NAFTA

PRIMARY BC TRUMP TALKED ABOUT IT 2024 ELECTION

SEE GLOBALIZATION/ OUTSOURCING

It’s not about immigrants taking jobs from working-class Americans.

After “reforming” our immigration laws in 1986, Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring people who are here without documentation (even though those employers were — and are — committing a crime by hiring undocumented workers).

As a result, entire industries like construction and meatpacking that once provided good union jobs have been de-unionized, their former American-citizen union employees replaced by low-wage workers without documentation.

And when the spotlight gets shined on those industries, Republicans are more than happy to put poor, hard-working brown people in jail, but there’s no way they’re ever going to go after wealthy white employers. The Trump administration, for example, kicked off the midterm election year of 2018 by raiding over ninety 7-Eleven stores, hauling off undocumented Hispanic people for the cameras they invited to the arrests. Not a single employer went to jail, although they were the ones who initiated the “crime.”

Republican politicians don’t give a damn about your job, particularly when they can find somebody else to do it cheaper, although they do have to put on a little show from time to time to keep the racists happy.

In fact, now they are fighting to bring more workers into the country who will do tech coding and be waiters at Trump’s gaudy golf motels.

It’s not about putting America or Americans “first.”

Reagan and Bush the Elder negotiated NAFTA and revived the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) so businesses could offshore entire factories. Since the Reagan administration instituted neoliberalism in 1981, over 60,000 factories have left America, taking along with them at least 15 million jobs.

Donald Trump’s rewrite of NAFTA even gave American companies a huge new tax break if they’d move their factories from America to Mexico.

At the end of the day, all Republican politicians care about is money. Greed is their principle animating force, and what binds them to their morbidly rich donors.

mta 12 23

Thirty years ago today, President Bill Clinton signed legislation supporting U.S. entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Removing restrictions on trade between the U.S., Mexico and Canada, NAFTA was aggressively opposed by organized labor, environmental organizations, and many “good government” groups for two major reasons.

First, NAFTA’s provisions prioritized “trade” of goods and services produced by multinational corporations over protecting workers, consumers and the environment.

Second, disputes brought by corporate investors directly against foreign nations over claimed “barriers to trade” were decided by unelected and unaccountable Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) "tribunals" largely composed of corporate-friendly members -- beyond the reach of citizens or even national legislatures or courts.

Reams of studies and reports on the negative impact of NAFTA on jobs and the environment has been produced during the last three decades. Less attention, but growing over time, has been the ISDS process of fining countries over their existing legal protections, which incentivized gutting those laws to avoid future financial cost with the ultimate aim to “harmonize” or "liberalize" (sweet sounding words for reaching the lowest common denominator between the three countries) laws protecting workers, consumers and the natural world.

Rules favoring corporate production and distribution and national decisions trumping democratically passed local, state or national laws is nothing new in the U.S. The Supreme Court’s sweeping interpretation of the U.S. Commerce Clause affirming the rights of “commerce” over all else is responsible for declaring 353 local ordinances, state laws and Acts of Congress as “unconstitutional” from 1789 to 2008, as identified in **Gaveling Down the Rabble** by Jane Anne Morris.

But another fundamental source of unaccountable corporate power that’s trampled over people, communities and the natural world is “corporate personhood” (shorthand for corporate constitutional rights) that the U.S. Supreme Court has granted to corporate entities since the 1880’s.

NAFTA and its renegotiated 2017 version wasn’t and isn’t ultimately about “trade,” be it free or fair, but about increasing corporate economic and political power. “Corporate personhood” is the same. It’s not about creating a predictable, uniform and safe business climate, _but about maximizing economic and political power. _

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-democrats-saved-trumps-north-america-trade-deal

no lnx

How Democrats saved Trump’s North America trade deal

Written by David Cay Johnston / Salon , DC Report January 3, 2020

Donald Trump is enjoying a burst of applause from the new trade agreement by our nation, Canada and Mexico. But he owes that applause in part to Democrats who were looking out for American interests. And he should hope Americans don’t come to understand the deep, long-term damage Team Trump is doing to our economy.

Overall Trump’s trade policies, notably on environmentally friendly electric generation equipment, soybeans and intellectual property, are big losers for America.

Congressional Democrats agreed to the revised USMC Agreement only after changes were made at their insistence to improve opportunities and competitive conditions for American workers.

For example, within a few years, 40 to 45 percent of cars must be made in factories that pay workers at least $16 an hour, a policy that affects only Mexico where average auto worker pay is just $2.60 an hour.

Showing they could negotiate and impeach at the same time, House Democrats approved the new trade agreement the day after voting to impeach Trump. (They have also passed more than 400 bills, most of them with bipartisan support, that now molder on the desk of Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader.)

“There is no question of course that this trade agreement is much better than NAFTA,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in announcing the bipartisan agreement on USMCA.

Pelosi said the new deal will be “infinitely better than what was initially proposed by the administration.”

Trump’s plan would have cut auto production

Team Trump’s initial proposed rules on automobile manufacturing would “lead to a decline in production of vehicles and parts in all three North American countries, with shifts toward greater sourcing of both vehicles and parts from outside of the region,” analysis by the International Monetary Fund IMF found.

The revised rules make that calamity less likely.

Under other changes negotiated by the Democrats, the USMCA should make it possible to organize independent unions in Mexico, will require serious safety inspections and impose environmental rules so that Mexican manufacturers do not gain a cost advantage by avoiding the costs of cleaning up their pollutants.

The Democrats failed, however, to revise or kill Section 230, which gives social media firms such as Facebook a general immunity for what they let others publish on their websites. The Russian military has made extensive use of Facebook to spread disinformation, including buying ads. Facebook founder Jeff Zuckerberg says he won’t stop the use of Facebook to spread Kremlin propaganda.

Now let’s look at some other trade issues.

Trade in solar panels

Trump regularly denounces wind power, asserting that it “destroy everybody’s property values, kill all the birds.” And in December he ranted about “fumes” and other ludicrous claims against wind turbines, which supply about 8% of U.S. electricity.

His tariffs would significantly slow the growth of electricity from wind, a form of subtle subsidy for coal, the dirtiest of fuels.

Trump’s solar panel tariffs will cost 62,000 American jobs and reduce investment by $19 billion from 2017 through 2020, according to a solar industry study.

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That lost investment means 1.8 million fewer homes will rely on solar power and there will be 26 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions that could have been avoided.

The administration argues that it is actually helping the solar industry by reducing its reliance on imported photovoltaic panels and related equipment. Who sought these tariffs? Two bankrupt solar panel makers, both foreign-owned, Suniva, a Chinese-owned company in Georgia, and SolarWorld Americas, a German-owned company in Oregon. Protecting inefficient enterprises raises costs long-term and creates a drag on economic growth.

Farm bailouts benefit richest owners

Trump’s war on American soybeans has helped spur increases in Midwest farm bankruptcies, according to the American Farm Bureau.

Of course, Trump claims the opposite. He gives credit to using your tax dollars to subsidize farmers who cannot sell their products in China, but without mentioning you or the taxes you pay.

“Our great Farmers will recieve [sic] another major round of ‘cash,’ compliments of China Tariffs, prior to Thanksgiving,” Trump tweeted on Nov. 17. “The smaller farms and farmers will be big beneficiaries.”

What Trump calls China tariffs are in reality a tax increase because the costs are born by Americans through either higher prices or, for business owners, reduced profits.

But big corporate farms, not yeoman farmers, benefit most from Trump’s taxpayer bailout, an analysis of government records by the Environmental Working Group found.

The bottom 80 percent of affected farms will get on average just $5,136. Some may collect only $1.

The EWG pointed out that the top 10 percent of recipients—the biggest and most profitable industrial-scale farms in the country—have received half of the $6 billion in aid given since August. Their average: $177,000 each.

EWG found that “the richest of the rich” farmers—the top 1 percent—received 13 percent of the federal payments. Three were given more than $1 million each and 45 got more than $500,000.

And the payments have been slow. Taxpayers have had to pay more than $1 million just in interest for late payments to farmers.

Rejecting Republican policy

Trump’s trade policies are mostly about erecting protectionist barriers, which Republicans opposed on principle before the party morphed into the Trump cult. In the short run, protectionism will result in more jobs in specific industries, that get protection and can raise prices. But the economic damage costs far more than the benefits. Trump tariffs are a net loser.

For decades the goal of American trade policy has been making it easier to trade manufactured goods. That also has the effect of enabling corporate employers to take advantage of low-cost labor in the developing world.

The net effect in America: downward pressure on wages for the “poorly educated,” whom Trump professes to love. But those who have kept their jobs in manufacturing tend to be better educated with at least some college.

Trump has been aggressively anti-union, so much so that what is still legally named the Department of Labor has morphed into the Department of Management Rights.

Team Trump delays job safety protections and kills job safety training that saves lives. Predictably worker deaths are rising where safety enforcement is falling. Overall, union rights are under constant assault. And then there’s the Trump administration love of child labor, which is both immoral and will tend to pull down wages further.

How many of the poorly educated who support Trump know about these and other policies designed to make them worse off?

Without a doubt, trade has been bad for lower-skilled manufacturing workers. In the first 15 years of this century 5.5 million manufacturing jobs vanished, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show, most of them lost during the George W. Bush administration.

Unionized workers were hit the hardest. About 40 percent of union manufacturing jobs vanished, twice the overall rate of job loss. So, the better paid were more likely to lose than were lesser paid factory workers.

A good deal for Trump

With one notable and self-serving exception, Trump has done nothing to lower the costs Americans bear by reducing trade in services. Indeed, Trump rarely mentions services Many of his comments suggest that despite having a degree in economics he doesn’t understand that there are two components of trade data: goods and services.

Trump has made it easier for him to hire foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort, under a visa program. He does this by claiming he cannot find workers in the Palm Beach area even though thousands are looking for such work. How does Trump get away with it? Trump puts a single, blind classified ad in a newspaper each year. Applicants have a very brief period to respond and must do so via fax, a technology few low-paid workers possess.

On the other side, Team Trump maintains barriers for professionals, which in turn raises costs to consumers. Americans would save about $700 per family annually if we just allowed qualified doctors trained in places like Canada and Germany to practice in the United States, economist Dean Baker calculated. That’s $100 billion per year we could save.

“The liberalization of trade in goods is largely a done deal,” according to Baker. “Tariffs are already zero or near zero in the vast majority of cases. The potential gains from further liberalization are limited” because people are spending a diminishing share of their income on goods.

The growth is in services, not manufactured products.

USMC act

CORP COURTS KILLED!

kpfa public citizen house vote 12/19/19

house dems forced fix of nafta,djt made it worse. generic drugs [// china? there is no deal yet]

Bob did not do right on environ and labor for right reasons, but b/c of US sovereignty;

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-monopolization-of-milk/

no lnx

The monopolization of milk

Written by Claire Kelloway / Washington Monthly November 21, 2019

Earlier this year, both The New York Times and National Public Radio reported that Chinese retaliatory tariffs in Trump’s trade war were accelerating the loss of U.S. dairy farms. In the first half of 2019, dairy exports to China were down 54 percent from the previous year, at a time when dairy farmers rely on exports to market a surplus of milk that’s driven milk prices below most farmers’ break-even point for nearly four years.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture has told dairy farmers that the only way to stay afloat in these tough times is to get big, or get out, while promising new markets for U.S. dairy products in theyet-to-be-ratified U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement.

These declarations reflect a powerful conventional wisdom about the plight of America’s farmers, namely, that agricultural consolidation is inevitable, and that American farmers must export their way to profitability. But that conventional wisdom, which is shared even by some leading voices in the Democratic Party, is seriously out of focus. Although trariffs and technology play a role, they are hardly the main factors in the dairy crisis.

One critical reason dairy farms feel pressure to consolidate is because milk retailers, buyers, and, processors have spent years consolidating around them—and neither the Trump nor previous administrations have done much to stop it. Now, a merger between major milk monopolists threatens to deal another blow to ailing dairy farmers, and its not clear if federal enforcers will do anything to stop it.

Last week, America’s largest dairy processor, Dean Foods, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced that it was in advanced talks to sell to America’s largest cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA). These two goliaths are a case study in how unchecked mergers beget abusive monopolies that harm both farmers and consumers. But because Dean has filed for bankruptcy, this otherwise questionable union could avoid antitrust scrutiny under the failing firm defense, which allows for mergers when one firm would otherwise go out of business. In other words, two monopolists may soon join forces to create an even bigger monopoly.

DFA is the amalgamate of a three-way cooperative merger in late 1997 and Dean Foods rose to prominence by buying up regional milk brands since the 1980s. Today, DFA has a near monopoly in many regional markets, and controls roughly 30 percent of all raw milk in the U.S., handling more than two and a half times as much milk as the next largest co-op. At the same time, Dean sells 12 percent of all fluid milk and claimed to be five times larger than its next competitor in 2013.

As detailed by Leah Douglas in the Washington Monthly last year, these giants have been accused of colluding against the interest of dairy farmers and consumers for years. Two groups of farmers have settled multi-million-dollar antitrust claims with DFA, and another has spun-off a case to seek more damages in court. On the consumer end, Dean Foods reached an antitrust settlement with grocery chain Food Lion in 2017 over allegations thatthe firm avoided competing with DFA-owned National Dairy Holdings to raise retail milk prices.

A Dean Foods-DFA merger would make this otherwise illegal collusion perfectly legal, since our antitrust laws permit collusion once it occurs within a single corporation. “The more DFA expands downstream into fluid milk processing the greater the leverage it’s going to have in a variety of ways,” Peter Carstensen, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Law School and former Department of Justice antitrust attorney, told me. So-called “‘tacit’coordination becomes much more possible because … that will be an internal corporate [decision].”

The merger means that dairy farmers have even fewer processors competing to buy their milk. “As a producer, I’m concerned about DFA making this large a purchase,” said Charles Untz, a farmer and former DFA board member. “It puts a lot of the control of the fluid market in the hands of one co-op. That sends a little fear as far as the milk price goes, because they can literally dictate what they pay for milk.”...

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WITH pod tradewatch public citizen 3 lawyer bd out of nafta 2?

boost inequality, wages down Mex 3%, flat in US

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Perhaps the biggest surprise in the midterm elections was that, unlike 2016, there wasn’t one. Polls and pundits expected Democrats would take control of the House and Republicans would keep the Senate, and that’s exactly what we’re getting.

The likely result: two years of congressional gridlock on economic policy, which requires both houses of Congress to agree on the same legislation. So, we can expect that the status quo on economic policy will mostly prevail.

There are, however, two economic issues on which the election outcome will make a meaningful difference: trade and infrastructure.

NAFTA lives

One of the first items of business in January after the new Congress gets sworn in will be the United States-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement.

The deal is intended to replace NAFTA, which President Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw from for several years. In reality, the new deal is little more than a slightly modified version of its would-be predecessor.

But before it can become the law of the land, Congress must ratify it, either by a majority vote by both houses or two-thirds of the Senate.

The USMCA’s chances were already far from assured before the Democrats took the House. Now its failure is very likely.

So what happens next?

The simple answer is not much. NAFTA remains in force. Ultimately I believe that’s a good thing for the U.S. economy because the new deal would likely shift auto industry jobs to Mexico.

With any luck, the USMCA defeat also convinces Trump to have second thoughts about his costly trade war.

But what if he tries to follow through on his threat to withdraw from NAFTA? Fortunately, most constitutional scholars say he can’t do so unilaterally. Were he able to, however, the consequences for the U.S. economy would be severe.

Roads, bridges and bipartisanship

Infrastructure, on the other hand, offers a rare opportunity for House Democrats and Trump to find common ground.

The signs of a crisis in America’s infrastructure are unmistakable: derailing and delayed trains, crumbling roadways, collapsing bridges, undrinkable tap water and a wastewater system that is a menace to public health.

The American Society of Civilian Engineers estimated that America’s “D+” infrastructure costs an average household US$3,400 annually. It also cost lives, as it did when a Minnesota bridge collapsed in 2007, killing 13.

In February, Trump proposed a fund to spend $1.5 trillion to fix the infrastructure mess, with the government putting up $200 billion and the private sector kicking in the rest.

While Democrats support infrastructure spending, the stumbling block in the Trump plan was the provision that the private sector would effectively own the roads and bridges that it builds.

While House Democrats may not support this plan, they would likely be willing to support something that mainly relies on just federal spending. And Republicans have a reason to go along as well: Infrastructure spending would boost economic growth, which is forecast to slow in 2019 – just before the 2020 elections.

While a few hundred billion dollars in spending won’t solve the U.S. infrastructure problem, it would be a good start. It would stimulate the economy and also make everyone’s lives more pleasant and less expensive – and may even end a little gridlock (pun intended).

Steven Pressman, Professor of Economics, Colorado State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

AN

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/doubling-down-on-the-biofuel-boondoggle/2018/10/14/3092cd7e-ccbc-11e8-920f-dd52e1ae4570_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2303e6fcccfd

Editorial Board

October 14 at 7:37 PM

FOR MORE THAN a decade, the United States has pursued the foolhardy energy policy known as the Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS. Thanks to legislation passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by a Republican president, George W. Bush, in 2007, the RFS illustrates the sad-but-true principle of Washington life that bipartisanship is no guarantee of wisdom. In a nutshell, the RFS required the nation’s petroleum refiners to blend ever-increasing quantities of biofuels, chiefly ethanol, into gasoline, purportedly to promote energy independence and fight climate change.

Never mind that the United States has meanwhile become a major oil exporter, due to a production boom. Never mind that the environmental harms of ethanol arguably outweigh its benefits, because it takes massive amounts of energy to distill ethanol from corn — and massive amounts of fragile farmland to grow that crop. Never mind that diverting resources into corn production for ethanol raises the price of food. Never mind all that, because 39 percent of Iowa’s corn crop goes to create nearly 30 percent of all U.S. ethanol. And Iowa is a swing state with six crucial electoral votes and a first-in-the-nation presidential caucus; whatever Iowa wants, Iowa gets, from politicians of both parties.

Hence President Trump’s announcement, on the midterm-election campaign trail in Iowa, that he would, in effect, double down on this decreasingly justifiable policy. Mr. Trump declared that the Environmental Protection Agency will draft regulations allowing the year-round sale of motor fuel containing 15 percent ethanol,as opposed to the 10 percent limitation in effect for several months a year because of air-pollution concerns related to summertime atmospheric conditions. This would incentivize gas station owners to install pumps capable of delivering the fuel, thus boosting ethanol sales.

The point is to rescue Iowa corn farmers from adverse market conditions, which include lower prices because of retaliation from trading partners against Mr. Trump’s tariffs. The more fundamental problem is that, at its inception, the RFS assumed that ever-rising U.S. gas consumption would permit refiners to absorb huge amounts of ethanol. In fact, the year after Congress adopted the bipartisan RFS legislation, the U.S. economy went into a recession, causing a collapse in the number of miles Americans drove and the amount of fuel consumed per capita. Only last year did consumption return to pre-recession levels.

Refiners face high and rising costs when they are forced either to mix more ethanol into their motor fuels or to buy offsetting credits known, obscurely, as Renewable identification numbers (RIN). Plagued by volatility and ma­nipu­la­tion, the market for RIN has turned into a major headache for smaller refiners, which often seek waivers of the ethanol blending requirement. The entire system adds enormous bureaucracy and complexity to the fuel market, with little or no benefit to consumers. E15, as the 15 percent ethanol blend is known, might cost less per gallon, but because of its lower energy content, motorists would probably get poorer mileage and have to fill up more often.

The petroleum industry has promised a lawsuit to stop Mr. Trump’s plan. While we hesitate to take sides between agribusiness and Big Oil, in this instance public policy clearly favors the latter.

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icn

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04102018/trump-trade-deal-climate-change-canada-mexico-pollution-outsourcing-nafta-usmca

How Trump's New Trade Deal Could Prolong His Pollution Legacy

BY: NICHOLAS KUSNETZ

The new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal could make it harder for future administrations to restore regulations that protect health and climate. And that's only part of the problem.

dairy got good deal on new nafta 10/18

https://www.alternet.org/economy/trumps-nafta-20-promises-deepen-economic-and-environmental-crises

After the U.S., Canada, and Mexico agreed to a new trade deal to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) late Sunday night, Trump heralded the new deal as “truly historic news for our nation and the world.”

Yet many activists and environmentalists are already critiquing the new deal,dubbed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), calling it a victory for large corporations and polluters at the expense of workers and the planet.

“This deal is a giant step backwards for people, communities and the environment,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement.

She explained that USMCA “would enshrine and globalize Trump’s deregulatory zealotry into a trade pact that would outlast the administration and imperil future efforts to protect consumers, workers and the environment.”

It many ways, the new deal promises to deepen NAFTA’s economic and environmental crises.

In the Shadow of NAFTA

Trump famously critiqued NAFTA, implemented under Bill Clinton in 1994, calling it the “worst trade deal ever made.” Yet for decades, activists across the hemisphere have denounced the agreement as terrible for workers, small farms, and the environment.

“Most people don’t know how bad a deal NAFTA was for Mexico,” Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Al Jazeera. “But a quarter-century after NAFTA, Mexican wages are about the same as they were in 1980, some 20 million more people are in poverty, five million were displaced from agriculture because of NAFTA tariff policy, and economic growth in Mexico ranks about 15 of 20 Latin American countries.”

NAFTA has also had a devastating impact on workers in the U.S.

“Americans have suffered under NAFTA’s corporate-rigged rules for decades,” Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said in a statement.

“Nearly one million U.S. jobs have been government-certified as lost to NAFTA, with NAFTA helping corporations outsource more jobs to Mexico every week,” she explained. “The downward pressure on U.S. workers’ wages caused by NAFTA outsourcing has only intensified as Mexican wages declined in real terms since NAFTA, with Mexican manufacturing wages now 40 percent below those in coastal China.”

New Deal a Win for Monsanto and Polluters

The new replacement for NAFTA is seen as a win for Trump and the various industries that are set to benefit from the agreement.

Mike Sommers, chief of the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil and gas industry lobby in the country, supports the deal, saying it would “help ensure the U.S. energy revolution continues into the future.”

Yet environmental activists and organizers were not so celebratory.

• “The [USMCA] has giant giveaways to the agrochemical industry that paves the way for unregulated gene-edited GMOs, rolls back Mexico’s regulation of GMOs, and lets chemical giants like Monsanto and Dow keep the data on the safety of their pesticides secret for 10 years,” Hauter of Food & Water Watch explained.

“The energy provisions will encourage more pipelines and exports of natural gas and oil that would further expand fracking in the United States and Mexico,” she continued. “The text also provides new avenues for polluters to challenge and try and roll back proposed environmental safeguards, cementing Trump’s pro-polluter agenda in the trade deal.”

Deeper Trade Policy Changes Needed

Other changes with the USMCA have drawn attention from the labor sector and advocates for progressive trade reform.

USMCA notably scraps NAFTA’s widely criticized Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process, which allows corporations to sue nations for discriminatory practices that infringe on company profits. (In the new agreement, ISDS has been removed between the U.S. and Canada, but not between the U.S. and Mexico.)

“This is a major change,” Wallach said. “The inclusion of expansive investor privileges and powers in the 1993 NAFTA hatched a new corporate-coup-d’etat-by-trade-agreement model that’s been followed ever since.”

“That even this corporate-compliant administration whacked ISDS means a future Democratic president cannot backslide and sends a powerful signal to the many nations worldwide also seeking to escape the odious ISDS regime,” she explained.

Among other changes, USMCA includes reforms in the auto industry. Beginning in 2020, in order to avoid paying tariffs, automotive companies will be required to produce at least 75 percent of a car in the U.S., Mexico, or Canada, up from the current 62.5 percent requirement. The reform is meant to push production away from Asia and other parts of the world.

In addition, starting in 2020, 30 percent of the manufacturing of the car must be conducted by workers making a minimum of $16 an hour—roughly three times the hourly wage of Mexican workers in the auto industry.

However, the deal will also extend patents on biologic drugs from eight to ten years, resulting in a rise in the prices for customers and a win for the pharmaceutical industry.

After the heads of state from the three participating nations sign USMCA, it will go to the U.S. Congress for a vote early next year. Critics are urging Congress to reject the new deal, and work for deeper, structural reforms.

“Failed U.S. trade policies that have dramatically boosted corporate power and harmed workers, consumers and the environment require a complete transformation,” Wallach said. “A final renegotiation package that stops NAFTA’s ongoing damage and begins the process of replacing the failed U.S. trade agreement model could obtain broad support.”

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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kpfa 8/28

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Trump's 'New Trade Deal' with Mexico Isn't New at All — It's NAFTA Wedded to the TPP

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https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/wra50.html

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http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100183300

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nafta

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http://www.ecowatch.com/nafta-renegotiations-2344471752.html

8 Critical Changes to NAFTA to Prioritize People and Planet

By Amanda Maxwell and Anthony Swift

President Trump has made renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) one of the main goals for his administration and has recently revealed the general plan to do so.

As this process moves forward, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Sierra Club and our partners across a broad range of sectors are calling on the administration to include eight critical issues among their priorities in changing NAFTA, outlined below. We want to ensure that any new provisions in NAFTA result in a transparent agreement that supports—and does not undermine—a more stable climate, clean air and water, healthy communities, indigenous peoples and good jobs.

In the 23 years since NAFTA's signing, the economies of Mexico, Canada and the U.S. have become intertwined and interdependent, with $1.1 trillion in trade moving among the three countries in 2016. During those decades, too, new issues such as climate change, clean energy and sustainability, have moved to the forefront of international relations. So, while it remains unclear exactly how and to what extent the Trump administration will change this accord, there are several critical provisions that should be included to improve the lives of people living and working in all three countries and the environments they depend on.

NRDC is pleased to ally with 350.org, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, Defenders of Wildlife, Earthjustice, Friends of the Earth, Global Exchange, Green America, Greenpeace USA, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, League of Conservation Voters, Food & Water Watch, Sierra Club and U.S. Human Rights Network in calling on the Trump administration to include the following eight issues among their priorities in changing NAFTA:

1. Eliminate rules that empower corporations to attack environmental and public health protections in unaccountable tribunals.NAFTA's investor-state dispute settlement system allows multinational corporations—e.g. ExxonMobil and TransCanada—to bypass our courts, go to private tribunals and demand money from taxpayers for policies that affect corporate bottom lines. Corporations have used NAFTA to challenge bans on toxic chemicals, decisions of environmental review panels and protections for our climate. They have extracted more than $370 million from governments in these cases and pending NAFTA claims total more than $50 billion. What's more, the cases are heard not by judges, but by corporate lawyers outside the normal court system.

2. Incorporate strong, enforceable environmental and labor standards into the core text of the agreement.To address environmental and labor issues, NAFTA created side agreements which are non-binding and have limitations. As a result, they have been relatively ineffective. To ensure that the new terms of a revised trilateral trade agreement create and uphold a fair playing field for environmental and labor conditions, these two areas must be included inside the core text of the agreement. That means that a country that fails to live up to its environmental obligations will be subject to trade sanctions similar to the existing provisions for violation of commercial parts of the agreement. This will also require that countries live up to existing international agreements and address environmental challenges such as critical conservation challenges related to illegal timber trade, illegal wildlife trade and fisheries management.

3. Protect energy sector reform from backward-looking rules. NAFTA's energy chapter limits Canada's ability to restrict production of climate-polluting fossil fuels such as tar sands oil. The chapter, written before awareness of climate change was widespread, must be eliminated. Other NAFTA rules allow renewable portfolio standards, low-carbon fuel standards and other climate-friendly energy regulations to be challenged for impeding business for foreign fossil fuel firms. Such rules must be narrowed to protect climate policies in each country.

4. Restrict pollution from cross-border freight vehicles.NAFTA encouraged a rise in cross-border motor carrier traffic without doing anything to mitigate the resulting increase in harmful vehicle emissions. Any deal that replaces NAFTA must require cross-border freight vehicles to reduce emissions in order for their goods to benefit from reduced tariffs. In addition, all cross-border commercial vehicles must be required to comply with all state and federal standards to limit pollution.

5. Require green government purchasing instead of restricting it. NAFTA's procurement rules limit governments' ability to use "green purchasing" requirements that ensure government contracts support renewable energy, energy efficiency and sustainable goods. Any changes to NAFTA must require signatory governments to include a preference for goods and services with low environmental impacts in procurement decisions.

6. Bolster climate protections by penalizing imported goods made with high climate emissions. NAFTA allows firms to shift production to a country with lower climate standards, which can spur "carbon leakage" and job offshoring. To prevent this and encourage greater climate action from high-emissions trading partners, each country should be required to impose a border fee on imported goods whose production causes significant climate pollution.

7. Require governments to prioritize policies that minimize climate pollution. While NAFTA restricts climate policies that limit trade or investment, any replacement deal must instead put climate first. This includes requiring governments to use a "climate impact test" for policymaking, in which potential climate impacts of policy proposals are reported and weighed.

8. Add a broad protection for environmental and other public interest policies. NAFTA's many overreaching rules restrict the policy tools that governments can use to protect the environment and other broadly-shared priorities. NAFTA includes no provision that effectively shields public interest policies from such rules—only a weak "exception" in Article 2101 that has consistently failed to protect challenged policies. Instead, any deal that replaces NAFTA must include a broad "carve-out" that exempts public interest policies from all of the deal's rules.

If President Trump moves forward with altering NAFTA, any renegotiations must be conducted transparently through open processes, providing the public in all three countries with the opportunity to participate. We and our partners in the environmental, labor, health, consumer, agricultural and other communities will be eager to see whether President Trumps supports a renegotiated NAFTA that supports—and does not undermine—a more stable climate, clean air and water, healthy communities, indigenous peoples and good jobs.

Amanda Maxwell is the director of the Latin America Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Anthony Swift is the director of the Canada Project and the International Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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defund the left tort ref undermines ppl right to ct, also arbitration but TPP allows

transcanada

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/another-corporation-suing-our-government-thanks-to-trade-agreements/

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Selling NAFTA

In 1990 the Mexican government hired B-M to sell NAFTA to the American public, media and politicians. B-M subcontracted this job to one of its subsidiaries, The Brock Group (TBG), a consulting firm that has done work for American Express, Bell Atlantic, Bacardi, Toyota and the Taiwanese government. TBG is headed by former senator, Republican National Committee chairman, US trade representative and labor secretary William Brock. He was certainly qualified for the job. As US trade representative, Brock engineered the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the US-Israel Free Trade Agreement, and began the negotiations that would eventually culminate in the signing of the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement.

William Brock co-chairs the Multilateral Trade Negotiations (MTN) Coalition, which was founded in 1990 to 'educate' the public-- and lobby for--the now-completed Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The coalition's members include American Express, General Motors, IBM, General Electric, Cargill, Citicorp, Procter & Gamble and other companies and trade associations. According to Malaysian activist Martin Khor Kok Peng, the MTN Coalition had a big influence on the 1990 G-7 Summit meeting held in Houston, USA, in which GATT figured prominently. At the Houston Summit, MTN held a high- profile press conference and released a report by an 'eminent persons group' on world trade.

The Contra Connection

One of TBG's top executives happens to be former Miami businessman and ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich. During the Reagan administration, the Cuban-born Reich headed the US state department's Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), whose task was to disseminate disinformation about the Sandinistas and discourage reporting critical of the contras. This outfit, whose operations were later found to be illegal by the US General Accounting Office, was staffed with five psychological warfare specialists from the 4th Psychological Operations Group of Fort Bragg. According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, "the OPD...helped spread a scurrilous story that some American reporters had received sexual favors from Sandinista prostitutes in return for writing slanted stories". In 1987, after the US Congress shut down the OPD, congressman Jack Brooks called it "an important cog in the (Reagan) administration's effort to manipulate public opinion and congressional action".

Interestingly enough, the OPD was conceived at an August 1983 meeting between then CIA director William Casey and a small group of PR industry executives. The meeting, whose purpose was to create a propaganda strategy for the Nicaraguan contras, was attended by B-M senior vice- president Kenneth D. Huszar and Philip Morris publicist James Bowling, who later moved to B-M. Their advice to Casey included the creation of a communications function within the White House, a recommendation that led to the creation of the OPD.

B-M, Mexico and the Neoliberal Project

B-M's success in insuring the passage of NAFTA encouraged the Mexican governing elite to retain the firm's services. It now has a luxurious office in the posh Colonia Anzures district on Mexico City that caters to customers like the Council of Businessmen, the National Stockbrokers' Association, the ministry of commerce and industrial development, and the Office of the President of the Republic. In addition to this, B-M parent Young & Rubicam rakes in over $100 million every year from Mexican clients. It is not an exaggeration to say that the credibility of the neoliberal project in the western hemisphere hinges on Mexico. Businessmen, politicians and neoliberal ideologues all over the hemisphere have touted Mexico as a symbol of capitalist success because of its privatization policy and its faithful adherence to the economic formulas prescribed by multilateral development banks (a.k.a. the Bretton Woods institutions). After the massive expenditure of political energy in getting NAFTA passed, business elites in both Mexico and the US are hard-pressed to put on a convincing performance in order to give credibility to future trade agreements. Bringing Guatemala and Chile into NAFTA has already become an agenda item.

However, neoliberal designs for Mexico are endangered by a series of crises, including the blatantly fraudulent elections of 1994, the embarassing collapse of the peso, revelations of drug-related corruption that compromise the Mexican elite all the way up to the president's office, a spate of political assassinations that seems to be beheading the ruling political party's leadership, and the popularity of the EjE9rcito Zapatista de LiberaciF3n Nacional (EZLN). B-M has a lot of work to do in Mexico. In the words of reporter Jon Reed, who investigated B-M's activities in Mexico, "Burson-Marsteller and other Mexican and transnational PR firms have demonstrated their effectiveness by working behind the scenes-- gauging public opinion, counseling government and corporate leaders, shaping media coverage, and facilitating elite-to-elite communications-- in short, guaranteeing that the inevitable upheavals in an authoritarian and unjust society do not interrupt business as usual".

Destroying Health Care

One of NAFTA's most nefarious consequences will be the dismantlement of Canada's government-run health care system. Since it places very strict limits on what domestic or foreign corporations can do, its more progressive features--such as compulsory licensing in order to control drug costs-- will eventually be challenged as barriers to trade. Once the Canadian system is gutted by NAFTA's notoriously secretive and undemocratic dispute resolution mechanisms, Canadian citizens will have no choice but to turn to the 'free market' for medical services and insurance.

However, American and Canadian pharmaceutical and insurance companies that want to crack open the Canadian market are frustrated by the fact that Canadians are very happy with their health care system. Worse yet, more and more Americans, especially in Vermont, are now calling for the introduction of single-payer health insurance in their country--a step in the direction of a Canadian-style system. This presents a grave problem for neoliberal demagogues, since it exposes the basic conflict between capitalism and democracy.

Enter Burson-Marsteller's health care unit, whose staff includes "a medical doctor/physician; former FDA (Food and Drug Administration) commissioner; former hospital administrator; former pharmaceutical communications executives; former non-profit communications chiefs; grassroots specialists, and former reporters" according to the senior editor of O'Dwyer's newsletter, which monitors the PR business.

B-M has plenty of experience in matters of public health. On behalf of client Philip Morris, B-M created the National Smokers' Alliance (NSA) to fight against smoking restrictions. According to John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, the NSA "is a state-of-the-art campaign that uses full- page newspaper ads, direct telemarketing, paid canvassers, (toll free) numbers and newsletters to bring thousands of smokers into its ranks each week. By 1995 NSA claimed a membership of 3 million smokers". The NSA is headed by B-M vice-president Thomas Humber and its members include B-M executives Pierre Salinger and Kennetz Rietz, as well as Peter Kelly, senior partner of B-M subsidiary Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly (see sidebar). In addition to this, B-M was hired by the A.H. Robbins company when its Dalkon Shield IUD contraceptive injured thousands of women who used it, and it is now currently promoting the 'virtues' of Eli Lilly's anti-depressant wonder drug Prozac.

The winners of the health care debate in the US were beyond any doubt the pharmeceutical transnational corporations (eleven of which are B-M clients) and the major insurance companies (which include B-M clients Met Life, Equitable Life, Aetna, State Farm and Mutal of Omaha). Now both businesses are vertically integrating themselves into superconglomerates known as health maintenance organizations (HMO's). According to Joyce Nelson, "During 1994 both the pharmaceutical industry and the private insurance industry consolidated into even bigger players on the health care scene, with B-M playing a major role in arranging the mergers among its clients". HMO's are not required to cover all illnesses or people, but can instead discriminate against elderly citizens and/or people with health problems in order to reduce operating costs.

http://home.intekom.com/tm_info/ge_bm.htm

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