NewsTrust - Trade - Most Recent Stories: News (Independent)

Latin America v. Obama: U.S. Policy on Cuba, Drug War, Economy Under Fire at Colombian Summit

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Apr. 16 (News Analysis) - Historian Greg Grandin analyzes the U.S.-Colombia "free trade" deal and the deepening split between much of Latin America and Washington following the Summit of the Americas in Colombia. The summit, which was marred by a U.S. prostitution scandal, concluded Sunday without agreement on the key questions of whether Cuba should be allowed to attend the regional meetings and on the issue of the legalization of drugs. Latin American leaders said Cuba should be invited to the next Summit in Panama in 2015, but the United States and Canada dissented. Ecuador's President Rafael Correa boycotted this year’s meeting because of Cuba's exclusion. On Sunday the United States announced that a free trade agreement with host country Colombia will come into effect in May, far earlier than expected. The agreement had earlier been deferred because of Colombia's weak record on workers rights, including murders and attacks on union activists. [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]

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Chinese Guest Workers Flee Living Hell in Jordan - Institute for Global Labour & Human Rights

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

globallabourrights.org - Mar. 31 (Investigative Report) - While young Chinese women guest workers are fleeing the grueling 93-hour workweek at the Rich Pine Factory, the Jordanian Ministry of Labor has rewarded Rich Pine its "Golden List" status, placing it among the very best export garment factories in Jordan.

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5 Things Corporations Are Trying to Hide From You

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By David Sirota - Mar. 15 (Special Report) - as Businessweek recently noted, regulations are hardly job killers. Instead, the magazine points out, they typically “wind up creating about as many jobs as they kill.” In the process, they also mitigate major social problems, as Coca-Cola and Pepsi just proved.

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Not a Great Deal for Asia

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

American Prospect - By Kevin P. Gallagher - Mar. 13 (News Analysis) - The Trans-Pacific Partnership is best understood as President Barack Obama’s extension of the Bush-era doctrine of “competitive liberalization.” Frustrated with pushback at the World Trade Organization by nations like China, Brazil, India, and South Africa, the United States seeks a coalition of the willing to import a commercial framework that rewards private firms at the expense of the common good. That policy regime is ailing in the U.S. and gets worse when exported. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) certainly isn’t about raising standards of living. The most ambitious estimates of the gains from the TPP suggest that participating nations will gain a mere one-tenth of 1 percent of the gross domestic product. Sixty percent of the projected gains go to Vietnam and the United States, and the other 20 percent goes to Malaysia—largely because the U.S. already has trade pacts with the other proposed big players in the TPP. However, the proposed deal is far from popular in Asia. In ...

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Will Chevron case take down trade pact investor-state system?

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

citizen.org - Feb. 17 (News Report) - After having lost on the merits in Ecuador and U.S. courts, Chevron has turned to an ad hoc “investor-state” tribunal of three private lawyers to help the company avoid paying to clean up horrific contamination in the Amazonian rainforest.

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U.S. Manufacturing Competitiveness in Global Trade

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Jared Bernstein: - Dec. 28 (News Analysis) - we're toward the low end of the advanced economies in terms of compensation costs. Second, in dollar terms, manufacturing compensation costs have increased much faster elsewhere over the past decade

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Gingrich On Climate Change

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson - Dec. 07 (Fact Check) - Newt Gingrich went too far when he claimed that “I’ve never favored cap-and-trade.” It’s true he’s never favored the approach taken by Democrats, but he said in 2007 that he would “strongly support” cap-and-trade if combined with “a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions”.

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Flipping Through DNC Playbook on Romney

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley, Brooks Jackson, D’Angelo Gore, Scott Blackburn, Lalita Clozel - Dec. 01 (Fact Check) - The Democratic National Committee casts Mitt Romney as an untrustworthy flip-flopper in a lengthy Web video, but pads a long list of examples with some falsehoods and distortions. It's true that Romney has changed or modified his position on some major issues -- including abortion, a federal assault weapons ban and Reaganomics, as the DNC says. But the video strains the truth ... More >>

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Fact-check: South Carolina Debate

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson, Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley - Nov. 13 (Fact Check) - We found several exaggerations and misstatements in the latest Republican presidential candidates’ debate. Romney issued a hollow threat to take China’s currency manipulation to a world body that doesn’t actually deal with overvalued money, and he claimed federal spending consumes more of the nation’s economic output than it really does. … More >>

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House Approves Controversial Trade Deal

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Oct. 13 (News) - Congress voted to approve a free trade agreement with Panama, a country of less than 4 million that still carries economic weight because of the Panama Canal.

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9 Policies Conservatives Were For Long Before They Were Against Them

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Joshua Holland - Sep. 22 (News Analysis) - Journalist Steve Benen noted that while "the record here may be inconvenient for the right ... it's also unambiguous: the mandate Republicans currently hate was their idea." It was championed by the Heritage Foundation ... Nixon embraced it in the 1970s, and George H.W. Bush kept it going in the 1980s. For years, it was touted by the likes of John McCain, Mitt Romney, Scott Brown, Chuck Grassley, Bob Bennett, Tommy Thompson, Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Judd Gregg, and many other ... notable GOP officials.

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American Superconductor: Ex-employee sold IP to China firm

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Bizjournals.com - Sep. 15 (News Report) - the company said a former employee of its Windtec subsidiary was arrested in Austria in July on charges of economic espionage and fraudulent manipulation of data. The employee was not named in the filing. The company said it now has evidence that the employee had been contracted by Sinovel to obtain parts of the company's wind turbine control software source code, and to transfer it to Sinovel.

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Rebuilt Ground Zero Billed as National Symbol, But Costly Construction Projects Outsourced Overseas

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Juan Gonzalez - Sep. 09 (News Report) - While the 10th anniversary has made international headlines, little attention has been paid to some controversial aspects of the rebuilding at Ground Zero. At a time when President Obama is launching a massive jobs initiative, key parts of the construction project were outsourced overseas. A Chinese glass company won the contract to manufacture the special blast-resistant glass base of 1 World Trade Center. Some 250 tons of stainless steel from Germany will also be imported for the project.

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Panama Trade Deal Would Undercut Efforts To Get Rich Americans To Pay Taxes (VIDEO)

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:35:34 -0700

Huffington Post - By Zach Carter, Sara Kenigsberg - Aug. 09 (News Report) - During a Monday press conference addressing Standard & Poor's downgrade of U.S. debt, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his commitment to raising taxes on the wealthy. But as he pushes to get the rich to pay more into federal coffers, Obama is also urging Congress to approve a trade agreement that would cement a key tax avoidance tactic deployed by some of the richest Americans.

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Six Ways To Get America Out From Under The Thumb Of Wall Street

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By David Korten, - Jul. 21 (Special Report) - Raising taxes on the rich and implementing financial reforms are essential elements of the solution to our seemingly intractable fiscal and economic crisis. Yet proposals currently on the table fall far short of the need. A newly released report of the New Economy Working Group, coordinated by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, goes beyond the current debate to call for a deep restructuring of the institutions to which we as a society give the power to create and allocate money.

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Violence, Potential Job Losses Hang Over Colombia Free Trade Agreement

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Dave Jamieson - Jul. 20 (News Report) - As U.S. lawmakers inch closer to enacting a long-stalled free trade agreement with Colombia, the deal's proponents have cited the safer atmosphere for finally pushing the deal through. But for Juan Cambindo, a Colombian sugar cane worker and union leader, the news of significant progress has come as a great surprise. Like many other Colombians, Cambindo says he has had his life threatened because of union ties. He first learned of his new and improved lot while watching television. "The United States was talking about how our situation has gotten better," Cambindo, who visited Washington last week to voice his opposition to the deal, told HuffPost through a translator (video below). "But that's not true. Our situation continues to be bad, and it's getting worse."

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Corporate Tax Holiday Would Shift Investment, Jobs Overseas: Report

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By James Sunshine - Jun. 25 (News Analysis) - Rather than using their extra earnings to invest in American jobs, corporations laid off thousands of workers and passed the savings onto their shareholders, states the report. Pfizer, which according to the WSJ is one of the main corporate supporters of the newly proposed tax holiday, repatriated $37 billion in 2004, the report states. Despite the repatriation windfall -- the largest of any firm in 2004 -- Pfizer cut 10,000 U.S. jobs in 2005.

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What They Don’t Tell You About Oil Industry Tax Breaks

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - May. 25 (News) - It really is a game—and the stakes are dangerously high So I was reading this New York Times explainer on yet another failure to take the oil industry off the sweet, sweet gravy train. And my mind went back a bit to what’s missing from the current discussion—the long, long history of tax [...] ...

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CHINA’S SUCCESSFUL ASSAULT ON ADVANCED U.S. MANUFACTURING MARKETS

Fri, 06 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

U.S. Business and Industry Council - By Alan Tonelson - May. 06 (Special Report) - Next week’s U.S.‐China Strategic and Economic Dialogue approaches amid signs that the sluggish U.S. economic recovery is slowing further, and that China has increased its use of trade and investment‐distorting practices to take growth and jobs from America and its other trade partners. Many Americans also remain concerned about the significant amount of American debt held by the Chinese, and the leverage it might create for Beijing over U.S. economic policy making. Meanwhile, worries continue to mount in Washington and in East Asia that China’s growing economic might has helped fuel the belligerent behavior displayed recently by Beijing towards its neighbors – which of course has major implications for U.S. interests in the region. All of these trends raise profound questions about the effectiveness of the China strategy being pursued by President Obama – and those of his immediate predecessors.

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The New Corporate World Order

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Robert Scheer - Apr. 22 (News Analysis) - The debate over Republicans’ insistence on continued tax breaks for the superrich and the corporations they run should come to a screeching halt with the report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal headlined “Big U.S. Firms Shift Hiring Abroad.” Those tax breaks over the past decade, leaving some corporations such as General Electric to pay no taxes at all, were supposed to lead to job creation, but just the opposite has occurred. As the WSJ put it, the multinational companies “cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million

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Korea-US Pact Makes Big Corporate Money

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

populist.com - By Jim Goodman - Apr. 22 (News Analysis) - The Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) is precisely what President Obama is promoting. The arguments and the promises are pitched again, over and over and over, ad nauseum,—- Free Trade Agreements (FTA’s) will produce more and better jobs for US workers, better markets and more profit for US farmers. The underlying assumption of job creation through FTAs is false. Current trade policy has not created more US jobs, it has, according to the AFL-CIO, cost the US 6 million jobs since 1998. Understanding that fact is not rocket science. Current trade policy has accelerated offshoring of US jobs and it has, in effect, allowed multinational corporations to opt out of environmental protection and fair labor standards.

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Soil Erosion Far Worse Than Reported In American Farmlands

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Joanna Zelman - Apr. 13 (Special Report) - If the American classic song is right and â€œthis land was made for you and me,â€* then why are we paying to have it destroyed?...

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As Obama Completes First Latin America Tour, Anniversary of Slain Salvadoran Archbishop Romero Evokes Legacy of U.S.-Backed Crimes

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Juan Gonzalez, Amy Goodman - Mar. 24 (News Report) - President Obama has returned from his first trip to South America since taking office. Obama faced protests in Brazil, Chile and El Salvador as he sought to boost regional trade and improve security ties. In El Salvador, hundreds of demonstrators called for Obama to renegotiate or dismiss the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which has devastated El Salvador's agricultural sector. Obama was also confronted with the legacy of U.S.-backed repression in Chile and El Salvador. Today marks the 31st anniversary of the slaying of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was killed by members of a US-backed death squad. We speak with investigative journalist Allan Nairn, who has reported extensively from Latin America since the 1980s.

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AbitibiBowater NAFTA settlement has privatized Canadian water, trade committee hears

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

canadians.org - Mar. 08 (News Report) - Council of Canadians Board member and trade lawyer Steven Shrybman presented to Parliament’s Trade committee today arguing that the record-setting $130-million NAFTA settlement with AbitibiBowater has effectively privatized Canada's water by allowing foreign investors to assert a proprietary claim to water permits and even water in its natural state. "It would be difficult to overstate the consequences of such a profound transformation of the right Canadian governments have always had to own and control public natural resources,"

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Cross-Border Trucking Program Could Begin Again

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

texastribune.org - By Julian Aguilar - Jan. 26 (News Report) - A proposal by the Obama administration that would grant Mexican truckers greater access to Texas roadways — and far beyond — would be a boon to businesses in the state, supporters say. But unions, the Teamsters in particular, say the plan would cost American jobs.

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