Free Republic

While the White House is progressing on trade deals with allies including Canada, Mexico, Korea and Europe, its dispute with China looks increasingly intractable, with tariffs between the world’s two largest economies likely cemented in place for years. In other trade fights, President Trump used tariffs as leverage to reach deals. Threatening car tariffs helped convince Canada and Mexico to concede to U.S. demands for a new North American Free Trade Agreement, the president boasted. “Without tariffs, we wouldn’t be talking about a deal,” he said Oct. 1 in the Rose Garden. China is different. Tariffs aren’t simply a negotiating...

The U.S. government spends a lot of money it doesn’t need to, according to Citizens Against Government Waste, and it’s occurring at a time when the federal debt continues to rise even as the economy expands and tax revenues increase.

We deserve to Know that it is CHINA who is actively intruding into American life.

The September jobs numbers are the 2018 United States economy in a nutshell: Even when an economic report is bad these days, it’s actually pretty good. When the latest numbers first were broadcast at 8:30 a.m. Friday, it looked like a big disappointment. Employers added only 134,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, well below the levels of recent months and well below what forecasters had projected. But even apart from the usual warnings about statistical error and randomness (the true rate of job creation could turn out to be either much higher or much lower), the numbers are a...

Ramping up wind power in America would also dial up the nation’s temperatures, a new study out of Harvard found. While wind energy is widely celebrated as environmentally friendly, the researchers concluded that a dramatic, all-out expansion in the number of turbines could warm the country even more than climate change from burning coal and other fossil fuels, because of the way the spinning blades disturb the layers of warm and cold air in the atmosphere. Some parts of the central United States are already seeing nights that are up to 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer because of...

OTTAWA — From the get-go, the Liberal government’s goal in rewriting NAFTA was to get a “progressive” trade deal for Canada that was “free and fair.” So did it? While there are lots of ways to tally the winners — and losers — in the new United States Mexico Canada Agreement, or USMCA, one is to look at the six objectives that Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland herself articulated on the eve of the renegotiation. [photo caption] As part of the trade deal with the U.S. and Mexico, Canada will ease protections on dairy. [photo credit: CHRISTINNE MUSCHI THE NEW...

Bringing it in just under the wire, negotiators representing Mexico, Canada, and the United States announced a new trade deal, to be named the USMCA, on Sunday, September 30, enabling the replacement for NAFTA for which many have long clamored. With the agreement to switch to this new program, the three nations are taking some steps – however small – back in the direction of the goals that Free Trade Agreements have always promised to support, but which have been largely forgotten in the quest for their side effects. Free Trade Agreements, in fact, are not designed to reduce taxes...

THE HAGUE -- The United Nations' top court on Wednesday ordered the United States to lift sanctions on "humanitarian" goods to Iran that President Donald Trump re-imposed after pulling out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) unanimously ruled that Washington "shall remove by means of its choosing any impediments arising from the measures announced on May 8 to the free exportation to Iran of medicines and medical devices, food and agricultural commodities" as well as airplane parts, said judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf. The court said sanctions on goods "required for humanitarian needs... may have...

Bloomberg link only.

Data center equipment run by Amazon Web Services and Apple may have been subject to surveillance from the Chinese government via a tiny microchip inserted during the equipment manufacturing process, according to a Bloomberg BusinessWeek report on Thursday. The claims in the report have been strongly disputed by the technology giants. -- Just noticed this, thought I would post this. Not yet clear, whether this report is accurate. I don't trust Bloomberg, but then again I greatly suspect China. So we will see.

Unlike sales taxes, American tariffs are not applied to a product’s retail price, nor are they applied to the wholesale price. In fact, they’re often not even levied on the entire import price. Instead, tariffs are levied on the first sale price—the price paid to foreign vendors by American companies or their middlemen. This method of calculation reduces the tax burden on American consumers, but preserves the tariff’s punitive effect on foreign producers. For example, suppose President Trump were to impose a 10 percent tariff on all Chinese toasters. Black & Decker makes toasters in China. These toasters sell for...

Iran's Regime Faces international pressure and Domestic tension. By: Hassan. Mahmoudi In The 73rd session of the UN General Assembly Trump, said the oil-related sanctions will be followed by other punitive measures to thwart what he characterized as a “corrupt dictatorship” that still harbors nuclear weapons ambitions and foments turmoil in the Middle East through its support of militant groups. “We ask all nations to isolate Iran’s regime as long as its aggression continues,” he said. he added, “we ask all nations to support Iran’s people as they struggle to reclaim their religious and righteous destiny.” Meanwhile, Iranian regime claim...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said this week that the combination of low inflation and low unemployment shows that the U.S. economy is in "extraordinary times." “This historically rare pairing of steady, low inflation and very low unemployment is a testament to the fact we remain in extraordinary times,” Powell said in a speech Thursday. “I was asked at last week’s news conference whether these forecasts are too good to be true — a reasonable question.” "From the standpoint of our dual mandate, this is a remarkably positive outlook," Powell said. "Since 1950, the U.S. economy has experienced periods of...

President Trump’s first and most enduring promise has been kept, and the American worker can rejoice. A deal experts said was dead in the water materialized last weekend when Canada announced it had reached an agreement with the United States to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The deal came about as a frustrated Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a late night meeting with his cabinet. Indeed, the materialization of an agreement serving to improve America’s trade position in North America would not have occurred were it not for the negotiating prowess and vision of President Donald Trump....

I’m still going through the USMCA text (even speed reading, it will likely take a while); here’s the link to the AGREEMENT DETAILS. However, many people have asked about how the NAFTA loophole was being closed. Well, the answer is exactly what it had to be – there was really no option. The U.S. now has veto authority over any trade deal made by Canada and/or Mexico with third parties. This is what Ambassador Lighthizer described as the “Third pillar”. Last year, despite the inevitability of it, we didn’t think Canada and Mexico would agree to it. The NAFTA loophole...

MOUNT LAUREL, New Jersey–The Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a leading Republican super PAC, continues to lead the charge to deploy the Republican grassroots to defy history and hold the House Republican majority, as seen by their efforts in New Jersey’s third congressional district and documented by Breitbart News. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC endorsed by the House Republican leadership, announced on Saturday that they held their fourth “Super Saturday” to reach a record number of Republican voters across the nation. CLF is using its 40 field offices to engage with over 500,000 targeted voters in key congressional districts...

Trump Rally tonight!!

It drives the media, Democrats and more than half of America mad, but President Trump's unorthodox, jam-your-opponent style can be effective. What he's done: He erased NAFTA, as a word, and replaced the trade pact with a different name (the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA) and better terms for America. Sure, he infuriated Canada and Justin Trudeau, but he delivered the goods. (And helped some farm-state candidates just before midterms.) Show less His tax cut, jammed through last year, continues to juice a red hot economy that has consumers confident, stocks soaring, joblessness sinking. His wild, improvisational press conferences and...

A senior software engineer at Google with responsibility for a key feature of Google’s search engine labeled Tennessee Senate candidate Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) a “violent thug” and a “terrorist,” who Google shouldn’t “negotiate” with, according to internal emails obtained by Breitbart News. The employee also defended the censorship of her campaign ads on social media. The comments took place in an internal email discussion that began on June 19 this year. The topic of discussion was Rep. Blackburn’s Fox News op-ed of the same month, which urged Silicon Valley companies to address bias against conservatives on their platforms. Blackburn,...

California has become the first state in the US to require publicly traded companies to include women on their board of directors. Governor Jerry Brown signed the new measure – which necessitates at least one female director on the board of each California-based public operation by the end of 2019 – into law on Sunday. Firms will need up to three female directors by the end of 2021, depending on the size of their boards. Hundreds of companies will be affected by the law and those who violate it can be fined $100,000 (£76,600) for a first violation and $300,000...