Norman Geras gives us the nod as well.
http://www.normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_08_31_normangeras_archive.html#106267979292139997
Thanks, norm!

Have you seen the EU’s FAQ on the WTO? The Press Office put it up this afternoon. It’s at http://europa.eu.int/rapid/start/cgi/guesten.ksh?p_action.gettxt=gt&doc=MEMO/03/169|0|RAPID&lg=EN Egad, what a load of malarky. This is the kind of self-serving crap that gives the EU a bad name.

>>
Q. How do export credits distort trade?

A. It is not widely recognised, but is nevertheless true that EU export refunds are by far not the only trade distorting tools to boost exports. Some WTO Members resort to state supported export credits for a significant part of their trade in order to capture market share in developing countries. According to an OECD study, the US used about US $ 4 billion of officially supported export credits in 1998. These practices, which are highly trade-distorting, should be disciplined in the same way as other forms of export subsidy. The OECD identified US payments and long-term credits as the source of 97 % of the world’s trade-distorting export credit subsidies. US credit subsidies are made on commodities which are already cheap, owing to the effects of counter-cyclical subsidies, giving considerable additional leverage to this instrument.
<<

In short, we’re okay, because America’s a bigger offender.

Still, decoupling is at least a politically palatable compromise, and whoever writes at Back40 has a point about adding value. The point that needs to be emphasised is that there are good reasons to carefully manage trade when you’re poor. They’re just a whole lot less good reasons when you’re rich.

“There’s an interesting article to be done on what fantasies European integration evokes from local paleocons. In Britain, it’s apparently Guy Fawkes.”

Consider:

As part of state policy to return England to Catholicism during Mary Tudor’s reign (1553-8), “A minimum of 287 people were burned [at the stake] between February 1555 and November 1558, while others died in prison. Some 85% of burnings took place in London, the south-east amd East Anglia; there was only one execution in the north . . Protestant preachers were first silenced and then put on trial for heresy . . ” [John Guy: Tudor England, OUP (1988), p. 238 - a source widely regarded as a respected standard text on the history of the period.]

“Beginning with their leader Coligny, some three thousand Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris (24-30 August 1572), and ten thousand more were killed in provincial France over a period of three weeks. To Protestants the Massacre was clear proof of a Catholic conspiracy . . All England was on fire with the news. .” [Guy op.cit. p. 278 - web estimates put the number of victims much higher, as in: http://www.reformation.org/bart.html]

“The objective of the [Spanish] Armada [in 1588] was the conquest of England. . Since Philip II [of Spain] intended the invasion to be carried out by his crack troops, an assault force of 4,000 Spaniards, 3,000 Italians, 1,000 Burgundians, 1,000 English Catholic exiles, and 8,000 Germans and Wallons was assembled in the ports of Flanders to await arrival of 131 vessels, themselves manned by 7,000 seamen and 17,000 troops . .” [Guy op.ci. p. 339]

In 1605, Guy Fawkes and his fellow Catholic conspirators planned to blow up Parliament during the state opening thereby killing King James, the first of the Stuart monarchs, and those assembled.

Is it any wonder that in consequence of this series of events, distributed over a quarter of a century, popular sentiment in England became somewhat paranoid towards Catholics and Catholicism? By comparison, the events of 9/11 in America look almost a minor incident, especially if we take into account England’s population of c. 5 million in 1600. By the estimate in Daniel Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman (1700): “In good Queen Bess’s charitable reign, Supplied us with three hundred thousand men. Religion, God we thank thee, sent them hither.”

As some measure of prevailing sentiments, the Gordon riots of 1780 in London amounted to an anti-Catholic pogrom. Pitt resigned as prime minister in 1801, in the middle of the Napoleonic wars (1793-1815), when George III opposed his intention to bring legislation for Catholic emancipation to Parliamnt and it took the combined political muscle of the Duke of Wellington, in the Lords, and Robert Peel, in the Commons, both political heavyweights at the time, to force through legislation in 1829 to accord equivalent political and legal rights to Catholics.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” [George Santayana: The Life of Reason] For comparison, recall that Benjamin Disraeli, the grandson of immigrants, became leader of the Conservatives in the Commons by 1859 and was prime minister of Britain in 1868 and 1874-80.

I hope that you might find the WTO useful links and news on www.earth-info.net of interest and use.

Best wishes

matt