Tag: Mexico

NAFTA Vs USMCA

In 2016 Trump and I had something in common…..we both disliked NAFTA….the only difference was he could do something about it and I could only bitch about it.

US, Canada and Mexico have come to an agreement on trade and NAFTA…..

Canada and the United States reached a deal Sunday night for Canada to stay in a free trade pact with the US and Mexico. In a joint statement late Sunday, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said the agreement “will strengthen the middle class, and create good, well-paying jobs and new opportunities for the nearly half billion people who call North America home.” The new deal, reached just before a midnight deadline imposed by the US, will be called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. It replaces the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, which President Trump had called a job-killing disaster.

The agreement reached Sunday gives US farmers greater access to the Canadian dairy market. But it keeps a NAFTA dispute-resolution process that the US wanted to jettison and offers Canada protection if Trump goes ahead with plans to impose tariffs on cars, trucks, and auto parts imported into the United States, the AP reports. “It’s a good day for Canada,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said as he left his office. Canada, the United States’ No. 2 trading partner, was left out when the US and Mexico reached an agreement last month to revamp NAFTA. US-Canada talks bogged down earlier this month, and most trade analysts expected the Sept. 30 deadline to come and go without Canada being reinstated.

Of course Trump’s new replacement for NAFTA has a nice ring to it……USMCA

America’s free trade pact with Mexico and Canada may be alive, but the same can’t be said for the NAFTA moniker. Once the new deal was arrived at Sunday night its new name was announced: the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. President Trump weighed in on the name during a Monday press conference, saying, “It has a good ring to it.” It’s also “a great deal,” he said per USA Today, one that should “pass easily, really easily … in theory there should be no trouble.” Congress needs to approve the agreement, and it needs to be ratified in Mexico and Canada as well. As for how one should say the name, Trump didn’t read it as a word a la NAFTA but spelled the letters out: U-S-M-C-A.

CNBC reports that while much of the deal echoes that of NAFTA, there are pivots in terms of how the dairy and auto industries are handled: US dairy producers’ access to Canadian markets will increase, while Mexico and Canada scored a win in terms of an exemption on passenger vehicles, pickups, and auto parts from potential tariffs. CNBC has much more, including details on changes that will could up the price of cars made in Mexico, which could push more of these jobs north of the border.

NYTimes op-ed states that USMCA is worse than NAFTA…….

North American business leaders are breathing a sigh of relief after Canada agreed, at the 11th hour, to join the revised North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Mexico. But before they break out the Champagne, they should look at the details.

Although the revised deal brings much-needed modernization in areas such as e-commerce and intellectual property, the media spotlight on Canada has obscured a bigger problem for the region: Under the new terms, North American trade is headed off the rails and, perhaps along with it, political stability south of the border.

But leave it to the master of business, the grad from the Wharton School, to negotiate a deal that has LESS trade in it……

The United States, Canada, and Mexico have completed their renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Being nothing, if not creative, negotiators named this revamp the “United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on Trade,” or USMCA for short. While the namers get an F for imagination and creativity, they receive an A for self-evaluation skills, as they aptly removed the term “free trade” from the title. The USMCA does not advance free trade in the world.

There are more than a few labor and manufacturing provisions in this bill that will, no doubt, lead to higher prices for American consumers. There is a sourcing requirement, which mandates that 75 percent of automobile parts be produced in North America, otherwise that automobile cannot enter duty-free. Not only are the costs of auto parts already rising due to President Trump’s trade dispute with China, they will now rise even further due to the requirement that manufacturers use more expensive domestic parts that could have been imported more cheaply.

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/10/02/leave_it_to_trump_to_negotiate_a_deal_that_leads_to_less_trade_103433.html

Is that a technique known only to those that study at Wharton?

How to cut a deal where there is less trade than the previous deal.

Foreign Policy Is Off With A Bang

We enter into our third week of thew Trump presidency….and the area that I was most concerned with, foreign policy, is making news….lots of news.

To begin with we have a new SecState……

The Republican-led Senate has confirmed Rex Tillerson as President Trump’s secretary of state, the AP reports. Senators voted 56-43 largely along party lines to approve Tillerson’s nomination to be the nation’s chief diplomat. Most Senate Democrats opposed Tillerson’s nomination, angering Republicans who considered the former Exxon Mobil CEO to be highly qualified for the post.

That was the only thing that could inaccurately be called “good news”…..

Then the president spent some time on the phone with PM of Australia and the president of Mexico……

For decades, Australia and the U.S. have enjoyed the coziest of relationships, collaborating on everything from military and intelligence to diplomacy and trade. Yet an irritable tweet President Donald Trump fired off about Australia and a dramatic report of an angry phone call between the nations’ leaders proves that the new U.S. commander in chief has changed the playing field for even America’s staunchest allies.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was left scrambling to defend his country’s allegiance to the U.S. after The Washington Post published a report on Thursday detailing a tense exchange that allegedly took place during the Australian leader’s first telephone call with Trump since he became president. During the call, the Post reported, Trump ranted about an agreement struck with the Obama administration that would allow a group of mostly Muslim refugees rejected by Australia to be resettled in the United States. The newspaper said Trump dubbed it “the worst deal ever” and accused Turnbull of seeking to export the “next Boston bombers” — a reference to Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, U.S. citizens born in Kyrgyzstan who set off explosives at the 2013 Boston marathon.

Next up was a threat to the Mexican president…..

President Trump threatened in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart to send US troops to stop “bad hombres down there” unless the Mexican military does more to control them, according to an excerpt of a transcript of the conversation obtained by the AP. The excerpt of the call did not make clear who exactly Trump considered “bad hombres”—drug cartels, immigrants, or both—or the tone and context of the remark, made in a Friday morning phone call between the leaders. It also did not contain Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s response. Still, the excerpt offers a rare and striking look at how the new president is conducting diplomacy behind closed doors. Trump’s remark suggest he is using the same tough and blunt talk with world leaders that he used to rally crowds on the campaign trail.

“You have a bunch of bad hombres down there,” Trump told Pena Nieto. “You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.”

And now for the chest thumping toward Iran…….

President Trump’s national security adviser said the US is “officially putting Iran on notice,” without specifying exactly what that means, Reuters reports. According to NBC News, Michael Flynn made the remark during a “surprise appearance” at a White House press briefing Wednesday. It was spurred by a recent Iranian missile test that Flynn characterized as “destabilizing activity.” While Flynn didn’t offer specifics on how the US may respond, three senior administration officials tell CNN they are “considering a whole range of options,” including everything from economic sanctions to military action.

If these situations are true then I would say that we are off to a rough 4 years internationally….

The “Wall” Of Today

I was wondering how long it would take to back peddle from one of Trump’s biggest applause and chants….”Build the wall”….”Build the wall”……”and make Mexico pay for it”…..thunderous applause and minutes of delirious chanting……

I did not have to wait very long….it did not make it to 20Jan17 and the official start of the Trump presidency……

Donald Trump is apparently keeping his promise to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the border with Mexico, but dropping the part about making Mexico pay for it. Insiders tell Politico that Trump’s transition team is working with Republican leaders on a plan to sidestep the need for new legislation by asking Congress to fund the wall under a George W. Bush-era law authorizing 700 miles of “physical barrier.” The sources say Republicans are considering adding wall funding to a spending bill that must pass by the end of April. They believe Democrats are unlikely to threaten a government shutdown to fight the move—especially since President Obama and Hillary Clinton were among the senators that voted in favor of the 2006 law.

GOP lawmakers declined to confirm to CNN whether Trump is planning to use taxpayer dollars to build he wall, but Trump himself had a response to the story. “The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!” he tweeted Friday morning. Reuters reports that a sheriff in Massachusetts has suggested using prison inmates from around the country to build the wall. “I can think of no other project that would have such a positive impact on our inmates and our country than building this wall,” Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, a Republican, said at his swearing-in ceremony this week.

The question is…will he build this wall?  Does anyone think this will truly stop the flow of immigrants leaving the country?

And will Mexico cave and without protests pay for something the US builds?

Another Lost City Found!

I am always interested in the Maya and their culture……after visiting several sites in Mexico I have become impressed with what man could accomplish with a string and a stick……

Newser) – Just a week after news broke of a “lost city” discovered in Cambodia, archaeologists have uncovered an ancient Mayan city among the dense foliage of the Mexican jungle. The team has dubbed it Chactun (meaning red or large rock), and says it’s one of the largest to be found in the Yucatan’s central lowlands. The numbers behind that claim: The 54-acre site would have once housed as many as 40,000 people, and evidence of 15 pyramids—one 75 feet tall—has been identified there. But the ruins don’t end with those structures, LiveScience reports.

The remains of plazas, homes, altars, inscribed stone slabs, and ball courts were found; the ball courts in particular indicate it was a prominent city, though one that met its end around 1000 AD, the team leader tells Reuters. The search team first stumbled upon Chactun by way of aerial photographs taken 15 years ago; hacking their way through 10 miles of jungle took three weeks. The archaeologists spent six weeks exploring its secrets, and hope the find will offer clues on relationships between Maya cities—the closest known was 16 miles away.

I keep hoping that eventually find more codices that will expand our knowledge of the Mayan culture….we have lost so much because of idiots priests and their devil worship bullsh*t.

New Twist To The Gun Debate

For decades the debate has been heated on both sides of the gun issue….should we control guns…should we not control guns……but now there is a bit of a new twist added to that debate.

Recently a story by the AP’s Suzane Gamboa sheds some new light on the issue.

Members of Congress may be alarmed by the surge in Mexican drug violence and its potential to spill across the border, but they grow silent when the talk turns to gun control as a solution.

Mexico’s drug violence has killed more than 9,000 people since President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006 as gangs battle each other for territory and fight off a government crackdown.

Underscoring the Obama administration’s concern over the violence and the potential for a large-scale spillover into the United States, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will travel to Mexico on Wednesday to show support for its crackdown on drug cartels.

Mexico has long tried to get the United States to curtail the number of guns — many purchased legally — that wind up south of the border, where gun laws are much stricter. The State Department says firearms obtained in the U.S. account for an estimated 95 percent of Mexico’s drug-related killings.

For his part, Obama has signaled a willingness to tighten restrictions on guns, calling the flow of drug money and guns “a two-way situation.” Yet 65 Democrats said in a letter to Holder that they would oppose any attempt by the administration to revive a ban on military-style weapons.

Congress did provide $45 million this year for Project Gunrunner, a federal program aimed at curbing the flow of guns. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, a Texas Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said he will seek another $30 million over two years for the program and $30 million more to fund efforts by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to crack down on gun trafficking.

Oh my God, I can see the letters now–they, whoever they are, will turn this into something it is not.  And this post will most likely generate interest.  I am not coming down on one side or the other, but I can see why this issue is being raised.