Tag: NAFTA

The Free Trade Con

As Americans we pretend that we are down with the concept of Free Trade…..but in reality there are very few voters who know what the term means and we voted a dim wit into the presidency with the promise of more “Free Trade”…….

First let us define “Free Trade”…… Free trade is a policy to eliminate discrimination against imports and exports. Buyers and sellers from different economies may voluntarily trade without a government applying tariffs, quotas, subsidies or prohibitions on goods and services. Free trade is the opposite of trade protectionism or economic isolationism. (Trump shot that concept in the ass!)

Politically, a free-trade policy may be the absence of any trade policies, so a government doesn’t need to take specific action to promote free trade. This hands-off stance is referred to as “laissez-faire trade” or trade liberalization. Governments with free-trade agreements do not necessarily abandon all control of import and export taxation. In modern international trade, few free trade agreements (FTAs) result in completely free trade.

If you have a hard ti me with this concept we can get more simple……

https://youtu.be/sLoL99lIJzU

From the start of these “Trade Agreements” like Clinton’s NAFTA and then it went on from there….I had to write about them as well….

https://lobotero.com/2016/12/09/what-about-nafta/

https://lobotero.com/2018/10/03/nafta-vs-usmca/

The promise of a better trade economy from the dolt in the White House has done little to expand the concept of “Free Trade”…..and the GOP can NO longer claim to be the party for Free Trade as long as they enable the policies of this president…..

The whole idea of a “new” NAFTA is a con and the American people need to be aware of this con…..

Approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA 2.0 also known USMCA) will do little to reverse the problems of the NAFTA trade agreement of 1994. Nothing in the proposed replacement agreement will prevent job outsourcing, nor is there any part of the agreement that would reverse our current agricultural trade deficit. So what’s the deal with the “Motorcade for Trade” tour?

The 2018 Census of Agriculture documents the occurrence of a clear shift in farm size. Small and medium sized farms are exiting production while the number and overall size of larger farms continues to increase. We are told growth is inevitable in any business if they wish to succeed, because growth goes hand in hand with efficiency and profit.

Farmers are told they must become more efficient and adopt economies of scale and that rationale is often accepted since farm prices are seemingly always on the decline and less income per unit of production means more units of production are required if one wants to survive. This same logic is applied to most jobs: factory workers must produce more, teachers must teach larger classes, etc.—all for the same low wage.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/17/dont-fall-hype-free-trade-agreements

Voters need to know that a con job is a con job and this BS is at beast “snake oil” for the mindless.

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.

It’s All About Trade

As no doubt you are aware Our Dear Leader has been on a tear for a couple of months about trade….he has pulled out of some agreements and imposed tariffs that have started a bit of a trade war (oh joy as if the American worker did not have enough problems)

The newest proposal is the threat of the US pulling out of the WTO…of which I have written…..https://lobotero.com/2018/09/03/if-it-is-monday-it-must-be-wto/

Dear Leader has started attacking NAFTA (again) and even has some vague words about a revised NAFTA……sadly it sounds like a scam…..keep in mind that I basically agreed with Trump on NAFTA…I think it was a barbaric thing to do to American worker……that aside…I was saying a “scam”?

If the renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement were good for working people, its content wouldn’t be hidden. Just what the Trump administration and the Mexican government of Enrique Peña Nieto have cooked up we do not know, but given the proclivities of both it is not likely to be good.

That the hurried-up deal appears to be intended to force Canada, which has the strongest regulations among the three NAFTA countries, into signing on disadvantageous terms, provides all the more reason to be skeptical. And, finally, a study of the United States Office of the Trade Representative’s “fact sheet” leaves no doubt that any new NAFTA will be a windfall for multi-national corporations, at our expense.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/31/revised-nafta-shows-every-sign-of-being-another-trump-scam/

Trump is doing what has become his trademark style….he goes in kicks over all the furniture and then rearranges …in other words he tries to ax an agreement and then with a little success he can claim ultimate victory…..which it is not.

It is always about appearance not results.

And then there is China….you remember them right?

It is 10 years in September since Lehman Brothers went bankrupt bringing global capitalism to the point of collapse.  Although the crash did not finally lead to a total meltdown, it triggered a slump of 1930s proportions and for most economies the last decade has been a lost decade of low growth, low investment, low productivity, marked by debt and deficit, with virtually no improvement in real incomes for the 90 per cent.

The stand-out story of the period has to be the continuing rise of China. Initially, the economy was also badly hit by the crisis, but China was able to recover rapidly to emerge today as a major economic power, moving steadily closer centre stage in the global order.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/31/the-decade-of-a-rising-china-10-years-after-the-financial-crisis/

Keep in mind that China is our world competitor….is it really a good idea to start a trade war with them?

Something else to consider…..with all the games played by Our Dear Leader with US trade we still had a deficit……

The US trade deficit widened for the second straight month in July, reaching the highest level since February, as imports hit an all-time high. The deficit in goods with China and the European Union set records, reports the AP. The Commerce Department said Wednesday that the deficit in goods and services—the difference between what America sells and what it buys from other countries—rose to $50.1 billion in July from $45.7 billion in June. Exports slipped 1% to $211.1 billion, while imports increased 0.9% to a record $261.2 billion on increased purchases of trucks and computers. The deficit rose despite President Trump’s efforts to bring it down by renegotiating trade agreements and imposing taxes on imports.

So far, Trump’s aggressive policies have had little impact on trade numbers. The goods deficit with China rose 10% in July to a record $36.8 billion. The EU gap shot up 50% to a record $17.6 billion and with Canada nearly 58% to $3.1 billion. The July deficit with Mexico, though, plunged 25% to $5.5 billion. So far this year, the trade deficit is up 7% from January-July 2017. Trump views trade deficits as a result of bad trade deals and abusive behavior by America’s trading partners, but mainstream economists blame an economic reality that can’t be changed much by trade policy: Americans spend more than they produce, and imports fill the gap, particularly as a strong US economy encourages Americans to buy more foreign products.

Maybe things will look up next month……

This will be one of few posts of the day….I must endure about 5 to 6 hours of medical tests and doctors visits….I shall return later…..

What About NAFTA?

During his run up to the victory….Mr. Trump was adamant that NAFTA and other trade agreements were bad deals and once he was elected they would be torn up and re-negotiated…..does anyone recall this?

Well once again…if anyone cares….we may have been played…..

After repeatedly referring to NAFTA as “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere” during the presidential campaign, the Trump administration seems to be softening it’s protectionist rhetoric.  According to The Hill, in speaking to a group of concerned business leaders, Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci said that the new administration isn’t looking to “rip up NAFTA” but rather to “right-size it and make it fairer.” 

Source: Trump Advisor Says Administration Not Looking To “Rip Up NAFTA” Or Impose “Quote-Unquote Tariffs” | Zero Hedge

Another source for this statement…….

Members of the Trump transition team are trying to tamp down concerns among corporate leaders that the incoming administration may spark trade wars with Mexico, Canada and other major trading partners over the next four years.

Anthony Scaramucci, a senior advisor on the Trump transition team, told a group of business leaders convened at a bipartisan meeting by the group No Labels that President-elect Donald Trump is a free-trader who is looking to make trade deals more fair, not scrap them.

Source: Transition official: Trump will not rip up NAFTA | TheHill

Almost daily his promises are falling by the wayside….and yet NO one seems concerned that he is crapping on the deals that he campaigned on…..now if this had been Clinton it would indeed be a big deal….but as usual….Trump will get a free ride from those that he played….

A Progressive Agenda for Renegotiating NAFTA

Does anyone remember the rhetoric by the Trump camp around that dismal trade agreement commonly called “NAFTA”?

If he truly wants to renegotiate the agreement then I believe there needs to be some progressive ideas incorporated into the process…..

During the campaign, President-elect Donald Trump pledged to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada, or withdraw the United States from the pact.

Although no one at Trump Tower so far has asked me for advice (and I’m not waiting by my phone for a call), I know a little bit about this subject: Eight years ago I helped convene a panel of experts to make recommendations to another president who promised to rewrite NAFTA.

That would have been Barack Obama, who, as a candidate in 2008, was clear on the issue: “NAFTA’s shortcomings were evident when signed and we must now amend the agreement to fix them.”

Source: A Progressive Agenda for Renegotiating NAFTA

I have been criticizing NAFTA since the days of Bubba……I agree with Trump that it needs to be either changed or eliminated……my problem is I do not see Trump as doing what he promised….at least not right now….my opinion could change in the future but it will take some work….so far none of his appointees have impressed me with their resolve.

I’d put Bill ‘in charge of revitalizing the economy’

Oh Crap!

I have never heard 9 more terrifying words uttered.  It sent a shiver up my spine.

These words were spoken by candidate Hillary Clinton when asked what job would she have for her husband if she is elected…..

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is beginning to hint at what role her husband, former President Bill Clinton, could have in her administration if elected president.

At a campaign stop in Fort Mitchell, Ky., Clinton said her husband would be “in charge of revitalizing the economy.”

Clinton said something similar at a campaign event in early May, saying she would bring him out of retirement to create jobs.

“He’s got more ideas a minute than anybody I know,” Clinton said. “Gotta put people back to work and make it happen. So we’re going to give it all we’ve got, absolute full-in 100 percent effort, because I worry we won’t recognize our country if we don’t do this.”

Now I know she wants history to be kind to her hubby but I do not have to be……Bubba’s signature policy NAFTA did more to kill the US manufacturing base than any policy before and his insistence that Glass-Steagall be repelled is what let banks go batcrap crazy that caused the economic collapse in 2007.

All I can say is that she is praying that the American voter has the attention span of a gnat and that they have the memory of a puppy.

People please before you vote for Clinton do a little reading or research and see what we got with the first Clinton in office……none of it is pretty.

Please do not let it happen again.

Keystone: Resurrecting The Dead

For a couple of years there was an amazing debate about the Keystone XL pipeline….you know the one…..it would carry Canadian oil from Northern Canada through the US to Houston for import to China and other points of call…

Toward the end of last year Obama put the screws to the Keystone project……

Just ahead of the president’s big speech on climate change, the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein breaks the news that President Obama will ask Secretary of State John Kerry to reject the Keystone XL pipeline if State finds the pipeline increases carbon emissions. It’s huge news that took environmentalists completely by surprise. They didn’t expect the president to address Keystone in his speech — he’s avoided discussing the pipeline at all since issuing an executive order to have State study the environmental impact some time ago.

(Salon.com)

With the announcement the peasants (environmentalists) danced…..a victory…..finally a victory!  Got another think coming…….

Now this brings me to NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement…..that worthless piece of crap that Clinton signed into law that has made so much inequality possible….. just what does this have to do with the Keystone?  You might query…….

News breaking today that Canada will take the US to court using NAFTA to re-start the project……

TransCanada could file a complaint against the U.S. if the Obama administration rejects its Keystone XL pipeline, thanks to a North American Free Trade Agreement provision that allows foreign firms to challenge the U.S. on decisions that threaten investments, President and CEO Russ Girling said. Observers say the company can make a strong argument against the U.S. under the international law. However, Shawn Howard, team lead for issues management and media relations at TransCanada, said the company is focusing its efforts on getting approval for the project instead of pursuing such a move.

If the court decides in Canada’s favor you may all thank Bill Clinton for giving them the ammunition to help destroy the environment of the US if there is a disaster……but they will not ….in the end it will be Obama’s fault….just like everything else happening in the country today…..

I thought that any celebrations was a bit premature…..and apparently I was right…..

Oops! There Goes Another Primary Promise!

At the height of his primary-season contest against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, Obama said the United States should use the “hammer” of threatening to withdraw from NAFTA if Canada and Mexico did not agree to change the pact.  To that I wrote that there would be no renegotiation of NAFTA.  I said that it was a primary promise that would go nowhere.  Damn!  I do so enjoy being a seer!

Pres. Obama wants to work with the leaders of Canada and Mexico to strengthen the North American Free Trade Agreement without renegotiating it, his top trade envoy said.

Obama promised last year to add “enforceable” labor and environmental provisions to the core of the text agreement and change investment provisions that critics say give business too much leeway to flout government regulations.

“The three leaders are all of the mind that we should look for ways to strengthen NAFTA,” U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said Monday. “I think they can be addressed without reopening the agreement.”

Obama pledged during the presidential election campaign that he would use the threat of opting out of NAFTA to force the Canadians and Mexicans to accept new standards for labor and the environment.

The partial reform miscalled free trade, which consists in the mere abolition of protection — the mere substitution of a revenue tariff for a protective tariff — cannot help the laboring classes, because it does not touch the fundamental cause of that unjust and unequal distribution which, as we see today, makes “labour a drug and population a nuisance” in the midst of such a plethora of wealth that we talk of over-production. True free trade, on the contrary, leads not only to the largest production of wealth, but to the fairest distribution. It is the easy and obvious way of bringing about that change by which alone justice in distribution can be secured, and the great inventions and discoveries which the human mind is now grasping can be converted into agencies for the elevation of society from its very foundations.

Agreements like NAFTA, CAFTA, etc are not promoting free trade.  They are however, destroying the manufacturing sector in the US.  It did however promote the spread of globalization which in turn out sourced thousands of American jobs to overseas locations.