Upcoming US-EU Trade War: Taxing Tech Giants

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,,, at 6/26/2020 11:01:00 PM
Trump wants his administration to beat up US tech giants, not European nations. If you've paid attention to US news, you're aware that Facebook and other tech giants have been in the Trump administration's crosshairs for supposedly suppressing "conservative" viewpoints that differ from their supposedly liberal, West Coast biases. After--by his reckoning, at least--wanting to be politically neutral by giving Trump free rein, Mark Zuckerberg recently took a more proactive stance to removing Trump's more [ob]noxious social media messages. Recently, FB banned a campaign ad that had an inverted triangle--a Nazi-era mark for...
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ASEAN's CoronaControl Meets US & UK's CoronaSlaughter

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,,, at 6/24/2020 06:24:00 PM
Reputable scientists want to hold the criminally negligent Trump and Johnson accountable... but whither ASEAN? With a blog subtitle featuring the words "elegant despair," I have primed you, dear reader, not to expect feelgood stories on this blog. Today, however, there may be some reason to hope that countries whose leadership is not criminally negligent actually can do something about the harms caused by COVID-19. Members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have been faring rather better than one would expect given their development status. The contrast is especially remarkable when compared to the examples...
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Border Conflict: Can India Boycott China?

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 6/20/2020 07:11:00 PM
They can burn as many Xi pictures as they like, but their compatriots won't stop buying PRC-made goods anytime soon. I have always been fascinated by territorial conflicts over uninhabitable lands. Due to its altitude, the area where Chinese and Indian forces had a border skirmish cannot sustain an appreciably-sized population of any sort. Moreover, the details of the encounter remain sketchy: Who initiated the conflict? If both sides were unarmed, why do casualties on both sides number in the double digits? There is still a lot we don't know. Importantly from an IPE perspective, will there be economic consequences for...
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Trump Infests USAID With Right-Wing Ideologues

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,,,, at 6/16/2020 09:53:00 PM
Truth in advertising should be applied to USAID given the similarly bigoted beliefs of Trump's new appointees.  Although foreign aid provision features much lofty rhetoric—giving the rest of humanity a helping hand—its reality is much more mundane. Like a lot of things in life, a mixture of altruistic and self-interested motives drive official development assistance or ODA provided by the likes of the American government through its US Agency for International Development (USAID). Being a practical sort, I do not believe this situation is necessarily wrong. For instance, the George W. Bush administration spearheaded...
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Can the UK Poach Up to 3 Million Hongkongers?

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,, at 6/13/2020 06:17:00 PM
British students are not even on par with Yankee ones. No wonder the UK needs people from fourth-ranked Hong Kong. Everybody is an opportunist: When the PRC passed security [sic] legislation by force in Hong Kong following the latter's supposed inability to do so, the British saw an opportunity. Now, the United Kingdom is still fully engaged in that exercise of unmitigated self-harm called Brexit. However, it seems that even the grossly inept government of Boris Johnson (my spell-checker suggests "Boorish Johnson"; who am I to disagree?) recognizes something. Without brainy Estonians, Irish, Polish, etc. coming from elsewhere...
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The Expendables 4: Granny Dies So Dow Jones Lives

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 6/11/2020 11:23:00 PM
Yo Adrienne, let's drink some Lysol! Death Wish aside, there is this more recent American movie franchise The Expendables starring the aging action star Sylvester Stallone. Apparently, Trump's America has real-life elderly expendables too--they go by the name of "senior citizens." In the calculations of Trump and his administration's officials, the almighty economy cannot be sacrificed in the name of preventing COVID-19's spread in retirement communities or probably anywhere else. The administration's gospel according to Treasury Secretary Steven "The Munchkin Man" Mnuchin goes like this: “We can’t shut down the economy...
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Brainless Markets, US vs. Asia COVID-19 Edition

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in ,,,, at 6/09/2020 11:34:00 PM
Are US stock markets missing something, or is Trumpland going to be socked more by COVID-19 than Asian economies? The legendary economist John Maynard Keynes is attributed for saying "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Well, if we are to evaluate countries by how hard hit they are by the coronavirus pandemic, the performance of American stock markets should be all the evidence you need that Keynes was right as it leads the rest of the world in rebounding from their March lows. The tech-heavy NASDAQ is somehow at record highs three months or so after stock markets worldwide imploded. Is it...
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