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Originally posted by Spanky
Why don't you look up "free trade" in the dictionary. The word "free trade" has a meaning. It does not mean insuring a level playing field and making other countrys have similar labor and environmental laws.
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I'm happy to talk about the substance of free trade with you, if you ever want to move beyond the semantic question of whether what I support is "free trade" in the sense in which you mean it. Since you don't know what policies I support and I don't want to bother to figure out how you use the term, I agree that further discussion in this vein is pointless.
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You focused on the word splicing because you know what you did was misleading. If you didn't believe what you were doing was misleading, you would focus on that word, and not splicing.
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I've addressed both halves of this at quite some length, and you've run out of things to say, which is telling. I focused on the word "splicing" because you said I did something I did not do. But I have explained why what I quoted from the Economist was not misleading. Again, here is why:
There is a very simple factual point on which we disagree. You said that the U.S. was an innocent bystander to the collapse of the Doha round, blameless for the failure of the Europeans and the third world to come to an agreement with each other, and that you think Bush was prepared to make big cuts in U.S. agricultural subsidies. You think the July 24 article in The Economist says this, though it says the opposite.
Here's the Financial Times' coverage from July, when the talks collapsed:
- The stumbling "Doha round"of trade negotiations fell into indefinite suspension yesterday after last-ditch talks ended in recrimination.
An emergency meeting in Geneva of the talks' six core negotiators - India, Brazil,the US, EU, Japan and Australia - collapsed over irreconcilable differences about farm liberalisation.
The US continued to argue for big cuts in farm import tariffs to open up markets for its farmers, a demand fiercely rejected by the EU, Japan and India, which said the US had first to go further in offering to cut agricultural subsidies.
The Doha round, which began in November 2001, will nowenter indefinite suspension unless and until a consensus in the World Trade Organisation's 149 member countries can be found to revive it.
The White House's authority from the US Congress to negotiate entire trade deals expires next year, meaning the end of this month was in effect a deadline for a WTO deal on farm goods and manufactures.
Most experts and officials think Congress unlikely to renew that authority, rendering any near-term agreement impossible.
Four of the six countries present rounded on the US as the culprit for the collapse in the talks, which started on Sunday and ended yesterday.
Peter Mandelson, EU trade commissioner, told the Financial Times: "If the US continues to demand dollar-for-dollar compensation in market access [cutting tariffs] for reducing domestic support, no one in the developing world will ever buy that, and the EU will not either."
Even Brazil, which shares some of the US's interest in reducing farm tariffs, identified American intransigence on subsidies as preventing an agreement.
Kamal Nath, the Indian trade minister, said of the US: "Everybody put something on the table except one country who said, 'We can't see anything on the table.' "
Do you see that this account flatly contradicts your understanding?
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I am sorry if you can't see that critisizing Bush for pushing through CAFTA and then critisizing him for not doing enough on free trade is beyond hypocritical, then this conversation can't continue.
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That would be hypocritical. But what I said was that I wasn't impressed with what Bush did with regard to CAFTA. It just wasn't much of an accomplishment, and he didn't have to do much to get his own party to vote for it.
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