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from the not-surrendering-to-corporations-for-now dept.
Common Dreams reports
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said [August 25] that the U.S. Senate will not vote on the 12-nation, corporate-friendly Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) this year, buoying progressive hopes that the trade deal will never come to fruition.
[...] McConnell told a Kentucky State Farm Bureau breakfast in Louisville that the agreement, "which has some serious flaws, will not be acted upon this year".
Common Dreams also reports
Germany's Vice Chancellor and Economic Minister said that the controversial Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has "de facto failed", admitting that negotiations between the U.S. and E.U. have completely stalled.
"Negotiations with the U.S. have de facto failed because, of course, as Europeans, we couldn't allow ourselves to submit to American demands", Sigmar Gabriel told the German news station ZDF [1][2] in an interview that will air at 7pm German time [August 28], according to Der Spiegel. [1]
"Everything has stalled", Gabriel said.
[1] In German [2] Content behind scripts
Reported by BBC, in English.
In 14 rounds of talks, the two sides had not agreed on a single common chapter out of 27 being discussed, Mr Gabriel said. "In my opinion the negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really admitting it," said Mr Gabriel.
He suggested Washington was angry about a deal the EU struck with Canada, because it contained elements the US does not want to see in the TTIP.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday August 29 2016, @02:40PM
Well, for starters, I think it's at least reasonable to dispute the "screwing things up so badly" moniker for the Bill Clinton administration. Because on paper at least, Clinton got a lot of things right:
- Federal deficits went down, and we were actually running a budget surplus when Bill left office.
- Crime turned around in a big way. It's unclear exactly why, but it was about 20% lower when Bill left office.
- GDP growth was solid throughout his presidency.
- Minimum of military stupidity, especially when compared to his predecessors and successors. (Bill's biggest screw-ups: The attempted Somalia intervention, and the attack on the USS Cole.) He even had one strong success intervening in Bosnia.
- A couple of significant diplomatic successes: Ending the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and coming closer than any US president ever has of creating peace between the Israelis and Palestinians (it didn't last, of course).
- Effective counterterrorism policy: Al Qaida existed throughout his presidency, and didn't succeed in pulling a 9/11-scale event until after Bill left office. And it wasn't for lack of trying - they bombed the World Trade Center about a month into his first term.
- Unemployment fell nearly in half.
- There was a real push to introduce America to this new thingy called the "Internet". Yes, that was more Al Gore's doing than Bill Clinton's, but Bill definitely went along with it. Bill remains the only president with a photo-op of him and his VP stringing network cable.
- The percentage of Americans with college degrees increased 5%.
Now, Bill Clinton's administration certainly had its problems, but you can understand why someone might look at that performance and think that we could have done a lot worse. As for Bill not being able to keep his pants on, I'll just point out that he's far from the only president with that challenge, and some of them are known as the greats: Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John F Kennedy, and Lyndon B Johnson were all known to have had affairs, and there were rumors at least about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln (with men!), Grover Cleveland, James Garfield, John Tyler, and George H.W. Bush.
I would have preferred someone else, but if it comes down to that kind of result and the kind of mess Donald Trump has made of absolutely everything he's ever gotten his hands on, I'll take Clinton 2.0.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 29 2016, @02:53PM
It's unclear exactly why
Yeah that is kinda a common theme of the Clinton presidency.
As a physics style thought experiment you could swap in Hillary or Al Gore or well, Jimmy Carter, and I'm not sure anything would have turned out different.
Or in all honesty swap in Bush the First.
I had to LOL at the % of college grads statistic, I don't think high school kids waited to decide what to do with their lives until they saw who was elected president. That's a result of immigration and real estate and taxation policy from quite literally a generation ago in the 70s which was baked into the cake when the parents were having sex resulting in those kids.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday August 29 2016, @03:30PM
No, but they did base their decision, in part, on the availability of scholarships and student loans, both of which were expanded significantly by the Clinton administration.
As for crime, the Clinton administration certainly tried some stuff, like introducing community policing, and providing funding for localities to hire more cops. The reason I say we're not sure if that helped is because we have no proven explanations of why crime started dropping in the early 1990's (theories range from more aggressive policing to abortion legalization 18 years earlier to lead levels to anti-drug propaganda in schools).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:59AM
It probably had to do with leaded gasoline being phased out starting in the 70s, so in the 90s you had teenagers and young adults growing up without lead poisoning.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:43PM
That is one of the ideas I specifically mentioned in my post. I'm a fan of what's commonly known as the lead-crime hypothesis, but definitive proof is very difficult for anything like this.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday August 30 2016, @09:06AM
Federal deficits went down, and we were actually running a budget surplus when Bill left office.
True, but only as a result of some quite dodgy book keeping. Clinton merged the social security budget with the general budget, allowing the SS surplus to be counted against the federal deficit. The long-term result of this was that there's now likely to be a significant shortfall in social security that will need to be made up from somewhere, but at least he got to claim an achievement that people are uncritically repeating almost two decades later.
Most of the rest was the effect of riding the wave of the dot-com boom. The budget benefitted from a more productive economy increasing tax revenues and most of the rest followed on from this. It's nice to blame Bush for everything after, but Clinton was the one that allowed the US economy to become overly reliant on an industry that was obviously in a bubble by the end of his term. Bush compounded it by trying to use a real-estate bubble to replace the dot-com collapse, but he was already too late. Clinton should have been taking tax revenue from the dot-com companies and funnelling it into subsidies to kick-start the next boom that would take over in the early 2000s. But then, what's his incentive to do this? He'd be out of office by then and could blame the failure of the economy on his successor...
sudo mod me up