#NAFTA agreement

[mostlysignssomeportents]

It all started with a mouse

For the public domain, time stopped in 1998, when the Sonny Bono Copyright Act froze copyright expirations for 20 years. In 2019, time started again, with a massive crop of works from 1923 returning to the public domain, free for all to use and adapt:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2019/

No one is better at conveying the power of the public domain than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, who run the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. For years leading up to 2019, the pair published an annual roundup of what we would have gotten from the public domain in a universe where the 1998 Act never passed. Since 2019, they've switched to celebrating what we're actually getting each year. Last year's was a banger:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/20/free-for-2023/#oy-canada

But while there's been moderate excitement at the publicdomainification of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," AA Milne's "Now We Are Six," and Sherlock Holmes, the main event that everyone's anticipated arrives on January 1, 2024, when Mickey Mouse enters the public domain.

The first appearance of Mickey Mouse was in 1928's Steamboat Willie. Disney was critical to the lobbying efforts that extended copyright in 1976 and again in 1998, so much so that the 1998 Act is sometimes called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Disney and its allies were so effective at securing these regulatory gifts that many people doubted that this day would ever come. Surely Disney would secure another retrospective copyright term extension before Jan 1, 2024. I had long arguments with comrades about this – people like Project Gutenberg founder Michael S Hart (RIP) were fatalistically certain the public domain would never come back.

But they were wrong. The public outrage over copyright term extensions came too late to stave off the slow-motion arson of the 1976 and 1998 Acts, but it was sufficient to keep a third extension away from the USA. Canada wasn't so lucky: Justin Trudeau let Trump bully him into taking 20 years' worth of works out of Canada's public domain in the revised NAFTA agreement, making swathes of works by living Canadian authors illegal at the stroke of a pen, in a gift to the distant descendants of long-dead foreign authors.

Now, with Mickey's liberation bare days away, there's a mounting sense of excitement and unease. Will Mickey actually be free? The answer is a resounding YES! (albeit with a few caveats). In a prelude to this year's public domain roundup, Jennifer Jenkins has published a full and delightful guide to The Mouse and IP from Jan 1 on:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/

Disney loves the public domain. Its best-loved works, from The Sorcerer's Apprentice to Sleeping Beauty, Pinnocchio to The Little Mermaid, are gorgeous, thoughtful, and lively reworkings of material from the public domain. Disney loves the public domain – we just wish it would share.

Disney loves copyright's other flexibilities, too, like fair use. Walt told the papers that he took his inspiration for Steamboat Willie from Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, making fair use of their performances to imbue Mickey with his mischief and derring do. Disney loves fair use – we just wish it would share.

Disney loves copyright's limitations. Steamboat Willie was inspired by Buster Keaton's silent film Steamboat Bill (titles aren't copyrightable). Disney loves copyright's limitations – we just wish it would share.

As Jenkins writes, Disney's relationship to copyright is wildly contradictory. It's the poster child for the public domain's power as a source of inspiration for worthy (and profitable) new works. It's also the chief villain in the impoverishment and near-extinction of the public domain. Truly, every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Disney's reliance on – and sabotage of – the public domain is ironic. Jenkins compares it to "an oil company relying on solar power to run its rigs." Come January 1, Disney will have to share.

Now, if you've heard anything about this, you've probably been told that Mickey isn't really entering the public domain. Between trademark claims and later copyrightable elements of Mickey's design, Mickey's status will be too complex to understand. That's totally wrong.

Jenkins illustrates the relationship between these three elements in (what else) a Mickey-shaped Venn diagram. Topline: you can use all the elements of Mickey that are present in Steamboat Willie, along with some elements that were added later, provided that you make it clear that your work isn't affiliated with Disney.

Let's unpack that. The copyrightable status of a character used to be vague and complex, but several high-profile cases have brought clarity to the question. The big one is Les Klinger's case against the Arthur Conan Doyle estate over Sherlock Holmes. That case established that when a character appears in both public domain and copyrighted works, the character is in the public domain, and you are "free to copy story elements from the public domain works":

https://freesherlock.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/klinger-order-on-motion-for-summary-judgment-c.pdf

This case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, who declined to hear it. It's settled law.

So, which parts of Mickey aren't going into the public domain? Elements that came later: white gloves, color. But that doesn't mean you can't add different gloves, or different colorways. The idea of a eyes with pupils is not copyrightable – only the specific eyes that Disney added.

Other later elements that don't qualify for copyright: a squeaky mouse voice, being adorable, doing jaunty dances, etc. These are all generic characteristics of cartoon mice, and they're free for you to use. Jenkins is more cautious on whether you can give your Mickey red shorts. She judges that "a single, bright, primary color for an article of clothing does not meet the copyrightability threshold" but without settled law, you might wanna change the colors.

But what about trademark? For years, Disney has included a clip from Steamboat Willie at the start of each of its films. Many observers characterized this as a bid to create a de facto perpetual copyright, by making Steamboat Willie inescapably associated with products from Disney, weaving an impassable web of trademark tripwires around it.

But trademark doesn't prevent you from using Steamboat Willie. It only prevents you from misleading consumers "into thinking your work is produced or sponsored by Disney." Trademarks don't expire so long as they're in use, but uses that don't create confusion are fair game under trademark.

Copyrights and trademarks can overlap. Mickey Mouse is a copyrighted character, but he's also an indicator that a product or service is associated with Disney. While Mickey's copyright expires in a couple weeks, his trademark doesn't. What happens to an out-of-copyright work that is still a trademark?

Luckily for us, this is also a thoroughly settled case. As in, this question was resolved in a unanimous 2000 Supreme Court ruling, Dastar v. Twentieth Century Fox. A live trademark does not extend an expired copyright. As the Supremes said:

[This would] create a species of mutant copyright law that limits the public’s federal right to copy and to use expired copyrights.

This elaborates on the Ninth Circuit's 1996 Maljack Prods v Goodtimes Home Video Corp:

[Trademark][ cannot be used to circumvent copyright law. If material covered by copyright law has passed into the public domain, it cannot then be protected by the Lanham Act without rendering the Copyright Act a nullity.

Despite what you might have heard, there is no ambiguity here. Copyrights can't be extended through trademark. Period. Unanimous Supreme Court Decision. Boom. End of story. Done.

But even so, there are trademark considerations in how you use Steamboat Willie after Jan 1, but these considerations are about protecting the public, not Disney shareholders. Your uses can't be misleading. People who buy or view your Steamboat Willie media or products have to be totally clear that your work comes from you, not Disney.

Avoiding confusion will be very hard for some uses, like plush toys, or short idents at the beginning of feature films. For most uses, though, a prominent disclaimer will suffice. The copyright page for my 2003 debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom contains this disclaimer:

This novel is a work of fiction, set in an imagined future. All the characters and events portrayed in this book, including the imagined future of the Magic Kingdom, are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. The Walt Disney Company has not authorized or endorsed this novel.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250196385/downandoutinthemagickingdom

Here's the Ninth Circuit again:

When a public domain work is copied, along with its title, there is little likelihood of confusion when even the most minimal steps are taken to distinguish the publisher of the original from that of the copy. The public is receiving just what it believes it is receiving—the work with which the title has become associated. The public is not only unharmed, it is unconfused.

Trademark has many exceptions. The First Amendment protects your right to use trademarks in expressive ways, for example, to recreate famous paintings with Barbie dolls:

https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/summaries/mattel-walkingmountain-9thcir2003.pdf

And then there's "nominative use": it's not a trademark violation to use a trademark to accurately describe a trademarked thing. "We fix iPhones" is not a trademark violation. Neither is 'Works with HP printers.' This goes double for "expressive" uses of trademarks in new works of art:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_v._Grimaldi

What about "dilution"? Trademark protects a small number of superbrands from uses that "impair the distinctiveness or harm the reputation of the famous mark, even when there is no consumer confusion." Jenkins says that the Mickey silhouette and the current Mickey character designs might be entitled to protection from dilution, but Steamboat Willie doesn't make the cut.

Jenkins closes with a celebration of the public domain's ability to inspire new works, like Disney's Three Musketeers, Disney's Christmas Carol, Disney's Beauty and the Beast, Disney's Around the World in 80 Days, Disney's Alice in Wonderland, Disney's Snow White, Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Disney's Sleeping Beauty, Disney's Cinderella, Disney's Little Mermaid, Disney's Pinocchio, Disney's Huck Finn, Disney's Robin Hood, and Disney's Aladdin. These are some of the best-loved films of the past century, and made Disney a leading example of what talented, creative people can do with the public domain.

As of January 1, Disney will start to be an example of what talented, creative people give back to the public domain, joining Dickens, Dumas, Carroll, Verne, de Villeneuve, the Brothers Grimm, Twain, Hugo, Perrault and Collodi.

Public domain day is 17 days away. Creators of all kinds: start your engines!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey

Image: Doo Lee (modified) https://web.law.duke.edu/sites/default/files/images/centers/cspd/pdd2024/mickey/Steamboat-WIllie-Enters-Public-Domain.jpeg

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

[screenshot-thoughts]

NAFTA, North American Free Trade

[radicalgraff]

Radical murals seen around Oventic, an indigenous Zapatista village in Chiapas, Mexico.

On January 1st, 1994 the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) launched an armed insurrection in Chiapas against the Mexican state and the NAFTA Free Trade Agreement.

The Zapatistas are a resistance movement of indigenous villagers in the mountains and jungles of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southern-most state.

[fatehbaz]

Avocado orchards had carpeted the gently undulating hills around the sacred lake of Pátzcuaro with stodgy green bushes. Here, before the cataclysmic arrival of the first envoys dispatched by Hernando Cortes from the Aztec capital over the mountains to the East, [...] the Purépecha had sown maize, amaranth, zucchini, cacao, cotton, tomato, beans, a dozen types of chili, and much more.

Now the monotonous “green gold” of the avocado boom had colonized the entire Mexican state of Michoacán. [...] [I]t was shocking to think that the cause of the disaster was America’s great patriotic party: the National Football League’s Super Bowl. A flurry of advertising creativity on behalf of the Mexican avocado was unleashed every year during the multi-million-dollar sports broadcast. [...] “Is your life just terrible?” asks the comic actor Chris Elliott, star of Scary Movie 2 and Scary Movie 4, in the 2019 spot. “You deserve more! Spread an avocado on top of everything!” [...] A few days before the Super Bowl, the domestic diva Martha Stewart [...] had released on social networks her latest recipe for guacamole [...]. Guacamole was now an obligatory snack for the 100 million or so Americans who watched the Super Bowl. In February of 2017, 278 million avocados -- most of them from Michoacán -- had been sold during the days before the game in [the US] [...].

---

The avocado had become the star product of Mexican food production in the age of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) [...] since NAFTA was signed in 1994 [...]. [Mexican] farmers produced 16 times more than the formerly dominant Californian growers. [...] Moreover, the avocado was now classified as a “superfood” [...].

It had not always been like this. In the 1950s, the avocado was known unsentimentally as the crocodile pear [...]. Imports from Mexico were banned until 1997 [...] . When complete liberalization was announced in 2007, Michoacán had become an unbeatable competitor for the Californian avocado growers. The Mexican producers specialized, like their Californian rivals, in the Hass variety of avocado, more meaty than those that the Purépecha had [...] consumed over the millennia, and with a tough skin that protected the pears during long hauls in chilled container trucks to El Paso or Tijuana and then beyond to the big US consumer markets. [...] [T]he Hass avocado was perfectly suited to the global market [...]. Michoacán, whose crystalline lakes had earned it the name of the “land of fish” in the indigenous language of Tarasco, would never be the same.

By 2020, 80 percent of the avocados consumed in the United States came from Michoacán [...].

---

Now in the 21st century, on the outskirts of Uruapan, the frenetic capital del aguacate, the new economy of agribusiness took shape [...]. Further west on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro, the monoculture had not yet colonized the entire landscape, but the advance of the avocado seemed unstoppable. [...] “Practically everybody here wants an avocado orchard [...],” explained [FFB], a resident of the Purépecha indigenous community of Jarácuaro on the shores of the lake. [...] [H]e was horrified by the extent of environmental destruction. “They pump water from the lake to water the avocado orchards [...]. It’s pillage. [...]”

The falling water level, together with the introduction of the rapacious predator tilapia, had wiped out almost all the [...] [native] fish species. Of the cornucopia of marine life that had fed the Purépecha cities, only the diminutive silvery charal remained. The same occurred at other great freshwater deposits in Michoaczán. [...] The Purépecha communities on the shores of the lake, a landscape of stunning beauty where dense pine and ilex oak forests met white nymphaea lilies floating on turquoise water, were girding themselves for the arrival of the aguacateros, avocado producers [...].

---

“They put a gun to your head and tell you to sign the deed before the notary. That’s how the transfer of land is agreed upon,” explained [GV], a sociologist at the University of San Nicolas de Hidalgo in Morelia [...].

Meanwhile, large exporters and avocado brokers -- some of them international brands like Del Monte -- were profiting by purchasing from producers at dirt-cheap prices and reselling to the US supermarket chains at very attractive ones. “They pay a dollar per kilo of avocado here and sell it for eight at a Minnesota W*lmart,” said [GV].

In order not to squander such a reliable source of profits, “transnational corporations, just like the Canadian mining companies in Zacatecas, pay the extortion money [...],” he continued.

---

Text by: Andy Robinson. Gold, Oil, and Avocados: A Recent History of Latin America in Sixteen Commodities. 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks added by me.]

[nodynasty4us]

Two things, it seems to me, are hurting the Democratic establishment in our era.  The first is the sense that their policy proposals are so obviously right that they don't have to explain them to the nation.  That was how they handled NAFTA and other trade agreements, and Obama's finance-friendly, "top-down" approach to recovery from the Great Recession.   The second is the rise of Trump, which has convinced them that not being Trump should secure their victory.  That strategy failed in 2016, barely succeeded in 2020, and has a 50-50 chance of succeeding now.  Balancing that, perhaps, are the Dobbs decision and new red state abortion laws, which have given the Democrats what looks like a winning social issue.

David Kaiser at History Unfolding: On the eve

[meandmybigmouth]

Trump's Anti-Worker Record

At every turn Donald Trump has made increasing the power of corporations over working people his top priority. The list of the damage done to working people by the Trump Administration is long. Here are a few examples.

Trump has encouraged freeloaders, made it more difficult to enforce collective bargaining agreements, silenced workers and restricted the freedom to join unions:

During a live conversation on X with Elon Musk on August 12, Donald Trump said striking workers should be fired.1

Trump packed the courts with anti-labor judges who have made the entire public sector “right to work for less” in an attempt to financially weaken unions by increasing the number of freeloaders.2

Trump stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointees who side with employers in contract disputes and support companies who delay and stall union elections, misclassify workers to take away their freedom to join a union, and silence workers.3

Trump made it easier for employers to fire or penalize workers who speak up for better pay and working conditions or exercise the right to strike.4

Trump promised to veto the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, historic legislation that will reverse decades of legislation meant to crush private sector unions and shift power away from CEOs to workers.5

Trump has restricted overtime pay, opposed wage increases, and gutted health and safety protections:

Trump changed the rules about who qualifies for overtime pay, making more than 8 million workers ineligible and costing them over $1 billion per year in lost wages.6

Trump reduced the number of OSHA inspectors so that there are now fewer than at any time in history, and weakened penalties for companies that fail to report violations.7

Trump threatened to veto legislation that would raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour.8

Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Eugene Scalia, is an anti-worker, union-busting corporate lawyer who aggressively defended Cablevision’s decision to fire 22 workers when they tried to win a contract with CWA.9

Trump has helped insurers reduce coverage and made it easier for pharmaceutical companies to inflate drug prices:

Trump supports an ongoing lawsuit that would eliminate protections that ensure that health insurers can't discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.10

Trump threatened to veto legislation to reduce prescription drug costs, even though last year the prices of over 3,000 drugs increased by an average of 10.5%.11

Trump’s made protecting the profits of pharmaceutical companies a priority in NAFTA renegotiations.12

Trump's proposed FY2021 budget would cut funding for Medicare.13

Trump has encouraged outsourcing and offshoring:

Instead of supporting CWA’s bipartisan legislation to help save call center jobs, Trump pushed for a corporate tax cut bill that gives companies a 50% tax break on their foreign profits - making it financially rewarding for them to move our jobs overseas.14

On two separate occasions, a group of Senators wrote Trump asking him to issue an executive order preventing federal contracts from going to companies that send call center jobs overseas, and CWA President Chris Shelton even asked him to do so during an in person during a meeting in the Oval Office. He never responded.15

Trump has broken his campaign promise to take on companies that move good jobs overseas—instead, he's given over $115 billion in federal contracts to companies that are offshoring jobs.16

Trump failed to prepare the nation for the COVID-19 pandemic, opposes hazard pay for essential workers, and has given employers a free pass to lower safety standards:

Trump failed to secure enough Personal Protective Equipment for essential workers during the COVID-19 crisis and has weakened protections for workers who are concerned about working in unsafe environments.17

Trump refused to use the Defense Production Act to get our IUE-CWA manufacturing members back to work producing ventilators or PPE and instead used it to force meatpacking plants to open despite thousands of workers getting infected on the job in unsafe working conditions.18

Trump promised to veto the Heroes Act, which would give essential workers premium “hazard” pay and expand paid leave and unemployment insurance for those impacted by the Coronavirus.19

Trump opposed providing aid to help state and local governments continue providing services and keep workers on payroll—he suggested instead that it might make sense to allow states to declare bankruptcy.20

Trump’s OSHA has lowered standards meant to protect workers from getting sick at work and given employers a free pass if they fail to follow even those minimal requirements.21

[beardedmrbean]

People still thinking the president or any other single world leader has any say on the sway of the economy and the price of things is wild. Trump becoming president again won't change inflation or any of that, and he's a clown for thinking he can, just as much as he is for anything else that clumsily tumbles out of his mouth from his syphilitic brain.

The only thing him becoming president again will affect in economic regard is it will arguably get potentially worse; all the billionaire parasites back him, because they know he'll be fine with them continuing to greedily gouge the rest of us. Remember: they saw record profits equal to the number which was the net amount that the middle class lost, during 2020/the first year of the pandemic.

America is kind of fucked for the next four years regardless. We haven't had such a "pick the lesser of two evils" choice like this in a long, long time.

POTUS sets the budget and economic policy for the fiscal year, congress approves it or makes changes and sends it back.

State department with all the various ambassadors and such that do the wheeling and dealing with other countries on trade deals are part of the executive branch, of which the president is the head.

The only thing him becoming president again will affect in economic regard is it will arguably get potentially worse; all the billionaire parasites back him, because they know he'll be fine with them continuing to greedily gouge the rest of us.

Three years ago, Joe Biden spoke onstage at a think tank event, opining on wealth in America. “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble,” he explained. “The folks at the top aren’t bad guys. I get in trouble in my party when I say wealthy Americans are just as patriotic as poor folks. I’ve found no distinction.”

And, based on who they supported during the 2020 election, billionaires don’t think Joe Biden is such a bad guy, either. About 25% of America’s billionaires donated to his election efforts, either directly or through a spouse, according to an analysis of records filed with the Federal Election Commission. By contrast, Donald Trump received money from only 14% of American billionaires.

The 230 Biden backers include the founders of companies like Patagonia, DoorDash and Netflix, Democratic megadonors like George Soros and Henry Laufer, as well as billionaire members of some of the country’s richest families like the Waltons, the Pritzkers and the Lauders. Broadly, they tended to hail from the coasts. More than one third live in California. Another 27% are based in New York. It makes sense, then, that about a quarter of them got rich in tech and a third made their fortunes in finance. On average, the billionaires gave about $170,000 to the Biden campaign and its joint-fundraising committees, which split their receipts with the Democratic Party.

Mike Bloomberg never donated directly to Biden’s campaign, but he threw $100 million into super-PACs supporting the Democratic nominee. ___________________________________________

America is kind of fucked for the next four years regardless. We haven't had such a "pick the lesser of two evils" choice like this in a long, long time.

Covid messed a bunch of stuff up the economy was one of the bigger things for sure, right up till then things were starting to look like they were going to pick up big time for us over here.

Successful renegotiation of NAFTA that looked to put more money in everyone's pockets especially Mexican citizens in Mexico because of the various worker protections baked into the agreement.

Had a good trade deal with China ready to go and both sides were on board, that one would have favored us here in a lot of places too, we had some pretty good leverage at the time that helped.

Not sure if he managed to get NATO countries to start paying their fair share or not, but he did try.

President can only do so much it's true, it takes two to tango so the nations we're trying to set up trade deals with need to play ball as well, that and the congressional rubber stamp.

Guy made some bad moves too, printing trillions of dollars was not a good plan for one, but that's not the point really.

Point is that the president as the head of the executive branch has a lot to say about the economic future of the nation.

Another point is ya I agree, giant douche or turd sandwich.

I won't vote for either, I'll try and find someone I can agree with on the majority of issues so long as they don't cross any of my red lines.

[that-starlit-wanderer]

Historically the primary argument in Canada against closer integration with the US, particularly up to and including the 1980s when the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement was signed (forerunner to NAFTA) was always that this would lead to increasing US cultural dominance in Canada and this was clearly a bad thing so we'd better be careful! I have many objections to that argument but maybe the most relevant is that even if that was a fight worth fighting, and even if an enemy could actually be identified, it was never a winnable fight. I also happen to think it wasn't a desirable fight and that most people in Canada would agree with that even if many wouldn't want to admit it.

(I guess I should clarify that when I say Canada in that last sentence I'm specifically talking about English-speaking Canada. Quebec is...a different story.)

[frasermints]

the fact that nearly every single usamerican can text and call canada and mexico without it counting toward their international plan because of some fuckass telecom agreement but canadian and mexican cell plans don't include that as standard is fucking insane to me what is NAFTA for if not to facilitate free trade what is free trade if not also communication I SHOULD BE ABLE TO SPEAK ON THE PHONE WITH MY FRIENDS FOR FREE

[rabbitcruiser]

National Spicy Guacamole Day

Grab a chip and prepare for some heat: National Spicy Guacamole Day is on November 14. No longer solely the choice of Super Bowls and burritos, spicy guac has been making big moves through the culinary scene! From party dips to burgers and everything in-between, there’s always a reason for spicy guac. So pick some avocados and get mashing!

History of National Spicy Guacamole Day

On National Guacamole Day, sure, we celebrate the great green goo that is good guac. But on National Spicy Guacamole Day, we’re here specifically for the extra kick that goes with adding chile peppers to that same green stuff. Because if you’ve ever tried chugging water after accidentally biting into a serrano or a jalapeño, you know there’s no rush that comes nearly as close to that feeling that your tongue is going to burn off. 

Various global civilizations have been upping the ante in regards to the kick that comes from spicy peppers for centuries. Chile peppers are native to the Middle Americas and Mexico, all the way to the middle of South America and have been a staple in Aztec, Mayan, and Andean cuisine for centuries before the Europeans came and shipped those peppers worldwide. Likewise, in Asia, the Sichuan pepper, which actually creates a numbing sensation rather than a spicy one, has been an integral part of Sichuan cooking for even longer. 

By contrast, guacamole, as we know it today, could not have even been possible until at least the 1490s after Columbus made his second journey to the Americas, dropping off Asian spices such as cumin and the Persian lime in the land of avocados. In fact, the dish actually developed out of an Aztec staple that translates to avocado sauce. It was pretty much just mashed avocados and salt. Over time, the dish spread throughout the Americas, and even to Europe, and variations on avocado sauces with add-ins (some of them spicy) eventually led to the classic guac as we know it today. 

National Spicy Guacamole Day falls during prime football season, where the stuff is consumed by the pounds on tortilla-chip vessels as a critical game-time snack.

National Spicy Guacamole Day timeline

750 B.C.

Avocado Trees Appear in the Americas

Archaeologists have traced the avocado plant to 750 B.C. in what would later become Mexico and South America, laying the foundations for the dish.

16th century

Guacamole is First Recorded

Spicy guacamole is first recorded as “āhuacamolli” upon the Spanish arrival to the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan.

1993

Chipotle Opens

The popular chain (and its legendary guac) opens a small restaurant in Denver, CO, to complement the area’s growing burrito fascination.

1994

NAFTA

The U.S., Canada, and Mexico enter into the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, prompting the U.S. to quickly lift restrictions on avocado imports.

National Spicy Guacamole Day FAQs

Where are the best peppers to use to make spicy guacamole? 

Jalapeño is the most popular, and most accessible, pepper option. Serrano peppers are a little bit smaller and pack an even mightier punch for those that like to walk on the wild side. Regardless, don’t touch your eyes when you’re cutting!

Why does spicy guac cost extra?

There’s no doubt that guac and spicy guac cost a bit more than, say, salsa or queso at your favorite cantina. Although, occasionally, an avocado shortage is to blame, this is typically because of the amount of water needed to grow avocados, along with transportation costs and the labor involved in creating guac, from start to finish. 

What’s the difference between National Guacamole Day and National Spicy Guacamole Day?

National Spicy Guac Day celebrates the classic kick that jalapeños, serranos, or another spicy pepper adds to the popular dip, wherease National Guacomole Day celebrates the dip in in all its glorious forms. 

HOW TO CELEBRATE NATIONAL SPICY GUACAMOLE DAY

Make your own spicy guacamole: Sure, it’s easier to grab guac from your neighborhood Chipotle, but rather than doing that, grab a couple of avocados, some spicy peppers, and try out the old mortar and pestle. For added effect, throw on some salsa music and have a solo dance party to celebrate your delicious dip.

Throw a spicy guacamole guac-off: Grab your friends, a few pounds of avocados and serranos, and hit the kitchen! Making guacamole is fine and dandy, and sharing it is even better. But a friendly competition to see who really has the lowdown on the best kickin’ guac recipe? That takes the mole!

Host a spicy guac in the face: Put your throwing arm to the test with this spin on the classic pie in the face. Instead of sugar and whipped cream, indulge in a faceful of spicy, salty, zesty guac! What better way to sample dips from the guac-off than by seeing who can take a fistful of the green stuff in the face.

WHY WE LOVE NATIONAL SPICY GUACAMOLE DAY

Avocados are grown all over the world: If you’re familiar with the ‘Avocados from Mexico’ jingle, you know Mexico is one of the fruit’s most viable producers. However, avocados can also be found growing in California, Peru, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Spicy guacamole can be healthy: If you’re unsure of guacamole because of the high concentrations of fat in avocados, fear not. Avocados are an excellent source of monounsaturated fat (the good kind!) and they’re also rich in vitamins C, E, and K. Bonus, the peppers that make spicy guac, well, spicy, are rich in vitamins A and C, as well as potassium and antioxidants. Dip up!

Spicy guac goes well with anything: You don’t need a tortilla chip to enjoy spicy guacamole. Grab some carrots, cucumber, or even a whole crudité platter to dip in the stuff, or, better yet, throw it on a burger for a zesty, south-of-the-border spin.

Source

[nicklloydnow]

“This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.

Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative -- destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base - 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.

“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim writes. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”

Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.

All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.

We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party. Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death. They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.

Pope John Paul II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled “Laborem exercens,” or “Through Work.” He attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work was merely an exchange of money for labor. Work, he wrote, should not be reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity. It allowed us to build a relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.

The pope castigated unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages, automation and a lack of job security as violations of human dignity. These conditions, he wrote, were forces that negated self-esteem, personal satisfaction, responsibility and creativity. The exaltation of the machine, he warned, reduced human beings to the status of slaves. He called for full employment, a minimum wage large enough to support a family, the right of a parent to stay home with children, and jobs and a living wage for the disabled. He advocated, in order to sustain strong families, universal health insurance, pensions, accident insurance and work schedules that permitted free time and vacations. He wrote that all workers should have the right to form unions with the ability to strike.

We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/#we-used-to-make-things

There's this great throwaway line in 1992's Sneakers, where Dan Aykroyd, playing a conspiracy-addled hacker/con-man, is feverishly telling Sydney Poitier (playing an ex-CIA spook) about a 1958 meeting Eisenhower had with aliens where Ike said, "hey, look, give us your technology, and we'll give you all the cow lips you want."

Poitier dismisses Aykroyd ("Don't listen to this man. He's certifiable"). We're meant to be on Poitier's side here, but I've always harbored some sympathy for Aykroyd in this scene.

That's because I often hear echoes of Aykroyd's theory in my own explanations of the esoteric bargains and plots that produced the world we're living in today. Of course, in my world, it's not presidents bargaining for alien technology in exchange for cow-lips – it's the world's wealthy nations bargaining to drop trade restrictions on the Global South in exchange for IP laws.

These bargains – which started as a series of bilateral and then multilateral agreements like NAFTA, and culminated in the WTO agreement of 1999 – were the most important step in the reordering of the world's economy around rent-extraction, cheap labor exploitation, and a brittle supply chain that is increasingly endangered by the polycrisis of climate and its handmaidens, like zoonotic plagues, water wars, and mass refugee migration.

Prior to the advent of "free trade," the world's rich countries fashioned debt into a whip-hand over poor, post-colonial nations. These countries had been bankrupted by their previous colonial owners, and the price of their freedom was punishing debts to the IMF and other rich-world institutions in exchange for loans to help these countries "develop."

Like all poor debtors, these countries were said to have gotten into their predicament through moral failure – they'd "lived beyond their means."

(When rich people get into debt, bankruptcy steps in to give them space to "restructure" according to their own plans. When poor people get into debt, bankruptcy strips them of nearly everything that might help them recover, brands them with a permanent scarlet letter, and subjects them to humiliating micro-management whose explicit message is that they are not competent to manage their own affairs):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

So the poor debtor nations were ordered to "deregulate." They had to sell off their state assets, run their central banks according to the dictates of rich-world finance authorities, and reorient their production around supplying raw materials to rich countries, who would process these materials into finished goods for export back to the poor world.

Naturally, poor countries were not allowed to erect "trade barriers" that might erode the capacity of this North-South transfer of high-margin goods, but this was not the era of free trade. It wasn't the free trade era because, while the North-South transfer was largely unrestricted, the South-North transfer was subject to tight regulation in the rich world.

In other words, poor countries were expected to export, say, raw ore to the USA and reimport high-tech goods, with low tariffs in both directions. But if a poor country processed that ore domestically and made its own finished goods, the US would block those goods at the border, slapping them with high tariffs that made them more expensive than Made-in-the-USA equivalents.

The argument for this unidirectional trade was that the US – and other rich countries – had a strategic need to maintain their manufacturing industries as a hedge against future geopolitical events (war, but also pandemics, extreme weather) that might leave the rich world unable to provide for itself. This rationale had a key advantage: it was true.

A country that manages its own central bank can create as much of its own currency as it wants, and use that money to buy anything for sale in its own currency.

This may not be crucial while global markets are operating to the country's advantage (say, while the rest of the world is "willingly" pricing its raw materials in your country's currency), but when things go wrong – war, plague, weather – a country that can't make things is at the rest of the world's mercy.

If you had to choose between being a poor post-colonial nation that couldn't supply its own technological needs except by exporting raw materials to rich countries, and being a rich country that had both domestic manufacturing capacity and a steady supply of other countries' raw materials, you would choose the second, every time.

What's not to like?

Here's what.

The problem – from the perspective of America's ultra-wealthy – was that this arrangement gave the US workforce a lot of power. As US workers unionized, they were able to extract direct concessions from their employers through collective bargaining, and they could effectively lobby for universal worker protections, including a robust welfare state – in both state and federal legislatures. The US was better off as a whole, but the richest ten percent were much poorer than they could be if only they could smash worker power.

That's where free trade comes in. Notwithstanding racist nonsense about "primitive" countries, there's no intrinsic defect that stops the global south from doing high-tech manufacturing. If the rich world's corporate leaders were given free rein to sideline America's national security in favor of their own profits, they could certainly engineer the circumstances whereby poor countries would build sophisticated factories to replace the manufacturing facilities that sat behind the north's high tariff walls.

These poor-country factories could produce goods ever bit as valuable as the rich world's shops, but without the labor, environmental and financial regulations that constrained their owners' profits. They slavered for a business environment that let them kill workers; poison the air, land and water; and cheat the tax authorities with impunity.

For this plan to work, the wealthy needed to engineer changes in both the rich world and the poor world. Obviously, they would have to get rid of the rich world's tariff walls, which made it impossible to competitively import goods made in the global south, no matter how cheaply they were made.

But free trade wasn't just about deregulation in the north – it also required a whole slew of new, extremely onerous regulations in the global south. Corporations that relocated their manufacturing to poor – but nominally sovereign – countries needed to be sure that those countries wouldn't try to replicate the American plan of becoming actually sovereign, by exerting control over the means of production within their borders.

Recall that the American Revolution was inspired in large part by fury over the requirement to ship raw materials back to Mother England and then buy them back at huge markups after they'd been processed by English workers, to the enrichment of English aristocrats. Post-colonial America created new regulations (tariffs on goods from England), and – crucially – they also deregulated.

Specifically, post-revolutionary America abolished copyrights and patents for English persons and firms. That way, American manufacturers could produce sophisticated finished goods without paying rent to England's wealthy making those goods cheaper for American buyers, and American publishers could subsidize their editions of American authors' books by publishing English authors on the cheap, without the obligation to share profits with English publishers or English writers.

The surplus produced by ignoring the patents and copyrights of the English was divided (unequally) among American capitalists, workers, and shoppers. Wealthy Americans got richer, even as they paid their workers more and charged less for their products. This incubated a made-in-the-USA edition of the industrial revolution. It was so successful that the rest of the world – especially England – began importing American goods and literature, and then American publishers and manufacturers started to lean on their government to "respect" English claims, in order to secure bilateral protections for their inventions and books in English markets.

This was good for America, but it was terrible for English manufacturers. The US – a primitive, agricultural society – "stole" their inventions until they gained so much manufacturing capacity that the English public started to prefer American goods to English ones.

This was the thing that rich-world industrialists feared about free trade. Once you build your high-tech factories in the global south, what's to stop those people from simply copying your plans – or worse, seizing your factories! – and competing with you on a global scale? Some of these countries had nominally socialist governments that claimed to explicitly elevate the public good over the interests of the wealthy. And all of these countries had the same sprinkling of sociopaths who'd gladly see a million children maimed or the land poisoned for a buck – and these "entrepreneurs" had unbeatable advantages with their countries' political classes.

For globalization to work, it wasn't enough to deregulate the rich world – capitalists also had to regulate the poor world. Specifically, they had to get the poor world to adopt "IP" laws that would force them to willingly pay rent on things they could get for free: patents and other IP, even though it was in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term interests of both the nation and its politicians and its businesspeople.

Thus, the bargain that makes me sympathetic to Dan Aykroyd: not cow lips for alien tech; but free trade for IP law. When the WTO was steaming towards passage in the late 1990s, there was (rightly) a lot of emphasis on its deregulatory provisions: weakening of labor, environmental and financial laws in the poor world, and of tariffs in the rich world.

But in hindsight, we all kind of missed the main event: the TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). This actually started before the WTO treaty (it was part of the GATT, a predecessor to the WTO), but the WTO spread it to countries all over the world. Under the TRIPS, poor countries are required to honor the IP claims of rich countries, on pain of global sanction.

That was the plan: instead of paying American workers to make Apple computers, say, Apple could export the "IP" for Macs and iPhones to countries like China, and these countries would produce Apple products that were "designed in California, assembled in China." China would allow Apple to treat Chinese workers so badly that they routinely committed suicide, and would lock up or kill workers who tried to unionize. China would accept vast shipments of immortal, toxic e-waste. And China wouldn't let its entrepreneurs copy Apple's designs, be they software, schematics or trademarks.

Apple isn't the only company that pursued this strategy, but no company has executed it as successfully. It's not for nothing that Steve Jobs's hand-picked successor was Tim Cook, who oversaw the transfer of even the most exacting elements of Apple manufacturing to Chinese facilities, striking bargains with contractors like Foxconn that guaranteed that workers would be heavily – lethally! – surveilled and controlled to prevent the twin horrors of unionization and leaks.

For the first two decades of the WTO era, the most obvious problems with this arrangement was wage erosion (for American workers) and leakage (for the rich). China's "socialist" government was only too happy to help Foxconn imprison workers who demanded better wages and working conditions, but they were far more relaxed about knockoffs, be they fake iPods sold in market stalls or US trade secrets working their way into Huawei products.

These were problems for the American aristocracy, whose investments depended on China disciplining both Chinese workers and Chinese businesses. For the American people, leakage was a nothingburger. Apple's profits weren't shared with its workforce beyond the relatively small number of tech workers at its headquarters. The vast majority of Apple employees, who flogged iPhones and scrubbed the tilework in gleaming white stores across the nation, would get the same minimal (or even minimum) wage no matter how profitable Apple grew.

It wasn't until the pandemic that the other shoe dropped for the American public. The WTO arrangement – cow lips for alien technology – had produced a global system brittle supply chains composed entirely of weakest links. A pandemic, a war, a ship stuck in the Suez Canal or Houthi paramilitaries can cripple the entire system, perhaps indefinitely.

For two decades, we fought over globalization's effect on wages. We let our corporate masters trick us into thinking that China's "cheating" on IP was a problem for the average person. But the implications of globalization for American sovereignty and security were banished to the xenophobic right fringe, where they were mixed into the froth of Cold War 2.0 nonsense. The pandemic changed that, creating a coalition that is motivated by a complex and contradictory stew of racism, environmentalism, xenophobia, labor advocacy, patriotism, pragmatism, fear and hope.

Out of that stew emerged a new American political tendency, mostly associated with Bidenomics, but also claimed in various guises by the American right, through its America First wing. That tendency's most visible artifact is the CHIPS Act, through which the US government proposes to use policy and subsidies to bring high-tech manufacturing back to America's shores.

This week, the American Economic Liberties Project published "Reshoring and Restoring: CHIPS Implementation for a Competitive Semiconductor Industry," a fascinating, beautifully researched and detailed analysis of the CHIPS Act and the global high-tech manufacturing market, written by Todd Achilles, Erik Peinert and Daniel Rangel:

https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/reshoring-and-restoring-chips-implementation-for-a-competitive-semiconductor-industry/#

Crucially, the report lays out the role that the weakening of antitrust, the dismantling of tariffs and the strengthening of IP played in the history of the current moment. The failure to enforce antitrust law allowed for monopolization at every stage of the semiconductor industry's supply-chain. The strengthening of IP and the weakening of tariffs encouraged the resulting monopolies to chase cheap labor overseas, confident that the US government would punish host countries that allowed their domestic entrepreneurs to use American designs without permission.

The result is a financialized, "capital light" semiconductor industry that has put all its eggs in one basket. For the most advanced chips ("leading-edge logic"), production works like this: American firms design a chip and send the design to Taiwan where TSMC foundry turns it into a chip. The chip is then shipped to one of a small number of companies in the poor world where they are assembled, packaged and tested (AMP) and sent to China to be integrated into a product.

Obsolete foundries get a second life in the commodity chip ("mature-node chips") market – these are the cheap chips that are shoveled into our cars and appliances and industrial systems.

Both of these systems are fundamentally broken. The advanced, "leading-edge" chips rely on geopolitically uncertain, heavily concentrated foundries. These foundries can be fully captured by their customers – as when Apple prepurchases the entire production capacity of the most advanced chips, denying both domestic and offshore competitors access to the newest computation.

Meanwhile, the less powerful, "mature node" chips command minuscule margins, and are often dumped into the market below cost, thanks to subsidies from countries hoping to protect their corner of the high-tech sector. This makes investment in low-power chips uncertain, leading to wild swings in cost, quality and availability of these workhorse chips.

The leading-edge chipmakers – Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, etc – have fully captured their markets. They like the status quo, and the CHIPS Act won't convince them to invest in onshore production. Why would they?

2022 was Broadcom's best year ever, not in spite of its supply-chain problems, but because of them. Those problems let Broadcom raise prices for a captive audience of customers, who the company strong-armed into exclusivity deals that ensured they had nowhere to turn. Qualcomm also profited handsomely from shortages, because its customers end up paying Qualcomm no matter where they buy, thanks to Qualcomm ensuring that its patents are integrated into global 4G and 5G standards.

That means that all standards-conforming products generate royalties for Qualcomm, and it also means that Qualcomm can decide which companies are allowed to compete with it, and which ones will be denied licenses to its patents. Both companies are under orders from the FTC to cut this out, and both companies ignore the FTC.

The brittleness of mature-node and leading-edge chips is not inevitable. Advanced memory chips (DRAM) roughly comparable in complexity to leading-edge chips, while analog-to-digital chips are as easily commodified as mature-node chips, and yet each has a robust and competitive supply chain, with both onshore and offshore producers. In contrast with leading-edge manufacturers (who have been visibly indifferent to the CHIPS incentives), memory chip manufacturers responded to the CHIPS Act by committing hundreds of billions of dollars to new on-shore production facilities.

Intel is a curious case: in a world of fabless leading-edge manufacturers, Intel stands out for making its own chips. But Intel is in a lot of trouble. Its advanced manufacturing plans keep foundering on cost overruns and delays. The company keeps losing money. But until recently, its management kept handing its shareholders billions in dividends and buybacks – a sign that Intel bosses assume that the US public will bail out its "national champion." It's not clear whether the CHIPS Act can save Intel, or whether financialization will continue to hollow out a once-dominant pioneer.

The CHIPS Act won't undo the concentration – and financialization – of the semiconductor industry. The industry has been awash in cheap money since the 2008 bailouts, and in just the past five years, US semiconductor monopolists have paid out $239b to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, enough to fund the CHIPS Act five times over. If you include Apple in that figure, the amount US corporations spent on shareholder returns instead of investing in capacity rises to $698b. Apple doesn't want a competitive market for chips. If Apple builds its own foundry, that just frees up capacity at TSMC that its competitors can use to improve their products.

The report has an enormous amount of accessible, well-organized detail on these markets, and it makes a set of key recommendations for improving the CHIPS Act and passing related legislation to ensure that the US can once again make its own microchips. These run a gamut from funding four new onshore foundries to requiring companies receiving CHIPS Act money to "dual-source" their foundries. They call for NIST and the CPO to ensure open licensing of key patents, and for aggressive policing of anti-dumping rules for cheap chips. They also seek a new law creating an "American Semiconductor Supply Chain Resiliency Fee" – a tariff on chips made offshore.

Fundamentally, these recommendations seek to end the outsourcing made possible by restrictive IP regimes, to undercut Wall Street's power to demand savings from offshoring, and to smash the market power of companies like Apple that make the brittleness of chip manufacturing into a feature, rather than a bug. This would include a return to previous antitrust rules, which limited companies' ability to leverage patents into standards, and to previous IP rules, which limited exclusive rights chip topography and design ("mask rights").

All of this will is likely to remove the constraints that stop poor countries from doing to America the same things that postcolonial America did to England – that is, it will usher in an era in which lots of countries make their own chips and other high-tech goods without paying rent to American companies. This is good! It's good for poor countries, who will have more autonomy to control their own technical destiny. It's also good for the world, creating resiliency in the high-tech manufacturing sector that we'll need as the polycrisis overwhelms various places with fire and flood and disease and war. Electrifying, solarizing and adapting the world for climate resilience is fundamentally incompatible with a brittle, highly concentrated tech sector.

Pluralizing high-tech production will make America less vulnerable to the gamesmanship of other countries – and it will also make the rest of the world less vulnerable to American bullying. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe so beautifully in their 2023 book Underground Empire, the American political establishment is keenly aware of how its chokepoints over global finance and manufacturing can be leveraged to advantage the US at the rest of the world's expense:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Look, I know that Eisenhower didn't trade cow-lips for alien technology – but our political and commercial elites really did trade national resiliency away for IP laws, and it's a bargain that screwed everyone, except the one percenters whose power and wealth have metastasized into a deadly cancer that threatens the country and the planet.

Image: Mickael Courtiade (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/197739384@N07/52703936652/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Officials in Ottawa and British Columbia have welcomed a ruling under the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it found elements of the United States' calculation of softwood lumber duties are inconsistent with that country's own law. A statement from Mary Ng, Canada's minister of international trade, says the government is pleased that the NAFTA dispute panel agreed with its challenge of America's so-called "dumping determination.'' Under the U.S. Tariff Act, the Department of Commerce determines whether goods are being sold at less than fair value or if they're benefiting from subsidies provided from foreign governments.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[historia-vitae-magistras]

I'm a bit delirious now but regarding the lumber incident, is that the one last 2017? I read that Canada placed tariffs on US gypsum exports in retaliation, and even planned to impose tariffs on coal and other products made in Oregon (the hometown of that senator who advocated for tariffs against Canada but I can't remember the name). but I remember that the book I read about this was by Thomas Oatley

anyway, NA bros pettiness 😭

So preface: This is one of those topics where I am blatantly a Canadian. Like violently angry about the US bullshit on this. Like you want a topic that instantly makes me a blue-flannel, blowing-up-busts-of-queen-victoria Quebecois stereotype, this is it. My family has been seasonal loggers for literally centuries and my ancestral plot of old growth trees was obliterated in a fire this past summer so this is an emotional topic for me. That said, its BC that gets fucked more in the ass every time this happens nowadays but still.

The Canadian side is absolutely as petty about it but the consequences on the Canadian side are profound. The lumber industry beef goes back to.... fuck. The Conquest really. It's older than the US or Canada as independent states but where it really came to a head was back in 1982. But tbh, on a civics level, what it comes down too is a difference in how two nations exercise sovereignty over undisputed, internationally recognized territory. In Canada, the government, represented by the crown has automatic ownership over the vast majority of land where softwood lumber farms exist, rather than being in private hands like the US. It's an inherent aspect of Canadian democracy that often moderates our politics. And the Canadian lumber industry is a fucked up thing, I might call it evil, and GOD knows there's labour exploitation but there are usually more and better unions, labour negotiation and working conditions on the Canadian side of this argument that get shaken everytime this shitshow resurges. And it fucks over indigenous peoples and people of colour especially.

In the US, the lumber industry has a powerful lobby that takes what has often been a series of difficult but more or less even handed agreements between two governments at least pretending to operate on a more or less respectful level by using institutions like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization to negotiate. Instead of moving forward, these people turn it into a nationalist shit show that takes US economic power and says "oh you want to be a fully recognized neighbor? fuck you. take your beating and say thank you or you'll get another."

Like tbh save the Northwest Passage which in practical military terms Canada likely won't have choice but to cooperate with the US and its giant defense budget this is one of the issues where the US really allows capitalism to fuck us up in the face of American law and international trade standards. And honestly in the grand scheme of things, God knows we've got it better than pretty much anyone else who lives next to a large superpower but its really sad to see that a majority of Americans in the last few years would rather take a nationalist stance, blame Canada for being 'communist' than take their own corporations to task. Its yank consumers getting fucked over here too. It should be a fucking solidarity issue on both sides, with workers and unions demanding the adoption of more and better legislation but instead its devolved into a nationalist shit show. On both sides, honestly but its kind of hard not to feel a lot resentment when people I've known for years as kind, cooperative, pro-labour people start parroting fuck Canada over they're dirty foreign communists like its 1924 all over again.

I generally try to shy away from headcanons about specific and more current stuff like this but considering its been a major contributer to Canadian economic woes and global inflation, its a topic where Matt vomits blood and Alfred says "have you tried not being a socialist?" and gets a mug thrown at his head. They're both fucking assholes but Alfred is still driving a tank to a knife fight.

[super-lad]

Trump has no interest in maintaining long-term relationships. That’s why he has so many failed marriages and bad foreign relations. Constantly calling other leaders dumb and weak. Threatening to pull out of NATO and actually leaving the Paris Agreement, NAFTA, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Bombing an Iranian general. The Muslim travel ban. Moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Loving on Putin like his life depends on it.

[soup-mother]

we don't put fairy girls in little jars and shake them around and keep them as pets like we used to. this is probably because of the NAFTA agreement i think