Trump Calls for 20% Tax on Mexican Imports to Pay for Border Wall
January 26th, 2017Update: Trump, Mexican President Agree to Not Debate Wall in Public
*phew*
Via: The Hill:
President Trump agreed not to publicly discuss payment of the border wall during an hourlong call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto Friday.
“With regards to the payment of the border wall, both Presidents recognized their clear and very public different positions on this very sensitive subject, and agreed to resolve these differences as part of an integral discussion on all aspects of the bilateral relationship,” a statement from Peña Nieto’s office said.
“The Presidents also agreed for now to not publicly talk about this controversial topic.”
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Update: Trump, Nieto Talk by Phone
It looks like cooler heads intervened. Thankfully.
Via: Reuters:
The presidents of the United States and Mexico spoke by phone on Friday after relations between the neighboring countries frayed further over Donald Trump’s border wall plan, with the U.S. leader calling the talk friendly but still demanding reworked trade and other ties.
The call between Trump and Enrique Pena Nieto came a day after the Mexican president scrapped a meeting set for next week at the White House over Trump’s demand that Mexico pay for a multibillion-dollar wall along the lengthy southern U.S. border with Mexico. Mexico insists it will not pay for it.
Both countries issued statements saying Trump and Pena Nieto recognized their clear differences of opinion on the payment demand, and agreed to settle the matter as part of a broader discussion on all aspects of the two nations’ relationship.
Financial markets took news of the call as a sign that the crisis in U.S-Mexican relations just days after Trump took office had eased. Mexico’s peso rose on the news.
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Update: Trump: Enough Talk
There you have it.
Via: Reuters:
President Donald Trump pushed Republican lawmakers on Thursday for swift action on a sweeping agenda including his planned U.S.-Mexican border wall, tax cuts and repealing the Obamacare law, despite tensions over timetables and priorities.
Congressional Republicans were in Philadelphia for a three-day retreat to hammer out a legislative agenda, with the party in control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives for the first time in a decade.
“This Congress is going to be the busiest Congress we’ve had in decades, maybe ever,” Trump said in a speech to the lawmakers at a Philadelphia hotel.
“Enough ‘all talk, no action.’ We have to deliver,” Trump added.
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Does Trump understand that bloody knuckles should be avoided when it comes to international relations?
A 20% import tariff on goods from Mexico would be roughly equivalent to carpet bombing the place.
Does Trump realize that he has an entire bureaucracy full of people who have spent a substantial portion of their lives learning about the languages, politics and customs of other countries? The State Department can be helpful here.
I think Trump wants everyone to know that he is not messing around. (I definitely believe that he is not messing around and that this is the warm up before the main event: China.) Surely, the people around him and professional diplomats will be trying to explain to him that a 20% import tariff would cause disaster in Mexico.
The way to go about this is to carrot and stick the Mexican regime over some period of time. When tensions are so high, why schedule such a high level meeting!? This should have been dealt with quietly in the diplomatic backchannel before scheduling the high level meeting.
Nope. Instead, Trump is coming at them with a baseball bat in the first week.
Maybe he’s bluffing. (I doubt it.)
Maybe he’s not listening to diplomats.
Maybe the time for talk is over.
Keep in mind, myriad components are made in Mexico that find their way into much higher value products that are made in the U.S. There could be weird butterfly effects. Maybe expensive automobiles, that are mostly made in the U.S., include floor mats, gas caps and windshield wiper blades made in Mexico. Maybe expensive computers, that are assembled in the U.S., use plastic connectors, screws and rubber feet that are made in Mexico. Etc.
What happens if there’s a trade war with Mexico? You could see product delays and higher prices on products in the U.S.
I hope someone in the Trump regime is thinking this thing through very carefully so that blowback is minimized. The mess that the U.S. is in happened over decades. They can’t flip a switch and make it go away overnight.
Via: Guardian:
Relations between the United States and Mexico appeared to be heading for crisis on Thursday after Enrique Peña Nieto cancelled a meeting with Donald Trump and the White House retaliated by suggesting a new 20% tax on imports from its southern neighbour to finance the construction of a border wall.
The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, made the announcement to reporters on Air Force One as Trump returned from addressing the congressional Republican retreat in Philadelphia.
Spicer painted the border tax as one aspect of a broader tax reform policy. “When you look at the plan that’s taking shape now, using comprehensive tax reform as a means to tax imports from countries that we have a trade deficit from, like Mexico,” said Spicer.
“If you tax that $50bn at 20% of imports – which is by the way a practice that 160 other countries do – right now our country’s policy is to tax exports and let imports flow freely in, which is ridiculous. By doing it that way we can do $10bn a year and easily pay for the wall just through that mechanism alone. That’s really going to provide the funding,” he said.
Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus later appeared to walk back on the proposal, describing it as one of a “buffet of options.”
He just cancelled the 20% tax, from what I heard. You’re entirely correct, I’m in Mexico. It would blow up in his face. It would really suck for Mexico and cause economic crisis and a grave security situation, which would snowball to the U.S.
A Mexican governor just wrote a decent piece for the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/23/trump-futures-mexico-us-interlocked-wall-border
I’m not a fan of NAFTA, but you can’t just burn things down in a day without a new plan.
It’s been surprising to me to see the smarter end of the paranoid “para-political” spectrum** treating the Trump phenomenon as a genuinely “anti-establishment” disruption of the status quo.
I’ve quietly watched Cryptogon unflinchingly report news from Project Veritas during this election cycle, a well-known producer of demonstrably false agitprop that received a $10,000 donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. [ For Example: https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=49733 & https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=49700 // Donation Citation: http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-foundation-paid-activist-filmmaker-james-o-keefe-n670381 ], not to mention weirdly leaning Trump as a “burn the system down” or “anyone but a Bush or Clinton” candidate [ https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=49238#comment-26188 ].
Please understand that I don’t mean to be rude, I am just hoping to do my part and get people thinking.
Here, as briefly as possible, is my take:
Trump is symptom of a split in the GOP and the Intelligence community on the issues of Islamic radicalism and Russia. The faction of Neo-Cons that surrounded the Bush family all had financial and personal ties to the Gulf regimes, obviously. Plus, party apparatchiks like Grover Norquist and Karl Rove were even hoping for a while to court Islamic Americans en masse to the GOP based on the idea that they are a natural bloc of “social conservatives” (persuadable on wedge issues like LGBT rights, women’s rights, etc.).
But there is a whole peripheral faction of NeoCon bureaucrats who were out of that particular, Bush-ite, “Safari Club,” geo-political power loop; they were the folks who have been more rabidly Islamophobic and view radical Islam not as the co-dependent proxy mercenaries that they’ve always been, but as some existential threat to “the West.” These are the people in JSOC that Sy Hersh talked about as thinking of “the War on Terror” as a 21st Century Crusade. [ Hersh: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/21/seymour-hersh-military-crusaders_n_812363.html // GOP and Islam: http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-515-update-on-the-gopislamist-connection/%5D The Intercept reported on some of the low-level grunts in this I.C. sub-culture back in 2014. [ Intercept Piece: https://theintercept.com/2014/07/09/under-surveillance/ ]
Tellingly, Trump’s National Security Adviser, Lt. General Michael Flynn, coauthored a book, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies” (July 2016), with none other than Michael Ledeen — whom you may remember from Adam Curtis’s documentary “The Power of Nightmares.” Ledeen was a lead suspect in the forged, Niger “Yellow Cake” evidence.
[ Book Link: https://www.amazon.com/Field-Fight-Global-Against-Radical/dp/1250106222 // An old Washington Monthly article about Michael Ledeen and the “Yellow Cake” evidence:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040830040143/http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshallrozen.html // An even-handed summary of the allegations saying Ledeen had a hand in the forged Iraq WMD evidence is in the “origin of the documents” section of this Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries ]
The book Flynn and Ledeen cowrote is basically a push for regime change in Iran; it tries to make the argument that Iran, al Qaeda, Russa, Cuba, and ISIS are all in cahoots on terrorism against the US and NATO. Stupid, dangerous stuff.
Secondarily, Trump’s Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, one of the most influential civilian advisors not counting family members like Ivanka and Kushner, has said that he believes (delusionally) “we are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism” and that “this war is metastasizing.”[ YouTube: https://youtu.be/FWXScQaZ2uI?t=7m30s ] His whole view of Islam and the views of the funders behind him back at Breitbart News would suggest that there’s going to be no “check” from the Trump team’s civilian wing when it comes to jingoist warmongering in the MidEast [ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/breitbart-news-drudge-alt-right-koch-trump/ ]
So, once you get a handle on how belligerent these people want to be with respect to the War on Terror, it becomes easier to understand why they’re acting like this with Mexico. This is a Manichean wing of the GOP’s hyper-hawks.
They are not merely imperfect representatives of a sane, anti-Globalist, anti-TPP, anti-NAFTA, movement. This won’t be a conservative take on the 1990s style, “Think Global, Act Local” rational approach to a sustainable, fair trade, economic world. They’re the punishment we’re all getting for not pushing for that route earlier. It’s straight-up 1930’s style nationalism and power politics. My prediction is that some terror attack (actual or manufactured) is going to be the pretext for an all-out resource war premised around the pretext of rooting out Islamic Radicalism “once and for all.”
With Clinton, awful as she was, we would have at least given ourselves four more years of the status quo under which to prepare to fight another day. Right now, I’m afraid, the fighting begins.
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**(e.g. Kevin here at this site, James Howard Kunstler, the gang at the Intercept, Sy Hersh, the smart but inconsistent Wayne Madsen — who, say what you will about him, at least produces credible original reporting on conspiracies from time to time)
Marbles, if you think that Hillary and “four more years” of the status quo would have been preferable to that bad ol’ “nationalism” of Trump, then clearly you have lost yours….marbles, that is.
You’re obviously one of the moronic Left that Paul Craig Roberts endlessly decries, for having allied with Wall Street and the CIA/Military/Security Complex against the “deplorable” American working class.
And seriously, you praise James Howard Kunstler, he of the Peak Oil scam and obnoxious cheerleader for the Iraq War? And you fancy yourself a member of the “sane” anti-globalist movement? Really?
@Marbles: Let us not forget that Hillary Clinton scared a lot of people into voting for Trump based on her apparent predisposition to provoke Russia into a full-on shooting-war (with ICBMs being the final thing shot off). I voted a straight libertarian ticket last November because I just found it too depressing that our joke of a political system was offering us not just one but two candidates who stood a fairly decent chance of setting off World War 3. If Clinton had been a perfect midpoint between a hawk and a dove but everything else about her remained the same, I could have been talked into holding my nose while voting for…that political party…one last time.
In all honesty, I think the recent election and Trump both are a reflection and culmination of what an utterly grotesque joke of a society we have become. That really is the kindest way I can phrase it. And there are not enough words for how much I wish it weren’t so.
Interesting angle, Marbles.
Loveandlight, your comment reminded me of this article by John Pilger:
http://johnpilger.com/articles/this-week-the-issue-is-not-trump-it-is-ourselves-
@Dennis: Thanks for the Pilger article, with which I thoroughly agreed. My own views on the society and politics of today (including the pernicious nature of so-called “social justice” ideology and its misguided defense of Islam) is best expressed in the recent videos of a YouTuber known as The Amazing Atheist.
1. Thanks, @Dennis
2. @tm, Opposing my argument on purely ideological grounds doesn’t really do much to change the facts, I’m sorry to tell you. Honestly, I would think that — as a professed opponent of Wall Street — maybe you’d be concerned by Trump’s cabinet picks, like Steven Mnuchin for Treasury Secretary (17 years at Goldman Sachs); or Trump’s transition advisor Anthony Scaramucci (8 years at Goldman Sachs and 9 years running a mini-Davos knock-off in Las Vegas called SkyBridge Alternatives); or his pick for director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn (25 whopping years at Goldman Sachs, where he is leaving as its former president with a nice $285 million golden parachute); and of course Chief Strategist Steve Bannon (5 years at Goldman Sachs). [ http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/goldman-sachs-power-white-house-231998 // http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/26/investing/gary-cohn-goldman-sachs-exit-trump/ //http://fortune.com/2016/08/17/donald-trump-bannon-mnuchin-goldman/ ]
I know that I’m sort of “pissing into the wind” with you and probably annoying Cryptogon’s esteemed proprietor with all this tangential material, but hopefully I’m getting it across that you ought to be arguing with actual evidence and not trashy aspersions.
I’m kinda tired right now, but speaking as a former chemical engineer who covered the petrochemical industry for a trade journal, I’m looking forward to schooling you on Peak Oil during some inevitable future argument. Also, I honestly disagree with Kunstler about a lot of things, including his stance on the Iraq War, but it’s a gross characterization to call his grim fatalistic attitude about it at the time “cheerleading.” [ http://web.archive.org/web/20040402032857/http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/ ]
3. @Loveandlight It might be worth it to you to dig up the English-language translation of Richard Labévière’s “Dollars for Terror: The U.S. and Islam.” http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-892941-06-0 While the more naive wing of us “social justice warriors” seem convinced that the roots of Islamic extremism are exclusively Western colonial and post-colonial oppression, there’s plenty of us paranoid SJWs with a more robust and nuanced understanding of how these extremists have been incubated and financially supported by various realpolitik strategists over the years (some e.g.’s: the Gulf State ruling class, unreconstructed Nazis like Ahmed Huber, CIA-types like Graham Fuller, U.S. foreign policy doyen Zbigniew Brzezinski, and basically every intelligence agency on Earth looking for deniable assets). Getting too spooked about Islam itself misses this bigger picture, if I may say so.
Anyway, for what it’s worth, I too was fearful of Clinton’s saber-rattling against Putin, but somehow convinced myself that it was mostly going to express itself as public rationalizations for defense budget pork, which (awful as that would have been) would not necessarily have led a nuclear holocaust. Who knows and who cares, tho’? It’s a pointless counter-factual hypothetical now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylEAwPutKvI
Hillary wanted war with Iran. Libya, Syria? Lethal and non-lethal aid to Isis? Provoking Russia to the point of accusing them of directly influencing our election? (Which the US has done countless times in other countries.) If you don’t think Shrillery had enough hubris, ruthlessness, or balls to push the buttons, you and I see politics very differently.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-29/trump-slams-mccain-graham-stop-trying-start-world-war-iii
Too spooked? Calais, France (repost)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulHPD_4nmWE
I’m not defending Trump here, but who is missing the bigger picture?