Thread: BREAKING Reports: Last Minute Trade Agreement Possible as Deadline Looms for Canada t

YES!! The truth is coming out. The CORRUPT MEDIA that hates Trump was taking the position that NAFTA was preserved, NO, NAFTA IS DEAD, it is being replaced with a new US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement. There is no pipe dream of a NORTH AMERICAN UNION from a NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT any more. There will be no more "merging of nations" now, no more "free flow of people and goods". They're terminating all that crap. The NAFTA WITCH IS DEAD!!

THANK YOU DEAR PRESIDENT TRUMP AND YOUR GREAT ECONOMIC AND TRADE TEAM THAT DID THIS FOR US!!!

KEEP THE TRUMP TRAIN ROLLIN' ROLLIN' ROLLIN' FOR US. VOTE ALL RED, VOTE REPUBLICAN IN 2018!!!!

YIPPEE!! YIPPEE!!! Let the good times roll and keep them rollin'!!!

US, Canada And Mexico Agree New Trilateral Trade Deal To Replace NAFTA

The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) updates and replaces the nearly 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

World | Agence France-Presse | Updated: October 01, 2018 10:18 IST

by Taboola

US, Canada And Mexico Agree New Trilateral Trade Deal To Replace NAFTA

The new deal "will result in freer markets, fairer trade and robust economic growth," the US said

WASHINGTON:

Negotiators from Canada and the United States went down to the wire but were able to reach an agreement on a new free trade pact that will include Mexico, the governments announced late Sunday night.

The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) updates and replaces the nearly 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which President Donald Trump had labeled a disaster and promised to cancel.

The rewrite "will result in freer markets, fairer trade and robust economic growth in our region," according to a joint statement from US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland.

After more than a year of talks, and six weeks of intense discussions, the governments were able to overcome their differences with both sides conceding some ground, but both hailing the agreement as a good deal for their citizens in the region of 500 million residents that conducts about $1 trillion in trade a year.

Canada will open its dairy market further to US producers, and Washington left unchanged the dispute settlement provisions which Ottawa demanded.

This will allow them to sign the agreement before Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto leaves office December 1, the date that was the cause of the last minute flurry of activity.

Under US law, the White House is required to submit the text of the trade deal to Congress 60 days before signing -- and officials barely made it by midnight.

Give and take

The United States and Mexico had already reached an agreement on a new NAFTA in late August, and since then negotiators from Ottawa had been in Washington for continuous talks, but as of late last week officials warned time was running out.

Trump complained about the behavior of Canadian officials, and said he rejected a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, although Trudeau's office said no meeting was planned.

A senior US administration official said the final rewrite is a "fantastic agreement" and he called it "a big win for the United States, Mexico and Canada."

In addition to the changes to the dairy market in Canada, officials said it includes stronger protections for workers, tough environmental rules, and updates the trade relationship to cover the digital economy and provides "groundbreaking" intellectual property protections, the official told reporters.

In addition, it adds provisions to prevent "manipulation" of the trade rules, including covering currency values, and controls over outside countries trying to take advantage of the duty-free market, he said.

While the new deal -- which includes revised provisions on the critical auto sector -- should protect Mexico and Canada from Trump's threatened 25 percent tariffs on cars, still pending are the duties on steel and aluminum, which officials said was on a "separate track," handled by the Commerce Department.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/usmc...-nafta-1924786

Jeet Heer

an hour ago


Chip Somodevilla/Getty


Meet the new NAFTA, almost the same as the old NAFTA but with a different name.

On Sunday night, senior officials in the Canadian government confirmed that their government had reached a tentative deal with the United States for a renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Astonishingly, the new trade agreement is only a minor shift from the status quo and from previous agreements.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau smiled as he said it was a “good day for Canada.”

Bruce Campion-Smith
✔@yowflier

.@trudeau leaves cabinet meeting on new NAFTA deal declaring that it’s a “good day for Canada.”
11:13 PM - Sep 30, 2018

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The major victory for the Trump administration is that the Canadian market will be opened up for more American dairy products. But, as The New York Times notes, this opening “is similar to what the United States would have gained through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade treaty that President Trump withdrew from last year.” In other words, the most significant concession Canada made was one that it had already been prepared to make.

In exchange for easier access to the Canadian dairy market, the United States has reportedly agreed to Canadian demands that it be allowed to keep in place protection of cultural industries and maintaining the existing tariff settlement system. President Trump has reportedly promised he won’t be putting tariffs on automobiles and automotive parts manufactured in Canada. While steel and aluminum tariffs will remain in place for now, the Canadian government expects them to be lowered in short order.

The changes are mostly cosmetic in nature. There is one other significant development in the realm of marketing. The trade deal will be renamed: NAFTA will now become USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement), only one letter away from USMA (United States Military Academy).

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/1514...different-name

NEW NAFTA!
SIGNATURE TRUMP PROMISE

Nafta is Dead. Long Live Nafta

by Wolf Richter • Aug 27, 2018

The biggest problem with Nafta that hurt US workers, Mexican workers, and the Mexican economy, though it hugely benefited profit margins of global automakers and Corporate America, remains unaddressed: Wage repression in Mexico, including via “protection contracts” as condition for building a plant.


The deal was announced with fanfare at a press conference in the Oval Office this morning: The US and Mexico had reached a new deal that would govern their totally out-of-whack trade relationship.

“A big deal looking good with Mexico,” President Trump tweeted.

Mexico’s outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto was wired in by conference call. This deal is between the US and Mexico. Canada, one of the few countries in the world with which the US has a balanced trade relationship in goods and services, was watching from the sidelines.

The name “Nafta” would be tossed. “We’re going to call it the United States/Mexico Trade Agreement,” Trump said. Nafta “has a bad connotation because the United States was hurt very badly by Nafta for many years.”

The negotiations between the US and Mexico had focused on the auto industry. This is important. US automakers and component makers – along with other global automakers and component makers, including Canada’s Magna International, the largest auto component maker in North America – set up huge manufacturing operations in Mexico to benefit from its cheap labor.

Thanks to the lure of cheap labor for Corporate America, the US had a goods trade deficit of $71 billion with Mexico in 2017, the second worst, behind China. A trade deficit is a negative for GDP.

The idea behind renegotiating Nafta had been to bring some of this manufacturing activity back to the US – against blistering lobbying by the automakers and component makers, often carried out in the media. They didn’t want to lose unfettered access to this cheap labor.

There will be some new rules, including requiring more US-content in some vehicles and components. If new plants are built in Mexico, they might have lower limits on US content for the first five years, same as under the old deal. We don’t know the details yet, and some details still need to be ironed out, but what happens when a company doesn’t comply with the rules? This is key. Bloomberg reported that the two countries “are said to have agreed” that the penalty for not complying with these rules will be a 2.5% tariff, same as under the old Nafta deal.

A punitive tariff of 2.5% would be so minuscule, compared to the huge wage differential, that this is a no-brainer. More on that in a moment.

We also don’t know about the fate of a “sunset clause” that would allow the new deal to expire automatically after five years. US automakers and component makers, and Mexico had all opposed this provision, and given the pressure from the US auto industry, a watered-down compromise will likely be found.

But here is what has been silenced to death: One of the major selling points of the original Nafta was that it would create well-paid jobs in Mexico, raise wages in Mexico due to all the rules about wages in the deal, and bring up the Mexican consumer base so that they could buy US products. And these higher wages in Mexico would relieve downward pressure on US wages.

But this is precisely what hasn’t happened.

In June, when GM announced that it would build its car-based crossover Chevrolet Blazer in Mexico, starting later this year, UAW vice president Terry Dittes put it this way:
“GM employs over 15,000 production workers in Mexico, pays the workers less than $3 per hour, and exports over 80 percent of the vehicles to the US to sell here. This is all happening while UAW-GM workers here in the US are laid off and unemployed.”
By comparison, in the US, assembly-line workers at automakers earn on average $29.62 per hour (June) and workers at component makers earn $20.81 per hour.

So how is it possible that, after all these years, wages in Mexico are still so low?
An AP report last year shed some light on a scheme of wage repression in auto manufacturing that makes this possible. The report cited an Audi plant in the state of Puebla, inaugurated in 2016, where workers made on average $2.25 an hour.
Government records cited by the AP show that in January 2014, when the factory was being discussed with local officials, Volkswagen, which owns Audi, signed a union contract that specified that wages would range from $1.40 per hour to $4 per hour.
The key may be so-called “protection” contracts, signed as a condition for building the plant. They lock in low wages in advance. Future workers have no say in it. While local officials might make out like bandits on a deal like this, workers come up short.
Automakers from the US, Germany, Japan, and Korea have invested heavily in Mexico to take advantage of these “protection contracts” that guarantee cheap labor for future years. And Nafta guarantees access to the US market.

Despite labor unrest in Mexico, manufactures have resisted significant wage increases in dollar terms. The peso continues to lose value against the dollar, so wages rise in peso terms, but don’t rise much in dollar terms. By now, wages in the auto manufacturing sector in Mexico are significantly lower than those in China and most other “cheap labor” countries – despite Mexico’s proximity to the US and the total integration of trade!
This type of organized wage repression is why, at least in part, the consumer economy in Mexico has lagged far behind. What Mexico needs is higher wages (in dollar terms). They’d perform miracles for Mexico’s consumer spending and the overall economy. And they would allow Mexicans to buy more imports from the US.

But rising wages in Mexico would squeeze profit margins of those automakers, and so everything must be done to repress them.

There appears to be nothing in this Nafta-is-dead deal that addresses this issue, and Trump has never said a word about it, and automakers will continue to use “protection contracts” to keep the scheme going. Corporate America’s profit margins are simply sacred. And no trade deal is allowed to impinge on them.

https://wolfstreet.com/2018/08/27/na...ng-live-nafta/

Canada agrees to join U.S. and Mexico in new trade deal to replace NAFTA, say US and Canadian officials

Michael Collins, USA TODAY Published 11:01 p.m. ET Sept. 30, 2018 | Updated 12:39 a.m. ET Oct. 1, 2018

WASHINGTON – Canada has agreed to join the United States and Mexico in a trade deal that will replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, U.S. and Canadian officials said Sunday night.

“Today, Canada and the United States reached an agreement, alongside Mexico, on a new, modernized trade agreement for the 21st Century: the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)," said U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland in a joint statement. "USMCA will give our workers, farmers, ranchers and businesses a high-standard trade agreement that will result in freer markets, fairer trade and robust economic growth in our region."

"It 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," Lighthizer and Freeland added.

“We look forward to further deepening our close economic ties when this new agreement enters into force," they said in crediting Mexican Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo "for his close collaboration over the past 13 months.”

The U.S. had imposed a deadline of midnight Sunday with Canada to reach a new three-country deal.

The last-minute deal will provide U.S. with greater access to Canada’s dairy market, an issue that had been considered vital for U.S. dairy manufacturers, a senior administration official told reporters.

The text of the new deal was to be submitted to Congress late Sunday and is expected to be signed by all three countries by the end of November, the official said.

“This is a big win for the United States, Mexico and Canada,” the official said.

The new agreement comes just one month after the U.S. and Mexico announced that they had reached a new trade pact to replace NAFTA, which essentially eliminated tariffs on most goods traded among the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and made it easier for companies in those three countries to move goods and supplies across their borders

Negotiators for the U.S., Canada and Mexico began talks more than a year ago to replace the 24-year-old agreement, which President Donald Trump has repeatedly blasted as “the worst deal ever.”

Canada was a part of the discussions to renegotiate NAFTA when the talks started last year. But the negotiations reached an impasse in late May, and Canada stayed on the sidelines while the U.S. and Mexico continued their talks. After the U.S. and Mexico reached a new deal, Trump indicated he was ready to move forward without Canada if an agreement could not be reached with Ottawa.

Negotiations between the U.S. and Canada appeared to be hopelessly stalled last week, partly because of U.S. demands for access to Canada’s dairy market.

Trump said at a press conference on Wednesday that negotiators for the two countries weren’t getting along, and he threatened to slap tariffs on Canadian-made cars. Trump also claimed he had refused to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a United Nations General Assembly in New York this week. A spokesman for Trudeau’s government disputed that a meeting had ever been requested.

But with a U.S.-imposed deadline of reaching a new deal by midnight Sunday, the talks accelerated over the weekend, leading to an 11th-hour deal announced late Sunday.

As part of the new deal, Canada will offer the U.S. greater access to its diary market than what the U.S. would have achieved through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade treaty that Trump withdrew from last year, the senior administration official said.

A dispute resolution process that the U.S. had wanted to scrap but Canada wanted to keep will be revised, the official said, and the new accord will include an “accommodation” to help shield Canada if Trump follows through on a threat to tax imported vehicles.

It was not immediately clear what that accommodation would entail, but published reports suggested Canada could be exempt from the auto tariffs if it agrees to limit its auto exports to the U.S.

Other new provisions are changes to the so-called auto rules of origin which dictate that, to avoid tariffs, a certain percentage of an automobile must be built from parts that originated from countries within the NAFTA region.

Under the new rules, cars must be built with at least 75 percent of parts made in North America, up from 62.5 percent under NAFTA. Also, 40 to 45 percent of an auto will have to be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour.

The new trade deal also includes standards designed to protect intellectual property and trade secrets, tougher labor requirements for Mexico and environmental obligations designed to combat trafficking in wildlife, timber and fish.

The agreement will run for 16 years, but will be reviewed after six years and could then be extended for another 16.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...nt/1453244002/

The text of the new deal was to be submitted to Congress late Sunday and is expected to be signed by all three countries by the end of November, the official said.

Wow. Trump played it right down to the wire. It's fun thinking about our government officials working all weekend and nights to get US a better trade deal and sandwiching the Canadians between the Mexico deadline and our Congressional deadline to help our dairy farmers and fix our trade imbalance. WELL DONE!!

Under our dear President Trump, working for the government is like working for business, on call 24/7, do whatever has to be done whenever it has to be done.

What a great evening!!! Another big win for America!! Oh my God, so glad NAFTA is history. 26 years of sucking our nation dry as a bone ... over.

God Bless Donald J Trump.

Thank you so very much, Mr. President.

KEEP THE TRUMP TRAIN ROLLIN'! VOTE REPUBLICAN IN 2018!!

U.S. reaches trade deal with Canada and Mexico, providing Trump a crucial win

The new pact is a major step toward completing one of the president's signature campaign promises.

By ADAM BEHSUDI, ALEXANDER PANETTA and DOUG PALMER
09/30/2018 07:42 PM EDT
Updated 10/01/2018 12:47 AM EDT

Trade ministers from the U.S., Mexico and Canada have reached a deal to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Trump administration announced late Sunday night.

The new pact, which is being called the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, is a major step toward completing one of Trump’s signature campaign promises and gives the president a concrete policy win to tout on the campaign trail this fall. It also sets the stage for what is sure to be a high-stakes fight to get the agreement passed by Congress before it can become law.

The Trump administration already formally notified Congress at the end of August of its plans to sign a new pact and faced a deadline of the end of September to provide a draft of the agreement.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in late August that officials are planning to sign with their Canadian and Mexican counterparts by the end of November — a date that would also satisfy Mexico, which is eager to have current President Enrique Peña Nieto sign the deal before his successor takes over Dec. 1.

“It’s a great win for the president and a validation for his strategy in the area of international trade,” a senior administration official said on a call with reporters late Sunday.

People briefed on the outlines of a revamped deal described changes in language governing dairy imports, dispute resolution between countries, limits on online shopping that can be done tax free, and limits on the U.S. threat of auto tariffs.

“It’s a good day for Canada,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said as he left the office late Sunday night. He said he would save other comments for an official announcement on Monday.

A formal vote in Congress won’t be held until 2019, and it is still an open question whether lawmakers — including members of the president's own party who have often clashed with him on trade — will fall in line to support the deal.

Republicans are expected to pay close attention to the final details regarding dispute settlement and intellectual property issues, while Democrats will likely be looking for stricter labor and environmental standards.

Lawmakers from both parties, along with powerful business and industry groups, are also examining whether new provisions, such as stricter automotive rules, may end up making life more difficult for domestic companies rather than easier.

A senior administration official highlighted the “great result” on dairy issues that was achieved. The pact opens up the Canadian dairy market to U.S. exports at a level higher than the 3.25 percent market share the Obama administration negotiated under the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The official also said that Canada agreed to eliminate a recent milk-ingredient pricing program that U.S. farmers complained had dried up demand for their exports of the product.

In exchange, Canada was able to preserve dispute settlement language. Canada has historically insisted on an international panel to judge whether the U.S. improperly uses duties as a commercial weapon.

Canada also agreed to an “accommodation” to its auto exports in response to tariffs Trump is expected to impose on vehicle imports for national security reasons, the senior administration official said. That arrangement will likely involve Canada agreeing to a side deal that would restrict its auto exports to a level well above the current volume of trade that flows south of the border, sources close to the talks said.

Lighthizer had hoped to reach an agreement by the end of 2017, a timeline that was extended until the end of March. The three nations failed to make that deadline but have been meeting almost continuously in Washington since as they sought to reach compromises on issues that have been both technically and politically challenging for all three countries.

Now, depending on the outcome of November's midterm elections, control of the House of Representatives may well turn over to Democrats, who may have little incentive to work with a president from the opposite party to ratify a deal that they may not like.

One strategy that circulated earlier this year was a plan to force a vote by withdrawing from the existing NAFTA agreement before the new one takes effect — thus forcing members of Congress to choose between the renegotiated deal or no deal at all.

Trump indicated last month that he would pursue such tactics, telling reporters in the Oval Office that he would "be terminating the existing deal and going into this deal."

Several prominent lawmakers, however, expressed cautious optimism with the new pact.

“Maintaining a trilateral North American deal is an important prerequisite to preserving and extending those gains and the Trump administration has achieved that goal,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “I look forward to reviewing this deal to confirm it meets the high standards of Trade Promotion Authority.”

Under the TPA, Congress will take a straight up-or-down vote without amendments. Those rules also have a series of other steps that also must be followed before the deal can be passed.

Even without congressional approval, having the preliminary deal in hand will give the administration and vulnerable Republicans up for reelection at least the skeleton of a policy achievement to use on the trail.

Officials have said that changes made to automotive rules to increase the amount of content that must be sourced from within NAFTA countries should play well in manufacturing states concerned about the offshoring of jobs.

Meanwhile, leading congressional Democrats say they’re not yet convinced that the new deal represents a significant shift from past trade policies that have rarely earned their support.

“The bar for supporting a new NAFTA will be high,” said Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Democrats and their backers in labor unions and environment groups will be looking for a deal they feel can be adequately enforced in terms of upholding worker rights and environmental protections.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said the ability of the deal to enforce those provisions will be a “crucial test” for a new agreement.

The country’s largest organized labor group also stressed that it will be studying the labor language closely.

“The text we have reviewed, even before the confirmation that Canada will remain part of NAFTA, affirms that too many details still need to be worked out before working people make a final judgment on a deal,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement.

It remains unclear at this point what the preliminary deal means for the steel and aluminum tariffs the Trump administration has put in place as well as the retaliatory duties Canada and Mexico imposed. Many industry sources and others close to the talks have long expected that reaching a deal would lead the U.S. to lift the tariffs, a move that would lead Canada and Mexico to follow suit.

A senior U.S. administration official said a possible exemption for Canada remains on a separate track from the broader trade negotiations and there was no agreement yet on that issue.

Mexican Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo said in late August that those tariffs — as well as Mexico's retaliatory duties on $3 billion in U.S. products like agricultural goods — would be enforced until the countries are closer to signing an agreement later this year.

Sabrina Rodriguez and Megan Cassella contributed to this report.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/...-canada-819081

The whole deal should be available in the not too distant future for everyone to read and study, and there will be people who like it and people who don't, but in the meantime, watch what our businesses and manufacturers do, more will be expanding here, not in Mexico and Canada, and more will be coming home to the US and more will be buying USA MADE, and wages will rise and China will be significantly cut out of auto parts and components through Mexico or Canada. The overall impact on the US just based on the few key items that have been reported show massive economic benefits for the United States from the way they negotiated this new deal and did so without any major disruption to any market that would adversely impact our companies, other than to stack the deck with a better location for them within the United States by their own math and choosing.

It's an extraordinary achievement in this political environment. And in 6 years if all goes well, Trump will get one more crack at it before the end of his second term. EXCELLENT!!

I'll reserve comments until ALL the particulars are made known. I've never been one to buy a bill of goods without first reading the fine details of the contract.