Will Agent Orange pick up Paul Manafort’s $19 million Russian marker with the aluminum tariff, thereby buying Manafort’s cooperation in #TrumpRussia.
This is not the first instance where Manafort’s involvement with Trump has been seen primarily as a means to pay off his creditors. The reality is that it’s not Mango Mussolini but the US economy that’s doing the payoff.
The charge of Chinese steel dumping is perhaps tinged with sinophobia as well as a Lord Dampnut thinking that his purchases of Chinese steel for his buildings had nothing to do with buying and hiring American (First). This is even with the steel and aluminum tariffs more about Mexico, Canada, and the E.U.. And that doesn’t even touch the ignorance that Agent Orange has shown about pipeline steel production.
But there is no aluminum dumping, per se and getting US beer drinkers and aerospace/auto workers to pay for Manafort’s bills should be more than a bit concerning. And then there’s the whole kleptocratic aspect of scoring extra cash off imports at the port of entry as well as the increased, migrating costs along the value chain.
About one-third of the 100 million tons of steel used each year by American business is imported, while imports account for more than 90% of the 5.5 million tons of aluminum used by U.S. companies.
fortune.com/…
When it opened the probe in late March, the Commerce Department said it was also launching a review of whether China should be treated as a market economy country, a designation that would effectively limit the calculation of anti-dumping duties on Chinese-made goods..
The terms of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 allowed other WTO members to use a third country’s prices to assess whether Chinese goods were being sold below cost or fair market value.
That clause expired last December and China has called on the United States and the European Union to drop their use of such surrogate pricing, which has led to higher U.S. anti-dumping duties on imported Chinese goods.
www.reuters.com/…
If the Commerce Department find dumping or unfair subsidization has happened, it will instruct U.S. Customs and Border Protection to start collecting cash deposits from all U.S. companies importing the subject aluminum sheet from China.
Those guilty of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning attribute the rebound in the U.S. semiconductor industry since the mid-1980s to the agreement. The agreement did spawn greater cooperation and joint ventures between SIA and EIAJ members. But the U.S. industry did well to get out of memory chips (where the Japanese are now battling the South Koreans) and into microprocessors and application-specific integrated circuits. The agreement had little to do with this.
(March 2017)
Today, news agency Associated Press reported that Deripaska paid Manafort $10 million a year to lobby for Putin-friendly oligarchs in Ukraine, and for pro-Russian governments in Georgia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, from 2006 through at least 2009. Deripaska also paid Manafort to undermine anti-Russian individuals in these former Soviet states, using front groups and media, according to the report.
[...]
Deripaska and Manafort became estranged in 2014, following a $19 million television deal gone bad. Two years later, during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, people around Deripaska accused Manafort of fraud and threatened to take action to recover money from Manafort.
Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska is a Russian oligarch, aluminium magnate and philanthropist. He is the founder and owner of one of the largest Russian industrial groups Basic Element. He has been the president of En+ Group and United Company Rusal, the second largest aluminium company in the world, until 2018
On 22 March 2017, the Associated Press published a report alleging that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's former presidential campaign manager, negotiated a $10 million annual contract with Deripaska to promote Russian interests in politics, business, and media coverage in Europe and the United States, starting in 2005.[94] Both Deripaska and Manafort have confirmed to have worked together in the past,[95] but rejected the contents of the AP story. Manafort argued that his work had been inaccurately presented, and that there was nothing “inappropriate or nefarious" about it.[96]
Responding to the allegations, on March 28, 2017, Deripaska published open letters in the print editions of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, in which he denied having signed a $10 million contract with Manafort in order to benefit the Putin government.[97] He also stated his willingness to testify before the United States Congress to dispel these allegations,[98] and argued that the accusations fall "into the negative context of current US-Russian relations."[99] According to Congressional sources cited by The New York Times, lawmakers declined Deripaska's request, after it emerged that he had asked for immunity. Unnamed officials argued that "immunity agreements create complications for federal criminal investigators".[100]
On May 15, 2017, Deripaska filed a defamation and libel lawsuit against the Associated Press in a U.S. District Court in D.C., arguing that[101] the outlet's report falsely claimed that Deripaska had signed a contract with Manafort to advance the goals of the Russian government.[102] However, the lawsuit was dismissed in October 2017 on the grounds that Deripaska had not disputed "any material facts" in the story by the Associate press [103]
During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Manafort, via Kiev-based operative Konstantin Kilimnik, offered to provide briefings on political developments to Deripaska, though there is no evidence that the briefings took place.[104][105] Behaviors such as these were seen as an attempt by Manafort to please an oligarch tied to Putin's government.[106]
Again paraphrasing Don Boudreaux, if a nation we trade with wants to fill its harbors with boulders to prevent foreign goods from getting in, does that mean America should then start filling her own harbors with boulders? If it sounds like something between economic masochism and economic suicide, that’s because it is — and tariffs are the boulders of trade policy.
(One exception to this would be to counteract “dumping,” where a foreign supplier is selling items at a loss for the primary purpose of putting our domestic producers out of business, following which the foreign producer would intend to gain monopoly pricing power. Though this is not the case with the majority of trade with China, dumping did appear to be happening with Chinese steel imports into the U.S. in 2009 and China lost a case on the issue at the U.S. International Trade Commission...)
spectator.org/...