With the stroke of a pen, newly inaugurated United States president, Donald J. Trump, today made good on one of his least controversial campaign promises; withdrawing his country from the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement via an executive order. The Agreement, which was signed by the US and eleven other Pacific-rim participants in […]
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Gabriel…they are trying to remain relevant, all of them are bottom of the barrel scrapings, never thought I would see the US sink this low, but after the 240 year facade, it was bound to come apart at the seams.
Caribbean people in the US should be glad they have somewhere as a plan B…..nothing good will come of the scrapings in the white house.
@ Vincent
@ David
Just watch and see how the technical staff appointed by Trump is going to change and make sense of’ the” nonsense” he is reported to have promised the electorate. Head is not brain. There are wheels within wheels.
The USA became an economic giant through taking the best brains and the most productive workers from the rest of the world. Just after WW2 it was mainly the German and Russian Jewish scientists Within recent times the highly trained and discipline Indians and Chinese. The West Indies provided an educated labour force since the 1920’s. If the wave of protectionism takes off the instituting countries will suffer economic decline within ten years . Economic growth requires markets, raw material, and cheap productive labour. Most of these come from beyond the geographical confines of a country.
I think China and India should start thinking in terms of bi-lateral trade agreements.They represent almost half of the world population.Lots of mouths to feed and clothe.Good business opportunities.
The destruction has started. oh Canada!!!!!
“Canada will focus on preserving its U.S. trade ties during talks to renegotiate NAFTA and may not be able to help Mexico avoid being targeted by the Trump administration, Canadian government sources say.
“We love our Mexican friends. But our national interests come first and the friendship comes second,” a source said on the sidelines of a cabinet retreat in Calgary, Alberta.”
David
Of course, the TPP for the Americans was tactical, not about trade per se.
This is what they have been doing for 50 years and more with trade agreements.
In international affairs a vacuum always seeks a pretender.
Yes, the Chinese, all other factors being equal, will fill it.
For the area is their sphere of dominance. As it should be.
“The destruction has started”… and who knows where it will all end – besides the neo-cons, the Illuminati, and the Bilderbergers of course. ; )
Operation Barbarossa II: The Yanks In Their Armoured Parade
By Jim W. Dean, Veterans Today
I stated some months ago, while assembling a criminal dossier against the NATO powers for the ultimate war crime of aggression, that the build-up of NATO forces in Eastern Europe, particularly American, concentrated on the Baltic states and Ukraine, presaged hybrid war operations against Russia leading to a general war.
This build up of forces and ancillary developments I termed Operation Barbarossa II in light of the remarkable similarities to the build up of forces by Nazi Germany for the invasion of the USSR in 1941 which the Germans code-named Operation Barbarossa. Events have only confirmed my views.
The degradation of American democracy continues before our eyes with the incessant hysterical allegations against Russia generally and the manipulation of Donald Trump as a device to put out even more sensational allegations, a campaign which serves two purposes.
The first was to build up anti-Russian feeling in the west to war levels by accusing Russia of cyber attacks and attacks on “democracy,” the second to either justify the removal of Trump as a factor in the presidency or to force him to toe the line of the war faction and drop any conciliatory rhetoric towards Russia.
GreenMonkey;
If the executive orders of the last 2 days, particularly today, are pointers to what is to come, the USA and the World is in for a rough ride.
Today the Trump administration froze all release of information from Government agencies such as the EPA and USDA to outside agencies and the General Public while seemingly laying the groundwork for significantly scuttling of the work of agencies which have historically provided data from scientific studies that support the Environmental thrust of the past half century and the highlighting the dangers to pachamama (mother Earth) of Fracking.
The battle has just begun. The Putin factor is in the ascendancy for now but who knows which global force will eventually win.
Well Well & Consequences January 24, 2017 at 8:08 PM #
Caribbean people in the US should be glad they have somewhere as a plan B…..nothing good will come of the scrapings in the white house.
………………………………………………
Does that plan B entails returning to Barbados with their life savings, where the Banks in Barbados , compliments of this administration , now pays less than 1% on saving accounts and planning in future to make deposit holders pay them instead for holding their monies.
Those people who have left these shores for the UK ,in the late 60’s early 70’s and have reached retirement age , and were considering becoming a ”Returning National” will surely be thinking twice of resettling. And ,as for the offspring of these Bajans, who were born in the UK, and who successive governments have been wooing to return to Barbados , or to keep up sending the remittances, will only return to Barbados at Crop Over and Christmas. And the same probably goes for the other Caribbean Countries. Many of the so-called Returning Nationals, from the UK, are now openly questioning their decisions to return home.
Many Bajans now living in the US ,would rather endure the hardships, kicks and bruises meted out to them by the great United States of America , than to return to Barbados and be beaten with scorpions, and bull pistles.
@Chadsterthetrumppimp……I remember when the Bush Admin went crazy after 9/11 and did this, they also put a ban on renewing work permits from every country…..Trump is even crazier….lol
Colonel…quite understandable , i know the feeling, the returning bajans will have to watch out for the thieves and nasty minded scum in Barbados, who would not want to treat them well or welcome them home.
……. like one relative of mine does, do not carry all their money to Barbados, split the funds up between 1 or 2 other countries, it’s safer and if you decide to leave, the central bank and their dwindling foreign reserves will not affect your exit negatively…….
…..the other islands are also an option, one does not have to totally immerse themselves in the cesspit Barbados has become, or become too entangled with the people there or any other island….properties are cheaper and better investments..in those other islands,
And all people returning to the island should be warned….stay out of the judiciary, stay clear of the lawyers, find an alternative if you must, it is not a real court system, not sure if it will ever become one … am still working on what to call it.
So far it is working out quite well for those who returned and who are doing it differently, Colonel.
There is always a way.
Trump bans environmentalists from speaking in public….the beginning of the US’ destruction….no surprise there.
Of course the idiot dont realize, they can speak everywhere else outside of the US until he is gone…he would have to make it a worldwide ban to stop them……and he cant…lol, hahaha.
Seems to me that the MOF & the GOTCB are using “alternative facts” when reporting on the Barbados economy
Following article explains why an overall shrinking EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) ratio is a major contributory factor to the explosion in debt and money printing over the last decade or so and why Trump will find it near impossible to “Make America Great Again” no matter what he does. However, the rapidly shrinking EROEI could lead to major warfare as industrialized countries try to get control of the largest remaining reserves of the easily recoverable (in terms of geology) high EROEI oil which remain largely in the Middle East, or alternatively to wage war against other countries competing for the same resources.
Fracked oil and gas are NOT high EROEI sources compared to the now depleted traditional land based wells which the US relied on to fuel the allied war effort in WWII, so Trump’s efforts to encourage more fracking for oil/gas in the continental US will not bring the results he and his followers think it will.
What is this ‘Crisis’ of Modernity?
The Automatic Earth Blog
The people at Conflicts Forum, which is directed by former British diplomat and MI6 ‘ranking figure’ Alastair Crooke, sent me an unpublished article by Alastair and asked if the Automatic Earth would publish it. Since I like his work and I (re-)published two of his articles last year already, ‘End of Growth’ Sparks Wide Discontent in October 2016 and Obstacles to Trump’s ‘Growth’ Plans in November 2016, I’m happy to.
His arguments here are very close to much of what the Automatic Earth has been advocating for years, both when it comes to our financial crisis and to our energy crisis. Our Primers section is full of articles on these issues written through the years. It’s a good thing other people pick up too on topics like EROEI, and understand you can’t run our modern, complex society on ‘net energy’ as low as what we get from any of our ‘new’ energy sources. It’s just not going to happen.
SNIP
Well, the Hill’s Group, who are seasoned US oil industry engineers, led by B.W. Hill, tell us – following their last two years, or so, of research – that for purely thermodynamic reasons net energy delivered to the globalised industrial world (GIW) per barrel, by the oil industry (the IOCs) is rapidly trending to zero. Note that we are talking energy-cost of exploration, extraction and transport for the energy-return at final destination. We are not speaking of dollar costs, and we are speaking in aggregate. So why should this be important at all; and what has this to do with spiraling debt creation by the western Central Banks from around 2001?
The importance? Though we sometimes forget it, for we now are so habituated to it, is that energy is the economy. All of modernity, from industrial output and transportation, to how we live, derives from energy – and oil remains a key element to it. What we (the globalized industrial world) experienced in that golden era until the 70s, was economic growth fueled by an unprecedented 321% increase in net energy/head. The peak of 18GJ/head in around 1973 was actually of the order of some 40GJ/head for those who actually has access to oil at the time, which is to say, the industrialised fraction of the global population. The Hill’s Group research can be summarized visually as below (recall that these are costs expressed in energy, rather than dollars):
The missing Illustration here shows net energy available for GDP growth after energy costs for extraction, processing, transportaion etc. have been absorbed shrank from 70% in 1920 to 17% in 2015 and is projected to be 0% by 1930
But as Steve St Angelo in the SRSrocco Reports states, the important thing to understand from these energy return on energy cost ratios or EROI, is that a minimum ratio value for a modern society is 20:1 (i.e. the net energy surplus available for GDP growth should be twenty times its cost of extraction). For citizens of an advanced society to enjoy a prosperous living, the EROI of energy needs to be much higher, closer to the 30:1 ratio. Well, if we look at the chart below, the U.S. oil and gas industry EROI fell below 30:1 some 46 years ago (after 1970):
SNIP
Briefly, what does this all mean? Well, the business model for the big three US IOCs does not look that great: Energy costs of course, are financial costs, too. In 2016, according to Yahoo Finance, the U.S. Energy Sector paid 86% of their operating income just to service the interest on the debt (i.e. to pay for those extraction costs). We have not run out of oil. This is not what the Hill’s Group is saying. Quite the reverse. What they are saying is the surplus energy (at a ratio of now less than 10:1) that derives from the oil that we have been using (after the energy-costs expended in retrieving it) – is now at a point that it can barely support our energy-driven ‘modernity’. Implicit in this analysis, is that our era of plenty was a one time, once off, event.
They are also saying that this implies that as modernity enters on a more severe energy ‘diet’, less surplus calories for their dollars – barely enough to keep the growth engine idling – then global demand for oil will decline, and the price will fall (quite the opposite of mainstream analysis which sees demand for oil growing. It is a vicious circle. If Hills are correct, a key balance has tipped. We may soon be spending more energy on getting the energy that is required to keep the cogs and wheels of modernity turning, than that same energy delivers in terms of calorie-equivalence. There is not much that either Mr Trump or the Europeans can do about this – other than seize the entire Persian Gulf. Transiting to renewables now, is perhaps too little, too late.
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2017/01/what-is-this-crisis-of-modernity/
See also the recent posts at OurFiniteWorld*com.
Trump plan to round up Mexicans or other undocumented aliens would cost the Federal and local govts billions of dollars
It can also create an economic crisis for the banking industry where deposits made by such sources can withold their monies and remove what ever savings they have accumulated out of fear for the worst
Trump seems to be a man that makes decisions without giving any thought to the long term consequences
@acJanuary 25, 2017 at 8:30 AM
“Trump seems to be a man that makes decisions without giving any thought to the long term consequence…”
Isn’t this a clear case of a mixed-race pot calling a ‘white’ kettle ‘black’?
Didn’t a man with similar initials to D J Trump ordered in true Gestapo style the removal (in the middle of the black of night ) of Guyanese who were deemed undocumented and undesirable?
Those who are without sin should cast the first stone. Fortunately for you ac, both your arms are broken.
Now you know how the Guyanese felt when they were treated in similar fashion by their fellow CSME brothers and sisters who pretend to be the first signatories to both the CSME and CCJ.
“Ever so welcome, wait for a call.” Isn’t that what Donald J is about to ‘trumpet’ in the ears of foreigners and others deemed unwashed and undesirable?
Bernard
No basic disagreement except to say,the same way a technocrat can make it look good,he can also do the opposite by ommission or commission.
Guyanese will be going back “home” in droves.
“Oil major ExxonMobil Corporation XOM recently declared that its Liza oil discovery, in Stabroek block offshore Guyana, is now commercial.”
ac January 25, 2017 at 8:30 AM #
“Trump seems to be a man that makes decisions without giving any thought to the long term consequences.”
@ ac
Ammm, I hear duh want you out by de article: “The Grotto: Solicitor General ‘Opinion’ Deems Dividend Payment from Housing Credit Fund ILLEGAL,” because Sinckler, et al, made decisions (about the HCF) without giving any thought to the long term consequences” as well.
Uh see yuh stanning far away from dah topic!!!
Miller u idiot are you comparing a trillion dollar economy to an economy which can least afford the burden of illegal immigrants.
Americas wealth has been built on the labour of illegal immigration and has worked considerably well to americas advantage
Donald Trump proposals to round up illegal immigrants is self defeating which would surely bite the economy in the a.sss
DT was correct in his utterances towards Guyanese as barbados economic resources are limited and in effect cannot sustained an additional populace of any other nation be it guyanese or whomever
Artax if the Solicitor general has an opinion that is within a legal right of law . Instead of mouthing off to draw water from a political well.The solicitor general should seek justice system to correct such a wrong doing if need be
Duh still want you out dey!!!
Artax you can tell them what ac said.
http://www.nationnews.com/nationnews/news/92829/jammeh-living-equatorial-guinea
The cowardly thief has run off to equtorial guinea, they know where to find him to get back that money later, he should be stripped of everything.
Other countries are now committed to showing up Trump’s stupidity…lol
Bernard Codrington
and others believe that American economic and technological primacy depends on European Jews, East Indians and Chinese immigrants. That is pure bull—.
I would agree that the Jews provided the brainpower for the Manhattan Project and the US nuclear weapons program, but American wealth is based primarily on technologies in oil, telecom, autos and computers that were invented or perfected by North Americans. Ever heard of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the Rockefellers, Bill Gates etc.?
The East Indians and Chinese come to North America to learn about these technologies. They barely understand them and they have shown scant ability to create new knowledge.
I work with some of these people in a $10 billion a year corporation. They cannot match the Anglos in brainpower.
Chad creating new goods and services is not about creating new knowledge . It is about using the new knowledge in creating consumable goods and services, It is the applicability. If you take away immigration, whether voluntary or forced, USA would not have achieved the economic hegemony it currently enjoys. Why do you think that large American firms produce traditional goods abroad? And Chad are you not a perfect example of immigrant ,labour ,mental or otherwise.?
Name the immigrants who have made America great.
Chad how many life times do you have? Begin with all of those who you mentioned at 12: 38 PM. Many of the leaders in the Industrial sectors of America are third generation descendants of Immigrants to the USA. USA is a relatively new economy.
Vincent @ 9: 13 AM
Are you saying that is what is happening now? I always wondered where the critical faults were . Now BU and I are aware.
Bernard
Immigrants who go to America with nothing, and whose children and grandchildren are tutored in American schools and universities cannot credit their countries of origin for what they have become as Americans.
Let me switch to another example. Arthur Lewis learned his Economics in the UK and the US, not in the Caribbean. He would have been a nobody had he stayed all his life in St. Lucia. St. Lucia should not be taking credit for his accomplishments, much less those of his children and grandchildren living abroad.
Chad 99999 @ 2:25 PM
I simply cannot operate at this level of discourse. No fault of yours . Mea culpa.
Chadsterthetrumppimp…..I guess you will never understand what it means to be a son or daughter of the soil, you are shaped by your earliest environment, it’s called foundation……..immigrating to the metrpolises broadens perspectives, pity you live in the US and still don’t know that, just as if ya never left Barbados.
Bernard…..ya cannot discourse with pimps, did you not learn that with the ACs….lol
Bernard Codrington. January 25, 2017 at 1:59 PM #
Its a possiblity,however I have seen it going downhill since the 70s through both administrations.
Bernard Codrington. January 25, 2017 at 2:32 PM #
Oh well you tried…….
Ah guees Chadthetrumppimp never heard about Shirley Chrisolm daughter of immigrants, you are an immigrant in the US chadster, just like Trump, his wife, his father, his grandfather, none of you are Native Americans, yall are illegals pretending to be legal, that’s why there is so much chaos and turmoil., why dont you make it great, ya cant even make Bim great, can you make the street or cross street wherenyou live great.
Dont worry, Trumps pen is working overtime, he will soon get around to you.
Under Trump the US will become isolated and suffer a brain drain…..inteiigent people are already prepping.
chad99999 January 25, 2017 at 1:35 PM #
“Name the immigrants who have made America great.”
@ chad99999
Surely you must remember those Africans who contributed to making “America great,” by forcibly providing free labour between the period 1619 when the first African slaves were taken to the North American colony of Jamestown, Virginia, and March 2, 1807 when the U.S. Congress passed an act to “prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States…from any foreign kingdom, place, or country.”
I dont know who Chadsterthetrumppimp thinks built America so that he could now denigrate black people,
Ironic how the heavily criticised actions of an enemy become their own actions. Down the road of an authoritarian state.
I would caution however, that people need to focus less on the little firefights and instead pay attention to the endgame, the big picture.
Trump is a face, the real players put him there to carry out their bidding.
The ones with the real $$$$$$$ who run the place.
Their agenda is what counts and must be considered.
A few things that I think we may expect over the next two years:
forget all trade agreements, all of the OECD tax proposals. With the US out, it will fall apart. This government clearly has an aim of making US number one with Russia likely number two. all else stand back. The overall financial scene is going to change with new rules.
a huge increase in military facilities
contrary to general opinion, probably a solidification of the EU, maybe dropping a couple of smaller countries and a clampdown on immigration / change in rules. But the larger countries will see a need to stick together for economic reasons, particularly with the US basically locking down on imports.
Cuba may be forced to adopt a more open approach to relations with the US.
ps frictions with Canada are likely to increase. The ideology of the governments of the two neighbours is so different that friction is inevitable.
@Crusoe
Where is the sense in creating friction with the two neighbouring countries?
Artax
Perhaps you noticed the American South, where the black slaves made their biggest contributions, is the poorest part of America.
Some help they were.
David re. your 7:51 post;
Where is the sense in rolling back laws and structures that protected the environment except maximise exploitation of resources to the detriment of the environment.
Trump action to build a wall to keep out the poor and vulnerable those actions would resonate negatively in the lives of his children children just like the injustices of slavery vibrates as consistent remainders to the families of past slave owners
@ Crusoe
I agree with you that the ideology of free trade and international economic cooperation will have an hiatus . But eventually it will sink in that for survival we have to reopen our borders. Greed and protectionism will take back seats again. Populism always follows economic and social upheavals and uncertainty. Believe it or not, Hitler came to power as a populist after the depression that followed the German defeat in World War 1. Have faith this world moves in cycles.
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