OT: Crisis deepens as Trump floats 20 pct tax on Mexico goods to pay for wall
Papi_Chulo
Miami, FL (or the nearest big-booty club)
PHILADELPHIA/MEXICO CITY, Jan 26 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump could pay for a wall on the southern border with a new 20 percent tax on goods from Mexico, the White House said on Thursday, deepening a crisis after plans for a summit with the Mexican president fell apart.
Trump wants the measure to be part of a broader tax overhaul package that the U.S. Congress is contemplating, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters on Thursday.
It was not immediately clear how the tax would work. Parts of the proposal that Spicer described resemble an existing idea, known as a border adjustment tax, being considered by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives.
Spicer said: "We have a new tax at $50 billion at 20 percent 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. But by doing it that way we can do $10 billion a year and easily pay for the wall. Just through that mechanism alone," Spicer told reporters traveling with Trump to Philadelphia.
The White House later on Thursday said it was not endorsing the border adjustment tax. No further details were available.
News of the tax proposal widens a rift with Mexico which earlier on Thursday scrapped a planned summit between President Enrique Pena Nieto and Trump over the Republican's demands that Mexico pay for the border wall to stem illegal immigration.
Pena Nieto wrote on Twitter that he was pulling out of the planned meeting with Trump in Washington next week.
He was responding to an earlier tweet from Trump who said it would be better for the Mexican leader not to come if Mexico would not pay for the wall.
Trump later presented the scrapped plan as a mutual agreement.
Addressing Republican members of Congress at a meeting in Philadelphia, he said he and Pena Nieto had agreed to cancel the meeting, adding it would be fruitless if Mexico did not treat the United States "fairly."
"I've said many times that the American people will not pay for the wall," Trump told the gathering. "Unless Mexico is going to treat the United States fairly, with respect, such a meeting would be fruitless and I want to go a different route."
Trump views the wall, a major promise during his election campaign, as part of a package of measures to curb illegal immigration. Mexico has long insisted it will not heed Trump's demands to pay for the construction project.
Trump, who took office last week, signed an executive order for construction of the wall on Wednesday, just as a Mexican delegation led by Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray arrived at the White House for talks with Trump aides aimed at healing ties.
The timing of that, and Trump's reiterated call for Mexico to foot the bill, caused outrage in Mexico, with prominent politicians and many on social media seeing at as a deliberate snub to the government's efforts to engage with Trump, who has for months used Mexico as a political punching bag.
UNDER PRESSURE
Pena Nieto was under pressure to cancel the summit.
"We have informed the White House that I will not attend the working meeting planned for next Tuesday with @POTUS," he tweeted on Thursday. "Mexico reiterates its willingness to work with the United States to reach agreements that favor both nations."
Relations have been frayed since Trump launched his campaign in 2015, characterizing Mexican immigrants as murderers and rapists.
Trump has vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and slap high tariffs on American companies that have moved jobs south of the border.
Mexico ships 80 percent of its exports to the United States, and around half of Mexico's foreign direct investment has come from its northern neighbor over the last two decades.
"The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers... of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting," Trump said in his tweet before the planned Pena Nieto talks were scrapped.
The United States runs a $58.8 billion trade deficit with Mexico, according to the latest U.S. government figures. But Mexico is also the United States' second-largest export market.
Former foreign minister Jorge Castaneda said the Mexican government should have canceled the summit earlier in the week, when it became clear that Trump was going to go ahead with measures to build the wall and clamp down on immigration.
"There is an atmosphere of crisis in the United States and it is going to last a long time. We are going to have to get used to living like this," he said on Mexican radio.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/c…
Trump wants the measure to be part of a broader tax overhaul package that the U.S. Congress is contemplating, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters on Thursday.
It was not immediately clear how the tax would work. Parts of the proposal that Spicer described resemble an existing idea, known as a border adjustment tax, being considered by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives.
Spicer said: "We have a new tax at $50 billion at 20 percent 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. But by doing it that way we can do $10 billion a year and easily pay for the wall. Just through that mechanism alone," Spicer told reporters traveling with Trump to Philadelphia.
The White House later on Thursday said it was not endorsing the border adjustment tax. No further details were available.
News of the tax proposal widens a rift with Mexico which earlier on Thursday scrapped a planned summit between President Enrique Pena Nieto and Trump over the Republican's demands that Mexico pay for the border wall to stem illegal immigration.
Pena Nieto wrote on Twitter that he was pulling out of the planned meeting with Trump in Washington next week.
He was responding to an earlier tweet from Trump who said it would be better for the Mexican leader not to come if Mexico would not pay for the wall.
Trump later presented the scrapped plan as a mutual agreement.
Addressing Republican members of Congress at a meeting in Philadelphia, he said he and Pena Nieto had agreed to cancel the meeting, adding it would be fruitless if Mexico did not treat the United States "fairly."
"I've said many times that the American people will not pay for the wall," Trump told the gathering. "Unless Mexico is going to treat the United States fairly, with respect, such a meeting would be fruitless and I want to go a different route."
Trump views the wall, a major promise during his election campaign, as part of a package of measures to curb illegal immigration. Mexico has long insisted it will not heed Trump's demands to pay for the construction project.
Trump, who took office last week, signed an executive order for construction of the wall on Wednesday, just as a Mexican delegation led by Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray arrived at the White House for talks with Trump aides aimed at healing ties.
The timing of that, and Trump's reiterated call for Mexico to foot the bill, caused outrage in Mexico, with prominent politicians and many on social media seeing at as a deliberate snub to the government's efforts to engage with Trump, who has for months used Mexico as a political punching bag.
UNDER PRESSURE
Pena Nieto was under pressure to cancel the summit.
"We have informed the White House that I will not attend the working meeting planned for next Tuesday with @POTUS," he tweeted on Thursday. "Mexico reiterates its willingness to work with the United States to reach agreements that favor both nations."
Relations have been frayed since Trump launched his campaign in 2015, characterizing Mexican immigrants as murderers and rapists.
Trump has vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and slap high tariffs on American companies that have moved jobs south of the border.
Mexico ships 80 percent of its exports to the United States, and around half of Mexico's foreign direct investment has come from its northern neighbor over the last two decades.
"The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers... of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting," Trump said in his tweet before the planned Pena Nieto talks were scrapped.
The United States runs a $58.8 billion trade deficit with Mexico, according to the latest U.S. government figures. But Mexico is also the United States' second-largest export market.
Former foreign minister Jorge Castaneda said the Mexican government should have canceled the summit earlier in the week, when it became clear that Trump was going to go ahead with measures to build the wall and clamp down on immigration.
"There is an atmosphere of crisis in the United States and it is going to last a long time. We are going to have to get used to living like this," he said on Mexican radio.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/c…
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21 comments
After poor, white, rural Trump supporters lose their health insurance, they'll go to Walmart to buy a Corona and find their beer has gone up by 20%.
Build that wall! Build that wall!
Letitia James
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/26/t…
SJG
SJG
Steve Bannon
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/27/t…
Trump and Bannon know what the media can do. They were very tough on LBJ. They got even tougher on Nixon. They were tough on Jimmy Carter. But then with Reagan they completely backed off.
Hey, you guys who voted for Trump, but then keep acting like you are something other than a complete moron, this is where you have to deliver.
"And this is—this is a fight, in Bannon’s own words, over the soul of what America is. Is America a pluralistic democracy, or is America an authoritarian, nationalist, populist society?"
Libertarianism is nothing but coercive conformity and property rights.
You had your chances. We could have amended the Constitution before 1/20. We could have gotten the Electoral Collage to revolt.
Now, are we going to impeach him quickly? If not, then there really will be a revolution. This government has already lasted so long that it has turned into an empire.
SJG
Hotel in Peru falling into river, except I can't get it to play.
https://weather.com/news/trending/video/…
John Hassel Magic Realism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avUmeqbO…
www.democracynow.org/2017/1/27/the_media…
This warped world view put out by Right Wing Media is how Trump got elected, and it also informs some of the strange views found in TUSCL Members.
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SARAH POSNER: Well, this is an effort by the Trump administration to intimidate the media, first. And second, the comments are directed not just at the media, which I would predict is going to be not intimidated by Bannon, but it’s also directed at Bannon’s own audience at Breitbart News and the entire constellation of the alt-right, for which Bannon claimed that Breitbart is the platform. He told me in July that Breitbart is the platform for the alt-right. So, this is an effort to delegitimize the media in the eyes of the Breitbart audience—the Trump base, more broadly—by suggesting that the media has dishonestly covered Donald Trump, when, in fact, the chief complaint that has been lodged against the media by the Trump administration, and amplified on by President Trump last night in that clip that you just played, is based on hard facts about numbers that Donald Trump doesn’t like.
Now, ironically, the alt-right spends much of its time deriding colleges and universities across the United States as havens for weak and hysterical people who need safe spaces and trigger warnings; meanwhile, the president of the United States cannot accept the cold hard facts of how many people were at his inauguration, and sent his press secretary out to complain that the staff has been demoralized by the coverage, which was just based on those facts.
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Breitbart News was founded by the conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, and Bannon took over after Breitbart died suddenly about four or five years ago. Under Bannon’s leadership, even former reporters and editors at Breitbart have said that it became a haven for the alt-right, for white nationalists, for racists. The coverage—the so-called coverage on the site, that was written by—that’s written by its reporters, feeds into these racist and xenophobic themes. It portrays refugees and immigrants as criminals. It has derided the Black Lives Matter movement. And the coverage is not news. It’s definitely from a very far-right perspective. And if you read it, it will cause you to question your sense of reality, which is exactly what they’re looking for. You read it, and you think, "Wow! This is not what I’ve seen with my own eyes." And that’s exactly what the Trump administration wants the public to start questioning.
So, Bannon, when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention in July, like I said, he told me that Breitbart is the platform for the alt-right. He denied that the alt-right is a white nationalist movement, but he basically admitted that it’s an ethnonationalist movement, and he pointed to these far-right, authoritarian, populist movements in Europe that were the model for the alt-right. And he said that these nationalist movements were alive and well in the United States before President Trump became a candidate for president, that he did not create this movement. And Bannon actually credited somebody else with really spurring this movement, and that’s Jeff Sessions, who’s about to become Trump’s attorney general.
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SARAH POSNER: Well, this is part of the ideology that has fueled the alt-right and has fueled Trump’s rise, the idea that the civil rights movement or the women’s rights movement have altered American society in terrible ways, that it has changed life for white Americans in ways that have been detrimental to them. And this is—this is a fight, in Bannon’s own words, over the soul of what America is. Is America a pluralistic democracy, or is America an authoritarian, nationalist, populist society? And this is the battle that Steve Bannon is waging from within the White House and drawing the media into it by portraying the media as something—as an institution that’s not—not an institution that is protected by the First Amendment of our Constitution. You notice in those comments that he made, that you just played, he doesn’t talk about the Constitution at all or how the Constitution protects a free press or the free speech rights and many other rights of Americans. He portrays all of that as having run amok, basically. And this is—this is one of the chief advisers to President Trump right now, chief strategist to President Trump.
"
SJG
Capitalism will eat democracy -- unless we speak up | Yanis Varoufakis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB4s5b9N…
If Europe is bankrupt, then that's not the only place which is bankrupt.
Are Dougster and his friends driving us towards a utopia, like implied in "Star Trek", or towards a dystopia, as detailed in "The Matrix"?
$5.2 Trillion, used completely unproductively.
And could Athenian Democracy ever actually be a solution, and are Dougster and his friends going to allow hookers to vote?