#Trade NAFTA

[sunshinestate323]

The great intergenerational theft is a venal fact of modern reality that a lot of people are painfully aware of, or at least vaguely sense, but this guy, Scott Galloway, is the only person I know of (whose name is not Bernie Sanders) with the the stones to say it out loud in public.

I think he could hit a little harder on the corporate kleptocracy (and their Central Casting reality show frontman) that engineered said intergenerational theft, with the Boomers being the happy beneficiaries of same. But still, this is the mic drop of the century afaic.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

"Canada, Mexico and car companies have been declared the winners in arguably the most important trade dispute under the new NAFTA, landing the U.S. on the losing side in a case about calculating the origin of auto parts.

The long-expected decision was known for weeks to the parties involved, yet it was withheld from public release until after North American leaders appeared together at a summit this week in Mexico. 

It involves small print with big consequences for the industry at the heart of the continental trade agreement: Automobiles.

At its core, the dispute was about how hard to push car companies to use parts from North America, at a time when countries are seeking to pry back manufacturing jobs.

The specific case involved two conflicting methodologies for calculating the origins of a car's parts: One stricter, one easier.

Americans took a hard line. The U.S. wanted the toughest interpretation of the rules, which would force cars to include more North American parts to avoid a tariff.

Mexico fired off a suit against the U.S., calling its method damaging, costly to companies and counterproductive to the continent's car industry. 

Canada joined the suit. Car companies eagerly supported the suit. And the complainants ultimately won."

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[masgwi]

I don't understand how political debates don't turn into fist fights more often.

[screenshot-thoughts]

NAFTA, North American Free Trade

[radicalgraff]

Radical murals seen around Oventic, an indigenous Zapatista village in Chiapas, Mexico.

On January 1st, 1994 the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) launched an armed insurrection in Chiapas against the Mexican state and the NAFTA Free Trade Agreement.

The Zapatistas are a resistance movement of indigenous villagers in the mountains and jungles of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southern-most state.

[andhumanslovedstories]

The thing about my dad being a trade reporter all my life is that he was the first person to introduce me to many of the concepts of international trade, which results in a strange sort of nostalgia for things that are not inherently nostalgic. Anyway, the solution to one of my crosswords today was “NAFTA” and my first thought was “like my old bedtime stories :)”

[socialistexan]

Do I, a leftist, like that the DNC ran far, far away from Palestine and trans people.? No. There were no trans speakers, and any nods to LGBTQ rights (from straight speakers) we're brief and only vaguely gestured at "loving with pride." They blocked out the Uncommitted movement out of fear of any attacks from the right for being seen as not as lockstep as possible with Israel.

But that's sadly how you win national elections in this country.

People mistakenly believe the average swing voters is socially liberal and fiscally conservative, but that not true (in fact, despite what the most annoying dudes at your college say, that's the smallest voting bloc in the US).

No, most swing voters, particularly those in the slightly-whiter, slightly center-right swing states in the Rust Belt, are socially conservative and fiscally liberal. They want strong unions, but think trans people are weird and off putting. They want a robust social safety net, but are wary of the "border crisis" and want to make sure immigrants don't get access to that safety net.

It's how Trump won in those states in 2016, hammering on social issues from the far right and at least gave the impression he would break with the conservative orthodoxy, particularly on free trade and labor (he won union households for a reason), while Clinton clung with her life to NAFTA and global capitalism.

The reason Trump lost those voters in 2020 is because when he got in office, all he did was adopt that conservative orthodoxy of cutting taxes for the rich and trying to slash social programs, while Biden offered an economic message that while different, was a break from neo liberal austerity.

It's not what I want, it makes me unhappy, but it is how you have to win in an electoral system which favors the right.

[tanadrin]

Watching this video on the history of Nortel and its collapse, and it seems like Canada has been in an impossible position economically for as long as it has existed: on the one hand, it benefits phenomenally from being economically integrated into the United States. On the other, that same relationship makes it very dependent on the US, which makes it harder for Canada to set its own course; it simply cannot be as functionally independent as another country might be.

And to an extent that's an issue all smaller countries deal with; like, the US is a quarter of world GDP, and that's gonna have hugely distorting effects on any country with close trade ties to the US. But at least if you're in Europe you can create an economic federation with other European states to help you punch above your weight. At least if you're on another continent, you are likely to be trading heavily with your other neighbors. Canada only borders the US directly, NAFTA is functionally only ever going to be "the US and friends", it's just an impossible position.

And it's not like joining the US and having Canadian representation in the U.S. Congress would help all that much--Canada just doesn't have that big of a population! It would be another California: big, but not nearly big enough to dominate the political agenda.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/#we-used-to-make-things

There's this great throwaway line in 1992's Sneakers, where Dan Aykroyd, playing a conspiracy-addled hacker/con-man, is feverishly telling Sydney Poitier (playing an ex-CIA spook) about a 1958 meeting Eisenhower had with aliens where Ike said, "hey, look, give us your technology, and we'll give you all the cow lips you want."

Poitier dismisses Aykroyd ("Don't listen to this man. He's certifiable"). We're meant to be on Poitier's side here, but I've always harbored some sympathy for Aykroyd in this scene.

That's because I often hear echoes of Aykroyd's theory in my own explanations of the esoteric bargains and plots that produced the world we're living in today. Of course, in my world, it's not presidents bargaining for alien technology in exchange for cow-lips – it's the world's wealthy nations bargaining to drop trade restrictions on the Global South in exchange for IP laws.

These bargains – which started as a series of bilateral and then multilateral agreements like NAFTA, and culminated in the WTO agreement of 1999 – were the most important step in the reordering of the world's economy around rent-extraction, cheap labor exploitation, and a brittle supply chain that is increasingly endangered by the polycrisis of climate and its handmaidens, like zoonotic plagues, water wars, and mass refugee migration.

Prior to the advent of "free trade," the world's rich countries fashioned debt into a whip-hand over poor, post-colonial nations. These countries had been bankrupted by their previous colonial owners, and the price of their freedom was punishing debts to the IMF and other rich-world institutions in exchange for loans to help these countries "develop."

Like all poor debtors, these countries were said to have gotten into their predicament through moral failure – they'd "lived beyond their means."

(When rich people get into debt, bankruptcy steps in to give them space to "restructure" according to their own plans. When poor people get into debt, bankruptcy strips them of nearly everything that might help them recover, brands them with a permanent scarlet letter, and subjects them to humiliating micro-management whose explicit message is that they are not competent to manage their own affairs):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

So the poor debtor nations were ordered to "deregulate." They had to sell off their state assets, run their central banks according to the dictates of rich-world finance authorities, and reorient their production around supplying raw materials to rich countries, who would process these materials into finished goods for export back to the poor world.

Naturally, poor countries were not allowed to erect "trade barriers" that might erode the capacity of this North-South transfer of high-margin goods, but this was not the era of free trade. It wasn't the free trade era because, while the North-South transfer was largely unrestricted, the South-North transfer was subject to tight regulation in the rich world.

In other words, poor countries were expected to export, say, raw ore to the USA and reimport high-tech goods, with low tariffs in both directions. But if a poor country processed that ore domestically and made its own finished goods, the US would block those goods at the border, slapping them with high tariffs that made them more expensive than Made-in-the-USA equivalents.

The argument for this unidirectional trade was that the US – and other rich countries – had a strategic need to maintain their manufacturing industries as a hedge against future geopolitical events (war, but also pandemics, extreme weather) that might leave the rich world unable to provide for itself. This rationale had a key advantage: it was true.

A country that manages its own central bank can create as much of its own currency as it wants, and use that money to buy anything for sale in its own currency.

This may not be crucial while global markets are operating to the country's advantage (say, while the rest of the world is "willingly" pricing its raw materials in your country's currency), but when things go wrong – war, plague, weather – a country that can't make things is at the rest of the world's mercy.

If you had to choose between being a poor post-colonial nation that couldn't supply its own technological needs except by exporting raw materials to rich countries, and being a rich country that had both domestic manufacturing capacity and a steady supply of other countries' raw materials, you would choose the second, every time.

What's not to like?

Here's what.

The problem – from the perspective of America's ultra-wealthy – was that this arrangement gave the US workforce a lot of power. As US workers unionized, they were able to extract direct concessions from their employers through collective bargaining, and they could effectively lobby for universal worker protections, including a robust welfare state – in both state and federal legislatures. The US was better off as a whole, but the richest ten percent were much poorer than they could be if only they could smash worker power.

That's where free trade comes in. Notwithstanding racist nonsense about "primitive" countries, there's no intrinsic defect that stops the global south from doing high-tech manufacturing. If the rich world's corporate leaders were given free rein to sideline America's national security in favor of their own profits, they could certainly engineer the circumstances whereby poor countries would build sophisticated factories to replace the manufacturing facilities that sat behind the north's high tariff walls.

These poor-country factories could produce goods ever bit as valuable as the rich world's shops, but without the labor, environmental and financial regulations that constrained their owners' profits. They slavered for a business environment that let them kill workers; poison the air, land and water; and cheat the tax authorities with impunity.

For this plan to work, the wealthy needed to engineer changes in both the rich world and the poor world. Obviously, they would have to get rid of the rich world's tariff walls, which made it impossible to competitively import goods made in the global south, no matter how cheaply they were made.

But free trade wasn't just about deregulation in the north – it also required a whole slew of new, extremely onerous regulations in the global south. Corporations that relocated their manufacturing to poor – but nominally sovereign – countries needed to be sure that those countries wouldn't try to replicate the American plan of becoming actually sovereign, by exerting control over the means of production within their borders.

Recall that the American Revolution was inspired in large part by fury over the requirement to ship raw materials back to Mother England and then buy them back at huge markups after they'd been processed by English workers, to the enrichment of English aristocrats. Post-colonial America created new regulations (tariffs on goods from England), and – crucially – they also deregulated.

Specifically, post-revolutionary America abolished copyrights and patents for English persons and firms. That way, American manufacturers could produce sophisticated finished goods without paying rent to England's wealthy making those goods cheaper for American buyers, and American publishers could subsidize their editions of American authors' books by publishing English authors on the cheap, without the obligation to share profits with English publishers or English writers.

The surplus produced by ignoring the patents and copyrights of the English was divided (unequally) among American capitalists, workers, and shoppers. Wealthy Americans got richer, even as they paid their workers more and charged less for their products. This incubated a made-in-the-USA edition of the industrial revolution. It was so successful that the rest of the world – especially England – began importing American goods and literature, and then American publishers and manufacturers started to lean on their government to "respect" English claims, in order to secure bilateral protections for their inventions and books in English markets.

This was good for America, but it was terrible for English manufacturers. The US – a primitive, agricultural society – "stole" their inventions until they gained so much manufacturing capacity that the English public started to prefer American goods to English ones.

This was the thing that rich-world industrialists feared about free trade. Once you build your high-tech factories in the global south, what's to stop those people from simply copying your plans – or worse, seizing your factories! – and competing with you on a global scale? Some of these countries had nominally socialist governments that claimed to explicitly elevate the public good over the interests of the wealthy. And all of these countries had the same sprinkling of sociopaths who'd gladly see a million children maimed or the land poisoned for a buck – and these "entrepreneurs" had unbeatable advantages with their countries' political classes.

For globalization to work, it wasn't enough to deregulate the rich world – capitalists also had to regulate the poor world. Specifically, they had to get the poor world to adopt "IP" laws that would force them to willingly pay rent on things they could get for free: patents and other IP, even though it was in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term interests of both the nation and its politicians and its businesspeople.

Thus, the bargain that makes me sympathetic to Dan Aykroyd: not cow lips for alien tech; but free trade for IP law. When the WTO was steaming towards passage in the late 1990s, there was (rightly) a lot of emphasis on its deregulatory provisions: weakening of labor, environmental and financial laws in the poor world, and of tariffs in the rich world.

But in hindsight, we all kind of missed the main event: the TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). This actually started before the WTO treaty (it was part of the GATT, a predecessor to the WTO), but the WTO spread it to countries all over the world. Under the TRIPS, poor countries are required to honor the IP claims of rich countries, on pain of global sanction.

That was the plan: instead of paying American workers to make Apple computers, say, Apple could export the "IP" for Macs and iPhones to countries like China, and these countries would produce Apple products that were "designed in California, assembled in China." China would allow Apple to treat Chinese workers so badly that they routinely committed suicide, and would lock up or kill workers who tried to unionize. China would accept vast shipments of immortal, toxic e-waste. And China wouldn't let its entrepreneurs copy Apple's designs, be they software, schematics or trademarks.

Apple isn't the only company that pursued this strategy, but no company has executed it as successfully. It's not for nothing that Steve Jobs's hand-picked successor was Tim Cook, who oversaw the transfer of even the most exacting elements of Apple manufacturing to Chinese facilities, striking bargains with contractors like Foxconn that guaranteed that workers would be heavily ��� lethally! – surveilled and controlled to prevent the twin horrors of unionization and leaks.

For the first two decades of the WTO era, the most obvious problems with this arrangement was wage erosion (for American workers) and leakage (for the rich). China's "socialist" government was only too happy to help Foxconn imprison workers who demanded better wages and working conditions, but they were far more relaxed about knockoffs, be they fake iPods sold in market stalls or US trade secrets working their way into Huawei products.

These were problems for the American aristocracy, whose investments depended on China disciplining both Chinese workers and Chinese businesses. For the American people, leakage was a nothingburger. Apple's profits weren't shared with its workforce beyond the relatively small number of tech workers at its headquarters. The vast majority of Apple employees, who flogged iPhones and scrubbed the tilework in gleaming white stores across the nation, would get the same minimal (or even minimum) wage no matter how profitable Apple grew.

It wasn't until the pandemic that the other shoe dropped for the American public. The WTO arrangement – cow lips for alien technology – had produced a global system brittle supply chains composed entirely of weakest links. A pandemic, a war, a ship stuck in the Suez Canal or Houthi paramilitaries can cripple the entire system, perhaps indefinitely.

For two decades, we fought over globalization's effect on wages. We let our corporate masters trick us into thinking that China's "cheating" on IP was a problem for the average person. But the implications of globalization for American sovereignty and security were banished to the xenophobic right fringe, where they were mixed into the froth of Cold War 2.0 nonsense. The pandemic changed that, creating a coalition that is motivated by a complex and contradictory stew of racism, environmentalism, xenophobia, labor advocacy, patriotism, pragmatism, fear and hope.

Out of that stew emerged a new American political tendency, mostly associated with Bidenomics, but also claimed in various guises by the American right, through its America First wing. That tendency's most visible artifact is the CHIPS Act, through which the US government proposes to use policy and subsidies to bring high-tech manufacturing back to America's shores.

This week, the American Economic Liberties Project published "Reshoring and Restoring: CHIPS Implementation for a Competitive Semiconductor Industry," a fascinating, beautifully researched and detailed analysis of the CHIPS Act and the global high-tech manufacturing market, written by Todd Achilles, Erik Peinert and Daniel Rangel:

https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/reshoring-and-restoring-chips-implementation-for-a-competitive-semiconductor-industry/#

Crucially, the report lays out the role that the weakening of antitrust, the dismantling of tariffs and the strengthening of IP played in the history of the current moment. The failure to enforce antitrust law allowed for monopolization at every stage of the semiconductor industry's supply-chain. The strengthening of IP and the weakening of tariffs encouraged the resulting monopolies to chase cheap labor overseas, confident that the US government would punish host countries that allowed their domestic entrepreneurs to use American designs without permission.

The result is a financialized, "capital light" semiconductor industry that has put all its eggs in one basket. For the most advanced chips ("leading-edge logic"), production works like this: American firms design a chip and send the design to Taiwan where TSMC foundry turns it into a chip. The chip is then shipped to one of a small number of companies in the poor world where they are assembled, packaged and tested (AMP) and sent to China to be integrated into a product.

Obsolete foundries get a second life in the commodity chip ("mature-node chips") market – these are the cheap chips that are shoveled into our cars and appliances and industrial systems.

Both of these systems are fundamentally broken. The advanced, "leading-edge" chips rely on geopolitically uncertain, heavily concentrated foundries. These foundries can be fully captured by their customers – as when Apple prepurchases the entire production capacity of the most advanced chips, denying both domestic and offshore competitors access to the newest computation.

Meanwhile, the less powerful, "mature node" chips command minuscule margins, and are often dumped into the market below cost, thanks to subsidies from countries hoping to protect their corner of the high-tech sector. This makes investment in low-power chips uncertain, leading to wild swings in cost, quality and availability of these workhorse chips.

The leading-edge chipmakers – Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, etc – have fully captured their markets. They like the status quo, and the CHIPS Act won't convince them to invest in onshore production. Why would they?

2022 was Broadcom's best year ever, not in spite of its supply-chain problems, but because of them. Those problems let Broadcom raise prices for a captive audience of customers, who the company strong-armed into exclusivity deals that ensured they had nowhere to turn. Qualcomm also profited handsomely from shortages, because its customers end up paying Qualcomm no matter where they buy, thanks to Qualcomm ensuring that its patents are integrated into global 4G and 5G standards.

That means that all standards-conforming products generate royalties for Qualcomm, and it also means that Qualcomm can decide which companies are allowed to compete with it, and which ones will be denied licenses to its patents. Both companies are under orders from the FTC to cut this out, and both companies ignore the FTC.

The brittleness of mature-node and leading-edge chips is not inevitable. Advanced memory chips (DRAM) roughly comparable in complexity to leading-edge chips, while analog-to-digital chips are as easily commodified as mature-node chips, and yet each has a robust and competitive supply chain, with both onshore and offshore producers. In contrast with leading-edge manufacturers (who have been visibly indifferent to the CHIPS incentives), memory chip manufacturers responded to the CHIPS Act by committing hundreds of billions of dollars to new on-shore production facilities.

Intel is a curious case: in a world of fabless leading-edge manufacturers, Intel stands out for making its own chips. But Intel is in a lot of trouble. Its advanced manufacturing plans keep foundering on cost overruns and delays. The company keeps losing money. But until recently, its management kept handing its shareholders billions in dividends and buybacks – a sign that Intel bosses assume that the US public will bail out its "national champion." It's not clear whether the CHIPS Act can save Intel, or whether financialization will continue to hollow out a once-dominant pioneer.

The CHIPS Act won't undo the concentration – and financialization – of the semiconductor industry. The industry has been awash in cheap money since the 2008 bailouts, and in just the past five years, US semiconductor monopolists have paid out $239b to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, enough to fund the CHIPS Act five times over. If you include Apple in that figure, the amount US corporations spent on shareholder returns instead of investing in capacity rises to $698b. Apple doesn't want a competitive market for chips. If Apple builds its own foundry, that just frees up capacity at TSMC that its competitors can use to improve their products.

The report has an enormous amount of accessible, well-organized detail on these markets, and it makes a set of key recommendations for improving the CHIPS Act and passing related legislation to ensure that the US can once again make its own microchips. These run a gamut from funding four new onshore foundries to requiring companies receiving CHIPS Act money to "dual-source" their foundries. They call for NIST and the CPO to ensure open licensing of key patents, and for aggressive policing of anti-dumping rules for cheap chips. They also seek a new law creating an "American Semiconductor Supply Chain Resiliency Fee" – a tariff on chips made offshore.

Fundamentally, these recommendations seek to end the outsourcing made possible by restrictive IP regimes, to undercut Wall Street's power to demand savings from offshoring, and to smash the market power of companies like Apple that make the brittleness of chip manufacturing into a feature, rather than a bug. This would include a return to previous antitrust rules, which limited companies' ability to leverage patents into standards, and to previous IP rules, which limited exclusive rights chip topography and design ("mask rights").

All of this will is likely to remove the constraints that stop poor countries from doing to America the same things that postcolonial America did to England – that is, it will usher in an era in which lots of countries make their own chips and other high-tech goods without paying rent to American companies. This is good! It's good for poor countries, who will have more autonomy to control their own technical destiny. It's also good for the world, creating resiliency in the high-tech manufacturing sector that we'll need as the polycrisis overwhelms various places with fire and flood and disease and war. Electrifying, solarizing and adapting the world for climate resilience is fundamentally incompatible with a brittle, highly concentrated tech sector.

Pluralizing high-tech production will make America less vulnerable to the gamesmanship of other countries – and it will also make the rest of the world less vulnerable to American bullying. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe so beautifully in their 2023 book Underground Empire, the American political establishment is keenly aware of how its chokepoints over global finance and manufacturing can be leveraged to advantage the US at the rest of the world's expense:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Look, I know that Eisenhower didn't trade cow-lips for alien technology – but our political and commercial elites really did trade national resiliency away for IP laws, and it's a bargain that screwed everyone, except the one percenters whose power and wealth have metastasized into a deadly cancer that threatens the country and the planet.

Image: Mickael Courtiade (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/197739384@N07/52703936652/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[mapsontheweb]

U.S. Global Trade Balance in 2023

In 2023, the U.S. goods trade deficit amounted to $1.153 trillion. The deficit with China reached $300 billion, representing 26% of the total. The trade deficits with NAFTA partners—Mexico ($157 billion) and Canada ($78 billion)—together accounted for 20.4% of the total. The European Union followed, with a trade deficit of $220 billion, making up 19.1% of the total.

[beelmons]

Experimental Pedagogy (18+)

cw: reader is a college student, oral fem receiving, mentions of economy concepts

A/N: I wrote this as a gift for our adorable @cassiemartzz , i hope this can get you going through the semester and i'm also very sorry i wrote it like a month before it ends lksjskf ily

The night had fallen earlier than you expected. You weren’t sure at what moment all that time had gone by, and it wasn’t the first time you had that sensation. Whenever you tried to study, specifically when it came to your international economy class, the minutes just seemed to slip through your fingers away from your grasp, and the information did the exact same thing away from your brain. The topic was so boring, not even a reward system was keeping you focused, nothing was motivation to swallow down endless concepts of useless themes. 

Spencer, being the boy genius that he was, had long figured out perhaps mental stimuli was not enough; he made it his little project to find a way you could feel yourself getting compensated for your hard work. And he tried, and tried: money, food, baked goods, objects, trips, they all worked for a limited period of time until you lost interest. He wondered if you were simply doomed to struggle with concentration, but it pained him to see you so frustrated, so tired, he couldn’t just give up. And he didn’t. After a million tries, Spencer finally found the way to keep your brain engaged. 

Physical stimuli was the answer. 

“Who’s considered the father of the modern day global economy?” he asked, his face not moving to look at you. 

He was settled in between your legs while you sat on your desk, a completely dark room barely illuminated by your computer screen. Your underwear had been gone for about an hour, and he had yet to reach your exposed core. He had gotten frustratingly close, though. 

This is how the game went: You had two hours to study as much as you could, he would read alongside you, albeit constantly finish way faster than you, and whenever you finished a paragraph he removed a piece of clothing, or caressed a specific spot, or kissed a well-liked area. Once you were ready for a test, he would kneel before your desk to press kisses to your inner thigh as he asked questions. For every right answer, you got a kiss closer to your slit, and if you were good enough, you could have his tongue. 

You only got to cum once you aced it. 

“Adam Smith.” you muttered, your tongue tracing over your lips as you watched his lips get closer to your needy cunt. 

“That’s my girl.” he grinned. 

His hands were spreading your legs open, since once you had dared to almost crush his skull and use his tongue without completing the test. He enjoyed so, very much, but academic integrity was crucial, and he was not about to let you take advantage once again. 

His lips attached to the remaining gap of skin next to your outer lips, his kiss was more of a bite, a rough suck that you were sure was going to be sore the next morning. Your back arched at the feeling, and you let out a wince. 

“Name of the international trade treaty held between the US, Canada, and Mexico.” his breath hitting your skin was driving you crazy, honestly, you had never wanted him to shut up more. 

“NAFTA.” you said with resolution. 

Spencer's head tilted to be facing your sex, and just when you thought he was going to give you what you needed, he simply blew hot air against the area of your clit. 

“That’s the old name.” he said, and you could feel absolute rage boil within you. 

“USMCA!” you yelled, anger plastered all over your tone. 

That emotion, however, dissipated in a blink once you finally felt the relief of his tongue. He wasn’t going to let you go that easy, though, so his muscle just trailed over your outer labia, not going into your slit or clit just yet. However, he thought you deserved your reward, and he purposely let his nose brush, although barely, against the sensitive nub. 

You did try to buck your hips forward, mind you, but his hands stopped you. Once he had licked enough, leaving your skin as wet as your insides were, he spoke up again. 

“This concept refers to the ability of a country to naturally produce goods for a cheaper price.” he asked against your core. 

Regardless of Spencer’s stoic demeanor as a teacher, he was just a man, and the passion he felt for teaching was often overtaken by the passion he felt for your body. While you scrambled  through your mind in an attempt to find the answer, his lips kept pressing soft kisses around the area, still not allowing his tongue to insert anywhere. 

“Come on,” he stopped his movements to raise his gaze at you “I know you know this, say it.” 

Your eyes locked with his, ever big and shiny like a puppy’s; there was a certain desperation in his eyes, and your eyebrows raised in question, after all he was supposed to be there to support you. 

“Don’t look at me like that.” he rolled his eyes lightly at your judging expression “I’m dying to taste you.” 

The praise disguised as a complaint gave you the final encouragement you needed, and it was like your brain sparkled with knowledge all of a sudden. 

“Comparative advantage.” you said. 

His face disappeared as soon as his brain fact-checked your answer; his eyes no longer locked with yours, since his tongue was entangled in your insides. You could feel him prod inside and out, taking his time to coat his tongue in your taste. Your legs threatened to close on his face again, a tight grip stopping you from it. Your hands locked on his messy hair, trying to keep him in place. 

You were already overstimulated as it was, having had him down there for over an hour, teasing and caressing like you were senseless, like he didn’t have any effect on you, even though he was well aware it was the opposite. Your back was arched against your study chair, and the only sounds in the entire place were your moans mixed by the erotic slurps of his mouth. 

“One last question.” once he felt you clench around him, dangerously close to your climax, he stopped his movements “What’s the main economic indicator of a country regarding the production of goods and services?” 

His tongue didn’t truly leave you unattended, instead, it just moved in painfully slow circles around your clit, keeping you on edge. Your breath was awfully rushed, making it unable for you to respond right away regardless of your clear knowledge of the answer. He took a long, slow lap at your core, trailing up every inch of it, all while having his big honey-like eyes fixed on your hot face. 

“GDP or Gross Domestic Product.” you answered when your eyes met hiss. 

Without breaking eye contact, his lips wrapped around your nup, and his tongue moved side to side at a rapid pace. You let out a pleasured, high-pitched noise as your climax took over you, your fluids spilling all over his face. Once you stopped trembling from the pleasure, he took his time to clean up any moisture left on your skin, sending light bolts through your veins whenever he touched an over-sensitive spot. 

“Jesus, Spencer.” you said, defeatedly laying against your seat “I still don’t understand how I can retain any information when you eat me out like that.” 

“Actually,” he began, standing up from the floor “the basis for this technique relies on unconscious rewarding instead of conscious rewarding. While you’re taking the test you will remember the sensations instead of the concepts directly, and eventually your unconscious will just make the connection between the two. Similar to how we sometimes use smells to help people remember facts about a case.” 

He moved behind you as he explained, laying his hands on your shoulders; you had only covered half the material for the final, so there was plenty left to go. You were listening intently to his ramble, and you couldn’t lie to yourself, it was a little bit so you had an excuse to not continue studying. 

“So, you’re telling me I’m going to be horny in the middle of the test if they ask me about GDP?” you asked in a half joke, however, he actually took his time to consider the possibility. 

“There’s a 30% chance that will happen. Don’t worry, though, I can be there to take care of you right after it.” from behind, he grabbed at your chin and tilted your head back to press a gentle kiss to your lips, almost spiderman-like. Immediately, he dragged a chair closer to your desk, ready to go back to studying with you “Come on, we still have two more blocks to go.”

[fatehbaz]

Avocado orchards had carpeted the gently undulating hills around the sacred lake of Pátzcuaro with stodgy green bushes. Here, before the cataclysmic arrival of the first envoys dispatched by Hernando Cortes from the Aztec capital over the mountains to the East, [...] the Purépecha had sown maize, amaranth, zucchini, cacao, cotton, tomato, beans, a dozen types of chili, and much more.

Now the monotonous “green gold” of the avocado boom had colonized the entire Mexican state of Michoacán. [...] [I]t was shocking to think that the cause of the disaster was America’s great patriotic party: the National Football League’s Super Bowl. A flurry of advertising creativity on behalf of the Mexican avocado was unleashed every year during the multi-million-dollar sports broadcast. [...] “Is your life just terrible?” asks the comic actor Chris Elliott, star of Scary Movie 2 and Scary Movie 4, in the 2019 spot. “You deserve more! Spread an avocado on top of everything!” [...] A few days before the Super Bowl, the domestic diva Martha Stewart [...] had released on social networks her latest recipe for guacamole [...]. Guacamole was now an obligatory snack for the 100 million or so Americans who watched the Super Bowl. In February of 2017, 278 million avocados -- most of them from Michoacán -- had been sold during the days before the game in [the US] [...].

---

The avocado had become the star product of Mexican food production in the age of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) [...] since NAFTA was signed in 1994 [...]. [Mexican] farmers produced 16 times more than the formerly dominant Californian growers. [...] Moreover, the avocado was now classified as a “superfood” [...].

It had not always been like this. In the 1950s, the avocado was known unsentimentally as the crocodile pear [...]. Imports from Mexico were banned until 1997 [...] . When complete liberalization was announced in 2007, Michoacán had become an unbeatable competitor for the Californian avocado growers. The Mexican producers specialized, like their Californian rivals, in the Hass variety of avocado, more meaty than those that the Purépecha had [...] consumed over the millennia, and with a tough skin that protected the pears during long hauls in chilled container trucks to El Paso or Tijuana and then beyond to the big US consumer markets. [...] [T]he Hass avocado was perfectly suited to the global market [...]. Michoacán, whose crystalline lakes had earned it the name of the “land of fish” in the indigenous language of Tarasco, would never be the same.

By 2020, 80 percent of the avocados consumed in the United States came from Michoacán [...].

---

Now in the 21st century, on the outskirts of Uruapan, the frenetic capital del aguacate, the new economy of agribusiness took shape [...]. Further west on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro, the monoculture had not yet colonized the entire landscape, but the advance of the avocado seemed unstoppable. [...] “Practically everybody here wants an avocado orchard [...],” explained [FFB], a resident of the Purépecha indigenous community of Jarácuaro on the shores of the lake. [...] [H]e was horrified by the extent of environmental destruction. “They pump water from the lake to water the avocado orchards [...]. It’s pillage. [...]”

The falling water level, together with the introduction of the rapacious predator tilapia, had wiped out almost all the [...] [native] fish species. Of the cornucopia of marine life that had fed the Purépecha cities, only the diminutive silvery charal remained. The same occurred at other great freshwater deposits in Michoaczán. [...] The Purépecha communities on the shores of the lake, a landscape of stunning beauty where dense pine and ilex oak forests met white nymphaea lilies floating on turquoise water, were girding themselves for the arrival of the aguacateros, avocado producers [...].

---

“They put a gun to your head and tell you to sign the deed before the notary. That’s how the transfer of land is agreed upon,” explained [GV], a sociologist at the University of San Nicolas de Hidalgo in Morelia [...].

Meanwhile, large exporters and avocado brokers -- some of them international brands like Del Monte -- were profiting by purchasing from producers at dirt-cheap prices and reselling to the US supermarket chains at very attractive ones. “They pay a dollar per kilo of avocado here and sell it for eight at a Minnesota W*lmart,” said [GV].

In order not to squander such a reliable source of profits, “transnational corporations, just like the Canadian mining companies in Zacatecas, pay the extortion money [...],” he continued.

---

Text by: Andy Robinson. Gold, Oil, and Avocados: A Recent History of Latin America in Sixteen Commodities. 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks added by me.]

[beardedmrbean]

People still thinking the president or any other single world leader has any say on the sway of the economy and the price of things is wild. Trump becoming president again won't change inflation or any of that, and he's a clown for thinking he can, just as much as he is for anything else that clumsily tumbles out of his mouth from his syphilitic brain.

The only thing him becoming president again will affect in economic regard is it will arguably get potentially worse; all the billionaire parasites back him, because they know he'll be fine with them continuing to greedily gouge the rest of us. Remember: they saw record profits equal to the number which was the net amount that the middle class lost, during 2020/the first year of the pandemic.

America is kind of fucked for the next four years regardless. We haven't had such a "pick the lesser of two evils" choice like this in a long, long time.

POTUS sets the budget and economic policy for the fiscal year, congress approves it or makes changes and sends it back.

State department with all the various ambassadors and such that do the wheeling and dealing with other countries on trade deals are part of the executive branch, of which the president is the head.

The only thing him becoming president again will affect in economic regard is it will arguably get potentially worse; all the billionaire parasites back him, because they know he'll be fine with them continuing to greedily gouge the rest of us.

Three years ago, Joe Biden spoke onstage at a think tank event, opining on wealth in America. “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble,” he explained. “The folks at the top aren’t bad guys. I get in trouble in my party when I say wealthy Americans are just as patriotic as poor folks. I’ve found no distinction.”

And, based on who they supported during the 2020 election, billionaires don’t think Joe Biden is such a bad guy, either. About 25% of America’s billionaires donated to his election efforts, either directly or through a spouse, according to an analysis of records filed with the Federal Election Commission. By contrast, Donald Trump received money from only 14% of American billionaires.

The 230 Biden backers include the founders of companies like Patagonia, DoorDash and Netflix, Democratic megadonors like George Soros and Henry Laufer, as well as billionaire members of some of the country’s richest families like the Waltons, the Pritzkers and the Lauders. Broadly, they tended to hail from the coasts. More than one third live in California. Another 27% are based in New York. It makes sense, then, that about a quarter of them got rich in tech and a third made their fortunes in finance. On average, the billionaires gave about $170,000 to the Biden campaign and its joint-fundraising committees, which split their receipts with the Democratic Party.

Mike Bloomberg never donated directly to Biden’s campaign, but he threw $100 million into super-PACs supporting the Democratic nominee. ___________________________________________

America is kind of fucked for the next four years regardless. We haven't had such a "pick the lesser of two evils" choice like this in a long, long time.

Covid messed a bunch of stuff up the economy was one of the bigger things for sure, right up till then things were starting to look like they were going to pick up big time for us over here.

Successful renegotiation of NAFTA that looked to put more money in everyone's pockets especially Mexican citizens in Mexico because of the various worker protections baked into the agreement.

Had a good trade deal with China ready to go and both sides were on board, that one would have favored us here in a lot of places too, we had some pretty good leverage at the time that helped.

Not sure if he managed to get NATO countries to start paying their fair share or not, but he did try.

President can only do so much it's true, it takes two to tango so the nations we're trying to set up trade deals with need to play ball as well, that and the congressional rubber stamp.

Guy made some bad moves too, printing trillions of dollars was not a good plan for one, but that's not the point really.

Point is that the president as the head of the executive branch has a lot to say about the economic future of the nation.

Another point is ya I agree, giant douche or turd sandwich.

I won't vote for either, I'll try and find someone I can agree with on the majority of issues so long as they don't cross any of my red lines.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Mandatory Latina ask: do Matt feel American as in part of one of the Americas? Part of the New World? Mexico and Cuba would try and explain they are all American and Alfred feels The New World™ on a Manifest Destiny kind of philosophy but do Matt feels some kindship with his friend Cuba and Caribbean commonwealth brothers and Latinos and former or current French colonies nations?

This is a fascinating question because it's a D.) all of the above. Question if this was multiple choice.

I think, in the year of our lord 2023, he would probably call himself a North American and think of himself as a part of the New World, but usually, that definition for Canadians silently includes some of the South Pacific, so that doesn't make a whole lot of goddamn sense either. North Americans in a different way than the Americans but not as much the Pan-American sense of America. And that's very new. There's a small spurt of French Canadians considering themselves Latin Americans in the early 19th century with our revolt against the British and nationalism that corresponded with some participation of individuals in the wars of independence and other conflicts in South America. Matt had a moment before anglophone domination took over that he might have seen a future in that sort of Pan-American definition of American, but it was done by the 1830s.

After that, it was the British Empire. He defines himself by participating in that imperial system, not the French and not a sense of being North American until after WW1. And even then, it took until NAFTA in the early 90s for an actual large-scale cultural flow with the mainland. Cuba and the Caribbean are a little different because the trade relationship was there. Halifax was the main port for centuries, but it's still... it's an odd relationship. Suppose I look at the British Empire in Africa. In that case, it's easy to see how that would work because the Canadians played a small but very bluntly colonialist role in multiple conflicts. With the Caribbean, there's some exchange of people and trade. However, it's from an early enough date that Canada is still kind of too shitty and underdeveloped to have an oppressive relationship from the very get-go. Still, there is a lot of fuckery in there. I will say I think it's a bit easier than it might otherwise be as Black Canadians were politically organized in the late 19th and early 20th century, and that, amongst other forces, largely blunted our own want for a mini-empire in our sphere the way NZ and Australia did with island ports in their own neighbourhood. There's an alternate universe where Canada fought the Falklands War. So I think Matt gets along with them, but I'm not sure there's a sense of kinship so much as comradery in an 'oh fuck what'd the limeys/yanks/frogs/Spaniards/Portuguese do this time.'

Born a francophone, he has... it's a weird relationship he's got with the rest of the Francophonie. I don't think he feels a sense of kinship at all. Friendly, sure, increasingly interested in them, yes. But French Canadians, particularly the Quebecois, are pretty proud and tend to think of themselves as entirely different from France or Belgium. And despite what the Quebecois nationalists would say in the 1970s, we really cannot compare our history with, say, Algeria's or Vietnam's. And Matt is really aware of that. He was way more privileged under Arthur than practically anyone was under Francois.

He's not unique by any means. There's been middling anti-social sorts in every empire since the Akkadians, but he's just kinda everywhere and nowhere. He and Cuba have definitely had a relationship. Like, I don't believe it, but there's a reason there's a conspiracy that Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro's son and not Pierre's lmao. If nothing else, Cucan has had some good sex. I think he gets along with Maria (my friend's Mexico) really well too. It doesn't help that he's not the most extroverted type either. He's such a weirdo I'm so sorry to whoever has to interact with him or us as a country lmao.

[that-starlit-wanderer]

Historically the primary argument in Canada against closer integration with the US, particularly up to and including the 1980s when the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement was signed (forerunner to NAFTA) was always that this would lead to increasing US cultural dominance in Canada and this was clearly a bad thing so we'd better be careful! I have many objections to that argument but maybe the most relevant is that even if that was a fight worth fighting, and even if an enemy could actually be identified, it was never a winnable fight. I also happen to think it wasn't a desirable fight and that most people in Canada would agree with that even if many wouldn't want to admit it.

(I guess I should clarify that when I say Canada in that last sentence I'm specifically talking about English-speaking Canada. Quebec is...a different story.)

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Officials in Ottawa and British Columbia have welcomed a ruling under the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it found elements of the United States' calculation of softwood lumber duties are inconsistent with that country's own law. A statement from Mary Ng, Canada's minister of international trade, says the government is pleased that the NAFTA dispute panel agreed with its challenge of America's so-called "dumping determination.'' Under the U.S. Tariff Act, the Department of Commerce determines whether goods are being sold at less than fair value or if they're benefiting from subsidies provided from foreign governments.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada