Trump’s APEC Address
by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman)
His remarks make painful listening, especially his disinformation, Big Lies and hostile threats.
Addressing the APEC summit in Danang, Vietnam, he lied about US economic conditions, ignoring protracted Main Street Depression conditions, including high unemployment, way higher underemployment.
Claiming “the whole world is lifted by America’s renewal” belies dismal conditions for workers in America and other Western countries, enduring forced-fed austerity while super-rich elites never had things better, benefitting from an unprecedented wealth transfer from most people to them.
Conditions in Asian countries are much the same, privileged elites prospering, ordinary people struggling to get by.
Trump’s promise about “a renewed partnership with America to work together to strengthen the bonds of friendship and commerce between all of the nations of the Indo-Pacific, and together, to promote our prosperity and security” is code language for greater US sought regional exploitation.
He seeks “robust trade relations,” advantaging US corporations at the expense of their competitors, ignoring the rights of ordinary people at home and abroad.
He lied claiming America hasn’t been “treated fairly by the World Trade Organization.” It’s much more than about trade.
It compromises food, drugs and environmental safety standards, along with other product safety rules. It challenges what it calls “illegal trade barriers,” a tribunal run by corporate trade officials settling disputes, favoring business over fairness.
It’s “a powerful mechanism for spreading and locking in corporate-led globalization,” Global Trade Watch founder-director Lori Wallach explained, adding:
“The WTO is a mechanism to bring every country in the world – ready or not – into an existing global market designed by corporations, and to take the practices those corporations invented willy-nilly – which, of course, suit their needs – and set them in stone as ‘WTO rules.’ “
It facilitates global corporate predation, benefitting corporate giants at the expense of everyone else. It inhibits banning products harmful to human health. It weakens clean air and water standards. It harms human rights.
It threatens democracy more than already. The same goes for other corporate designed trade deals.
WTO rules “have little to do with trade and even less to do with the nineteenth-century free trade philosophies of Adam Smith or David Ricardo,” Wallach explained.
Anything limiting profit-making is considered a trade barrier, including health, public safety, environmental, consumer and worker rights.
“We can no longer tolerate…chronic trade abuses, and we will not tolerate” anything inhibiting unlimited profit-making of US corporate giants, Trump roared, favoring US business exclusively my comment, not his, what he meant without stating it bluntly.
“The current trade imbalance (with China) is not acceptable,” he blustered. “I wish previous administrations in my country saw what was happening and did something about it. They did not, but I will.”
The fault lies with corporate predators he supports, offshoring jobs to low-wage countries, a policy ongoing for many years, mainly since the neoliberal 90s.
“(W)e seek friendship, and we don’t dream of domination,” said Trump. Longstanding US policies reveal otherwise, taking advantage of other nations, pressuring and bullying them, attacking independent ones, raping and destroying them, exploiting workers at home and abroad.
Trump blasted North Korea, unleashing the same venom heard in Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing, uncalled for remarks, falsely calling Kim Jong-un “a dictator (with) twisted fantasies of violent conquest and nuclear blackmail, comments applicable to Washington and its rogue allies.
During a photo-op of summit leaders attending, Putin and Trump met briefly.
They exchanged a few remarks, short of a meeting on the sidelines – a shameful US snub, reflecting the deplorable state of bilateral relations.
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