What's all the fuss about the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

What is the TPP? Some see it as a creeping plan to"privatise government" and (among other things) stifle the free exchange of information on the internet. There are protests against the secrecy surrounding the talks, and suspicions regarding the effect on small farming and food safety.

The Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) began with four small nations in 2005. It was a sort of mini-free trade agreement.

But in July 2008, the Doha round of the World Trade Organisation stalled after a few days' talks in Geneva. This round had been going for almost seven years, without agreement. The blocking issue was how smaller nations could protect their agricultural base against massive foreign imports and aggressive price-undercutting by competitors. They wanted a "Special Safeguard Mechanism" (SSM)that would allow them to impose import tariffs.

The United States had already started talking to the TPP back in February 2008, ostensibly on the issue of financial services; now (September 2008) she declared her intention to apply for TPP membership. This was like an elephant joining four kids in their inflatable backyard pool:

Perhaps the clue to the USA's interest is in her dominant position in agricultural exports (see Table 852 here):

And if all applicants are accepted, then together they will have almost sealed-off the Eastern Pacific to non-members:

As America turns her face towards the East in the 21st century, this may become significant. Brooking Institution fellow Joshua Meltzer told a Congressional Committee in May, "The TPP has the potential to be the building block for a wider Free Trade Agreement of the Asia-Pacific Region (FTAAP)".

There are powerful players at work, and much smoke being created. Worldwide, but particularly in Africa, there is a rush to grab agricultural land. Protestors are arguing against the dispossession of small farmers; the World Bank counters the interests of producers, expressing its concern instead for poor urban consumers in this 2010 report:

 

"... we note that many of the main arguments in favor of the SSM focus on the well-being of vulnerable agricultural producers. Yet many rural residents in poor countries are net purchasers of food, and in many countries, urban poverty is growing ever more significant. In this context, the potential for policies based on the SSM rules to lessen poverty vulnerability seems very questionable. Future work should take into account the poverty dimension of the Special Safeguard Mechanism."

 

The food prices about which the World Bank is so concerned might be considerably lower if we did not have the harebrained scheme to use corn as a fuel substitute, and if we could keep speculators out of this market - one that could kill millions if trading gets out of hand. Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam recently did a study in Mexico concluding that those two factors have tripled the price of corn.

 

It is possible to see the TPP as a backdoor way in for Big Farmer and Big Pharma. The potential profits - and the power implicit in gaining control over food supplies- are irresistible. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that dirty deals are being done in the shadows.

 

A longer-term concern is what may ultimately happen when the world converts to mechanized and chemicalized methods of food production. There is a tradeoff between efficiency and sustainability. Initially, modern farming techniques (applied for example to the Guinea Savannah Belt that the UN's FAO is now eyeing) could create a period of abundance that may in turn encourage further population expansion. We shall then be dependent on this approach. What happens when this system is hit by fuel price hikes and supply hiccups, and soil quality deteriorates across the globe because of the vastly expanded (and profitable) use of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides in conjunction with crops genetically engineered to tolerate them? Is humanity set for a great leap and then - after some decades, or a century or two - a monstrous crash?

 

What's all the fuss about the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

What is the TPP? Some see it as a creeping plan to"privatise government" and (among other things) stifle the free exchange of information on the internet. There are protests against the secrecy surrounding the talks, and suspicions regarding the effect on small farming and food safety.

The Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) began with four small nations in 2005. It was a sort of mini-free trade agreement.

But in July 2008, the Doha round of the World Trade Organisation stalled after a few days' talks in Geneva. This round had been going for almost seven years, without agreement. The blocking issue was how smaller nations could protect their agricultural base against massive foreign imports and aggressive price-undercutting by competitors. They wanted a "Special Safeguard Mechanism" (SSM)that would allow them to impose import tariffs.

The United States had already started talking to the TPP back in February 2008, ostensibly on the issue of financial services; now (September 2008) she declared her intention to apply for TPP membership. This was like an elephant joining four kids in their inflatable backyard pool:

Perhaps the clue to the USA's interest is in her dominant position in agricultural exports (see Table 852 here):

And if all applicants are accepted, then together they will have almost sealed-off the Eastern Pacific to non-members:

As America turns her face towards the East in the 21st century, this may become significant. Brooking Institution fellow Joshua Meltzer told a Congressional Committee in May, "The TPP has the potential to be the building block for a wider Free Trade Agreement of the Asia-Pacific Region (FTAAP)".

There are powerful players at work, and much smoke being created. Worldwide, but particularly in Africa, there is a rush to grab agricultural land. Protestors are arguing against the dispossession of small farmers; the World Bank counters the interests of producers, expressing its concern instead for poor urban consumers in this 2010 report:

 

"... we note that many of the main arguments in favor of the SSM focus on the well-being of vulnerable agricultural producers. Yet many rural residents in poor countries are net purchasers of food, and in many countries, urban poverty is growing ever more significant. In this context, the potential for policies based on the SSM rules to lessen poverty vulnerability seems very questionable. Future work should take into account the poverty dimension of the Special Safeguard Mechanism."

 

The food prices about which the World Bank is so concerned might be considerably lower if we did not have the harebrained scheme to use corn as a fuel substitute, and if we could keep speculators out of this market - one that could kill millions if trading gets out of hand. Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam recently did a study in Mexico concluding that those two factors have tripled the price of corn.

 

It is possible to see the TPP as a backdoor way in for Big Farmer and Big Pharma. The potential profits - and the power implicit in gaining control over food supplies- are irresistible. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that dirty deals are being done in the shadows.

 

A longer-term concern is what may ultimately happen when the world converts to mechanized and chemicalized methods of food production. There is a tradeoff between efficiency and sustainability. Initially, modern farming techniques (applied for example to the Guinea Savannah Belt that the UN's FAO is now eyeing) could create a period of abundance that may in turn encourage further population expansion. We shall then be dependent on this approach. What happens when this system is hit by fuel price hikes and supply hiccups, and soil quality deteriorates across the globe because of the vastly expanded (and profitable) use of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides in conjunction with crops genetically engineered to tolerate them? Is humanity set for a great leap and then - after some decades, or a century or two - a monstrous crash?

INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: Mostly in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), but now planning to build up some reserves of physical gold via regular saving.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.

Sleepers, awoke!

When you read the term ‘woke’ these days, you assume it is to do with dizzy-headed left-wing idealists making a fuss over the things the government (Lab or Con) is happy for them to witter about – generally, sexual matters that ought to be private, equality of outcomes (well, up to a certain level in society), and the benefits system that can be used to bully the poor, subsidise workers’ wages and boost corporate profitability.

Oh, and greenery. Apparently the reason we are deindustrialising a small country whose bloated population depends on industrial trade, and turning for our power needs to solar panels that work only intermittently in a cloudy climate and windmills that have to be deactivated in a gale, is to protect ourselves against the carbonavirus, that disease which, so we are told, will be caught by all and is 100% fatal... except in the East, to whose coal-fired economies our corporations have transferred our productive capacity and from which they derive vast wealth that must be hidden in tax havens.

Let us turn from this ship of fools as they sail in search of fantasy adventures with Tintin (yep) Thunberg at the helm, Snowy yipping excitedly by her feet; for that’s not where ‘woke’ started.

Pace Wikipedia, the first time I was struck by the contemporary usage was when watching the 2008 TV series ‘Breaking Bad’. Walter White, a man who has always done the right thing, studied hard, passed lots of exams and gone into teaching, suddenly realises that life has shafted him. Underpaid for his learning – Anglos despise education – he is eking out his salary by labouring at a garage, only to be spotted and mocked by his students. His conditioning breaks and returning home, he says, ‘I am awake.’ For if you only do what you’re supposed to do, you get what you’re supposed (but not by you) to get. That word, with its ominous undertone, was like the moment in ‘The Long Ships’ when the Viking leader who has long sought a huge golden bell, disgustedly flings away the little one he finds hanging in a deserted chapel, only to have it strike the dome with a great ringing sound…

I heard a tinkle in c. 1990 when none of my life company’s excellent pension funds was hitting the 13% growth ceiling assumed by the regulator as reasonable for projections. I heard it when, post-dotcom bubble, the stockmarkets halved in 2000-2003 and yet all that happened was monetary reflation, especially in mortgages; I heard a clang when the loan-fakery blew up in 2008, Congress refused to bail out crooked banks with $700 billion, and the US Treasury Secretary ‘Hank’ Paulson ordered them to vote again and shares re-collapsed; and when, instead of financial reforms, the money-pumping continued at a far greater rate, reinflating the burst balloons of the S&P 500 and the FTSE. Again, when I read recently of the hundreds of billions of emergency overnight government lending to banks in the US ‘repo market’, rather like the old custom of desperate businesses ‘kiting’ cheques over a weekend because there wasn’t enough in their account on Friday. Nobody up there is doing the right thing, but they want you to keep calm and carry on.

The whole thing is running on tick. Fiscal conservatives wail about the levels of government debt, but that’s only half the story. If you want to see the big picture, look for the overall burden of credit in the economy, both public and private; known (in the US, at any rate) as ‘Total Credit Market Debt Outstanding’, or TCMDO; and compare it to the overall level of economic activity, aka Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Back in January 2012 McKinsey reported (page 5) that the UK’s total debt-to-GDP stood at 507% - rivalling the moribund Japan (512%).

At that time America’s TCMDO-to-GDP was merely 279%; but by the third quarter of 2019 its TCMDO had soared to $74.56 trillion. This compares with US GDP of $21.44 trillion  – so, by late last year, their total-debt-to-GDP had not fallen but risen, to around 348%. Unfortunately, the British government is rather more coy about such matters and does not publicly disclose such data on a regular basis, so I can only guess that we, too, have sunk deeper into the mire.

Worse still, debt-to GDP can deteriorate in two ways: a rise in debt, or a fall in GDP. Should there be a serious economic dislocation caused by say, a Covid-19-seized-up China, or a vindictive French Brexit trade negotiator, then we shall all find out that whatever happens to income or investments, debts remain fixed. If masses of individuals or their governments start defaulting, there will be a domino effect, and austerity may not be enough to stop it (indeed, may itself worsen GDP.)

The alternative is to pump even more money into the system, as has been happening for a long time; but possibly on an accelerating basis. So far we haven’t seen high inflation (though it is significant that almost the first act of the new 2010 ‘Conservative’ government was to stop issuing index-linked NS&I savings bonds.) One of the reasons we haven’t, is the declining velocity of money – the rate at which a pound changes hands annually. This 2018 article illustrates the general principle and trend  – the money supply is increasing, but not pushing GDP correspondingly higher. Whether capital projects like HS2 will turn things around is a moot point (look out for cheery government references to ‘job creation’ without details re limited duration), especially if the work is given to the Chinese.

It may be that a long-cycle economic downturn is unavoidable, as Irving Fisher and Nikolai Kondratiev theorised; and could be sudden, as latterly Hyman Minsky and following him the Australian economist Steve Keen have suggested (Keen would like to see a ‘debt jubilee’ to clear accounts and restart the system). Writing in 2008 before the Global Financial Crisis hit, Charles Hugh Smith forecast 2020 as the confluence of several negative trends including the passing of ‘peak energy’.

As long as there is a Welfare State, the government will have irreducible obligations (despite trying to declare the disabled and dying as fit for work) and as national earnings wane it will be increasingly difficult to balance the books. Something will give, and if there is not a debt jubilee then it will be the currency, I suppose. Already the law has changed to permit ‘bail-ins’, i.e. in another emergency, depositors’ account balances may be converted to shares in the rotten banks where they are held; but the strategy could go further, in raiding the value of money itself.

Back to gold, that ‘barbarous relic’ beloved of those who really don’t trust their rulers. Something funny is going on here, as ‘Tyler Durden’ has just noted: suddenly (in a two month period), the UK has exported a massive £12 billion-worth of gold and this has distorted official figures about the health of our economy. The Bank of England holds some 310 tonnes of gold (far less than it used to), which if pure and at current prices would be worth only around £9.3 billion, so presumably there is some other explanation. However, you may have noticed in the Daily Wail in past months, advertisements for gold coins for sale by the Royal Mint; and something you probably haven’t noticed, but rang a little gold tocsin in my head: a recent Privy Council meeting (chaired by Jacob Rees-Mogg) on 6th November 2019 approved the issuance of a variety of gold coinage including a £7,000 one. Where is that gold coming from? Not from a Chinese government grateful for all the business we’ve given them. So, from stock.

What’s the thinking behind that last? Revenue-raising? Part of a long-term plan (as gold bugs suspect) to keep down the market price of gold so as not to scare the populace? Or an opportunity for those in the know and with deep pockets, to secure at least some of their wealth in advance of a looming financial crisis?

The discovery of great hoards of Anglo-Saxon gold shows how the yellow metal is no protection in the worst case; but I fear there may soon be a clapper of alarm that will jolt the middle-class poseurs out of their dreamy world-saving playing-about and make them ‘woke’ for real.

Conservatives are an endangered species

What is a Conservative? An endangered species, I would suggest; and the reason is corporatism.

British Conservatives tend to be coy about their beliefs. If you wish to be the ‘natural party of government’ it is not a good idea to be too definite and dogmatic about principles, which can only lead to damaging splits as per the factions in Python’s ‘Life Of Brian’ . Quintin Hogg said it was ‘not so much a philosophy as an attitude, a constant force, performing a timeless function in the development of a free society.’

Okay, something to do with freedom; but specifically, individual freedom – not some collective freedom that is equivalent to a coach trip going where many of the passengers don’t wish to go.

And that implies a degree of economic independence.

Over the centuries, between the peasant in his field and the King in his court there sprang up the burgess in his town, where ideas, information and capital could circulate creatively. The special skills of goldsmiths and haberdashers, protected from ruinous competition by guilds, allowed their accumulation of wealth through trade; and fostered the attitude that the rulers should serve the people, or at least, people like themselves. There might be challenges to the throne from time to time, yet as my farmer grandfather observed, the oxen change but the trough remains the same.

Now, the social order is threatened not by an ‘overmighty subject’ looking to unseat the King, but by multinational businesses that undermine the burgess class with impunity. There is no need to be over-careful about a nation’s welfare and social cohesion so long as one can extract the cash and carry it far away.

And then, political attitudes will change.

What goes around, comes around. Tesco’s Dave Lewis is calling for a cut in business rates funded by a tax on online sales. It’s not as though Tesco hasn’t itself taken advantage of Internet trading and tax offshoring, in the past, but now they are getting pinched between the likes of Amazon in the virtual world and the discount supermarkets in the real one.

Still, what’s happening now to the big brick shops is only what they themselves have done to small High Street traders. When I first came here in suburban Birmingham, the local shopping parade boasted a mom-and-pop hardware store, a second-hand bookshop, a post office, two greengrocers and three butchers.

All gone.

What have we got now? Knock-off shops, nail and tattoo parlours, fast-food takeaways and an opaque-fronted store selling hydroponics to grow cannabis. The people are getting fatter, tatter and mad as a hatter. Greyfaced hoodies slip unshaven from the barber’s and into their mates’ nippy cars - don’t look at them, and don’t walk around at night.

The bookshop owner told me the neighbourhood was ‘artisan’; that was over thirty years ago.

The self-serving narrative of big capital is that it ‘creates jobs’, but as the sharply pessimistic US writer James Kunstler observes, ‘one of the founders of the Home Depot company, billionaire Ken Langone… made his fortune by putting every local hardware store in America out of business, which enabled him to capture the annual incomes of ten thousand small business owners and their employees.’

And more is lost than even this wide-angle perspective might show. One of my greengrocers was employing his son, training him up to take over. The boy learned how to talk to customers, handle goods and money, and build the relationships that would sustain what would one day be his business. He would not be hanging around the off-license at night or setting fire to street waste bins. Round the corner, one of the butchers had three generations in the shop, the latest a primary age child who on Saturdays donned his little striped apron and watched how meat was cut. He, too, was going to grow up law-abiding and self-supporting.

Don’t expect a shelf-stacker on income supplements to vote the same way as them.

One of the reasons more people don’t support Brexit is, I think, the Marie Antoinette effect: they tend their washed sheep in blithe ignorance. Some of the comfortably-off, based perhaps in London or university cities or market towns, will still have butchers and greengrocers, will buy at the deli, the wine merchant and the artisan baker, will patronise the farmer’s market and fuss over having their strawberries in paper bags instead of plastic punnets. Despite what their eyes may skim over in the papers, they will look around their immediate environment and see that nothing much has altered. What on Earth, they will feel, is this ridiculous fuss all about?

They are heartened by the LibDems’ success in the recent council elections, not seeing that while Con and Lab each lost 7% of their voters, most of those didn’t migrate to the LibDems, who only added 3% to their own, much smaller share. It was an electoral collapse for the major players, and a shop-soiled victory for the least hated.

But it’s not business as usual. A great change is coming.

Thick as a brick? No, much thicker: how Samantha Brick mugged Daily Mail readers

All that fuss about Samantha Brick's April 3 article, "Why Women Hate Me For Being So Beautiful". Mail readers obviously didn't do any research at all before keying in their bilious online comments, for if they had they'd have come across one of hers from almost exactly a year ago: "I'll always be that fat girl: Samantha Brick has always obsessed about her weight... all because she was a chubby child".

The latest, controversial hit was published two days too late, for it's made fools out of millions.This is about beauty versus brains, and brains win hands down every time.

What clever Brummie (and there's another preconception exploded) Samantha has discovered is what Malcolm MacLaren said years ago: you can make much more exploiting yourself than exploiting others. I'd like to know who at the Mail gave her the space to do this one, but I guess it's enough of an obvious coat-trailer to justify publication on its own meretricious merits, without having to speculate on the possible use of her feminine wiles at the workplace, delicious journalistic follow-up though that might be.

Can men do the same? You may care to copy and paste her article, and swap the sexes to make a comic spoof. The exercise is comically revealing, because male attractiveness is measured differently in a woman's eyes.  They say a woman is what she is, and a man is what he does. He does confidence, action, aggression  - like Lord Flashheart in the Blackadder series:  



... and again here (from about 4:07 in):



Traditionally, the strategy for women is to have a sponsor, and to be set in a context of focused admiration, as Roger Vadim did for Brigitte Bardot in the cinematic launch vehicle "And God created woman":



But a young, slightly chubbier in those days Madonna broke the mould - it became "look at me", not "look at her", though again it's be piquant to know the who and how behind getting her the film deal:



Like Madonna, what's smart about Brick is her use of brash self-assertion - and if she hasn't really got the confidence, she's faked it very well for the purposes of her piece. She's played it the man's way.

Good luck to her.