The Daily Telegraph:
Obama voted in the US senate against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, is a critic of the free trade agreement with China, and expresses strong reservations about trade deals in general.
He has even threatened to withdraw the US from the North American Free Trade Agreement – which created the largest trading bloc in the world – if the other members, Canada and Mexico, do not agree to renegotiate its terms.
This statement is reinforced by an article on Obama’s website; an article he wrote for the Chicago Tribune in 2005.
Globalization is not someone’s political agenda. It is a technological revolution that is fundamentally changing the world’s economy, producing winners and losers along the way. The question is not whether we can stop it, but how we respond to it. It’s not whether we should protect our workers from competition, but what we can do to fully enable them to compete against workers all over the world.
At first this stance seems like a case of Obama’s protectionism gone awry. But is it? Is DR-CAFTA really free trade? I’m sure Stiglitz would agree with Obama on this one. Is it more important to fight to provide fair trade agreements, or to just have free trade agreements in place?
Without fairer trade agreements, the benefits from trade will not be realized. NAFTA and CAFTA will increase poverty because they prematurely open markets to US agricultural goods which are subsidized, making local farmers unable to compete with imports, and the nations in question do not have the ability to bear the costs of switching resources with their available capital, nor deal with the consequences of even short-term unemployment. These agreements have been more geo-political than economic, and the essential problem with recent bilateral agreements, including CAFTA, is that they are not free-trade agreements. More generally, bilateral agreements fail to produce all the benefits expected, in part because of the inequality of the negotiating position of the parties involved.
In this case, I believe Obama is fighting for the just cause and not just the cause that is most beneficial for Americans.
(The final quote is adapted from the Opposition section of the DR-CAFTA entry on Wikipedia. It discusses the main points of Joseph Stiglitz’ opposition to the DR-CAFTA free trade agreement. The paragraph is flagged as requiring citation, but if you have read Stiglitz’ Globalization and its Discontents or Fair Trade for All you will know that it follows his views pretty closely.)
All I need to relax after a hectic day:
And yes, this is just an excuse for me to post these pictures!
I’ve been experimenting in Photoshop recently (I’m disastrously unskilled at present) and this is my first attempt at a triptych, a diptych, and at selective colouring.
It’s true, though: I find that to relax there’s nothing better than half an hour of doing nothing with only an espresso (or Americana) and PBJ on toast for company.
I’ve written about information overload before but have never really done anything to combat it my own life. Not for the want of trying, mind you – it’s just I’ve never found a method that works for me.
GTD is the closest I’ve ever come to actually utilising an information management system full-time, but I find it too structured – even when not adhered to as rigidly as some purists demand.
However, my dabbling wasn’t a completely failed attempt at Getting Things Done: one of the core GTD principles is the crux of my new system for managing the information I come across on a daily basis: moving tasks out of the mind by recording them. Simple yet effective.
But how to record? I’ve tried and failed with many methods – with del.icio.us being the closest I’ve come to finding a permanent solution – but I eventually discovered that ‘bookmarking’ was not the method for me.
I want to save websites or articles on obscure and interesting topics, that contain great quotes, or sometimes I just want to save a video that I want to share with some friends at a later date. I don’t want to write a full-blown post on the item here, but if I don’t I’ll have to spend half an hour tagging each page in order to find it again 12 months down the line. Now it seems I’ve come across a method that works… and it’s been staring right at me for almost 2 years. Blogging!
Taking the structure from two of my more regular reads – kottke and BoingBoing – I’m now ‘bookmarking’ with LoneGunman. All it takes is a quick sentence or two explaining the entry, a quote, and a link. Eureka, you’ve got yourself a searchable, elegant bookmarking facility that you can control. So far I’ve found it to be extremely effective.
Take a look.