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Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador convened a special legislative session to hold the vote after the Senate convened in April..“The USMCA is synonymous with opportunity in the short and long term,” Mexican Sen. Verónica Martínez García said of the pact. Canada has already introduced legislation through its parliament to ratify the agreement and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to lobby Democrats to support the USMCA during his visit to Washington, D.C., this week. Meanwhile, the deal is running into some roadblocks , Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the authority to bring legislation on the matter before the chamber,...

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping “will be having an extended meeting next week at the G-20 in Japan.” In a tweet, Trump said that he and Xi “had a very good telephone conversation,” and that “our respective teams will begin talks prior to our meeting.” _____________________________________ Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump Had a very good telephone conversation with President Xi of China. We will be having an extended meeting next week at the G-20 in Japan. Our respective teams will begin talks prior to our meeting. 24.5K 9:39 AM - Jun 18, 2019...

Last week, Ed Morrissey pointed to some pretty clear evidence that things were changing in Mexico in response to direct pressure from President Trump. Specifically, it appears Mexico is making a more concerted effort to stem the flow of migrants from Central America to the US border despite some claims in the media that Trump’s tariff threats hadn’t accomplished anything. Yesterday, the Associated Press reported some more evidence Trump’s plan is working: Mexican authorities increased immigration enforcement along well-traveled routes for migrants in southern Mexico over the weekend, checking identifications, pulling migrants off public transport and intercepting four trucks...

33% of likely voters say President Trump has made life better for African Americans. When Obama left office in 2099 only 13% of likely voters said he made life better for African Americans. This is not the first time Trump has seen his numbers climb among African Americans. A VoterLabs poll in May found that 29% of female African Americans approve of President’s Trump.

The Hong Kong demonstrations reveal that President Trump was right in many ways to identify China early on as a threat to the United States. He saw them as an economic threat and dishonest trading partner. To a lesser degree, he saw them as a military threat. He was right, although ultimately, their military — including space and cyber warfare — are probably the largest threat. To be clear, China is a bigger, long-term threat economically and militarily than anyone else, including Russia which has aging nukes but otherwise is a virtual third-world economy and a vastly weakened military. Modern...

Walmart and Target are the problem. EVERYTHING sold in Walmart (except most groceries) is from China. Don't know about Target, but I presume they are exactly the same. I know, not (everything). But close enough.

A massive crowd on the streets of Hong Kong Sunday as the protest continues against the extradition law. Organizers say some two million people took to the streets.... 30 killed and 40 wounded in a suicide bombing attack in northeastern Nigeria..... At least 12 killed, more than a dozen wounded in a jihadist rocket attack on a government held area in northwestern Syria... Turkey says it attacked the Syrian army in northwestern Syria in response to an attack by Syrian government forces on a Turkish observation post... Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says the Russian S-400 air defense system is...

Three years ago, then-president Barack Hussein Obama (D) mocked the plans of his sure-not-to-be-successor, Donald J. Trump (R), for the country, comparing them to his oh, so successful eight-year "scandal free," high unemployment, high food stamp use, successful administration. "He just says, 'I'm gonna negotiate a better deal.' Well how? How exactly are you going to negotiate that?" Obama said during the town hall portion of the event. "What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is, he doesn't have an answer." Well, that was then. And this is now. To Obama's shock and dismay, Trump is president....

Candidate Donald Trump promised that we would get tired of winning. When he said that we could almost hear the mainstream media rolling their eyes. President Trump hasn’t deviated from his America First agenda. He has pursued it relentlessly. The media hasn’t deviated much from their agenda either. As Trump delivers on his promise to Make America Great Again, they feverishly work to make him look bad.  It’s a weird symbiotic relationship. The more Trump succeeds, the more frustrated they become. It is pathetic to watch. A large portion of the media seems almost eager to sacrifice their credibility and audience...

Hong Kong’s embattled government was working to defuse the crisis over its controversial extradition bill with a possible pause for further discussion, sources told the South China Morning Post on Friday, with the clock ticking towards another showdown with protesters planning a mass rally on Sunday. Several heavyweight advisers to the city’s leader suggested there was no need for Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor to meet a self-imposed July deadline to have the bill passed. But divisions emerged within the Executive Council, with others suggesting she should stick to her guns and continue to fast-track it through the legislature....

Both GOP senators from Texas are joining other republicans in breaking ranks with the president over a tariff threat to Mexico. Senator Ted Cruz says it is a game of chicken on who will blink first. “I understand that the president is frustrated with congressional democrats refusing to do their job,” Cruz said. “That being said, this is the wrong solution to the crisis.”

The import price index FELL 0.3% last month. It's down 1.5% for the year. That didn't stop NPR (and many other news sources) from doing an extended story about how tariffs on Chinese goods are hurting the poor. Even the Drudge Report had screaming headlines about how rising costs from the tariffs had ALREADY (just weeks in) cost U.S. consumers more than they'd made from the Trump tax cuts. American Public Media host Kai Ryssdall (who sounds to me exactly like the guy from the old "You Don't Know Jack" video game), hosts "The Market Report." He has spent nearly...

The Treasury Department reported a $208 billion deficit for the month of May — which is $61 billion higher than May 2018. To put that in perspective, the deficit for the entire year of 2007 was $161 billion. In the first eight months of the current fiscal year, red ink has already reached $738 billion. Even adjusting for inflation, the total annual federal deficit has exceeded that only six times in the nation’s history (five of them under President Obama). Not surprisingly, the Republican tax cuts are taking the blame for this year’s extraordinary deficits. But wait a minute. Overall...

As part of a series of sanctions, the White House announced new sanctions targeting the Iranian mullahs’ energetic petrochemical industry. Following calls of the Iranian resistance, the cries of the people to stop human rights violations, and the US commitment to fighting against Iranian Regime terrorism new sanction on the petrochemical industry starts. The new sanctions come while Washington is increasing pressures on Tehran for its ballistic missiles, terrorism, and proxy wars across the Middle East. The U.S. Treasury said Iran’s oil ministry last year awarded Khatam al-Anbiya, the economic and the engineering arm of the regime’s Terrorist Revolutionary Guards...

The prices of goods imported into the United States fell in May even as tariffs increased on goods from China. ...Imports from Asian countries outside of China also fell in price, dropping by 0.2 percent in May for a 1.4 percent decline compared with 12-months prior. This suggests that companies that have shifted production out of China are not paying higher prices, undermining one of the key assumptions behind claims that tariffs would drive up prices for U.S. consumers. Inflation in the U.S. has fallen below the Federal Reserve’s target of two percent, indicating that consumers have not been squeezed...

As President Donald Trump says his administration is moving closer to a trade deal with China, one of the major sticking points has been China’s disregard of intellectual property protections and claims dating back years about rampant Chinese theft of corporate trade secrets. The allegations are not hyperbole. One in five North American-based corporations on the CNBC Global CFO Council says Chinese companies have stolen their intellectual property within the last year. In all, 7 of the 23 companies surveyed say that Chinese firms have stolen from them over the past decade. As the Trump administration works on a trade...

For many Chinese, they would instinctively think of the fact that China had no say in shaping these rules, and is actually making a compromise when it agrees to follow them. However, when it comes to the understanding of IP rights issues, the Chinese regime has always and will always continue with its demonic mindset. On Feb. 1, the day after the US-China trade negotiations, Beijing-based Chinese media group Duowei News (with print circulation in the U.S.) published an article titled, “Lessons Learned from the Trade War: Beijing Can No Longer Bear the Shame of Having a Knife Held to...

(Snip) What’s going on? Economists point to a variety of explanations. The global economy has gotten weaker and the U.S. dollar stronger, making imports cheaper for Americans to buy and lessening the impact of tariffs. The cost of imports excluding foreign oil have fallen almost 1% in the past year. “We are importing deflation,” asserted chief U.S. economist Chris Low of FTN Financial.

Manufacturing has slipped sharply in recent months, and President Trump’s tariffs appear partly to blame.Gauges including the ISM and Markit PMI indicate either flat or contracting activity.Nearly a half million manufacturing jobs have been added since Trump took office, but only 13,000 this year.While those measures could change direction once the tariff issue is settled, current conditions show that one of the key pillars in the Trump expansion is starting to wobble.

There seems to be a growing appreciation among some on the right for economic nationalism. If the goal is global growth then the concept of comparative advantage makes free trade a clear winner. If the goal is “America First” then there are certain situations in which one could claim Mercantilism is the best thing for the USA. I contend that the USA is currently not in one of those situations in which Mercantilism is best. Mercantilism adherents believe that tariffs should be placed on high value imports and raw material exports, for purposes of a definition. They also dislike free...