American Agricultural exporters demand change in PMA
and ILWU negotiations

ANGRY agricultural exporters and truckers attending the Agriculture Transportation Coalition (AgTC) annual meeting in San Francisco expressed frustration about losses and delays incurred during the recent cargo handling slow down at west coast ports.
They want assurances that there will be no slow down when the current contract expires in 2019 between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA).
"The US cannot afford another collapse of our gateway container ports," said the AgTC statement. "We cannot stand by and wait for US west coast ports, which have now shut down twice over the past 13 years, to do it again when the recently approved ILWU-PMA contract expires in just four years, in 2019."  >More
 

Economist tells the truth, nothing but the truth, but not
the whole truth about US-Mexican affairs

THE question whether NAFTA was a step to rival the creation of NATO, or a mortal blow to US jobs from cheap Mexican labour was the big talking point when they forged the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) back in the early '90s.
Looking back, London's Economist concludes NAFTA's backers have won the argument. America's trade with Mexico increased by 506 per cent between 1993 and 2012, compared with 279 per cent with non-NAFTA countries. A thoroughly good thing as the Economist sees it.
But with illegal aliens streaming across the border arousing much suspicion that the Economist's sunny conclusions about greater cultural integration are not as sanguine as that newspaper suggests. There are strong countervailing fears of these developments are not good and they crowd the issue lists of presidential politics.  >More
 

US Export-Import Bank proves to be bad target for assault
on US federal power

FOR the longest time the US Export-Import Bank has been the target of choice of people want to cut the US Federal Government down to size. Not because the Ex-IM Bank was so bad, but because its would-be destroyers felt they could get leftists on side to wholeheartedly back its destruction. It's role, after all, was to dispense soft loans to "corporate welfare bums" to use the parlance of the socialists.
One hesitates to say that the US Export-Import Bank is dead even now that a Republican controlled Congress refused to reauthorise it. One hesitates because we live in a world when deadlines are not things that signal the end of things, but only spawn new deadlines. Like bankruptcies, they are no longer the end of the story, but the turning the page into Chapter 11. So it is better than even money that the US Export-Import Bank will rise again.
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US loses meat labelling case; trade war looms

Winston Churchill once said that democracy was the worst system of government except when compared with everything else. Of course, he had Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini in mind, not Hong Kong's Tung Chee-hwa or Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew when considering everything else.
Whatever Tung and Lee's faults, and however disappointing they were to democratic purists, it must be admitted that they steered clear of the many inevitable pitfalls in that democracies throw up the world over.
No better example can be found these days than in the senseless quarrel between Mexico and Canada on one side and the United States on the other. Here are three friendly nations, normally on excellent terms with each other, threatening to loose a trade war over meat labels, under a US law called COOL - Country of Origin Labelling. >More