BBC4 Analysis: The Invisible Hand of Donald Trump

Donald Trump's surprise elevation to the office of president last November stunned the world and electrified the financial markets. Promises to cut red tape, bring huge infrastructure projects to life, and sort out the byzantine American tax system propelled Wall Street to record highs. It's called the Trump Bump. Yet Trump's protectionist rhetoric simultaneously created fears of a global trade war.

Martin Wolf, Chief Economic Commentator of the Financial Times, reflects on what Trump has accomplished in economic terms in the year since the election heard round the world. Financial systems are recovering from the calamities of the last decade, but that improvement was well under way before Trump took the helm of the world's largest economy. New proposals from the administration are stalled for lack of clarity, infirmity of purpose and political disarray. This doesn't mean that President Trump's decisions on everything from trade tariffs to the Federal Reserve will not send ripples around the globe in the years ahead. He's vowed to deliver tax reform, build a wall, bring jobs home and tear up trade treaties. Will these promises still be delivered? If they are, what might follow?

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Jacobin Magazine: How the Donald Came to Rule

Since the 1960s, the voter base of the Republican Party has been made up primarily of older, suburban, white, middle-class, small businesspeople, professionals, and managers, and a minority of older white workers. Until recently, the particular passions of that base — especially its hostility to the democratic gains of people of color, women, and LGBT people — could be contained. Minor concessions to social conservatives on abortion, affirmative action, voter restrictions, and same-sex marriage/legal equality maintained their loyalty, while capitalists set the substantive neoliberal agenda for the Republicans. As with the Democrats, the non-capitalist elements of the Republican coalition were clearly junior partners to capital.

The Bush and Obama administrations’ bailouts of banks, the auto industry, and some homeowners changed this dynamic, catalyzing a radicalization of the Republican electorate. The Tea Party began as an alliance between a grassroots rebellion of older, white, suburban small businesspeople, professionals, and managers, and elements of the capitalist class. While the middle-class ranks of the Tea Party railed against “corporate welfare” and “bailouts for undeserving homeowners,” in particular people of color who held subprime mortgages, capitalists like the Koch brothers saw an opportunity to advance their libertarian agenda of defeating Obamacare and privatizing Medicare and Social Security. Broader layers of the capitalist class encouraged the Tea Party’s mobilizations as long as they targeted unions and social services, and supported the continued deregulation of capital. [...]

The two most important “business lobbying” organizations — the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable — oppose wholesale deportations and other policies that reduce the size of the immigrant workforce. Instead, they are leading the fight for an immigration reform that would create massive “guest worker” programs and a difficult “path to citizenship” for those in the United States without papers. [...]

What made Trump unacceptable to the Republican establishment and their corporate backers was not merely his unabashed racism and misogyny, or his casual references to his penis size. Trump champions an economic nationalism that rejects central tenets of the bipartisan neoliberal agenda that has impoverished segments of the middle and working classes. Capital was uneasy with Trump’s stance on immigration and the federal debt — he floated the idea of trying to persuade creditors to accept less than full payment on loans to the US government. [...]

Trump’s nomination sent the majority of the capitalist class, including traditionally Republican capitalists, running to support the reliable neoliberal imperialist, Hillary Clinton. According to OpenSecrets.org, Clinton received over 92 percent of corporate contributions in the 2016 election cycle, including over 80 percent of the contributions from finance, insurance, and real estate; communications/electronics; health care, defense, and “miscellaneous business.” Trump’s support was limited to 60–70 percent of contributions from construction, energy and natural resources, transportation, and agribusiness — which together accounted for less than 10 percent of total capitalist donations. [...]

Trump’s margin of victory came from a small minority of voters who had supported Obama in 2008 and 2012. Of 700 counties that had voted for Obama twice, nearly one-third (209) swung to Trump; and of 207 counties that Obama won once, almost 94 percent (194) went to Trump. The shift to Trump was concentrated in traditionally Democratic states of the Great Lakes and Midwest that had suffered the loss of manufacturing jobs and were experiencing a rise in the Latino population. However, Trump’s victory was primarily a result of a sharp drop in the participation of traditionally Democratic voters, rather than a sharp swing to Trump.

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Salon: Dead in the water: Why the TPP and TTIP trade deals probably won’t go anywhere

EU officials were quick to downplay Sigmar’s statement, saying they hoped to “close this deal by the end of the year.” But Gabriel isn’t the first to cry foul on the TTIP, which, if enacted, would establish the world’s largest free trade zone between the United States and the EU’s 28 member states. In May, French negotiators threatened to block the agreement. U.S. negotiators have also reportedly been angry over the passage of a similar agreement between Canada and the EU, which included protections U.S. negotiators don’t want included in the TTIP. [...]

“The fact that TTIP has failed is testament to the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to protest against it, the three million people who signed a petition calling for it to be scrapped, and the huge coalition of civil society groups, trade unions, progressive politicians and activists who came together to stop it,” writes Kevin Smith of Global Justice Now, an organization that has worked to fight TTIP in the United Kingdom.

While the TPP has become a lightning rod for labor and other progressive organizations in the United States, the TTIP has slipped mostly under the radar stateside. That’s partially because talks over it, which began in 2013, have taken place almost entirely behind closed doors. Among the proposals unearthed are provisions to open European public services to U.S. businesses and to scale back online privacy protections. European groups have also raised the concern that the deal could send jobs from their continent to the United States, where trade unions and labor protections are weaker than in the EU.

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Deutsche Welle: With TTIP talks stuttering, free trade is reaching its limits

Arbitration tribunals, for instance, are a hot-button issue in Europe, especially in Germany. Such private tribunals give investors the opportunity to sue a government if they feel that a country's laws restrict their "legitimate expectations." The EU and Canada were able to overcome this hurdle in their CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) negotiations by agreeing to nix arbitration courts in favor of a permanent dispute settlement tribunal. But it remains unclear whether TTIP negotiators can strike a similar compromise.

The same goes for rules concerning government bids. There is a lot of money at stake, said Laura von Daniels of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. "Inside the EU, public bids amount to 16 percent of GDP," she said. "In the US, it is up to 12 percent." [...]

At the moment, too much seems up in the air to foresee an end to negotiations. On a visit to Germany in April, US President Barack Obama said he expected the agreement to be hammered out by the end of the year. But since then, the prospect of free trade has grown more and more unlikely.

It is even uncertain whether the already finalized agreement between the EU and Canada will enter into force, after it was decided that it will have to be independently ratified by all national EU parliaments.

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The Guardian: Leaked TTIP energy proposal could 'sabotage' EU climate policy

A leak obtained by the Guardian shows that the EU will propose a rollback of mandatory energy savings measures, and major obstacles to any future pricing schemes designed to encourage the uptake of renewable energies.

Environmental protections against fossil fuel extraction, logging and mining in the developing world would also come under pressure from articles in the proposed energy chapter.

Paul de Clerck, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth Europe, said the leaked document: “is in complete contradiction with Europe’s commitments to tackle climate change. It will flood the EU market with inefficient appliances, and consumers and the climate will foot the bill. The proposal will also discourage measures to promote renewable electricity production from wind and solar.” [...]

The Green MEP Claude Turmes said: “These proposals are completely unacceptable. They would sabotage EU legislators’ ability to privilege renewables and energy efficiency over unsustainable fossil fuels. This is an attempt to undermine democracy in Europe.”

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AP: NAFTA a sore spot for some Democrats on Clinton in Michigan

Bernie Sanders beat her in the state's Democratic primary by railing against the North American Free Trade Agreement. Republican Donald Trump is more popular with Michigan's working-class white voters than past GOP candidates, and has pledged to back out of the treaty that some blame for the loss of countless Rust Belt jobs.

While Clinton's history of supporting free trade may not cost her the state, it is costing campaign staff and money to defend its 16 electoral votes. [...]

Hillary Clinton supports renegotiating NAFTA, signed in 1992 and in effect since 1994, with Canada and Mexico. She also has said she opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious agreement with Asian nations. [...]

A solid third of union members typically vote Republican in presidential elections. But Clinton's advantage among union members in surveys over Trump is the same as Obama's was over Arizona Sen. John McCain at the same point in the 2008 campaign, said Michael Podhorzer, political director with the American Federation of Labor.

He acknowledges Trump is stronger than past GOP nominees, at least with nonunion, working-class whites.

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NBC News: Democrats Advance Most Progressive Platform in Party History

The draft platform, which still needs to be ratified at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia later this month, showed Sanders' clear influence, even though he lost a battle on his top priority, opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. [...]

The document goes further left than Clinton's position on a number of issues, with Sanders policy director Warren Gunnells saying his campaign achieved "at least 80 percent" of what they came for. "I think if you read the platform right now, you will understand that the political revolution is alive and kicking," he said. [...]

Clinton won the nomination and now effectively controls the party, but it was Sanders who drove the process in Orlando. While many questioned his decision to stay in the primary race long after losing the nomination, none of the progress of his ideas on the platform would have happened if he had dropped out.

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Deutsche Welle: Commentary: More democracy, less room for debate on CETA?

In light of the attacks, European Commission President Jean-Claude had to back down and allow national parliaments to participate in the ratification of CETA. The Greens in the European Parliament immediately applauded the decision. They called it a "victory for civil society and for European democracy." In principle they are correct, for it is no doubt more democratic when all 28 parliaments in the EU can now pore over the fine print of the trade agreement.

It is also clear that this draft agreement - just like TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) - bears the birth defect of having been negotiated in secret over the course of several years. That is exactly the kind of opacity that Europe is always accused of. Thus, member states' parliaments will now be retroactively invited to participate. With that, a years-long wrangling will begin, because the trade portion of the agreement goes into effect as soon as it is ratified by the European Parliament. However, those portions that affect national responsibilities will be overlaid with change requests from individual member states. That process went on for more than four years in the trade agreement between the EU and South Korea. [...]

Opponents of the treaty and those critical of aspects such as investor protection and arbitration courts contained within it will be especially happy. But how justified is the enthusiasm about this "victory for democracy"? Decision-making processes within the EU will become slower, and the Commission will be more or less unable to act. On the one hand, the EU is supposed to provide more economic growth and create jobs, but on the other hand - and in this political climate - it will be unable to push through the market liberalization that has, to date, been the best method for accomplishing just that.

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Salon: Noam Chomksy: There’s nothing free about free trade agreements

Chomsky points out that “the so-called free-trade agreements are not free-trade agreements. To a larger extent they’re not even trade agreements. These are investor rights agreements.” He continued:

There’s a reason why they’re kept secret from the public and as soon as you look at them you see why. They’re not secret to the corporate lawyers and lobbyists who are writing the detailed regulation – of course in the interest of their constituents. The investors are given the right to sue governments for their potentially future profits They go to private trade adjudiction groups made of largely corporate representatives. They’re already going on with NAFTA and we can expect more of them. The major trading partners already have agreements that have reduced tariffs substantially with few exceptions—not many.

Chomsky also noted that the phrase “climate change” does not appear once in these 280 pages.

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The Guardian: Think TTIP is a threat to democracy? There’s another trade deal that’s already signed

But TTIP is not alone. Its smaller sister deal between the EU and Canada is called Ceta (the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement). Ceta is just as dangerous as TTIP; indeed it’s in the vanguard of TTIP-style deals, because it’s already been signed by the European commission and the Canadian government. It now awaits ratification over the next 12 months.

The one positive thing about Ceta is that it has already been signed and that means that we’re allowed to see it. Its 1,500 pages show us that it’s a threat to not only our food standards, but also the battle against climate change, our ability to regulate big banks to prevent another crash and our power to renationalise industries. [...]

David Cameron takes the most aggressive position on Ceta – not only supporting it entirely but pushing for provisional application in the UK. On this basis, Ceta could take effect in Britain early next year without a Westminster vote. In fact, even if the British parliament voted Ceta down, the corporate court system would still stay in effect for three years. Cameron’s Brexit rebels are not going to like that much.

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Independent: After the leaks today showing just what it really stands for, this could be the end for TTIP

According to official statistics, at least one million jobs will be lost as a direct result of TTIP – and twice that many if the full deal is allowed to go through. Yet we can now see that EU negotiators are preparing to trade away whole sectors of our economies in TTIP, with no care for the human consequences.

The European Commission slapped a 30-year ban on public access to the TTIP negotiating texts at the beginning of the talks in 2013, in the full knowledge that they would not be able to survive the outcry if people were given sight of the deal. In response, campaigners called for a ‘Dracula strategy’ against the agreement: expose the vampire to sunlight and it will die. Today the door has been flung open and the first rays of sunlight shone on TTIP. The EU negotiators will never be able to crawl back into the shadows again.

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