Sue Lannin | July 2

abc.net.au - A leaked report from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) says that nations are throwing up trade barriers in response to the global recession.{snip} WTO director-general Pascal Lamy says the global economy is fragile and that wealthy nations will see exports drop by 14 per cent this year, and that is not going to help the world recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

“We very much want to work with others to make sure that we have … as pro-American a tax system for corporations as we possibly can …” Lawrence Summers

The Administration is struggling to fund its spending spree in ways that would nominally be consistent with the President’s campaign promises. The Obama budget proposed to inflict two substantial tax increases on U.S. corporations with global operations. One would make it more expensive to bring cash from those operations into the U.S. The other would make it expensive (on average 30% more expensive) to pay Americans, rather than citizens of any other country, to perform headquarters administrative jobs such as accounting, IT, or HR. These proposals were supposedly aimed at fulfilling the promise to “end tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas”. While they hurt companies with global operations, it is hard to see how they would do anything other than reduce U.S. jobs.

The Bilderbergers are meeting this weekend in Greece and its always interesting to see the coverage of the secretive confab. Haaretz has turned their top man (internet intern Adam Abrams) loose on the topic:

The individuals at the meeting come from such power houses as Google and the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Senate and European royalty. Governments, the banking industry, big oil, media and even the world of academia are amongst the Bilderberg ranks.

Those reportedly in attendance at last year's conference in Virginia include former U.S. senator Tom Daschle; Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner and his predecessor Henry M. Paulson; former U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice; Microsoft executive Craig Mundie; senior Wall Street Journal editor Paul Gigot; World Bank President Robert Zoellick and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The UK Guardian is taking a more tongue in cheek approach and the TimesOnline is getting in on the fun too.

Leo Kolivakis cuts the crap at Pension Pulse:

I also agree with my friend Tom Naylor that the Bilderberg Group are nothing but a "bunch of arrogant self-promoters" who think they are powerful.

Jonathan Nitzan reminded me that the power elite do not need to meet in Athens or anywhere else in the world. "They continuously talk to each other, go to the same clubs, talk the same economic lingo and they've already screwed up the world for a very long time."

For all of their pooh-poohing however, they all run at least this quote (Kolivakis runs much more) by conspiracy maven Daniel Estulin:

According to the pre-meeting booklet sent out to attendees, Bilderberg is looking at two options -- either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty — or an intense but shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.

Like the proverbial broken clock that's right twice a day (this analogy only works with analog clocks of course) Estulin is boiling the current economic dilemma down pretty well, his error is attributing mastery to those gathering in Greece. SouthPark's diagnosis of the conspiracy neurosis is still the best out there: a deep-seated need to believe that someone is in charge, even if their agenda is deeply evil.

Personally I prefer to put my faith in the blind idiot god Azathoth.

A fascinating place that provides 90% of cell phone to sub-Saharan Africa?

Wikipedia

There is a good deal of evidence that we are now a little past "peak oil". Many of us find it doesn't feel quite like we had imagined.

A lot of us had expected that peak oil would be basically a liquids fuels crisis, caused by geological limits. We expected that the solutions of the Department of Energy's Hirsch Report would be sufficient to forestall a crisis, especially if we had started 20 years ago, instead of now. These solutions included things like more oil from tar sands, improving automobile efficiency, and electrification of transport.

Now, when we seem to be at peak oil, we find the current situation feels a lot more like a "box" caused by limits to growth, rather than a liquid fuels crisis. The limits are of many forms--not just geological limits relating to oil--but other resource limits as well, such as fresh water, and concerns about climate change and the environment. The financial system is even behaving strangely.

Scott Canon | Apr 30

Kansas City Star - The warehouse at Top Innovations on Troost Avenue is stocked from ceiling to floor with boxes of infomercial wonders of steam.

Gadgets for cleaning and shining and making wrinkles disappear just like that. And each shiny metal and plastic gadget is made in China.

Company president Benny Lee’s trip to five Chinese cities last month revealed the recession on full display. Half-empty hotels. Shuttered factories. An exodus of workers from coastal manufacturing hubs.

“You can feel it,” he said. “They have too much of everything” — raw materials, production capacity, people seeking wages — “and having too much of something is usually a problem.”

The old cliche: When the U.S. economy catches cold, the rest of the world comes down with pneumonia.

The wheezing from America and China — the world’s largest economy and its largest work force, respectively — shows just how contagious globalization has made our economic ills:

Do you think this crisis is just going to solidify the advantages of China and these other Asian and Southeast Asian economies?

Well, again, throughout history, the center of the world has shifted to where the capital is, where the assets are. You don't see any period in history where things are shifting to the debtors, and America's the largest debtor nation in the history of the world. Unless something's different this time, unless the world's changed very very dramatically, the center of the influence, the center of power, the center of the earth, the center of the globe, is going to be shifting towards Asia, because that's where all the money is. Have you ever heard of anybody saying, "Let's go to where all of the debtors are"? It just doesn't happen that way.

...Sachs stressed that the economy means more than simple dollars and cents: “It’s the life-and-death struggle of the poor, and the plight of the planet. ” He compared the current economic crisis to a slot machine turning up three lemons, and defined the economy by three “uns”: It is unstable, unfair, and unsustainable.

The instability comes as a result of what Sachs calls an “odd period” in American society, an era that began in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s statement “The government is not the solution but the problem. ” Deregulation became the norm, as the cutting back of government services, the lowering of taxes, and the capping of public expenditures were seen as routes to economic prosperity.

I reside here but I don't belong to anybody. The left blogs discount anything I say by pointing out my "sources" are mere right wing delusionals and or anti-(insert anything here). The right wing blogs, well that is just a back patting society. So what if I have a fixation for the Scully-Muldar X-file types. It works for me far better than Octomom, Loohan or actually any of the more offensive lamestream media from the "What To Think Network". This is what both political parties do, tell you what to think.

This story on Dailykos and other places generated a stream of lame comments.
http://www.docudharma.com/diary/12874/thermite-explosive-cutting-agent-found-in-911-wtc-catastrophe-dust-samples

Asia Times - March 26
"Liquid War: Welcome to Pipelineistan"
By Pepe Escobar

What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.

Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "global war on terror", which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War", sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin - a global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.

All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the 1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. I've crossed the Caspian in an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!)

I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from Shanghai to Istanbul, annotating my own do-it-yourself routes for LNG (liquefied natural gas). I used to avidly follow the adventures of that once-but-not-future Sun-King of Central Asia, the now deceased Turkmenbashi or "leader of the Turkmen", Saparmurat Niyazov, head of the immensely gas-rich Republic of Turkmenistan, as if he were a Conradian hero.

Read on at Asia Times

David Smith & Richard Rogers | Mar 22

The Observer - Office workers face chaos next week with swaths of London in security lockdown for the G20 summit and warnings that bankers will be targeted in a series of protests aimed at causing maximum disruption.

Staff in the City are being advised to dress down and postpone non-essential meetings amid fears that they will be forced to run the gauntlet of protesters. Thousands of G20 Meltdown campaign posters show a mannequin wearing a suit being hanged, while an anarchist website has the slogan: "Burn a banker!"

Details of direct action, gleaned from chatter on anarchist websites and meetings attended by the Observer, include a rumoured plan to block the Blackwall Tunnel and cause a security scare on the London Underground by leaving bags unattended on trains. There is also speculation that protesters will drive a tank to the ExCeL conference centre in London's Docklands, where the G20 are meeting, and attempt to harass politicians with wake-up calls to their hotels in the middle of the night. None of the organisers of the peaceful demonstrations say they are aware of any such tactics.

Maria Baran | Mar 21

Belleville News Democrat - Lawmakers in Illinois are calling foreign steel being used to construct a pipeline a slap in the face to U.S. workers.

Steel pipes painted with a "Made in India" logo are being shipped through Granite City, Ill., right in front of a steel mill where more than 2,800 steelworkers have been laid off.

"This is a perfect example of how our trade laws are failing our workers. At a time when thousands of local steelworkers are laid off, shipping steel from India for a project in our area is unacceptable and outrageous," said U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Ill. "It is precisely why I support strong 'Buy America' provisions and have voted against trade agreements. We can and should make that steel in the U.S. and I will continue to work for fair trade policies that support good-paying jobs here at home."

Construction began recently on the 2,148-mile oil pipeline joint-venture between ConocoPhillips and Calgary, Alberta-based TransCanada.

David Clark Scott | Mar 21

CSM - Mexico’s greatest boxer, Julio César Chávez, would be proud.

Mexico threw a series of precise counterpunches at the US ban on 18-wheelers on Thursday.

Bang! It hit shipments of grapes from California with a 45 percent tariff.

Pow! Pow! Pow! Fresh pears, Christmas trees, and frozen French fries from Oregon were all smacked with a 20 percent tax.

Bam! Sunflower seeds from North Dakota were tagged with a 15 percent duty.

Mexico is the third-largest US trading partner, after China and Canada. The tariffs that went into effect Thursday will hit some $2.4 billion goods across 40 states. That’s likely to mean lost American jobs during one of the worst recessions in recent memory.

The response was not unexpected. You can read it about it here: “Mexico’s punitive tariffs raise stakes on US trucking dispute”

But what’s noteworthy is not the breadth of Mexico’s retaliation. It’s the political accuracy of their tariff targeting.

** Related thread: US law sparks Mexican trade row

I suppose someday a pope will tell us that abortion is acceptable under certain circumstances, contraception is an important part of any birth control plan, and gays are humans deserving of God’s grace in equal measure to everyone else.

Something like that happened today in the business world. Jack Welch, as close as one can get to a living god in corporate America, renounced most of the business practices he once used as CEO of General Electric. Jack Welch was universally esteemed in the 1980s and 1990s as America’s most brilliant and successful manager. He took a sleepy industrial company and made it into an earnings powerhouse by buying and selling subsidiaries as if they were baseball cards. Year after year he produced solid earnings growth, and the GE share price followed suit. People rushed to buy his books and they studied every public word he uttered to benefit from his managerial genius.

Anthony Faiola | Singapore | Mar 5

WaPo - As World Trade Plummets, Bustling Ports Stand Idle And Foreign Workers Track Back Home

This shimmering city-state was the house globalization built. When world trade boomed, Singapore's seaport at the crossroads of East and West became the Chicago O'Hare of freighters and supertankers. Singapore Airlines took off despite serving a country with no domestic air routes. Nearly everything manufactured here is made for export. One out of every three workers is a foreigner.

But as the world enters a period of deglobalization, Singapore is a window into the reversal of the forces that brought unprecedented global mobility to goods, services, investment and labor. With world trade plummeting for the first time since 1982, the long-bustling port has become a maritime parking lot in recent weeks, with rows of idled freighters from Asia, Europe, the United States, South America, Africa and the Middle East stretching for miles along the coast. "We're running out of space to park them," said Ron Widdows, chief executive of Singapore-based NOL, one of the world's largest container lines.

Thousands of foreign workers, including London School of Economics graduates with six-digit salaries and desperately poor Bangladeshi factory workers, are streaming home as the economy here suffers the worst of the recessions in Southeast Asia. Singapore is an epicenter of what analysts call a new flow of reverse migration away from hard-hit, globalized economies, including Dubai and Britain, that were once beacons for foreign labor. Economists from Credit Suisse predict an exodus of 200,000 foreigners -- or one in every 15 workers here -- by the end of 2010.

Singapore's exports collapsed by a stunning 35 percent in January, mirroring much of the rest of Asia. The export boom here was tied to credit-fueled buying sprees in the United States that stopped abruptly and may take years to return, if ever. Manufacturers are grasping for a Plan B. But none of the options -- mining domestic markets, or trying to tap consumers in still-growing China and India -- offers a truly viable solution. Adding to fears of a years-long depression for exports is a rising tide of trade protectionism in countries including neighboring Indonesia.

The scene in this port city -- along with a glimpse inside two of its reeling neighbors in export-dependent Southeast Asia -- illustrates the ebbing of a golden age of trade, innovation, wealth accumulation and poverty reduction through globalization.

"The collapse of globalization . . . is absolutely possible," said Jeffrey Sachs, a noted American economist. "It happened in the 20th century in the wake of World War I and the Great Depression, and could happen again. Nationalism is rising and our political systems are inward looking, the more so in times of crisis."

Haig Simonian | Zurich | February 22 2009

Financial Times - Switzerland’s finance minister has accused US authorities of “shock” tactics to compel holders of undeclared UBS accounts to come forward, but warned that court action to discover the names of thousands of clients would not succeed.

Hans-Rudolf Merz, finance minister and Switzerland’s head of state this year under its rotating presidency, defended the Swiss government’s role in prompting the world’s biggest wealth manager to breach hallowed bank secrecy and last week reveal some 250-300 client names to the US.

But Mr Merz, speaking in a weekend radio broadcast, said the disclosure last week of a limited number of account holders suspected of tax fraud did not mean UBS, or the Swiss government, would bow to a separate US drive to identify all the bank’s American clients with offshore accounts in Switzerland.

San Francisco | Feb. 22, 2009

MarketWatch - The European leaders of the Group of 20 called Sunday for more transparency and regulation of all financial markets, products and investors, including hedge funds, according to published reports.

Heads of state and finance ministers from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic and Luxembourg met in Berlin to come up with a European position ahead of the G20 summit in London scheduled for April 2.

"There was a consensus ... that all financial markets, products and participants -- including hedge funds and other private pools of capital which may pose a systemic risk -- must be subjected to appropriate oversight or regulation," a summary of the meeting said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

This week's Economist features a special report on the "burgeoning bourgeoisie," referring to the emerging global middle class that now encompasses -- by generous estimate -- roughly half the world and is centered in the emerging markets of the East and South. Arriving amidst the first truly global recession of this now truly globalized economy, such mainstream media attention could not be timelier.

Roughly a century ago, the middle class was rapidly expanding in numerous Western nations, a great number of which were engaged in consolidating colonial empires around the planet. Now, those former colonies provide much of that emerging global middle class.

Congress is spending nearly a trillion dollars on the stimulus bill. That’s about $3,000 for every man, woman and child in America, $12,000 for a family of four. This is on top of that family’s $126,000 share of the existing federal deficit, a debt of 3 times the median family income. The interest paid on that debt is money that cannot be used to fund college or vocational training, safe streets or a secure retirement. We are told that taking on this new debt will cure the economy, that if people spend their tax reductions on toys and the government spends on roads everything will be good once more. But some time in 2010 the toys will be in the trash and the road builders will be laid off again. What then? Another trillion? For the last decade our economy has been built on debt. Will our government now do anything to stimulate real organic growth, or will it perpetuate policies that stifle demand and maintain our dependence on artificial stimulants?

More after the jump.

link

Jamie Doward, Toby Helm, and Tom Kington | Rome | February 1

As industrial unrest at foreign-owned companies refusing to hire British workers spreads, it has emerged the government was told in 2004 that EU laws were being used to prevent local people taking up UK jobs

Guardian Online -The government was warned five years ago that European laws governing the employment of foreign workers in the UK would result in the current industrial unrest sweeping the country.

The disruption has come back to haunt the prime minister, Gordon Brown, who in 2007 - in his first speech to the Labour party as its leader - promised to bring in "British jobs for British workers".

Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, said there was a real risk that "prestige projects", such as the 2012 Olympics, would be hit by similar protests unless ministers acted. The former Labour minister Frank Field last night called on Brown to make an emergency statement to parliament tomorrow. Field wants a new law to compel companies operating in the UK to offer contracts to domestic workers first. "We have got to get ahead of this debate rather than react to it," Field said. "Unless we do, we are supplying oxygen to the BNP."
 

See earlier story: Mediators called in as wildcat strikes spread across UK

Eric Pfanner | Paris | Jan 12

IHT - Much ink has been spilled about how the world is shrinking, with people from Boston to Bangalore wearing the same clothes, driving the same cars and watching the same movies.

A book titled "The Global Brand" might seem to fit squarely into this category.

Think again. In the book, Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst at the market research firm Millward Brown, argues that the trend is actually headed the other way. Yes, better transportation links and modern communications are bringing people closer. But instead of becoming more alike, they are more eager than ever to assert their differences, Hollis writes. And marketers - at least those who want to create global brands - ignore this at their peril.

"There are some underlying decisions people make when they decide to go global," Hollis said during an interview. "One is that the world will become more and more homogeneous. That is just not happening. There's a lot of evidence that despite the spread of globalization we still live in a very localized world."

David J. Lynch

USA TODAY - The deep river of private money that helped knit together the global economy has abruptly dried up, new government figures show.

As the global financial crisis grew more severe this summer, foreigners sold almost $90 billion of U.S. securities — the greatest quarterly fire sale by overseas investors since the government began keeping track in 1960. U.S. investors also are retrenching; they unloaded about $85 billion worth of foreign holdings in the quarter, says the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis.

"We've had a global panic. Everyone is pulling their money home," says economist Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute in Washington, D.C.

That's bad for economic growth in the U.S. because it threatens to starve capital-hungry companies and entrepreneurs. But it's especially serious for emerging-market countries that rely heavily on outside financing. Capital flows into countries such as South Korea, Turkey and Brazil were evaporating even before the mid-September Lehman Bros. bankruptcy made things worse.

The reversal of private capital flows signals an abrupt end to a nearly two-decades-long era of financial globalization, says economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. Private flows into and out of the U.S. for purchases of stocks, corporate bonds and federal agency bonds have dropped from around 18% of economic output to near zero "in a remarkably short period of time," Setser says.

2 January 2009

AFP - Outgoing US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said that a failure to address the rise of emerging markets and resulting imbalances was partly to blame for the global financial crisis, according to an interview published Friday. Paulson told the Financial Times that imbalances between fast-growing nations which save, such as China, and those who spent were at the root of the problem.

He said that in the years leading up to the crisis, savings from nations such as China and oil exporters -- at a time of low inflation and booming trade and capital flows -- exerted downward pressure on yields everywhere. This pushed down interest rates and drove investors to riskier assets, sowing the seeds of a global credit bubble that extended beyond the US subprime or high-risk home loan market and eventually burst.

At the end of December we look ahead to the new year and try to see what it might bring. Assessments and soothsaying and wild guesses are typically upbeat – a reflection of the holiday festiveness or maybe just too much Jameson in the egg nog. It’s difficult to look ahead to 2009 with much optimism. The recession we are entering will likely deepen and stagnate. Look at the bankruptcies, failures, and foreclosures – all at the beginning. The global picture isn’t so good either. We have a world economy and we will have a world recession. This has been the case since the Europeans set sail centuries ago to trade with and plunder the far reaches of the world, but it’s even more true today. Okay, here’s a little optimism: things might be a lot worse abroad than they will be here.