority, Marie-Noëlle Lienemann.

“I am very hostile to this treaty,” she said. “We are forced to note that happy globalisation did not happen! … multinational companies are in a situation that we cannot regulate,” she added.

The MP was sceptical about the growth perspectives, too. She added that the promised growth points could be reached with a recovery policy supported by large-scale work projects.

Read more: French senators strongly attack EU-US trade deal | EurActiv

EU-US Trade Negotiations: EU sovereignty ‘at risk’ if judicial independence is surrendered to multinational corporations

More than 200 organisations across the EU, including the TUC, Greenpeace and War on Want, have written a joint letter to European and American trade negotiators demanding the removal of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process from the final treaty.

“ISDS is a one-way street by which corporations can challenge government policies, but neither governments nor individuals are granted comparable rights to hold corporations accountable,” they wrote.

Campaign groups in Britain are due to put their concerns to the Department of Business  this Wednesday, while an Early Day Motion in Parliament, signed by MPs from all parties, calls for the trade talks to be frozen until the issue is resolved.

The European Commission and the British Government insisted the deal would include safeguards to prevent misuse by corporations, thus guaranteeing the right of EU governments to “pursue legitimate public policy objectives such as social, environmental, security, public health and safety” without the risk of being sued.

ISDS has been a long-established principle of multilateral trade deals between countries and is a process designed to ensure investors are not discriminated against by governments or biased judicial systems. It allows companies who believe they have been unfairly treated to take states to a neutral arbitration panel that can award compensation for loss of earnings.

But in recent years, campaigners claim, it has been used by large multinational companies to sue governments acting in the public interest. The Slovak Republic was forced to pay $22m (£13.4m) damages after the government reversed the liberalisation of its health-insurance market.

Campaigners say the arbitration panels are unaccountable and are not likely to assess issues of national interest when making decisions.

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, who tabled the parliamentary motion, said the move would “overturn decades of laws and regulations formed through democratic processes on both sides of the Atlantic”.

Former UK Labour minister John Healey, who chairs the British parliamentary group on EU-US trade and investment, said: “It is not clear ISDSs are justified at all when the agreement will be struck between countries with some of the most advanced and stable legal systems in the world.”

Frances O’Grady, TUC general secretary, said: “These clauses could thwart attempts by a future government to bring our health service back towards public ownership.”

Charlie Kronick, senior climate adviser at Greenpeace, said the group feared ISDS provisions could be used to prevent the EU from restricting imports of US diesel made from polluting tar sands in Canada.

But EU trade spokesman John Clancy said the fears of campaigners were entirely misplaced. “The sad irony is that the many critics of investment protection and in particular ISDS are actually arguing for us to maintain the status quo which is at the heart of the problem.” He added: “The EU wants to close down such loopholes in a future EU-US deal by spelling out what is and is not possible, improving transparency and creating modern, state-of-the art investment arrangements.”

The question which remains ignored by the EU Commission and EU Parliament  is how the EU can even  negotiate with a partner like the US, where most  of the political establishment is now indirectly on the payroll of multi-national and local corporations and which has a spy-network in place which is collecting personal data not only from EU-citizens, but also is able to extrapolate strategic negotiation information from the EU-trade negotiation team wherever they may be. 

To anyone with at least some intelligence these trade negotiations have, so far, not been carried out on a level playing field and the EU better take off their "blinders" .    

EU-Digest