Tag Archives: nafta

The Curious Case of Dr. Donald and Mr. Trump

by PearlineVentura Posted on April 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Fox Business this morning, President Trump said he’s not done with health care after all. In fact, he wants to take another swing at TrumpCare before he tackles tax cuts for the rich. Just for the record, then, here is what Trump’s domestic and foreign policy has looked like over the past two months:

March

  1. NAFTA is the worst trade deal ever. It must be uprooted and fundamentally reformed.
  2. China needs to stop screwing us on trade and North Korea or they’re in big trouble.
  3. We’re committed to good relations with Russia.
  4. Assad can stay in power. We don’t really care.
  5. Health care is dead, time to move on to taxes.

April

  1. We have a few modest changes we’d like to make to NAFTA.
  2. We had a pleasant meeting with Xi. It would be nice if they helped out with North Korea.
  3. Russia’s actions in the Ukraine, its interference with our elections, and its backing of Assad are intolerable.
  4. Assad is a monster who has to go.
  5. We’re going to try again on health care before we get to taxes.

FFS, does Trump have any idea at all what he wants to do? On health care, I gather that somebody explained to him yet again why tax cuts for billionaires will be procedurally easier if they gut health care first. So now he’s on board with taking another run at it. I suppose that he’ll forget the explanation shortly, though, and make yet another U-turn until someone explains it again.

I dunno. The first few twists in this show were entertaining, but the writers are getting lost lately. In just the past few episodes they’ve given us an EPA administrator who wants additional security to protect him from his own employees; a press secretary whose can-you-top-this bloopers now include a defense of Hitler; a fresh-faced son-in-law they don’t quite know what to do with; and a president who’s ready to go to war because of what he sees on Fox News. I like quirky characters as much as the next guy, but this is getting to be a little much.

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The Curious Case of Dr. Donald and Mr. Trump

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In Face of Corn Boycott, Trump Decides NAFTA Not So Bad After All

by KristanWynne Posted on March 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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Mexico is threatening to use the power of corn to fight Donald Trump’s tough talk on trade:

As President Trump threatens Mexico with drastic changes on trade, its leaders are wielding corn as a weapon. Mexico’s Senate is considering legislation calling for a boycott of U.S. corn, and the government has begun negotiating with Argentina and Brazil to import corn from those nations tax-free. The threat of a boycott is Mexico’s latest and perhaps cleverest attempt to fight back against Trump, whose threats to pull out of free trade agreements and slap a 20% import tax on Mexican products have shaken confidence in Mexico’s economy.

And apparently it’s working:

The Trump administration is signaling to Congress it would seek mostly modest changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement in upcoming negotiations with Mexico and Canada, a deal President Donald Trump called a “disaster” during the campaign.

….The draft, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, talks of seeking “to improve procedures to resolve disputes,” rather than eliminating the panels. The U.S. also wouldn’t use the Nafta negotiations to deal with disputes over foreign currency policies or to hit numerical targets for bilateral trade deficits, as some trade hawks have been urging.

….Jeffrey Schott, a trade scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics…noted that a number of the proposed negotiating objectives echo provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade pact among Pacific Rim countries. Mr. Trump campaigned heavily against the TPP.

Do not underestimate the power of corn! Alternatively, maybe corn has nothing to do with it. Maybe Trump was just blathering all along and never really had any intention of getting tough with Mexico. In the end, he’ll build a few more miles of fencing, make a few modest changes to NAFTA, and then call it the greatest boon to the working man since the Wagner Act. I’ve also read a few pieces recently about China, and apparently all those Goldman Sachs folks he hired have talked Trump into backing down on a trade war there too. I guess Goldman Sachs has to be good for something.

Anyway, having given up on Mexico and China, now Trump is going after the ultra-conservatives of the House Freedom Caucus:

I’ll bet they’re scared shitless. Trump is demonstrating that his talk may be big, but he can’t make it stick. In his first two months, he’s failed on his immigration order and his health care plan, has no chance of building his wall, and has backed down on Mexico and China. His bark is unquestionably worse than his bite.

The health care bill would have flamed out in the Senate anyway. The HFC did everyone a favor by getting it off the agenda quickly so Congress could move on to important matters like cutting taxes for the rich.

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In Face of Corn Boycott, Trump Decides NAFTA Not So Bad After All

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Trump Just Met With the Mexican President—and Didn’t Ask Him to Pay for the Wall

by AngeliaMajeski Posted on August 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump traveled all the way to Mexico City on Wednesday to meet with Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, but by his own account, he didn’t ask the Mexican leader to pay for a border wall between the United States and Mexico—a key promise of his campaign. Peña Nieto, for his part, opted not to chasten Trump for the insulting comments he has made about Mexicans, including his claim on the first day of his campaign that Mexico was sending rapists across the border.

“We did discuss the wall,” Trump told reporters after the meeting. “We didn’t discuss payment of the wall. That’ll be for a later date.” Peña Nieto did not take the opportunity to say that Mexico would not pay for it, as his predecessor has done with colorful language.

The effort to gloss over the wall controversy was indicative of the general tone of the event. Each politician handled the other with kid gloves, and neither sought to take a swing. That the meeting and public statements made afterward would go this way was never a foregone conclusion.

Trump’s last-minute decision to go to Mexico to meet with the Mexican leader was a gamble, coming just hours before he is scheduled to give a speech in Arizona detailing his immigration policies. Some suspected that Peña Nieto, whose current approval rating in Mexico is an abysmal 23 percent, would use the opportunity to gain favorability by bashing the even less popular Trump—Mexicans give him an approval rating of 4 percent.

Peña Nieto did take the occasion to contradict some of Trump’s positions. Standing next to Trump, Peña Nieto sang the praises of free trade, and particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Trump regularly rails against in his campaign. But Peña Nieto did say he was open to working with the United States to revise the deal in a mutually beneficial way. Peña Nieto also took issue with Trump’s portrayal of the US-Mexico border by noting that undocumented immigration across the border peaked 10 years ago and has since declined to negligible numbers. He made the point that that Mexico actually suffers because cash and weapons flowing south from the United States fuel violence in Mexico. But his tone was conciliatory.

Trump spoke after Peña Nieto and took the occasion to claim a successful and substantive discussion with the Mexican president. He expressed his “tremendous feeling” for Mexican Americans and claimed that he has employed many people of Mexican descent. Reading from prepared notes, Trump stressed that he wanted to renegotiate NAFTA and secure the border. He said that he and Peña Nieto agreed that each nation has a right to erect a barrier along its borders. But Trump’s tone was not harsh and he talked about “mutually beneficial” outcomes for both countries. He ended by telling Peña Nieto, “I call you a friend,” and shaking his hand. With that, Trump pulled off what looked like a successful diplomatic meeting.

If Peña Nieto hoped to score political points with the meeting, he might have blown his chance. Faced with the issue of Trump’s insulting rhetoric about Mexicans, he chose to defend Trump. “Mexicans have felt offended by what has been said,” Peña Nieto said, “but I am certain that his genuine interest is in building a relationship.”

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Trump Just Met With the Mexican President—and Didn’t Ask Him to Pay for the Wall

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The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

by LoreneTanaka453 Posted on January 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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In November, environmentalists were ecstatic when President Barack Obama decided not to grant a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. But TransCanada, the company behind the project, was not so happy. On Wednesday, it filed a lawsuit against the federal government seeking to overturn the permit rejection. At the same time, it gave notice that it plans to pursue compensation under the North American Free Trade Agreement, to the tune of $15 billion.

In its NAFTA complaint, TransCanada alleges that “the politically-driven denial of Keystone’s application was contrary to all precedent; inconsistent with any reasonable and expected application of the relevant rules and regulations; and arbitrary, discriminatory, and expropriatory.”

In other words, TransCanada thinks it got misled and ripped off by the Obama administration, just to satisfy a wacky cabal of treehuggers. Now, it wants the US Treasury to cough up an apology in cash.

NAFTA is a trade agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico meant to protect trade between those countries. One provision of the agreement, Chapter 11, allows a corporation in one country to sue the government of another country if it feels that country’s regulations unfairly discriminate against it. It’s a provision that has always been highly controversial with environmentalists, since it provides an avenue for corporations to contest another country’s environmental policies, as TransCanada is doing now.

That strategy is unlikely to succeed, according to David Wirth, a professor of international trade law at Boston College and a leading expert on international environmental disputes. Wirth said he actually used this very question—could TransCanada win a NAFTA case against the United States?—on a recent exam, and the answer was pretty clearly no. First off, although TransCanada claims to have spent around $3 billion preparing to build the Keystone XL pipeline, it’s not clear that this would actually count as an “investment” that was illegally taken from the Canadian company by the US administration.

“They knew that without the permit approval the project wouldn’t go forward,” Wirth said. “So any money spent in advance is purely speculative.”

Second, although the complaint claims that “environmental activists…turned opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline into a litmus test for politicians—including US President Barack Obama,” it’s not clear how that really constitutes a legal problem.

“The president, in making a decision in the national interest, has to weigh a variety of factors, including arguments of environmentalists,” Wirth said. “Just because there was political disagreement doesn’t mean the process was defective.”

But most importantly, Wirth said, TransCanada’s complaint doesn’t distinguish between a bureaucratic trade decision that treated a foreign company unfairly—the kind of action NAFTA is supposed to prevent—and a decision made by the president for the benefit of public health and the environment.

“The intent of NAFTA was not to require governments to pay every time they take an action that’s in the public interest,” Wirth said. “It’s very troubling if every time the president makes a decision in the interest of the people, he’s risking an enormous liability of this sort.”

The US has a good track record on NAFTA suits brought by foreign corporations, having lost just one of 14 since the agreement came into effect in 1994. Wirth said NAFTA tribunals have tended to set a pretty low bar for the minimum standard of treatment foreign companies should expect to receive. In other words, TransCanada would have to prove that it was treated exceptionally unjustly by the Obama administration, not just that it had a frustrating experience.

As for TransCanada’s federal lawsuit seeking to reverse Obama’s ruling, the odds for that aren’t great either, since US courts have previously found that cross-border pipelines really are the president’s decision to make, according to Reuters.

Sorry, TransCanada. Maybe try for the permit again in 2017 if a Republican wins the White House. Until then, you might be out of luck.

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The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

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