the world is wising up big time:free trade propaganda being equated as nazi propaganda, which it is:"Goebbels used to say if you repeat a lie several times it becomes a truth"
Vid...@tcq.net
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080720/ap_on_re_eu/wto_quoting_goebbels
Brazil official's Nazi reference rocks WTO talks
By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 1 minute ago
GENEVA - Some pre-negotiation jabbing turned into a potentially
damaging diplomatic incident Saturday when Brazil's foreign minister
said rich countries' deception in trade talks reminded him of tactics
used by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
ADVERTISEMENT
His comments drew a sharp rebuke from the United States, whose chief
trade negotiator, Susan Schwab, is the daughter of Jewish Holocaust
survivors. Her spokesman described the reference to Goebbels as
"incredibly wrong."
The controversy threatens to overshadow next week's last-ditch effort
to save seven years of frustrating talks on a new global trade pact
toward alleviating poverty around the world.
The so-called Doha trade round is already teetering on the brink of
collapse. President Bush has made a Doha deal a key part of his trade
agenda.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said the U.S., Europe and
other wealthy economies have so frequently misrepresented the talks
launched in Qatar's capital in 2001 that public perception has become
totally warped.
"Goebbels used to say if you repeat a lie several times it becomes a
truth," Amorim told reporters at the World Trade Organization, where
top negotiators from over two dozen countries are expected Monday for
the official start of the talks.
Poorer countries have demanded cuts in the farm tariffs and subsidies
used by wealthy countries, saying they hinder Third World development.
In exchange, rich countries have insisted on better market access in
developing countries for their manufacturers and service providers.
Amorim implied that rich countries were employing Goebbels' lying
tactics in describing the agricultural concessions they claim they are
willing to make, while criticizing poorer countries for refusing to
liberalize their industrial markets.
"I am reminded of Goebbels," said Amorim, whose country has co-led
with India a broad coalition of developing countries at the WTO talks.
Later, his spokesman qualified the remarks and apologized to Schwab.
Sean Spicer, spokesman for the Office of the U.S. Trade
Representative, said he was horrified by the "personal venom" of
Amorim's words.
"We came here to Geneva to negotiate on substance," Spicer told The
Associated Press. "For him to make remarks like this is so incredibly
wrong. They are insulting."
Spicer noted that Schwab visited Amorim to soothe tensions immediately
after negotiations collapsed in acrimony in 2006.
In an interview with the AP, Amorim's spokesman Ricardo Neiva Tavares
said the minister "regrets if Susan Schwab or anyone else was upset by
his comments on a historical fact. He certainly did not intend to hurt
anyone's feelings, which he deeply respects."
___
Associated Press writer Eliane Engeler contributed to this report.
orang...@googlemail.com
> Poorer countries have demanded cuts in the farm tariffs and subsidies
> used by wealthy countries, saying they hinder Third World development.
> In exchange, rich countries have insisted on better market access in
> developing countries for their manufacturers and service providers.
> Amorim implied that rich countries were employing Goebbels' lying
> tactics in describing the agricultural concessions they claim they are
> willing to make, while criticizing poorer countries for refusing to
> liberalize their industrial markets.
they then compare protectionism to nazism -
> "I am reminded of Goebbels," said Amorim, whose country has co-led
> with India a broad coalition of developing countries at the WTO talks.
> Later, his spokesman qualified the remarks and apologized to Schwab.
> Sean Spicer, spokesman for the Office of the U.S. Trade
> Representative, said he was horrified by the "personal venom" of
> Amorim's words.
which is a little harsh. but i think we can all agree, free trade will
benifit the poor.
FrediFizzx
news:801abaa1-f3a9-4a19...@y21g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
Free global trade usually benefits everyone in the long run.
Fred
Vid...@tcq.net
> well spotted. poor countries are arguing for more free trade -
>
> > Poorer countries have demanded cuts in the farm tariffs and subsidies
> > used by wealthy countries, saying they hinder Third World development.
> > In exchange, rich countries have insisted on better market access in
> > developing countries for their manufacturers and service providers.
> > Amorim implied that rich countries were employing Goebbels' lying
> > tactics in describing the agricultural concessions they claim they are
> > willing to make, while criticizing poorer countries for refusing to
> > liberalize their industrial markets.
>
> they then compare protectionism to nazism -
no, they simply state that all the happy talk of open markets means
world prosperity is just that, propaganda. just ask starving haitians
who were talked into giving up rice production that enabled them to
feed themselves, to grow tomato's for exports, then later on found
that the global rice markets had been cornered, and they could not
afford to buy from unreliable, unstable global markets. giving up food
security is as dumb as giving up production for consumption.
>
> > "I am reminded of Goebbels," said Amorim, whose country has co-led
> > with India a broad coalition of developing countries at the WTO talks.
> > Later, his spokesman qualified the remarks and apologized to Schwab.
> > Sean Spicer, spokesman for the Office of the U.S. Trade
> > Representative, said he was horrified by the "personal venom" of
> > Amorim's words.
>
> which is a little harsh. but i think we can all agree, free trade will
> benifit the poor.
bullshit. you ignored this years food riots, and the ever larger
hoards of people working for $2.00 a day or less.
com...@webtv.net
high school kids have recited shakespear.....
"Arrest the oil commodity speculators for conspiracy to commit "price
fixing" !
Buff-Meister "BUFFETTHATER"
> video61 recites the nutt ravings of wife beater, karl marx, more than
> high school kids have recited shakespear.....
Nothing funnier than watching one kook make fun of another kook
quoting another kook.
com...@webtv.net
Vid...@tcq.net
> <orangata...@googlemail.com> wrote in message
you are parroting a disgraced, completely discredited assumption.
The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little
coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated
our economic debate for three decades.
Since the Reagan years, free market cliches have passed for
sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these
ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that
capitalism is ailing.
You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and
deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth
doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to
"grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces
well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy
is "protectionism."
e.j. dionne
harryh...@yahoo.com
It's unfortunate that Brazil's foreign minister compared rich nations'
propaganda to Nazi propaganda. The truth is, Europe and America do
subsidize agriculture, or at least parts of it.
And that has had an atrocious effect on the agricultural sector of
poorer countries. One of the reasons that so many Mexicans are
flocking to the US is because NAFTA put small farmers out of
business. Thrown off the land, they come here to earn a living. The
native-born complain; but what else are these dispossessed to do? Lay
down and die in the street?
Lisa
com...@webtv.net
than all the other nations combined. right here in south bend, they have
a christian group,"LESEA BROADCASTING. they ship food in every emergency
situation. they even got a cargo plane into burma when their idiot govt.
refused everyone else entrance.we have all this food to give to the poor
because of our capitalist system. i never hear f chna,north korea,cuba
or serbia, all socialist governments, donating any food to any starving
person...that is because socialsm is a rotten idea.
Vid...@tcq.net
>
> It's unfortunate that Brazil's foreign minister compared rich nations'
> propaganda to Nazi propaganda. The truth is, Europe and America do
> subsidize agriculture, or at least parts of it.
>
but lisa, he is saying in reality that free trade is unworkable. he
is calling them out for the showdown. the reality is that the phrase
free trade is being bandied about, as the great poverty reducer, and a
democratic process, which it is not. he is outraged at what has
happened to the third world. they can no longer feed themselves. and
have to rely on unstable, unreliable free markets.
yes we subsidize, you have to be crazy not to, otherwise we would end
up like haiti, or africa, that were talked out of subsidizing their
farmers, and growing crops for exports. that is inflationary, and
unreliable.
the third world is sick of adhering to a cult that does not work to
the detriment of many, to enrich a few. the un-productive wealthy have
always looked for ways to enslave for profit, yesterday it was forced
free markets, fascism, today its not done at the point of a gun in
most cases, its economic enforcement.
here is what the third world is going back to, and it works. he is
just pointing out the lie.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/africa/02malawi.html
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Slide Show
Ending Famine in Malawi
But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl
to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling
more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any
other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of
thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.
In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen
sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three
tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished
children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan
Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said
jubilantly.
Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad
implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one
word: fertilizer.
Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi
depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked
country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate
fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively
subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in
a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president,
decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.
Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to
reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical
reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that
across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most,
of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.
“As long as I’m president, I don’t want to be going to other capitals
begging for food,” Mr. Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior
civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his
advisers, “Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use
the soil and the water we have.”
The country’s successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader
reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty
in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the
basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education,
credit and agricultural research.
Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania,
is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing.
As its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk,
impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to
feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie
fallow or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded
less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.
Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they
reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-
aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets
and an antipathy to government intervention.
In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to
eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was
that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export
and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to
Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.
In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African
agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not
only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer
prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed
to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was
essential to lifting food production.
“The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters
mounted,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who
lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi’s fertilizer
program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should
invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa’s farmers.
Here in Malawi, deep fertilizer subsidies and lesser ones for seed,
abetted by good rains, helped farmers produce record-breaking corn
harvests in 2006 and 2007, according to government crop estimates.
Corn production leapt to 2.7 million metric tons in 2006 and 3.4
million in 2007 from 1.2 million in 2005, the government reported.
“The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and
inorganic fertilizer, full stop,” said Stephen Carr, who has lived in
Malawi since 1989, when he retired as the World Bank’s principal
agriculturalist in sub-Saharan Africa. “This technology has not been
used in most of Africa. The only way you can help farmers gain access
to it is to give it away free or subsidize it heavily.”
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Slide Show
Ending Famine in Malawi
The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and
increasing wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College
London and Michigan State University concluded in their preliminary
report that a well-run subsidy program in a sensibly managed economy
“has the potential to drive growth forward out of the poverty trap in
which many Malawians and the Malawian economy are currently caught.”
Farmers interviewed recently in Malawi’s southern and central regions
said fertilizer had greatly improved their ability to fill their
bellies with nsima, the thick, cornmeal porridge that is Malawi’s
staff of life.
In the hamlet of Mthungu, Enelesi Chakhaza, an elderly widow whose
husband died of hunger five years ago, boasted that she got two ox-
cart-loads of corn this year from her small plot instead of half a
cart.
Last year, roughly half the country’s farming families received
coupons that entitled them to buy two 110-pound bags of fertilizer,
enough to nourish an acre of land, for around $15 — about a third the
market price. The government also gave them coupons for enough seed to
plant less than half an acre.
Malawians are still haunted by the hungry season of 2001-02. That
season, an already shrunken program to give poor farmers enough
fertilizer and seed to plant a meager quarter acre of land had been
reduced again. Regional flooding further lowered the harvest. Corn
prices surged. And under the government then in power, the country’s
entire grain reserve was sold as a result of mismanagement and
corruption.
Mrs. Chakhaza watched her husband starve to death that season. His
strength ebbed away as they tried to subsist on pumpkin leaves. He was
one of many who succumbed that year, said K. B. Kakunga, the local
Agriculture Ministry official. He recalled mothers and children
begging for food at his door.
“I had a little something, but I could not afford to help each and
every one,” he said. “It was very pathetic, very pathetic indeed.”
But Mr. Kakunga brightened as he talked about the impact of the
subsidies, which he said had more than doubled corn production in his
jurisdiction since 2005.
“It’s quite marvelous!” he exclaimed.
Malawi’s determination to heavily subsidize fertilizer and the payoff
in increased production are beginning to change the attitudes of
donors, say economists who have studied Malawi’s experience.
The Department for International Development in Britain contributed $8
million to the subsidy program last year. Bernabé Sánchez, an
economist with the agency in Malawi, estimated the extra corn produced
because of the $74 million subsidy was worth $120 million to $140
million.
“It was really a good economic investment,” he said.
The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American
food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to
help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support
for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of
it. Over the years, the United States Agency for International
Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in
delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that
effort.
But Alan Eastham, the American ambassador to Malawi, said in a recent
interview that the subsidy program had worked “pretty well,” though it
displaced some commercial fertilizer sales.
“The plain fact is that Malawi got lucky last year,” he said. “They
got fertilizer out while it was needed. The lucky part was that they
got the rains.”
And the World Bank now sometimes supports the temporary use of
subsidies aimed at the poor and carried out in a way that fosters
private markets.
Here in Malawi, bank officials say they generally support Malawi’s
policy, though they criticize the government for not having a strategy
to eventually end the subsidies, question whether its 2007 corn
production estimates are inflated and say there is still a lot of room
for improvement in how the subsidy is carried out.
“The issue is, let’s do a better job of it,” said David Rohrbach, a
senior agricultural economist at the bank.
Though the donors are sometimes ambivalent, Malawi’s farmers have
embraced the subsidies. And the government moved this year to give its
people a more direct hand in their distribution.
Villagers in Chembe gathered one recent morning under the spreading
arms of a kachere tree to decide who most needed fertilizer coupons as
the planting season loomed. They had only enough for 19 of the
village’s 53 families.
“Ladies and gentlemen, should we start with the elderly or the
orphans?” asked Samuel Dama, a representative of the Chembe clan.
Men led the assembly, but women sitting on the ground at their feet
called out almost all the names of the neediest, gesturing to families
rearing children orphaned by AIDS or caring for toothless elders.
There were more poor families than there were coupons, so grumbling
began among those who knew they would have to watch over the coming
year as their neighbors’ fertilized corn fields turned deep green.
Sensing the rising resentment, the village chief, Zaudeni Mapila,
rose. Barefoot and dressed in dusty jeans and a royal blue jacket, he
acted out a silly pantomime of husbands stuffing their pants with corn
to sell on the sly for money to get drunk at the beer hall. The women
howled with laughter. The tension fled.
He closed with a reminder he hoped would dampen any jealousy.
“I don’t want anyone to complain,” he said. “It’s not me who chose.
It’s you.”
The women sang back to him in a chorus of acknowledgment, then
dispersed to their homes and fields.
> And that has had an atrocious effect on the agricultural sector of
> poorer countries. One of the reasons that so many Mexicans are
> flocking to the US is because NAFTA put small farmers out of
> business.
that is true, and i predicted it back in the early 90's before it was
enacted. but, it also destroyed lots of small mexican business's. so
its unworkable no matter what sector of a economy is affected.
Thrown off the land, they come here to earn a living. The
> native-born complain; but what else are these dispossessed to do? Lay
> down and die in the street?
>
yep, and i point that out when ever i can. the un-productive wealth
love this. it floods the world with cheap desperate labor, just
another way to exploit and enslave. as the guy from brazil said, put
up, or shut up. we cannot open our markets even more, we are on the
verge of a major economic blowout. the slightest breeze will push us
over the edge, and the guy from brazil knows it. the rich have hung us
with the rope they bought. now they are trying to bail us out on the
backs of the worlds poor. the third world is sick of it.
someday even in this country, free trade will be a dirty word again,
and free trade, is not trade. and the illusions of retraining will be
viewed as a distraction from the truth. and the debt will be viewed as
a disaster.
> Lisa
harryh...@yahoo.com
> On Jul 22, 8:28 am, harryharr...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>
>
> > It's unfortunate that Brazil's foreign minister compared rich nations'
> > propaganda to Nazi propaganda. The truth is, Europe and America do
> > subsidize agriculture, or at least parts of it.
>
> but lisa, he is saying in reality that free trade is unworkable. he
> is calling them out for the showdown. the reality is that the phrase
> free trade is being bandied about, as the great poverty reducer, and a
> democratic process, which it is not. he is outraged at what has
> happened to the third world. they can no longer feed themselves. and
> have to rely on unstable, unreliable free markets.
> yes we subsidize, you have to be crazy not to, otherwise we would end
> up like haiti, or africa, that were talked out of subsidizing their
> farmers, and growing crops for exports. that is inflationary, and
> unreliable.
> the third world is sick of adhering to a cult that does not work to
> the detriment of many, to enrich a few. the un-productive wealthy have
> always looked for ways to enslave for profit, yesterday it was forced
> free markets, fascism, today its not done at the point of a gun in
> most cases, its economic enforcement.
> here is what the third world is going back to, and it works. he is
> just pointing out the lie.http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/africa/02malawi.html
I was merely pointing out it would have been better if the foreign
minister had not used politically-loaded phrases to make his point.
He really doesn't have to---the reality is bad enough, and there's no
need to dress it up.
Free trade benefits the strong. It does not benefit the weak. Cotton
farmers in India are committing suicide because they can't compete
with cotton farmers in the First World.
Free trade is a shuck.
Lisa
Les Cargill
I don't mean this as a perjorative... but this is Luddism, pure and
simple. It's opposing economy of scale because economy of scale frees
up labor for other uses. Unfortunately, because of substitutability
problems, thes eeconomies of scale are disruptive. But net-net, the
cheaper food *appears* to serve each person randomly chosen in a
better way. This is, in my opinion, the remaining portion of
Utilitarianism that still works.
Food's just too important.
Disruptive? You better believe it is. But how can we go back? More
seriously, are there adjustments that can help?
--
Les Cargill
Vid...@tcq.net
> I was merely pointing out it would have been better if the foreign
> minister had not used politically-loaded phrases to make his point.
agreed, and i understand. but from his point, his world has been
victimized for well over 30 years now, and they may view this
differently than we do, billions are starving, billions have been
enslaved, and we who are only becoming aware of what the third world
has gone thru, because its now happening to us.
> He really doesn't have to---the reality is bad enough, and there's no
> need to dress it up.
>
he maybe fed up. its was bad, but maybe they see this differently.
hopefully he tones it down, and uses more appropriate language. he
should have called it what it is, fascism.
> Free trade benefits the strong. It does not benefit the weak.
correct, towering statement there.
Cotton
> farmers in India are committing suicide because they can't compete
> with cotton farmers in the First World.
>
true. and its outraging them to the point where the gloves are off.
every country should get their
sovereignty back, and dump free trade shit.
> Free trade is a shuck.
>
worthless, correct.
> Lisa