A disgusting vat of filth that no self-respecting intelligent person would wade into.

[Spanky]

Democrat victory = huge blow to free trade

Latin America and the United States

Nov 23rd 2006 | LIMA AND MIAMI
From The Economist print edition

The new United States Congress seems poised to strike a blow for Hugo Chávez by killing trade deals in Latin America

LATIN Americans dislike George Bush because of the war in Iraq and what they perceive, fairly or not, to be his high-handed neglect of their region. But Latin American governments have mixed feelings about the capture of both houses of Congress by the opposition Democrats in this month's mid-term election. On many matters, from immigration to Cuba, American policy might change in ways that are to their liking. The big exception is trade.

Nowhere is the change of political control on Capitol Hill viewed with more disquiet than in Peru and Colombia. Under a 1991 law aimed at stimulating alternatives to drug production, the two countries, together with Bolivia and Ecuador, enjoyed duty-free access to the American market for ten years for their “non-traditional” exports. This law, temporarily renewed in 2001, expires on December 31st.

Peru and the United States signed a permanent Free-Trade Agreement (FTA) earlier this year. It has since been ratified by Peru's Congress. Officials from the United States and Colombia signed a similar agreement on November 22nd. Peru's new president, Alan García, has swallowed earlier doubts about the FTA and is lobbying hard for the United States Congress to approve it before the end of the year. That was always unlikely.

Now both deals look dead on arrival. A group of senior Democrats this week called on Susan Schwab, the United States Trade Representative, to re-open negotiations with both countries and insert new clauses that would toughen labour and union rights. Mr Bush's “fast-track” authority, under which trade deals must be accepted or rejected in their entirety by the Congress, expires in June. New talks would be tantamount to killing the deals.

Peru's exports to the United States which benefited from the trade preferences totalled $2 billion last year, involving some 500,000 jobs according to the exporters' association. Colombia's preferential exports are worth a similar amount. The administration has sent to Congress a measure to extend the existing trade preferences for up to two years.

This is likely to be approved, and will be welcomed in Bolivia and Ecuador. But the governments in Peru and Colombia see it as a poor substitute. They worry that investment in businesses ranging from textiles and clothing in both countries, to asparagus and avocados in Peru and flowers in Colombia will switch to Central America, the Dominican Republic, Chile or Mexico, which already have FTAs with the United States.

Hernando de Soto, an economist who is acting as Peru's chief lobbyist for the FTA, has pointed out that rejection of the agreements would send a negative message to Latin America as a whole. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's anti-American president, has campaigned noisily against FTAs with the United States (although his country in effect has one, sending 1.5m barrels per day of oil tariff-free).

On the other hand, Peru and Colombia have bent over backwards to accommodate special interests in the United States. Peru recently agreed to lift a sanitary ban on certain cuts of American beef to satisfy Max Baucus, who will chair the Senate Finance Committee in the new Congress. To be snubbed regardless may encourage these countries to seek closer ties with Asia and China in particular.

Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, may face other difficulties with the new Congress. His government is battling left-wing guerrillas and drug-traffickers but faces criticism over its alleged links to right-wing paramilitaries. The Democrats are likely to be more critical of Colombia's failure to prevent horrors such as killings of trade-unionists.

According to Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington, DC, the Democrats are unlikely to halt the $600m or so of mainly military aid that Colombia gets each year since they will not want to be seen as soft on either drugs and terror ahead of the 2008 presidential campaign. Mr Shifter adds that the election has strengthened the State Department's role in dealing with Mr Chávez, reducing the scope for impromptu interventions from hardliners elsewhere in the administration.

Policy towards Cuba may change, especially if Fidel Castro, the country's communist president, were to die (see article). The Bush administration has hitherto fought off efforts by a growing bipartisan group in Congress to pass legislation to soften the trade embargo against Cuba. That will become harder. In particular, a measure approved in 2004 which restricted family visits and remittances to the island may be repealed. It has gone down poorly in Miami, where Cuban-American political leaders have long been the main promoters of the embargo.

The Democrats plan to hold hearings into a new report by the Government Accountability Office that criticised the poor management and lack of oversight of a programme to aid dissidents in Cuba. In one case, a Cuban exile group in Miami used taxpayers' money to send cashmere sweaters, chocolates and computer games to supposed dissidents.

The issue on which Latin Americans, and especially Mexicans, have highest hopes of change is immigration policy. Most Democrats opposed the plan to fence long stretches of the southern border approved by the outgoing Republican Congress. Like Mr Bush, they support a proposal, drafted in the Senate with bipartisan support, which would combine tighter border security with increased legal migration and steps to regularise the status of undocumented migrants. Mexico's president-elect, Felipe Calderón, visiting Washington, DC, earlier this month, said that the outcome of the election held out the possibility of “improvement” in bilateral ties. Several of his colleagues further south will not share that view.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Spanky
Democrat victory = huge blow to free trade

Latin America and the United States

Nov 23rd 2006 | LIMA AND MIAMI
From The Economist print edition

The new United States Congress seems poised to strike a blow for Hugo Chávez by killing trade deals in Latin America

LATIN Americans dislike George Bush because of the war in Iraq and what they perceive, fairly or not, to be his high-handed neglect of their region. But Latin American governments have mixed feelings about the capture of both houses of Congress by the opposition Democrats in this month's mid-term election. On many matters, from immigration to Cuba, American policy might change in ways that are to their liking. The big exception is trade.

Nowhere is the change of political control on Capitol Hill viewed with more disquiet than in Peru and Colombia. Under a 1991 law aimed at stimulating alternatives to drug production, the two countries, together with Bolivia and Ecuador, enjoyed duty-free access to the American market for ten years for their “non-traditional” exports. This law, temporarily renewed in 2001, expires on December 31st.

Peru and the United States signed a permanent Free-Trade Agreement (FTA) earlier this year. It has since been ratified by Peru's Congress. Officials from the United States and Colombia signed a similar agreement on November 22nd. Peru's new president, Alan García, has swallowed earlier doubts about the FTA and is lobbying hard for the United States Congress to approve it before the end of the year. That was always unlikely.

Now both deals look dead on arrival. A group of senior Democrats this week called on Susan Schwab, the United States Trade Representative, to re-open negotiations with both countries and insert new clauses that would toughen labour and union rights. Mr Bush's “fast-track” authority, under which trade deals must be accepted or rejected in their entirety by the Congress, expires in June. New talks would be tantamount to killing the deals.

Peru's exports to the United States which benefited from the trade preferences totalled $2 billion last year, involving some 500,000 jobs according to the exporters' association. Colombia's preferential exports are worth a similar amount. The administration has sent to Congress a measure to extend the existing trade preferences for up to two years.

This is likely to be approved, and will be welcomed in Bolivia and Ecuador. But the governments in Peru and Colombia see it as a poor substitute. They worry that investment in businesses ranging from textiles and clothing in both countries, to asparagus and avocados in Peru and flowers in Colombia will switch to Central America, the Dominican Republic, Chile or Mexico, which already have FTAs with the United States.

Hernando de Soto, an economist who is acting as Peru's chief lobbyist for the FTA, has pointed out that rejection of the agreements would send a negative message to Latin America as a whole. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's anti-American president, has campaigned noisily against FTAs with the United States (although his country in effect has one, sending 1.5m barrels per day of oil tariff-free).

On the other hand, Peru and Colombia have bent over backwards to accommodate special interests in the United States. Peru recently agreed to lift a sanitary ban on certain cuts of American beef to satisfy Max Baucus, who will chair the Senate Finance Committee in the new Congress. To be snubbed regardless may encourage these countries to seek closer ties with Asia and China in particular.

Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, may face other difficulties with the new Congress. His government is battling left-wing guerrillas and drug-traffickers but faces criticism over its alleged links to right-wing paramilitaries. The Democrats are likely to be more critical of Colombia's failure to prevent horrors such as killings of trade-unionists.

According to Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington, DC, the Democrats are unlikely to halt the $600m or so of mainly military aid that Colombia gets each year since they will not want to be seen as soft on either drugs and terror ahead of the 2008 presidential campaign. Mr Shifter adds that the election has strengthened the State Department's role in dealing with Mr Chávez, reducing the scope for impromptu interventions from hardliners elsewhere in the administration.

Policy towards Cuba may change, especially if Fidel Castro, the country's communist president, were to die (see article). The Bush administration has hitherto fought off efforts by a growing bipartisan group in Congress to pass legislation to soften the trade embargo against Cuba. That will become harder. In particular, a measure approved in 2004 which restricted family visits and remittances to the island may be repealed. It has gone down poorly in Miami, where Cuban-American political leaders have long been the main promoters of the embargo.

The Democrats plan to hold hearings into a new report by the Government Accountability Office that criticised the poor management and lack of oversight of a programme to aid dissidents in Cuba. In one case, a Cuban exile group in Miami used taxpayers' money to send cashmere sweaters, chocolates and computer games to supposed dissidents.

The issue on which Latin Americans, and especially Mexicans, have highest hopes of change is immigration policy. Most Democrats opposed the plan to fence long stretches of the southern border approved by the outgoing Republican Congress. Like Mr Bush, they support a proposal, drafted in the Senate with bipartisan support, which would combine tighter border security with increased legal migration and steps to regularise the status of undocumented migrants. Mexico's president-elect, Felipe Calderón, visiting Washington, DC, earlier this month, said that the outcome of the election held out the possibility of “improvement” in bilateral ties. Several of his colleagues further south will not share that view.

Let's see, the article says Dems may support opening up trade with Cuba and being more open to legal immigration.

Tell me, aren't the Dems the party of free trade on those two issues?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Let's see, the article says Dems may support opening up trade with Cuba and being more open to legal immigration.

Tell me, aren't the Dems the party of free trade on those two issues?

Be that as it may, it's clearly the Democrats' fault that voters in Ecuador just picked a leftist to run the country instead of the right-wing pro-free-trade banana magnate who was running against him.

[SlaveNoMore]

Latest essay from Ty's favorite "hack", Victor Davis Hanson, is definitely a keeper. Click the link and read the whole thing - it touched on a lot of the WWII discussion we had a few weeks back:

...So what passes for international Western morality these days? Not much. Not the reported $30 million paid in blackmail by the Europeans to Iraqi terrorists that went, no doubt, to replenish their IED inventories, dangerously low after so many attacks on Americans. Most pundits and journalists are warning more about Bush hurting Iran than Iran fulfilling its promises to wipe out Israel.

And where has the realist hysteria gone of the last month? We were supposed to talk to Iran, talk to Syria, bring in the allies, bring in the UN, bring in the Big Two—China and Russia—bring in anyone other than George Bush to solve the Iranian, Iraqi, Afghan, Palestinian, and any other crisis?

The problem, of course, was the last word “crisis.” What we announce as “crises,” our newfound “friends” consider “opportunities.” The last thing Syria wants is what we envision—two democratic and peaceful states on either side of Damascus with booming economies and free opinionated peoples. And the last thing a corrupt United Nations wants is the use of its global prestige in service of the liberal Western notion of self-rule and peaceful coexistence—a virus that would quickly doom most of the autocracies that comprise its own membership. The old imperial powers of Russia and China have discovered newfound wealth and influence in the global village’s madcap desire for both oil and “things”, whether knock-off video games or cheap T-shirts. One wants oil—acquired anywhere from genocidal Sudan to the Strangelovian Iran—the other wants its fossilized nuclear and arms industry to flesh out again by resupplying most of the weapons used in the fighting in the Middle East. Both agree that it is both psychologically gratifying and practically liberating to see the hyperpower United States checked and floundering....

***

In essence, the progressive Leftist is often affluent, insulated from the savagery about him by his material largess, and empathizes with those who are antithetical to the very forces that made him free, secure, and prosperous—as a way to assuage the guilt, at very little cost, of his own blessedness.

We see odd symptoms of this progressive disease in the most surprising ways. Note the current agitating for intervention in Dafur—but without promises to “stay the course” when it gets messy (and it will); note also sermonizing about the killing there without frequently mentioning the culprits: radical and racist Islamists (notice the odd preference for the passive voice that thousands “perish” or “die” rather than Islamic nomadic and Arab nationalists raping, butchering, and machine-gunning them).

It is hard to know whether liberals are more scared of doing nothing while 400,000 “perish” or indirectly aiding George Bush’s trumped war against terror by lending their support to stopping radical Islamic killers, many of whose enablers in the Sudanese government were the very ones who hosted Osama bin Laden....

***

If you have taught youth for generations that the story of World War II is Hiroshima and the Japanese internment, not Normandy, the Bulge, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, then how can you expect a nation to fight an enemy without making a mistake? And if dropping the bomb on Japan to stop its daily murdering of thousands in its collapsing empire, and to avoid something that would have made the horrific Battle for Berlin look like a cakewalk is equated with the Holocaust, how can the United States marshal the moral authority to press ahead, secure that its killing of jihadists is a different sort from jihadists killing the innocent or each other?

link

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Let's see, the article says Dems may support opening up trade with Cuba and being more open to legal immigration.

Tell me, aren't the Dems the party of free trade on those two issues?

Just because they are right in two out of twenty doesn't make them the right team.

But I won't argue with you the Republicans (except the President) being wrong on immigration.

When it comes to Mexican immigration, Democrats want to let the Mexicans across the border but they don't want people in Mexico to be able to sell their products here so they can lift themselves out of poverty (which would give them less incentive to come here).

But there is no question that to have a truly free market you need free movement of people, goods and capital.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Be that as it may

So you agree that the Democrat win in Congress is a big boost to Hugo Chavez and his desire to scuttle AFTA (and free trade in Latin America in general).

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Spanky
You're right. I'm wrong.

Thank you, Spanky, it takes a big man to admit this.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Spanky
So you agree that the Democrat win in Congress is a big boost to Hugo Chavez and his desire to scuttle AFTA (and free trade in Latin America in general).

Spanks,

Did you think Rummy's Hitler slur against Chavez or Chavez's Devil slur against Bush was more offensive? Which reflects worse on America? Which was funnier?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Latest essay from Ty's favorite "hack", Victor Davis Hanson, is definitely a keeper. Click the link and read the whole thing - it touched on a lot of the WWII discussion we had a few weeks back.

Implicit in this, or at least in the parts you posted, is this funny notion that if realists and liberals just buckled down and found the will to do what has to be done, all would be right with the world. It's as if Donald Rumsfeld hasn't been running the war. Do you think General Abizaid and the other military officers running the war aren't trying to do whatever they can to win? Of course they are. The notion of negotiating with Iran and Syria (e.g.) has been prompted by the fact that it isn't working.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
So you agree that the Democrat win in Congress is a big boost to Hugo Chavez and his desire to scuttle AFTA (and free trade in Latin America in general).

I do not believe that the Democratic* win is a big boost to Hugo Chavez, though there doubtless will be some instances where Democrats' policy preferences will align more closely with what Chavez would like than what the GOP was doing. OTOH, the opposite is also true. For example, the Bush White House's energy policy, with its refusal to seriously entertain energy conservation, clearly has been a huge positive for Chavez.


* I recall that you went to a union-crippled public school, but you should know by now that "Democrat" is a noun, and that the adjective is "Democratic"

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
being more open to legal immigration.

Can a conservative on this board (or a Democrat who agrees with that fat pig Lou Dobbs) explain to me the problem with Mexican Immigration? Which on of my assumptions is wrong

1) Poor mexicans (in this constantly shrinking world) are our problem no matter what side of the border they are on

2) Mexicans in this country send money back to Mexico, which boosts the mexican economy which is good for us.

3) Mexican immigrants benefit the US economy.

4) Mexican immigrants see the benefit of our political and economic system, and encourage changes in Mexico to reflect the good aspects of our system (the Mexican immigrants in this country overwhelmingly voted for the free enterprize candidate in Mexico in the last election). And a prosperous and liberal Mexico is good for us.

5) Mexicans do not pose a threat to our political or economic way of life in the United States. Millions of immigrants came from Southern Europe in the last two centuries from countries where corruption and autocracies were the name of the game. Yet they didn't try and bring those screwed up systems here. They became firm believers in our political and economic system. So what is the difference between massive Mexican immigration and massive immigration from Southern Europe.

6) Mexicans do not pose a cultural threat to the United States. The immigration from Southern Europe, and the influx of Southern European culture greatly benefited the US (because Northern European "culture" sucks). Why won't a massive influx of Mexicans benefit our culture?

What did I get wrong?

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I do not believe that the Democratic* win is a big boost to Hugo Chavez, though there doubtless will be some instances where Democrats' policy preferences will align more closely with what Chavez would like than what the GOP was doing. OTOH, the opposite is also true. For example, the Bush White House's energy policy, with its refusal to seriously entertain energy conservation, clearly has been a huge positive for Chavez.


* I recall that you went to a union-crippled public school, but you should know by now that "Democrat" is a noun, and that the adjective is "Democratic"

We have already been through this. There is nothing "Democratic" about the "Democrat party". The term Democrat is not used to modify the term party, it is another noun. It is the name of the party, it does not describe what kind of party it is.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

I'd be curious to hear a conservative explain what should be done about the congressional race in Florida's Thirteenth District. The state-certified result had the Republican candidate winning by a few hundred votes. However, it appears that the electronic voting machines in use in one county -- or a part thereof -- within the district failed to record votes for the House race in a disproportionate number (15%) of instances. If one assumes that those voters attempted to vote for the Democratic candidate in similar proportions to other voters in the same precincts, the Democrat would have won by an even larger margin. I haven't seen an alternative explanation for the events there other than that the voting machines cost the Democrat the election.

The issue is not resolved, since the Democrat is challenging the result in Court, and since it ultimately will fall to the new House to decide whom to seat.

[Replaced_Texan]

Originally posted by Spanky
We have already been through this. There is nothing "Democratic" about the "Democrat party". The term Democrat is not used to modify the term party, it is another noun. It is the name of the party, it does not describe what kind of party it is.

Spanky is right and the Democrats are wrong about the name of their party.



It's only a matter of time before they hire him to revamp the website and other material with the proper party name.

Originally posted by Spanky
We have already been through this. There is nothing "Democratic" about the "Democrat party".

That's a little harsh. Just because they've rolled over and accepted the results of two blatantly rigged presidential elections doesn't mean that they've given up on representative democracy entirely.