Thread: Secretary Wilbur Ross Delivers A Message – The “UniParty” Congress is Put On Notice…

Secretary Wilbur Ross Delivers A Message – The “UniParty” Congress is Put On Notice…



Posted on April 14, 2017 by sundance


To say we consider Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross a man with a unique skill-set for this defined moment in U.S. economic history would be an understatement of epic proportions. Ross is one of the most consequential and dynamic forces within the President Trump administration.






That said, Secretary Ross also knows the real economic adversary is not necessarily external to our border. The bought-and-paid-for UniParty congress has been under the influence of the globalist-minded U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the myriad of K-Street lobbyists, for almost two decades.


Today, Wilbur “Wilburine” Ross fires a shot across the bow of the U.S. Economic Swamp Defenders:

Our message is simple – the games are over, and improper treatment of the United States will no longer be tolerated. We will approach future negotiations and actions with a clarity of purpose guiding us as we work to establish both free and fair trade.

Unfortunately, NAFTA negotiations cannot begin until Congress accepts our 90-day notification letter in compliance with the Trade Promotion Act. But, under President Trump’s leadership, I have no doubt that we will be successful in rebalancing American trade in favor of American workers and businesses.

There are, as you know, trillions of dollars at stake. The American electorate have no reference points for the battles that lie ahead within budgets and trade principals. The Trump administration will necessarily direct attention to the real source of political power and influence, the DC financial system.






Wilbur Ross provides no quarter. This is a zero-sum game; it is not some esoteric argument about priorities. The DC UniParty will do everything within their power to block their diminishment.

As outlined by Wilburine:


Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross – The United States is the least protectionist country in the world but has the largest trade deficit, while other countries are highly protectionist and have huge trade surpluses. This cannot continue.

We can no longer afford to be ignorant or naive in the aggressive global marketplace, and there is no reason why we should be forced to singlehandedly absorb the $500 billion trade surplus of the rest of the world.

Since inauguration, the Administration and the Department of Commerce have been moving rapidly to institute the vision and policies of President Trump. We are acting to vigorously protect the interests of the United States and to restore the primacy of American workers and businesses.

This administration will not be taken advantage of or cheated through illegal subsidies and market manipulation, and we are acting aggressively against those countries that mock our trade laws.

To start, we have brought a new energy to enforcement, working to ensure that all countries play fair and by the agreed-upon rules. We have been executing these trade investigations very rapidly.

In our short time in office, Commerce has opened investigations into dumping or unfair subsidization of over $1 billion dollars of aluminum and metal imports from China and other countries; progressed in investigating over $14 billion in dumped or illegally subsidized imports of steel, chemicals, and other products into the United States; and issued final determinations and imposed duties on imports of steel and other products valued at over $2 billion, including steel from China.

We have also begun the process of self-initiating trade cases, which speeds up the process of taking corrective action while allowing the Department of Commerce to shield American businesses from retaliation.

To further these efforts, the President recently issued two executive orders giving the federal government additional tools to ensure fair treatment of American workers and businesses.

The first order tasks the Department of Commerce with an omnibus review of our nation’s trade deficit. We are now going through country by country, product by product, to identify and study the sources of America’s trade imbalance.

While some of this information is already collected by various government agencies, there has never been such a systematic collection, review, and analysis of the data. As we seek to rebalance our trade relationships, this report will be our go-to resource.

The second executive order provides another more concrete weapon in the fight against unfair trade practices. I was amazed to hear that the government has failed to collect literally billions of dollars in antidumping and countervailing duties that we impose pursuant trade judgements in favor of American industry. Many importers use straw man companies with little or no assets to import their goods, so that when it comes time to collect the duties, there is nothing to collect.
It makes no sense to expend the time and resources to get an affirmative ruling if you cannot then take the necessary action to punish and deter bad actors. This will no longer occur, as the President’s second executive order empowers the Department of Homeland Security to require companies to put up collateral in the form of cash, insurance bonds, or letters of credit in order to import goods.

While we will ensure that there is a full and fair assessment of the facts in all enforcement cases, we intend to act swiftly and harshly to halt any unfair or improper trade practices.

Commerce is also charged with protecting our national security from those who would harm this country. In executing that mission, our Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) recently led the federal government in imposing a $1.19 billion dollar fine against Chinese telecommunications manufacturer ZTE, the largest fine ever in an export control case. BIS caught ZTE shamelessly exporting sensitive telecommunications products to both Iran and North Korea.

Our message is simple – the games are over, and improper treatment of the United States will no longer be tolerated. We will approach future negotiations and actions with a clarity of purpose guiding us as we work to establish both free and fair trade. Unfortunately, NAFTA negotiations cannot begin until Congress accepts our 90-day notification letter in compliance with the Trade Promotion Act. But, under President Trump’s leadership, I have no doubt that we will be successful in rebalancing American trade in favor of American workers and businesses. –link–

https://theconservativetreehouse.com...put-on-notice/

Wilbur Ross will be the first real Secretary of Commerce FOR the United States in over 50 years. God bless him for stepping out of his wonderful life to help US fix our country.

Thank you Mr. Ross! Thank you very very much!!

Nice article GeorgiaPeach, thank you so much for posting it.

Thank you for the appreciation Judy. Means a great deal to many.

Oh you are so welcome, GeorgiaPeach. There's not a lot of good news and nice articles lately, so it's wonderful to see the good ones!!

Originally Posted by Judy

Oh you are so welcome, GeorgiaPeach. There's not a lot of good news and nice articles lately, so it's wonderful to see the good ones!!

Very true Judy.

Originally Posted by GeorgiaPeach

Very true Judy.

It does sound good - hope he can make it stick.

I'm thinking the American people could go a long way to fixing our trade deficits - if we would only work at it.

There is a story on the internet about China stockpiling aluminum in Mexico.

So while they might not be able to export it from China to the US - through NAFTA, they could get it into the US.

All those loopholes needs to be changed.

I would like to see this country begin to limit the amount of foods from China, of course, but also from Mexico. I would like to see American farmers again be able to grow the produce we need in this country.

Many years ago, you could not use food stamps for imported food. It would certainly show us how much of our necessities we do import - which is a very scary thought. We should at least be producing our own necessities - like food.

All those loopholes needs to be changed.

Yes they do, nntrixie, and NAFTA is like 2,000 pages of this crap, so it will take a little time to weed through it for a "renegotiation".

china needs to be dealt with big time...an example - our solar panel industry...more of the same to come....
flash those wolverine teeth at them!

When Solar Panels Became Job Killers

By KEITH BRADSHERAPRIL 8, 2017

WUHAN, China — Russell Abney raised two children on solar power. The 49-year-old Georgia Tech graduate worked for the last decade in Perrysburg, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo, pulling a good salary as an equipment engineer for the largest American solar-panel maker.

On the other side of the world, Gao Song boasted his own solar success story. A former organic fruit retailer who lives in the dusty Chinese city of Wuhan, he installed solar panels on his roof four years ago and found it so lucrative that he went into business installing them for others. By last summer, he and a team of 50 employees were installing solar-panel systems on nearly 100 roofs a month.

Then China shook the global solar business — and transformed both their lives.

“A small vibration back in China,” said Frank Haugwitz, a longtime solar industry consultant in Beijing, “can cause an avalanche in prices around the world.”

Late last summer, Chinese officials began publicly toying with slashing the subsidies they offer domestic solar-panel buyers. Mr. Gao’s business dried up, and he laid off half his workers. “I have been working hard and was just off to a good start,” he said. “Now I have to start over.

China’s solar-panel makers cut their prices by more than a quarter to compensate, sending global prices plummeting. Western companies found themselves unable to compete, and cut jobs from Germany to Michigan to Texas and points beyond.

Those points included Perrysburg — where Mr. Abney and about 450 other employees suddenly found themselves out of work. “Within just a few months, it all came crashing down,” Mr. Abney said. “It’s like a death in the family. People feel awkward talking about it.”
President Trump, who pressed President Xi Jinping of China on trade and other issues this week when they met at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., has vowed to end what he calls China’s unfair business practices. Much of his oratory has involved old-fashioned smokestack industries like steel — industries in which the jobs were already disappearing even before the rise of China.

But economists and business groups warn that China’s industrial ambitions have entered a new, far-reaching phase. With its deep government pockets, growing technical sophistication and a comprehensive plan to free itself from dependence on foreign companies, China aims to become dominant in industries of the future like renewable energy, big data and self-driving cars.

Building More Factories

Over the next six years, Beijing pushed state-owned banks to provide at least $18 billion in loans at low-interest rates to solar-panel manufacturers, and encouraged local governments to subsidize them with cheap land. China had more on its mind than just dominating solar exports: Its severe pollution problems and concerns that rising sea levels from climate change could devastate its teeming coastal cities lent urgency to efforts to develop green technology. At the same time, China also became a major player in wind power through similar policies.

With ample assistance, China’s solar-power production capacity expanded more than tenfold from 2007 to 2012. Now six of the top 10 solar-panel makers are Chinese, including the top two, compared with none a decade ago. The solar division of Mr. Liu’s company, the Tongwei Group, which discloses few financial details, is one of the fastest-expanding players in the industry.

That growth forced many American and European solar-panel manufacturers into a headlong retreat. Two dozen of them filed for bankruptcy or cut back operations during President Barack Obama’s first term, damaging the heady optimism then about clean energy.
In 2012 and 2013, the United States and the European Union concluded that Chinese solar-panel makers were collecting government subsidies and dumping panels, or selling them for less than the cost of producing and shipping them. Both imposed import limits. Chinese manufacturers and officials denied improper subsidies and dumping, and still do.

Several large Chinese manufacturers that had previously overexpanded and had been selling at heavy losses for years then closed their doors. But Western solar companies say Chinese banks still lent heavily to the survivors despite low loan-recovery rates from the defaults of big Chinese solar companies like Suntech, Chaori and LDK Solar.

“The main subsidy is massive, below-market loans by Chinese state-owned commercial banks to finance new capacity and also the massive ongoing losses of Chinese companies,” said Jürgen Stein, the president of American operations for SolarWorld, a big German panel maker.

Li Junfeng, a top architect of China’s renewable-energy policies until he retired from that responsibility in early January, said that the West had exaggerated the role of the state in helping to finance Chinese solar-panel manufacturers. “The market can decide for itself,” he said. “The good companies can get money, the bad companies cannot.”

High-Tech Hopes

Like the Chinese solar industry as a whole, Tongwei is thinking bigger.

Mr. Liu’s company bought an enormous solar-panel manufacturing complex in central China in 2013 from LDK Solar, which had run into severe financial difficulties. Now it plans to build factories of five gigawatts apiece in the Chinese cities of Chengdu and Hefei. By comparison, the entire global market is only about 77 gigawatts each year, while world capacity is 139 gigawatts.

At the same time, Mr. Liu is dismissive of companies in the West that pioneered many solar technologies but have lost their market shares to China. “They are very jealous,” he said, “and cannot catch up with China’s pace.”

From an environmental standpoint, China’s solar push has been good for the world. Solar-panel prices have fallen close to 90 percent over the past decade. Many of the solar panels in America’s backyards and solar power plants are made by Chinese companies.
But for the solar industry, Chinese expansion could mean an extended period of low prices and cutbacks for everybody else.

“The solar industry is facing again, I would say, a new winter,” said Patrick Pouyanné, the chairman and chief executive of Total, the French oil and gas giant, which owns a controlling stake in SunPower, an American solar-panel maker.

China now hopes to replicate its solar industry’s growth in other areas.

Under a plan called Made in China 2025, China hopes to become largely self-sufficient within seven years in a long list of industries,

including aircraft, high-speed trains, computer chips and robots. The plan echoes the solar-panel and wind-turbine buildup a decade ago, but with a larger checkbook. Made in China 2025 calls for roughly $300 billion in financial backing: inexpensive loans from state-owned banks, investment funds to acquire foreign technologies, and extensive research subsidies.

If successful, Made in China 2025 would represent a fundamental shift in how China deals with the world. Initially, most of the industries that moved to China, such as shoe and clothing production, were already leaving the United States anyway. Heavy industries such as steel followed. While the shift was profound — some economists estimate that up to 2.4 million American jobs were lost to China from 1999 to 2011, though others dispute that analysis — China has struggled in some areas like autos to create viable global competitors.

American and European business groups have warned that the China 2025 plan means that a much wider range of Western businesses will face the same kind of government-backed competition that has already transformed the solar industry.

“The policies started in solar and are now starting to infect the higher reaches of the economy with Made in China 2025,” said Jeremie Waterman, the president of the China Center at the United States Chamber of Commerce in Washington.

In the end, China did not slash subsidies for rooftop solar panels, and cut them only slightly for large power-plant arrays. But prices barely rebounded from last year’s slump.

Mr. Gao, of Wuhan, is a slender 37-year-old whose dark hair is already thinning. He said that his business had depended not on homeowners but on profit-minded investors who made use of the subsidies.

The investors would pay three-fifths of the cost of a homeowner’s system. The homeowner would take only enough electricity from the panels to power the home. The investor would sell the rest of the electricity to the grid at a high, government-assisted price.

The suggestion that the government might cut the subsidy, even though the government did not follow through on it, panicked his investors. So they stopped financing further deals.

“They fear that the year after next, they may have nothing,” he said. He recently hired four more employees to drum up sales, even as installations creep along at a small fraction of demand a year ago.

In Perrysburg, Mr. Abney lost his job at First Solar, the largest solar-panel manufacturer based in the United States, and looked in vain for a job in the auto industry in the Toledo area. He ended up taking a job three weeks ago at a building materials company in Lancaster, Pa. His daughter is going off to college in the autumn, while his wife and son, a high school freshman now, will follow him to central Pennsylvania this summer.

“It’s hardest on him because we’re pulling him away from his high school and his activities,” Mr. Abney said.
First Solar struggled with improving Chinese technology as well as dropping prices.

It laid off workers in Perrysburg partly because it decided not to produce its Series 5 generation of panels, which represented a limited improvement over its existing Series 4 panels. First Solar, to better compete with Chinese producers, will wait for its lower-cost,

high-efficiency Series 6 panels to be ready for production in 2018. In the end, First Solar, which is based in Tempe, Ariz., laid off 1,600 people worldwide.

“It’s just kind of a shock factor when a lot of families realize they’re no longer going to have a job,” said Michael Olmstead, the Republican mayor of Perrysburg.

Though Mr. Abney has started his new job at almost the same pay as his previous one, he says part of him pined for the days when the United States still led in solar energy, and when First Solar was at the forefront of that leadership.

“They were good for us,” he said. “And it was great while it lasted.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/b...nels.html?_r=0

Somehow I think there is a solution in there somewhere.

Of course, China is going to undercut any time they can. They are going to steal technology anytime they can.
Thanks to our government.

Does the equipment need to cost as much as it does?

As to cost, use the cost of the MOAB as an example. If you only produce 15 MOABS that cost $314 million to develop, then the cost by some standards is $16 million per MOAB, even though the actual production cost is only $170,000 per MOAB. That's been the historical issue with solar panels. Solar panels also require a lot of chemicals to make, many of them highly toxic, and the amount of electricity used to produce them for decades exceed the amount of electricity they saved. Also, they're ugly and no one wants them on their house. So it's been a cost issue, an economic issue, an environmental issue and a marketing issue. That's why unless there were tax credits to underwrite all these flaws, it wasn't a viable industry. There has been a lot of progress made on the cost, they are a little cheaper now, and some new technologies are reducing the amount of toxins used in them as well as the amount of energy storage which reduces the ratio of energy used to produce versus energy generated. They're still pretty ugly so what they decided to do was instead of selling them to consumers, they would focus on industries and big retailers and also solar farms where they sell the electricity generated to the power companies. The problem with that is it of course takes natural habitat for the solar farms and increases the amount of land cleared and dedicated to the operations instead of preserved for farming or nature.

There are no perfect solutions yet, which is why all forms need to be pursued.