‘It is not easy, we don’t think we will have it by Thursday’

by Mexico News Daily

Reaching an updated NAFTA deal before Thursday’s deadline is looking unlikely, Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo said today.

United States House Speaker Paul Ryan set the cut-off date last Wednesday amid some optimism that Mexico, the U.S. and Canada could soon reach an agreement in principle as a result of meetings attended last week by the chief trade representatives in Washington.

However, ultimately no new deal was forthcoming and talks this week also look set to fall short of reaching a definitive outcome, which would allow the U.S. Congress a chance to approve it before the end of the year.

“It is not easy, we don’t think we will have it by Thursday,” Guajardo told broadcaster Televisa.

“We will keep negotiating, and in the moment that we have a good negotiation, we can close the deal . . . independent of which Congress [the current or new one] that will vote on it,” he said.

The United States will hold midterm elections in November and a new Congress will first sit in January. Under the U.S. “fast track” trade negotiation law, there are lengthy notification periods before Congress could start considering a new NAFTA, precipitating the establishment of this Thursday’s deadline.

Mexico’s presidential election is also now less than seven weeks away, further complicating talks.

The lingering uncertainty over the future of the 24-year-old trade pact, coupled with the upcoming election, has placed pressure on the Mexican peso, Guajardo said.

The currency fell to its lowest level in more than a year yesterday and some analysts believe that it will continue to decline in the lead-up to the election, which according to opinion polls, Andrés Manuel López Obrador is likely to win.

The economy secretary, who said last month that there was an 80% chance that a new agreement would be struck in the first week of May, now believes that there are “different moments to close the negotiation.”

“It could be before the Mexican election on July 1, it could be just after,” he said.

A push to conclude a deal by the end of the week came yesterday in the form of a telephone conversation between Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and United States President Donald Trump.

A report in Canadian media said Trudeau make a direct appeal to Trump to keep momentum alive at the negotiating table.

Guajardo’s successor, should López Obrador become Mexico’s next president, said last month that an incoming AMLO administration would be willing to accept a new NAFTA deal that was struck before July 1.

However, if that doesn’t happen, Graciela Márquez said, it would be preferable to complete the negotiations after the new president is sworn in in December.

In the five-month period between election day and the swearing-in ceremony, Guajardo said, the next government’s team would need to be involved in any ongoing trilateral trade talks.

Guajardo said that negotiators were close to reaching agreement on rules of origin for the auto sector.

However, U.S. demands for a so-called sunset clause that would see NAFTA automatically expire if the agreement is not renegotiated every five years as well as the elimination of settlement panels for trade disputes remain sticking points.

The United States and Canada are also pushing Mexico to increase wages in its automotive sector.

Guajardo added that more flexibility was needed in order to reach a deal.

Kenneth Smith, the head of Mexico’s technical negotiating team, reiterated in a radio interview that from Mexico’s perspective there are no fixed deadlines it is working towards.

“Mexico’s position since the start of the negotiation has been that we’re not going to sacrifice the quality of the deal to conclude quickly,” he said, although he added that there is still time to reach a conclusion before the end of the year.

“There’s no question the possibility exists, we’re interested and I think the United States and Canada share this view,” he said.

Source: Reuters (en)

In other non-related news:

It’s no longer just about drugs: pipeline thieves move into Sinaloa
Pemex has detected an average of three new illegal taps per day

Violent crime in Sinaloa is not the exclusive domain of drug cartels: gangs of fuel thieves known as huachicoleros have taken their fight into the northern state.

This year, state oil company Pemex has detected on average three new illegal taps on its pipelines per day in Sinaloa, which is now one of eight Mexican states where 80% of the crime is concentrated.

Last month, turf wars between rival gangs over the control of the illicit fuel market in the state triggered a wave of violence, mainly in state capital Culiacán and the town of Mocorito, located about 120 kilometers to the north.

The Topolobampo-Culiacán pipeline runs through both municipalities and, according to Pemex data, there were 252 illegal taps on the duct in the first three months of the year, almost double the number detected in the first quarter of 2017.

In Culiacán and Mocorito, state security authorities have reported gun battles and cars being set alight in connection with the crime and schools have been closed due to the fear generated by the feuding, between heavily-armed groups.

On April 15, 10 people were kidnapped in Culiacancito, located just outside the capital, and the following day a shootout in El Limón de los Ramos — also in the municipality of Culiacán — left an innocent passerby wounded.

Authorities subsequently seized a burned-out car with several bullet holes from the scene of the confrontation.

Two days later on April 18, another car was set alight at a home in the community of El Tamarindo, Culiacán, leading to an air and ground-based police operation and the suspension of classes in the area.

The same day, state Public Security Secretary Genaro Robles attributed the incident to fuel thieves.

In response to the rising levels of fuel theft, the state Public Security Secretariat has launched a joint operation with the army and navy.

It has also called on residents not to buy stolen fuel in order to discourage its sale and in turn reduce the prevalence of the crime.

Pemex CEO Carlos Treviño said last month that fuel theft costs the state oil company 30 billion pesos (US $1.5 billion) a year.

Source: Reforma (sp)

By Jon Rappoport

In several recent articles (all here under category: socialism), I’ve exposed the myth that socialism is a revolution of and for the people.

I’ve presented evidence that socialism is actually a movement owned, operated, and funded by ultra-wealthy elites.

Dupes, foot soldiers, blind idealists, indoctrinated students, and low-level thugs are recruited through cutouts to serve the agenda of Rockefeller Globalists, for example, who are determined to bring about worldwide socialism.

Socialism, in a nutshell, equals ultra-rich elites (represented by the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, etc.) owning the free market, cutting out competition, and creating more powerful, overarching, central governments.

Hidden in the plan is the granting of greater dominion to mega-corporations. This is a key fact.

The US Constitution was a document that established extremely limited central government. Regardless of the motives of the authors and the state legislatures that ratified it, the ideas contained in the Constitution were, and are, extremely oppressive toward large centralized structures controlling the people.

But there was another factor present at the beginning of the American Republic.

At the dawn of the United States, corporations were chartered and thus allowed to operate by the individual states. If a corporation, in the eyes of a state legislature, violated a basic trust by harming the people, committing offenses against the citizenry, the legislature could summarily cancel their charter and literally exile them from the state.

This power followed, in part, from the fact that corporations were not and are not individuals. They do not have the rights and freedoms of individuals. Corporations were not granted the rights of citizens in the Constitution.

Richard Grossman, an activist and scholar of US corporate history, unearthed and made lucid these facts.

At the birth of the American Republic, therefore, there was a double limitation on power. Central government and corporations were both strapped and shackled.

Of course, just as the federal government has been allowed to expand like an unchecked fungus, so has corporate power.

Under socialism (aka Globalism), mega-corporate power is the prow of a ship that sails on and on and conquers the economies of the world.

Corporate crimes go unpunished.

Contrary to popular belief, the real agenda of socialism has nothing to do with prosecuting those crimes.

The idea, for example, that greater socialism in America would defeat Monsanto is ludicrous in the extreme.

Monsanto is one of the components of actual socialism—the real, not the fake, version.

Again, socialism is by, for, and of the ultra-wealthy elites. It is not a movement on behalf of the downtrodden.

As Gary Allen puts it in his 1971 classic, None Dare call It Conspiracy: “…pressure from above and pressure from below… The pressure from above comes from secret, ostensibly respectable Comrades in the government and [elite Globalist] Establishment, forming, with the radicalized mobs in the streets below, a giant pincer around middle-class society. The street rioters are pawns, shills, puppets, and dupes for an oligarchy of elitist conspirators working above to turn America’s limited government into an unlimited government with total control over our lives and property.”

“The American middle class is being squeezed to death by a vise. In the streets we have avowed revolutionary groups… Virtually all members of these groups sincerely believe that they are fighting the Establishment. In reality they are an indispensable ally of the Establishment in fastening Socialism on all of us. The naive radicals think that under Socialism the ‘people’ will run everything. Actually, it will be a clique of Insiders in total control, consolidating and controlling all wealth. That is why these schoolboy Lenins and teenage Trotskys are allowed to roam free and are practically never arrested or prosecuted. They are protected. If the Establishment wanted the revolutionaries stopped, how long do you think they would be tolerated?”

Gary Allen wrote that passage in 1971. Does it ring a familiar bell now?

As philosopher George Santayana famously wrote in 1905, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Equally famous is the prescription for all advertising: repeat the same message over and over, so it sinks into the mind and forms a false impression of truth.

Thus it has been with the basic message of socialism. “This is a form of government that finally serves the people. It is the people rising up to take the reins of power.”

Once that notion is rigidly fixed in consciousness, it is impossible to believe socialism is actually emanating from the elite of the elite.

Fortunately, more and more people are waking up to the basic con of fake news, which doesn’t only broadcast distorted current events spooling out through screens, day by day.

Basic themes of fake news also span decades and even centuries.

What will happen when enough young people, who want to tear down the structures of the monopolists, realize those same men are bankrolling them in the streets?

What will happen when these young people realize their teachers and mentors and handlers and professors have been feeding them the precise reverse of the truth?

As long as independent media continue to proliferate, that day is coming.

(Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed, Exit From The Matrix, and Power Outside The Matrix).

The employers of Nicaragua break with Ortega

Business sector says that the corporatist model “got exhausted” and they support a change in the government

by Carlos Salinas

Among the changes generated by the unprecedented popular rebellion in Nicaragua, which for the past 43 days has demanded the departure of President Daniel Ortega from the government, is the end of the corporatist model that for ten years was one of the main pillars that gave it stability to the regime.

On Tuesday night, the Higher Council for Private Enterprise (COSEP), the country’s leading business chamber, demanded that its members resign “in an immediate manner” to any relationship they had with the Ortega Executive, while two of the most powerful businessmen of the country, Carlos Pellas and Piero Coen, affirmed that this corporatist model “was exhausted” and that a change of Government is necessary.

The COSEP said in a statement made public on Tuesday night that from April 18 – when Ortega unleashed a fierce oppression against demonstrations that opposed a Social Security reform imposed without consensus – he suspended his participation “in any meeting with government authorities as a consequence of our rejection of repression and our commitment to justice and democracy in Nicaragua.” Many members of the chamber, however, held positions in commissions, committees or just directives of public institutions, within the model of partnership between the private sector and the government developed by Ortega. Since yesterday that relationship was broken.

The businessmen criticized the repression and acts of violence unleashed by the Executive, which has not implemented the recommendations made by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH), which demanded the end of all forms of repression, respect for the rights of Nicaraguans to protest in a peaceful way, the protection of the demonstrators and the creation of an international, autonomous mechanism to investigate and clarify the violations of human rights in the country since April.

On Monday, Nicaragua experienced one of the most violent days since April, after forces of the Sandinista Front, para-police groups and riot police attacked the campus of the National University of Engineering (UNI), where a hundred students had barricaded themselves that demand the end of the Sandinista government. The images retransmitted live on television showed the officers shooting at close range in what is the commercial and financial heart of Managua.

The violence left two dead, more than 40 wounded, a score of young people imprisoned, businesses attacked, the façade of a pro-government radio and journalists assaulted.

Relatives of these detainees were showed up on Tuesday at the headquarters of the Directorate of Judicial Assistance, in Managua, popularly known as “El Chipote” and denounced as a torture center. The mothers of these people demanded their release and after several hours of pressure a group of priests could access the building. After a quick negotiation they obtained the promise of the authorities to release 22 young people captured on Monday. They were delivered to the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Nicaraguan capital, but other mothers reported that their children were not on the list, whom they call “disappeared”.

“We demand the immediate release of young people and citizens who are still illegally detained,” the businessmen said in their statement.

The tourism business sector of Nicaragua – one of the pillars of the economy of this country – also declared their stand Tuesday night. This union has been hard hit by the crisis. There are hotels in the colonial cities of Granada and Leon –postcards of this country in front of the world- that do not have guests, others that work at 20 percent of their capacity, while the restaurants reported losses of up to 50 percent.

In its statement, the Chamber of Tourism blamed the government for the violence and urged all its members to participate in a national demonstration to be held on Wednesday, May 30, Mother’s Day in Nicaragua, which would be led by the mothers of those killed by the repression. The demonstration, to which all business chambers, university students, peasants and civil society organizations would join, promised to be gigantic.

“We reiterate our firm and clear position next to the people who fight to achieve justice for the murdered, wounded, tortured, disappeared and illegally detained,” said the businessmen. “Tourism, someday, when peace shines in our homeland, we can recover it, but the lives of more than 90 Nicaraguan brothers, mostly students in the prime of youth, we will never be able to recover them. For that reason and for them we demand justice. ”

The most symptomatic statements of the break with the government came, however, from two of the country’s leading entrepreneurs.

Piero Coen, president of a group of companies with interests in the agribusiness, finance and real estate sector, criticized the government’s fierce repression in an interview with journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro, director of Confidencial magazine.

Coen advocated a “quick, orderly and peaceful” exit from the crisis and claimed that the corporatist model was “unsustainable.” For Coen the businessmen “we no longer set the tone”. In similar terms, Carlos Pellas, the powerful entrepreneur who leads the Pellas Group, producer of the famous Ron Flor de Caña, said in an interview with the newspaper La Prensa that “the model that brought the country was exhausted” and that is needed “urgently” a change, what happens by advance elections and “deep institutional transformation.”

Ortega had imposed for 10 years an economic model in which decisions were made between him and the business leadership. The president guaranteed the entrepreneurs stability and advantages to do business, while they did not intervene in the political decisions of Ortega and his authoritarian drift. Thus, they allowed the kidnapping of the institutions, the reform of the Constitution so that the Sandinista ex-guerrilla would perpetuate himself in power and develop a dynastic government, with his wife as vice president, and with denunciations of serious violations of human rights and freedom of press.

“Ortega has now been configured the worst scenario. It has the people in the streets, the citizens demand that that he leave power and now it has fallen the model that was one of its pillars, the relationship with capital”, explains to El País, Azahaléa Solís, participant jurist at the table of the National Dialogue that seeks to find a solution to the deep political crisis that the country suffers.

“This scenario is darker for Ortega,” he adds. Solis adds that now there can be no “soft landing”, that is, a long-term solution through an agreement with the OAS, which bet that Ortega would finish his term in 2021.

“That agreement is outdated and anachronistic,” the analyst said. Although it is difficult to predict what will be Ortega’s response to the rupture of the businessmen, a symbolic action by the president shows his weakness: he ordered to build more barricades with huge stones around his house, in the capital El Carmen neighborhood, and increased the perimeter security, with dozens of armed officers in the area.