Dropping the Ball, or Saving the Game? A Response to Fran O’Sullivan
THE DEEP ANXIETY of the “Free Trade” lobby was on full display in this morning’s NZ Herald (7/9/16). Fran O’Sullivan, that most indefatigable of the Herald’s free trade advocates, was so moved by the uncertainty currently surrounding the ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that she devoted a good chunk of her business column to the global fight against protectionism.
That it was left to the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, to lead the charge against the rise in protectionism across the globe struck O’Sullivan as particularly galling. Since the 1980s, it has been the West that has set the pace on trade liberalisation – particularly the United States. That this no longer appears to be the case clearly leaves O’Sullivan unimpressed.
Of President Barack Obama’s reticence on the subject – on display at the just concluded G20 meeting in Hangzhou, China – O’Sullivan is scathing:
“US President Barack Obama could hardly lead the charge given the two candidates fighting for election to president don’t have the bottle to even support the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The US previously argued TPP would enhance US economic supremacy and ‘contain’ China’s ambitions.”
Those scare-quotes around the word “contain” indicate just how sceptical O’Sullivan has become of the United States’ capacity to any longer dictate economic terms to the world’s major economic powers – especially China. Her dismay at this turn of events is clear:
“Now Xi is driving the call for a more open economy, yet another sign of how badly ‘the West’ has dropped the ball in the post-Global Financial Crisis era.”
But if the West has “dropped the ball” in relation to the GFC, and if its political leaders no longer “have the bottle” to support free trade agreements like the TPP, then it is surely incumbent upon O’Sullivan to tell her readers why. Sadly, no such explanation is forthcoming.
There is, of course, a very good reason for O’Sullivan’s silence on the cause of the West’s failure. Even in the business pages of the Herald, blaming the world’s economic problems on democracy is a reputationally risky gambit. And yet, no other explanation suffices. That the very same international trends: free trade, globalisation; whose declining influence O’Sullivan so volubly laments; are also the root causes of the massive upsurge of populism across the USA and the United Kingdom is simply undeniable.
It’s not that Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton lack “the bottle” to back the TPP, more a case of them recognising that to do so at this juncture in American history would cost them the election. What O’Sullivan refuses to recognise is that free trade and globalisation have, over the past 30 years, imposed a tremendous economic and social cost upon the populations of the West. That the effects of free trade and globalisation were bound, eventually, to trigger a day of democratic reckoning was something their proponents preferred not to think about.
O’Sullivan offers a fine example of this political denial by quoting the words of the Chinese billionaire, Jack Ma. The founder of Alibaba (China’s equivalent of TradeMe) told CNN that: “We should keep on going along the path of globalisation … globalisation is good … when trade stops, war comes.”
Wa went on to dismiss the strongly antagonistic tone adopted by Donald Trump towards America’s Chinese competitors: “Every time there’s an election, people start to criticise China. They criticise this, they criticise that … [But] how can you stop global trade? How can you build a wall to stop the trade?”
The answer, of course, is by erecting the very same protectionist trade-barriers that Wa’s President, Xi Jinping, was warning the G20 against. As boss of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi clearly struggles to fathom the West’s sudden falling-out-of-love with what used to be called the “Washington Consensus”. Perhaps his political empathy would be enhanced if his party’s policies were subjected to the judgement of the Chinese people every four years – like those of his Western counterparts.
2016 may prove to be the year in which the electorates of the West finally demonstrate to their political elites the democratic folly of pursuing trade policies that are free – but not fair. If that is what they do, then, far from dropping the ball, the voters of the West will have saved the whole capitalist game.
Andrew you almost appear to be living in a dream but i presume you are awake to some of the environmental destruction at the hands of mindless consumerism driven by capitalist expansion.
I suppose you also subscribe to continued population expansion because it is good for business.
When fully awake a shock awaits.
America’s track record on trashing its own environment is well-documented over a least a century.
It doesn’t rate highly on its care for its citizens, either.
The ra-ra on housing, etc, that you provided has often happened in spite of, not because of. People in other countries are well-able to solve their own problems eg http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/women-make-change/2015/09/kenya-water-women-150907100720512.html
At this time the probable ‘next wave’ of industry is forming and flowing in those centuries’ old civilizations of China, India, Brazil and other countries you term ‘third world’. Frugal innovation.
If we’re smart, as both people and nation, we’d get on board and leave the US to its lavish stupidity.
Seems you want to re-litigate the Cold War issues, oh so boring.
As for computer simulations for rockets and so forth, yeah right, they did so in the 1940s and 1950s, I suppose, when computers were in their infancy.
Comparing apples with pears, I reckon.
You also have a rather romantic view of colonialism, it seems, I wonder how many citizens of those former colonies share your views, then and now.
As usual, you are not all that objective, although you try to present yourself as such, Andrew.
What a selective summary and how one sided, Andrew.
Yes, the US came out of the war rather strengthened, but other nations in Europe and even Japan swiftly reconstructed, not following the US style laissez faire economic policies.
Any post war period of reconstruction brings growth, even the Soviet Union had its version of this, although rather different, and somewhat constrained, by lack of availability of technology and financial transfers, due to the Cold War and the west basically boycotting them.
They did not get their rockets into space by sitting there idly and remaining a “developing country”.
The third world has hardly seen as significant an “uplift” out of poverty as some try to make out. After WW2 many former colonies were allowed to become “independent”, some of course had to fight for it, but that was only on paper.
The dependence on the richer nations, the former colonial powers remained, and population explosion drove ever more into abject poverty, which meant people moved to the cities and filled the new huge slums.
Recent “liberalisation” of trade has primarily benefited the corporations of the rich and powerful nations, now many having their tax status also in traditional tax havens and other low tax countries.
China’s government has flirted with capitalism, but is doing it its own way, keeping tight control on trade and economic and fiscal affairs (behind the scenes and by manipulating its currency and pulling other strings).
At any given time they can bring back tighter controls.
“Free trade” simply boosts volumes of goods and services created and transported or shifted around the globe, but they come with immense pressures on workers and consumers to compete at all levels, thus destroying the quality of lives of most.
Who is “happy” in this world of rampant consumerism, where we are also raping and pillaging the planet and its resources, where people are out to make dollars and beat their business competitor, their competing “fellow” worker and beating themselves, trying to please a boss to stay employed and to perhaps get some humble pay rise.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11428573
We build the new cities and towers of Babel, rip the guts out of the earth, the sea and now even fancy that we can perhaps “mine” some planets.
The government and business keep the pressure up, telling us that due to failed housing policy, we must be pleased to have “any” home, even a pigeon hole or shoe box apartment in a high rise block, it seems like it was intentional to create a kind of housing affordability crisis, so people “humble” themselves and settle for less.
We will end up like people in other countries and cities, where neighbours walk past each other and don’t want to know each other, where we are all just numbers and dumbed down, brain washed consumers and workers competing at the lowest common denominator. That is apart from the upper class and the “professional” and business operating upper middle class, who are the ones that keep this system alive, by voting the pack of nasty operators that continue selling us lies.
The day will come that people will suddenly have to wake up, those that have not done so yet, that this dream of theirs to “get ahead” will turn out to be a nightmare, a betrayed dream, a lie.
They have been sold stuff that was not worth the promise that came with it. So far we still have too many ignorant and blinded, and they keep the wheels turning.
Welcome to being a tenant and slave in your own land, that is the future for NZ Inc..
As with John Key, it’s time for Fran to step down, and let someone else ( with a lilttle more compassion and sense ) have a go.
GOSH THOSE POOR RIGHT WINGERS, SAYING WE CANT RELY ON OURSELVES, BUT THAT JUST SHOWS THEIR IGNORANCE.
I came from the war generation as a baby born in 1944.
unlike you I grew up watching Kiwis build everything here and we got to be the top of all countries best to live.
We had wise open trade not China, or India or a tppa, or any other trade pact, nor did we have the overwhelming corporates buying up the country either so you are the bloody fools’ aWanderer to buy that “global economy so stick it where the sun doesn’t shine sport.
We can be self reliant again, all it takes is the will I saw in my forefathers.
Oh by the way I to travelled and worked for several times around the Globe by myself in the 1960,- 70s, and 80’s in case you think I’m just a village yokel and think this was the very best place to raise a family and it was until your crooked mate key came into town as a stool pigeon for the corporate Goldman Sachs, The Bilderberg group all to steal this green & gentle land I love.
Here is the official communique out of the G20:
http://www.g20.org/English/Dynamic/201609/t20160906_3396.html
Andrew
This is typical of the uninformed nonsense you post.
‘Americans enjoyed a unique period of prosperity based on’…..extraction of increasing quantities of easily extractable oil within American borders (the main reason why the Allies won the war).
That cheap oil facilitated the operation of all kinds of machinery to chop down and saw up trees, to dig up minerals and coal, to industrialise agriculture etc.
‘3. Communism held back the development of those countries unlucky to be controlled by it’
This is patently untrue. At the beginning of WW2 USSR had the most technologically advanced tanks in the world. Despite having been utterly devastated by the German assault on its major industrial base and much of its population, during the 1940s and 1950s the USSR was way ahead of the Americans in rocketry and launching of space probes.
The communist system took peasant societies and morphed them quite rapidly into industrial societies. Towards the end of the communist era educational opportunities in communist states were world-leading (as compared to what happened under capitalism, where education became just another profit centre, as dumbing-down became the top priority.
Every day that passes Russia get relatively stronger and America gets relatively weaker (taking down NZ with it, of course).
Completely missing from your narrative (of course) is that industrialism is at the heart of the global energetic and environmental predicaments, which will demolish EVERYTHING over the next two decades.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/co2_800k_zoom.png
Andrew left out the Bretton Woods agreement and the gold standard
Sadly your logic doesn’t work as it appear to based on ignoring the major factors in population expansion, consumption of Non Renewable Natural Resources, consequences of energy consumption and destructive global pollution that all limit the end game.
Already the rate of industrialisation has slowed and soon will move into decline. Surely you must know about this stuff as it has been shown for decades. Unless of course you live in ignorance or denial.
Reds under the bed is laughable. Roger Douglas long discredited for the damage done to NZ and elsewhere where the neoliberal model was copied.
Those brainwashed to limit their beliefs to capitalism may defend in vane a dysfunctional dying system of extracting wealth for the benefit and power of a ruling class.
Idiots – the lot of you.
NZ is a middle income country off the back of trading links to the world. Do you really think NZ can build high quality cars, tvs, iphones, industrial machinery etc… at the same prices as overseas?
Read and learn from history – I’ll save you the trouble – steep reductions in trade result in global war.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/matthew-o-jackson-can-trade-prevent-war
Look a little wider and you may see that growth that the banks depend on is coming to an end.
If you don’t know why then I suggest the dictionary may help with what finite means. It is not negotiable and immune to spin.
Also look up NNR
Funny enough AWANDERER we already have cars and tvs and iPhones and we don’t have the TPPA!!
So they don’t come hand in hand.
But if it comes down to clean drinking water and air and a house vs a cheap TV and iPhone I think people will overwhelmingly choose the clean water and air and house.
Consumerism is both over rated and rammed down our throats. If the MSM spend as much time talking about the necessity and amenity of a clean river next to you rather than a toxic dump site that would kill a dog, let alone a kid, rather than the Bachelor then we would have a different debate.
People are being fed a dumbed down diet of facts with misdirection to skew people’s perceptions.
“Do you really think NZ can build high quality cars, tvs, iphones, industrial machinery etc… at the same prices as overseas?”
No. Who said NZ could? What’s your point?
Try this one on Chris, I was watching Fox news briefly over the Clinton/Trump campaign and the email scandal and it was a news release that came over showing that one of the US largest banks has blocked all their employees from donating to the Trump campaign and recommend donating to the Clinton campaign, and the bank was you guessed it yes it was Goldman Sachs!@!!!!$%^&*
This bank (GS) is the most corrosive corrupt bank in history meddling in all counties like (Greece) who they (GS) force into bankruptcy and now (GS) are involved in NZ trying to undermine our economy using Key.
So why vote for Clinton if she is undermining countries though banks like Goldman Sachs?????????
Remember also Zespri, the crack down on NZ based baby formula exporters to China, the issues with “standards” and “quality” of NZ products into China, as of late.
How “free” is the Chinese government, I ask, is Fran blind on one eye, perhaps?
They find other ways to protect their own businesses and interests, that are not covered by FTAs, hence Key would like to renegotiate the trade deal with China, but there seems to be some reluctance by them.
From Chris’ post:
““Now Xi is driving the call for a more open economy, yet another sign of how badly ‘the West’ has dropped the ball in the post-Global Financial Crisis era.”
But if the West has “dropped the ball” in relation to the GFC, and if its political leaders no longer “have the bottle” to support free trade agreements like the TPP, then it is surely incumbent upon O’Sullivan to tell her readers why. Sadly, no such explanation is forthcoming.”
Fran is just plain silly, and not quite honest, or perhaps too brainwashed and short sighted.
China is driving the push to have other markets open their trade barriers and borders, for its own damned self interest, no other reason. It needs to export, needs growth, so its government is now hell bent on telling others, open your borders, so our exporters can sell stuff, which is often sold at prices that others cannot compete with, at times it is sold below costs, just to cover some costs they have.
Heard of the protests about Chinese steel dumping recently? Has Fran not heard about the Yuan being kept low so Chinese exporters have an advantage.
The US is equally calling for freer trade, with for example the EU, hence their push to get an FTA agreed upon with them, as the US wants to export for helping their own exporters.
Given that we have in some areas cut throat competition, the pressure by the mighty economic powers on others to let in their goods and services is heating up, while many people all over the world have started realising, that free trade does not necessarily bring them the benefits they were promised.
It is sometimes rather a race to the bottom, and it is for that reason, that textile manufacturers have moved from China to Vietnam, Bangla Desh and other places, and that manufacturing from the EU, the US and also this region has moved to China and other places.
The end result will be low wages and incomes for many, cuts in government services as less tax will eventually be gathered to pay for additional social, health and retirement services.
At present we are just scraping the bottom of the barrel in many economies, it is not a coincidence that countries like Brazil, South Africa and Russia are going through some tough times. Some oil exporting nations are in the doldrums too, unable to pay workers and government officials, go to Iraq, Venezuela and Nigeria to find out.
Fran is brain washed by her darlings Douglas, Prebble and now Key and English, and cannot see that there is a limit to growth that will hit us all. It is starting to hit China, and they are hiding this with artificially polished statistics.
They are experts at that, some Mainland Chinese migrants convince NZ Immigration that they have investment funds or earn enough from businesses they start here, but take a closer look often it is not what it seems. But in order to get PR, they do anything they can to prove their worth.
Maybe the waning power of the forces that want to convince of benefits of FTAs will lead also to Fran losing her job, maybe that is why she is so worried. A new future trend to more sustainability instead of blind, obsessive growth for growth’s sake may make her a redundant commentator.
Now there may be hope, after all, in this what we observe.
Fran O’Sullivan clearly does not understand the significance of the flag behind Obama, CEO of US Inc. the flag is that of the Republic of the United States now headed by General Dunford.
TTIP is now dead in the water. Next secret deal to be blown off the desk is the TPPA. No decent writer should back any deal drawn up and signed in the dark behind the backs of the people. Shame on Fran O’Sullivan.
Fran is a columnist, full stop. Maybe she should just assign her opinions straight to the dustbin, after all, they are just opinions, everyone has them.
The fact that she is a friend of Key’s and China, would indicate anything written would have a rightwing slant to it.
The popular myth that NZ is a democracy is now losing its capacity to capture minds and NZ is increasingly seen to be what it is, an oligarchy with a thin façade of democracy.
Current economic arrangements are totally unsustainable and trade, free or otherwise, is now in its final years; trade, as it currently operates, will be completely gone (along with almost everything else most people currently take for granted) long before 2030……perhaps before 2020.
Both the USA and China have peaked in conventional oil extraction, and the easily-extractable oil required to perpetuate current economic arrangements does not exist. Of course the NZH won’t mention that.
http://crudeoilpeak.info/chinas-oil-peak-45-years-after-the-us-peak
Also, the rate of overheating the Earth is increasing (largely as a consequence of trade) and humanity will break through the so-called upper safe limit of 450 ppm atmospheric CO2 around 2030…..perhaps significantly before then. We are already witnessing the dire effects of 120 ppm above the historic baseline, and the effects of 170 ppm above the historic baseline will be utterly catstrophic. Again, you won’t hear about that from NZH.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/global.html#global_growth
‘[But] how can you stop global trade?’
You can’t stop global trade. The people who are in control of most nations are absolute maniacs and will keep doing what they do -promoting looting and polluting, and lying to the masses- until they can’t.
What you can do is point out that they are maniacs and are ‘Emperors without clothes’.
No this si Fran just doing her puppet masters dance here.
Step one;
Seed some unease in the TPPA debate when it looks a dead duck.
Step two;
Place the blame and a get-out clause by suggesting the anti TPPA brigade will waver later so to place the debate back on an even playing field.
In Britain last year this happened when the Northerners in Britain voted down staying in the EU.
So they then made a scapegoat Jeremy Corbyn.
Then they construct another phoney petition to try and force another brexit vote.
see the comparison.
Let Fran do her silly dance for her puppet masters.
Shame about democracy, it spoils the fun of the powerful.
The inchoate rage shown by the occupy demonstration (in the US of all places) is flowering across many countries. Brexit and the stresses in the EU reflect this, as well as Trumps mass appeal.
Global corporatisation does not sit easily with those outside the charmed inner circle of the top wealthiest 1% (actually probably something more like the top 49%).
O’Sullivan is a typical right wing know all toadying up to those who wield wealth and power. Screw the demos, power is all that matters, greed is the driver. OBTW wealthy and powerful buy advertising which is of some slight interest to media organisations.
Pity the demos who cannot buy advertising. They just do not understand what is good for them.
Why is it that the only people clamouring for globalisation are business people who are fixated on “the bottom line”?
Nothing else matters.
Who was it that said: “Democracy sounds like a good idea. We should try it some time.”
I think it was Churchill who said: “America will do the right thing after it has tried everything else.” Not that I’m a fan of Churchill: he was an arrogant arsehole of the highest order, and a member of the 0.1%. But occasionally he got it right. “I thought the miners the worst people to have to deal with until I met the mine owners.”
Well Obama have proven that presidential powers can be constrained by a money hungous congress.
Lobby money is a huge problem in NZ as well. Cash has really captured the process.
I also feel anxious. When either Trump or Clinton are comfortably in power, then we will find that they support the TPPA. Surprise, surprise!!
It is called lies and promises before an election. And more lies and promises after the election. No surprises just consistent lying punctuated by inconsistent lying.
If a statement leaves and impression different to the truth then it is a lie.
In NZ we have a PM who revels in lying and many greedy who gain from his lies while many others get nothing believe the lies.
Very few political leaders are honest people who work for common good.
We need to celebrate them.
Anyone who is a serious threat to the Great Lying Machine gets politically assassinated or literally assassinated.
Politics in NZ has degenerated into a pseudo-religious system: don’t ask awkward questions; don’t bring up inconvenient facts; just believe. (Keep consuming the ‘soma’. And keep giving us your money.)
Only one large country is likely to get through the first bottleneck. And none are likely to get through the second one.
I agree, but Obama will push it through right after the election.
It will be heavily modified in the US’s favour and to the detriment of countries like NZ, to make it palatable to congress.
John Key will then breathlessly announce we have no choice but to accept the new draconian provisions, or we risk the TPPA.