The Digger

"Here’s  part one  of this series on the origins of NAFTA and our current trading regime. It’s amazing what you find in the Congressional Record. For example, you find American political officials (liberal ones, actually) engaged in an actual campaign to get rid of countries with their pesky parochial interests, and have the whole world managed by global corporations. Yup, this actually was explicit in the 1960s, as opposed to today’s passive aggressive arguments which amount to the same thing. Here’s the backstory. As I wrote in  part one of this series on the origin of modern American trade policy , the first real mention of NAFTA in the Congressional record that I could find came from a hearing in 1967. This was a Joint Economic Committee hearing conducted just after a major series of global trade talks known as the “Kennedy round”, from 1964-1967. The Kennedy round went quite far in reducing explicit tariffs, and was a capstone to the trading regime of tariff...

Link:  Ocasio-Cortez Vs. The Conditioners Excerpt: "I gotta say it:  sure sounds like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right about this biannual “bipartisan” Harvard orientation for incoming Congressional freshmen : On Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez criticized the event for including four corporate CEOs but no labor leaders or activists to talk to the new members. Barra, the GM CEO, attended a “discussion with business leaders” at which she was joined by Alex Gorsky, chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical manufacturer, and Dennis Muilenburg, chair and CEO of Boeing. Mark Gearan, director of the Harvard Institute of Politics, confirmed in an interview that no labor leaders were represented on panel discussions. “Lobbyists are here. Goldman Sachs is here,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter, a reference to panelist Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive and top economic adviser to President Trump. “Where‘s labor? Activists? Frontline community leaders? ...