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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: 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