In case you haven’t the least idea what the heck it means for China to “float” its currency, let me put it in the language we economists use: China’s float don’t mean squat.
Yet our President, a guy whose marks in Economics 101 are too embarrassing to publish here, ran out to hail the fact that buying Chinese money will now cost more dollars.
President Kerry might have made the right decisions; too bad Senator Kerry didn’t.
By Greg Palast
LONDON — Three confidential documents from inside the World Trade Organization Secretariat and a group of captains of London finance, who call themselves the “British Invisibles,” reveal the extraordinary secret entanglement of industry with government in designing European and American proposals for radical pro-business changes in WTO rules.
Inside Corporate America
After the attack on the World Trade Center, some enterprising hucksters here in New York tried to sell little bags of ashes to victims families, supposedly of their missing kin.
The stomach-churning commercialization of mass murder didn’t bottom out there. Barely had the towers hit the ground when U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick proclaimed the way to defeat Osama bin Laden was to grant George W. Bush extraordinary ‘fast-track’ trade treaty negotiating authority. Ambassador bin Zoellick, speaking from what looked like a cave on Capitol Hill, surrounded by unidentified Republicans, said Americans had to choose: stand up for free trade or for terrorism.
(Note to American readers: Replace the words “Trade Minister Dick Caborn” with the words, “US Trade Representative” – whose assurances about the WTO are virtually interchangeable with European ministers’ happy-talk…)
Britain’s Trade Minister Dick Caborn does nothing all day and that keeps him very, very busy. Caborn is busy reassuring his nation that nothing in the proposed General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) threatens Britain’s environmental regulations. Nothing in GATS permits American corporate powers to overturn safety and health regulations.
Poor Tony. With the election of George W Bush, the Prime Minister is like a poodle left behind when his owners have moved house.
