Trump's Trade War & Economic Accountability (2024)

03/01/2022

President Joe Biden will announce plans Monday to combat the market power of the giant conglomerates that dominate meat and poultry processing, ratcheting up a months-long campaign that has blamed anti-competitive practices in the industry for contributing to surging food inflation.

Biden will join Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Attorney General Merrick Garland to meet virtually with ranchers and farmers to hear complaints about consolidation in the industry, while a newly launched portal will allow them to report unfair trade practices by meatpackers. The White House will also highlight initiatives it is taking to counter meatpackers’ economic power, including $1 billion in federal aid to assist expansion of independent processors and new competition regulations under consideration.

The latest announcement focuses fresh attention on Biden’s fight with the meat industry and helps cast him as a president willing to take on powerful business interests over consumer prices. Many Democrats are concerned that months of negotiations over Biden’s economic plan have distanced him too much from the most pressing kitchen-table concerns facing Americans.

Inflation has swiftly moved to the top of public concerns as the annual rise in consumer prices hit its highest level in almost 40 years. Meat prices, which in November were up 16% from a year earlier, have been the biggest contributor to grocery inflation. Meatpacking industry representatives have blamed soaring prices on labor shortages, rising fuel prices and supply-chain constraints.

Shares for meat companies were lower Monday, with JBS SA, the world’s biggest meat supplier, easing as much as 4.1%. Tyson Foods Inc., the biggest U.S. meat company by sales, fell as much as 1.2%.

Companies including JBS have said that a shortage of workers is affecting operations in every developed nation, limiting production increases and raising costs.

“Labor remains the biggest challenge,” Sarah Little, a spokeswoman for the North American Meat Institute, a trade group, said in a statement. “Our members of all sizes cannot operate at capacity because they struggle to employ a long-term stable workforce. New capacity and expanded capacity created by the government will have the same problem.”

Biden singled out the meat and poultry processing industries for scrutiny in a July executive order on promoting competition across the economy. His top economic adviser later criticized meatpackers for “pandemic profiteering.” The U.S. Agriculture Department also announced plans in June to consider three new sets of regulations on unfair trade practices in livestock and poultry markets, with officials anticipating the proposal of new rules early this year.

The president has placed critics of corporate consolidation in key positions across his administration, including Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter as assistant attorney general for antitrust.

Four large meatpacking companies control more than 80% of U.S. beef processing capacity, with similar levels of concentration in pork and poultry processing.

A fact sheet the White House distributed to reporters asserts that as a result most livestock producers “now have little or no choice of buyer for their product and little leverage to negotiate.” Tyson Foods Inc. reported record profits on its beef processing in quarterly earnings released in November.

The aid for independent meat and poultry processors, which will come from Covid relief funds, includes $375 million for gap financing grants and $100 million for guarantees of loans made through private banks, according to the fact sheet.

— With assistance by Michael Hirtzer

By Mike Dorning

President Joe Biden will announce plans Monday to combat the market power of the giant conglomerates that dominate meat and poultry processing, ratcheting up a months-long campaign that has blamed anti-competitive practices in the industry for contributing to surging food inflation.

25/10/2021

Documents and recordings obtained by the Guardian shed new light on a powerful and secretive rightwing network and the influence it was able to exert on Trump administration policies favoring the super-rich.

The recordings include speeches given to the Council for National Policy (CNP) by conservative media stars including Dennis Prager, emerging Republican power players such as Charlie Kirk, and close economic advisers to Donald Trump.

Some of the previously published recordings appear to no longer be publicly available.

The Guardian’s independently sourced recordings offer an insight into how conservative economic thinkers – from bodies representing the interests of some of the richest individuals in the country – were able to exert influence on the supposed populist Trump.

In particular, a panel discussion at CNP’s February 2019 meeting suggests that Trump decided one of his most far-reaching economic policies on very limited evidence – on the basis of a personal conversation.

The panel involved Bill Walton, president of CNP; the Washington Times columnist and former member of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority Richard Rahn; Jonathan Williams, chief economist at the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec); and Stephen Moore, a one-time Trump nominee for the Federal Reserve board, whose nomination was withdrawn following revelations in the Guardian that he had failed to pay his ex-wife hundreds of thousands of dollars in alimony.

The panelists offered a favorable assessment of the Trump administration’s economic performance, but also used the platform to claim credit for pushing the administration in the direction of radical free-market policies.

Moore claimed that he, together with Larry Kudlow, Trump’s director of the National Economic Council from 2018, had persuaded the thenpresident to offer unprecedented corporate tax cuts.

He described a meeting with Trump where they argued that the US’s corporate tax rate, relative to those among certain Asian and European competitors, was effectively a penalty on US companies, stating: “Look, you know, we’re at 40% – they are 20%. This is a big problem.”

Moore said that they explained these tax differences using charts, “because Donald Trump likes to look at pictures, he doesn’t like to read”.

According to Moore: “Trump looked at this and he said: ‘No, I don’t want to do that,’” instead proposing “not 20%. I want 15%,” with the number coming back to an effective 20% rate only after Senate negotiations.

Trump’s tax cuts slashed effective corporate tax rates in half, while providing other measures benefiting wealthy corporations.

The cuts have been blamed for widening inequality, and worsening deficits, with a large amount of the savings going to stock buybacks, according to business reporters and economists. The Congressional Research Service pointed out that any positive effects, like wage or GDP growth, were transient, and had petered out by the end of the quarter in which the cuts were put into effect.

This reveals the power of the CNP, a little known body whose members are deeply secretive about their meetings. CNP attendees’ access to this picture of the inner workings of the Trump administration, and the players who helped set its course, is the result of adherence to a strict code of silence.

In introducing the panel, the CNP conference director,Mary Margaret Hathaway, enjoined participants to secrecy, reminding them to “not record any speaker remarks”.

Hathaway continued: “CNP meetings are off-limits to the press. So please be aware of who you’re talking to.”

She added, “Don’t grant any interviews and if you run into a reporter asking questions about the event, please let a member of the CNP staff or leadership team know.”

Despite her warnings, the organization itself made the recordings obtained by the Guardian, and uploaded them on their website in a manner that made them accessible to any internet user.

Other recordings obtained by the Guardian include talks at 2018 and 2019 meetings by senior Republicans including Senator Tom Cotton and the US congressman Steve Scalise; and former governors including Scott Walker and Sam Brownback.

The CNP was founded in 1981 by influential Christian-right activists, including Tim LaHaye, Howard Phillips and Paul Weyrich, who were also involved in founding and leading the Moral Majority.

Initially, they were seeking to maximize their influence on the new Reagan administration. In subsequent years, CNP meetings played host to presidential aspirants like George W Bush in 1999 and Mitt Romney in 2007, and sitting presidents including Donald Trump in 2020.

The Guardian previously reported on a leak of the group’s 2020 membership list.

By Jason Wilson

Recordings from a 2019 panel discussion of the Council for National Policy reveal tax cuts were sparked by personal conversations

06/10/2021

A financially strapped trucking company received inside support from the Trump White House in 2020 while seeking a pot of Treasury Department pandemic relief aid meant to support businesses key to national security, according to emails released Wednesday by a congressional oversight committee.

Yellow Corporation gave the Treasury Department a 30 percent stake as a condition for the $700 million loan, which came from funds that Congress designated for companies “critical to national security.” Critics of the loan, including Republicans and Democrats charged with oversight over relief funds, contend that the Pentagon and Treasury stretched the term to include Yellow, previously known as YRC, a Defense Department subcontractor with several competitors in the trucking market.

Congressional investigators on the Democratic-led select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, which released the emails, are now asking the National Archives and Records Administration to provide it with Trump White House communications, memos and calendar entries regarding the loan to Yellow or its private-equity backer, Apollo Global Management.

The emails released Wednesday show exchanges in May and June 2020 between Mike Kelley, a senior executive at Yellow, the firm’s lobbyists, White House staff and officials at the Teamsters, the union that represents most Yellow workers. They depict a multi-pronged campaign by the company to win the aid, one that reached the highest levels of the White House, Treasury Department and Pentagon.

On May 6, 2020, Erskine Wells, a lobbyist whose firm registered to represent Yellow in April 2020, copied Kelley on an email stating that Trump White House official Tim Pataki had committed to “call Treasury on our behalf.” The email also was also sent to Rohit Kumar and Todd Metcalf of PwC, former senior Republican and Democratic Senate aides, respectively, also registered to lobby for Yellow in April 2020. A spokesperson representing Pataki declined to comment.

In another email, Wells informed Kelley that he has shared “key materials” with an aide to Larry Kudlow, then the director of the National Economic Council at the White House. Wells also said in the email that he had spoken to or contacted several other offices at the White House, and had “debriefed” Senate staff, who committed to calling then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Justin Muzinich “to check in on YRC.”

Yellow significantly increased its spending on lobbying in 2020, ultimately paying lobbyists $570,000 that year compared with zero in 2019, according to federal disclosures. The company has spent nearly $585,000 so far this year on lobbyists.

“Yellow reached out to the appropriate executive and legislative branches to help save 30,000 jobs and protect the vulnerable U.S. supply chain during the height of the COVID-19 crisis,” the company said in a statement provided by a spokeswoman. “Our request received bipartisan Congressional support and the full support of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. When negotiating with the Department of the Treasury, all guidelines were followed, and the due diligence process was extensive. We stand by our work and are proud to partner with the U.S. government and our military to support America’s domestic supply chain.”

Spokespeople for PwC and the Teamsters declined to comment. Kudlow declined to provide a statement for this report, and Muzinich and Wells did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Pataki declined to comment on his behalf.

Members of the Congressional Oversight Commission, a bipartisan body set up to watch over Treasury Department spending of Cares Act funds, started raising concerns about the loan to Yellow just weeks after it was announced in July 2020, pointing out that it was not the type of company envisioned for the $17 billion in the Cares Act set aside for businesses “critical to national security.” Aircraft manufacturers including Boeing were the fund’s intended recipients but largely balked at the terms and did not apply.

The Cares Act did not specify what “critical to national security” meant, leaving that to Treasury. The agency defined such businesses as those operating under top secret clearances or working on certain priority contracts, but also created a third route for businesses certified as critical by the Secretary of Defense. That was how Yellow ultimately qualified for the loan, and emails show the company reached out to high-level officials at the Pentagon in search of a waiver. Yellow received the largest loan by far of any company, with the other loans going to an array of defense-focused start-ups.

The Congressional Oversight Commission struggled to get satisfactory answers from the Pentagon as to why it certified Yellow for the loan, at one point stating that “the Department of Defense did not even consider whether the services it obtains from YRC could be obtained elsewhere,” and later concluding that “DOD applies their national security designation inconsistently.”

COC members also raised concerns about the risk the loan posed to U.S. taxpayers, pointing to Yellow’s past financial troubles. The company lost more than $100 million in 2019, before the pandemic hit.

“Overall, the Commission continues to believe that Treasury and DOD made missteps in deeming Yellow as critical to national security and executing the loan,” the Commission wrote in April.

In a June letter to the select subcommittee, Yellow said chief executive Darren Hawkins wrote that “before the loan was issued, all necessary and appropriate steps to justify the national security designation were followed by Yellow, Treasury and the Secretary of Defense.

Yellow is backed by Apollo Global Management, a large private equity firm whose founder, Joshua Harris, advised the Trump administration on infrastructure policy in 2017, the New York Times reported. Apollo also lent $184 million to the family real estate company of Jared Kushner, a top White House aide and Trump’s son-in-law.

A spokeswoman for Apollo said the firm “was not involved in the company’s decision to seek the Treasury funds and did not advocate on their behalf.” The emails released Wednesday do not show any Apollo executives involved in the effort.

Yellow was seen as a controversial recipient because of the size of the loan, its possible connections to the White House via Apollo, and because its services could feasibly be replaced by any number of national logistics companies. If Yellow went belly-up, another trucking company could step in, critics argued.

In December, COC members grilled former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin over the loan. Mnuchin replied that he had no communication with Kushner or his staff about the loan, and cited letters from members of Congress, saying there was “tremendous interest” to expedite it. Mnuchin recommended that his successor sell the loan.

At the time the loan was issued, Mnuchin called the company a “critical vendor” to the Defense Department. He said the loan would allow the company to sustain its employment while providing an appropriate repayment to taxpayers.

A spokesman for Mnuchin declined to comment, referring to his past comments on the issue. A spokesman for the Treasury Department also declined to comment. The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, found several discrepancies in how Yellow was treated by the government compared with other companies applying for aid. Treasury fast tracked the loan to Yellow “due to the urgency of the business’s financial circumstances,” GAO found, even though other companies faced similarly dire circumstances. And the loan was negotiated and executed by Treasury staff who were “not otherwise involved in the loan program,” GAO said.

Yellow has since used the Treasury loan, in part, to pay for capital investments, including new tractors and trailers to upgrade its aging fleet, according to company statements.

This year it also hired Heather Nauert, a former State Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration. Nauert said in an email that she works “with a range of clients and began advising Yellow in early 2021.”

By Yeganeh Torbati, Aaron Gregg

Yellow Corporation, previously known as YRC Worldwide, received a $700 million loan from a Treasury Department program meant for businesses crucial to national security. Members of a congressional oversight committee are skeptical.

27/09/2021

Former "President" Donald Trump sent billions in federal aid in a bid to win over America's farmers -- but now they're all for President Joe Biden's $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, in hopes it will mean fixing roads and bridges critical to the delivery of food to the rest of the nation.

The bill could be a big bipartisan win. It was drafted by lawmakers from both parties and passed the Senate with 19 Republican votes in August, but its fate remains uncertain with Democrats divided over tying it to a larger $3.5 trillion spending package.

"We'll take as much money the federal government can send our way and I would say almost every state is in a similar condition," said Bill Panos, the director of the North Dakota Department of Transportation, who also serves as the president of the Western Association of State Highway Transportation Officials.

Panos has a 10-year plan for North Dakota that is projected to cost $2 billion just to maintain existing infrastructure -- about the amount in federal funding the state expects to receive for road and highway investments if the bill passes. North Dakota's senators Kevin Cramer and John Hoeven, both Republicans, voted for the bill.

"These are the kinds of projects that bring food from the farm to your grocery store," Panos added.

Iowa farmer Dave Walton is a prime example of where the problems are. During the fall harvest, he drives his soybeans east to a terminal on the Mississippi River, where a barge will eventually deliver them down to the Gulf of Mexico. But that first leg of the trip takes Walton a lot more time than it used to.

"We have to detour in several places now because the bridges are in disrepair and the weight limit has lowered," Walton said, adding, "It can be miles and miles out of the way."

Poor infrastructure is causing delays and costing farmers money across the country. Roads are getting worse as farm equipment is getting bigger. The problem is made even worse by extreme weather events and the stresses the pandemic has put on the supply chain, leading to shortages of everything from McDonald's milkshakes to used cars.

By Katie Lobosco

Former President Donald Trump sent billions in federal aid in a bid to win over America's farmers -- but now they're all for President Joe Biden's $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, in hopes it will mean fixing roads and bridges critical to the delivery of food to the rest of the nation.

01/06/2021

As well as stocks have done since Biden was elected, the rally in farm prices has been no less astonishing.

As Donald Trump preps for his upcoming summer grievance tour, holding campaign style rallies over the next few months in Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida, farmers in those and other states should be listening to his message with some skepticism. South Dakota’s ag community in particular has good reason to doubt that a return to Trumpism will do it much good.

The ex-President’s trade policies were the worst thing that could have happened to American agriculture in decades. The nosedive in soybean and corn prices stemming from Trump’s rather iditoic notion that starting trade wars with our biggest trading partners would be a good thing for our farmers blew up in everybody’s face.

The turnaround in farm commodity futures markets since last Fall has given South Dakota’s ag sector - representing the state’s largest industry - a mighty boost. Soybean prices have moved up 50% since Biden was elected, while corn has jumped nearly 70%. These are huge numbers when you convert them into dollars, representing for South Dakota billions of dollars of revenue that wasn’t there when Trump was in office.

Much of this is due to a jump in demand from our overseas customers, China in particular. A return to stability and predictability in our trade policy has probably had much to do with the turnaround in the ag sector, particularly when it comes to China. Trump and his inept and ignorant “trade wars are easy to win” approach to dealing with our overseas customers got him and his farm belt supporters the financial punishment that was sure to come. Even Trump’s highly touted “Phase One” agreement with China in 2019 proved to be a bust, as that country fell far short of its buying commitments the following year.

As it turned out, American taxpayers came to the rescue of our country’s affected farmers (a program I wholeheartedly supported even though I abhorred the Trump policies that created a need for it) by providing billions in mitigation payments to make up for their Trump-created losses.

As Trump progresses through his coming tour, I doubt that he’ll have much of a pitch for farmers. He certainly can’t sell them on his results. South Dakota’s ag industry is having a heyday now that the Biden administration has committed to rebuilding a world trading platform that conforms to the normal synergies of supply, demand and comparative advantages.

We don’t need Trump and his lack of understanding how trade policy and tariffs work.

His coming grievance tour will probably have its following, but farmers, once-bitten, twice shy, shouldn’t be swayed by him this time around.

John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills.

As well as stocks have done since Biden was elected, the rally in farm prices has been no less astonishing. As Donald Trump preps for his upcoming summer grievance tour , holding campaign style rallies over the next few months in Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida, farmers in t

29/04/2021

U.S. economic growth accelerated in the first quarter as a rush of consumer spending helped bring total output to the cusp of its pre-pandemic level, foreshadowing further impressive gains in coming months.

Gross domestic product expanded at a 6.4% annualized rate following a softer 4.3% pace in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department’s preliminary estimate showed Thursday. Personal consumption, the biggest part of the economy, surged an annualized 10.7%, the second-fastest since the 1960s.

The inflation-adjusted value of domestically produced goods and services climbed to an annualized $19.1 trillion, indicating GDP will soon eclipse the pre-pandemic peak of nearly $19.3 trillion.

U.S. stock futures rose after the report and investors digested a batch of corporate earnings.

Rising vaccinations, faster job growth and two rounds of federal stimulus payments combined to supercharge household spending. As government restrictions on activity are widely lifted, consumer demand is seen broadening and driving outlays for long-downtrodden services such as travel and leisure.

A host of high-frequency data, including restaurant and air travel bookings, already confirms a rapidly improving economy that has helped drive stock prices to fresh highs.

The pent-up demand that’s seen driving outsize growth this year is propelling prices skyward at the same time producers are experiencing material shortages and supply-chain challenges. Further, the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve are pushing ahead with policy prescriptions that provide even more juice for the economy.

The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 6.7% growth in the January through March period.

The pace of government spending jumped at a 6.3% annual rate, the fastest since 2002 and a reflection of federal stimulus. Annualized non-defense outlays climbed by the most since 1963.

The pickup in growth in the January to March period also reflected continued strength in business investment and housing. Non-residential investment rose an annualized 9.9%, driven by equipment and intellectual property, while residential investment increased at a 10.8% rate.

✦ Trade, Inventories

Firm household and business spending has left inventories lean and spurred import demand -- two areas that weighed on first-quarter growth. Net exports of goods and services subtracted 0.87 percentage point from GDP, while the change in inventories subtracted 2.64 points.

Excluding the trade and inventories components of GDP, final sales to private domestic purchasers, a gauge of underlying demand, accelerated to a 10.6% pace.

U.S. growth forecasts have been upgraded over the past few months after the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill that passed through Congress along party lines proved to be larger than many economists originally expected.

In addition, President Joe Biden has now proposed two additional spending plans -- one focused on infrastructure and the other on families -- that would infuse trillions more dollars into the economy over the next decade.

Meanwhile, Fed officials are sticking with their ultra-easy monetary policy to ensure businesses have access to capital and consumers can borrow cheaply for big-ticket items such as homes and cars.

“We were in a deep, deep hole a year ago and now with a lot of help from fiscal policy, some additional help from monetary policy, and a great deal of help from vaccination, we’re seeing a strong rebound in activity,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said during a press conference Wednesday after the central bank’s policy meeting.

While acknowledging the economy’s progress, the Fed kept its key interest rate near zero and maintained its $120 billion monthly pace of bond purchases. In their statement, policy makers said that while inflation has picked up, it mostly reflected “transitory factors.”

The GDP report showed the personal consumption expenditures price index excluding food and energy costs climbed an annualized 2.3% in the first quarter after a 1.3% pace in the previous three months.

While overall output has yet to surpass pre-pandemic levels, the value of nonresidential investment has and personal consumption is just tens of billions of dollars from doing so.

Disposable personal income jumped in the quarter by the most on record, to an annualized $19.6 trillion, after the pandemic relief bills passed in December and March distributed direct payments to millions of families and re-instituted a weekly top-up in unemployment benefits.

By Reade Pickert

U.S. economic growth accelerated in the first quarter as a rush of consumer spending helped bring total output to the cusp of its pre-pandemic level, foreshadowing further impressive gains in coming months.

08/04/2021

As President Joe Biden announced his $2 trillion plan to invest in American infrastructure, he claimed that the program’s costs would be covered by undoing the corporate tax cuts America saw underneath former "President" Donald Trump. This has sparked a great deal of conversation for the onset of tax season, so it may be worth remembering that Gary Cohn, Trump’s former White House National Economic Council Director and CEO of Goldman Sachs, has expressed the opinion that tax cuts went too far during the Trump administration.

Biden held a press event on Wednesday to outline how the American Jobs Plan would focus on roads and bridges over the next 8 years, but also a number of broader expansions for infrastructure and economics. He argued that the program would be affordable if corporate tax rates were raised to 28 percent, but he also condemned corporations for exploiting tax loopholes and said the Trump administration only helped the wealthy by lowering the rate to 21 percent with the tax cut of 2017.

“I’m sick and tired of ordinary people being fleeced,” Biden said. “It’s not fair to the rest of the American taxpayers. We’re going to try to put an end to this.”

There’s a high probability that Democrats and Republicans will argue about whether the package is too expansive and what is the appropriate corporate tax rate. In the meantime, one might care to remember that Cohn gave an interview to Yahoo Finance’s Adam Shapiro where he defended the Trump-era tax cuts by arguing that they stimulated the economy, but he would back Biden’s proposals to bring corporate taxes up.

"I’m actually okay at 28 percent. The level we got to in our tax plan on the corporate side was actually a bit lower than I thought we needed to go. We had come down from 35 percent. Getting down in the low 20s was probably lower than what we needed to go. I always thought there was a compromise rate sort of in the mid 20s that made sense. I’ll remind everyone, though, that the corporate tax rate is not where we collect a lot of dollars. So the difference between going from 35 percent to 21 percent was less than $100 billion a year. We don’t collect a lot of money in the corporate tax rate… If we go to 28 percent, that’s probably the top end of the range that we can go to and be competitive with the rest of the world. It’s at the outer bounds of my limit of acceptability. I could live with 28 percent."

Former White House National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn previously said he was on board with President Joe Biden's proposed 28 percent corporate tax

Trump's Trade War & Economic Accountability

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