Brexit minister David Davis called on the European Union on Sunday to relax its position that the two sides must first make progress on a divorce settlement before moving on to discussing future relations.

After a slow start to negotiations to unravel more than 40 years of union, Britain is pressing for talks to move beyond the divorce to offer companies some assurance of what to expect after Britain leaves the EU in March 2019.

This week, the government will issue five new papers to outline proposals for future ties, including how to resolve any future disputes without “the direct jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ)”, Davis said.

“I firmly believe the early round of the negotiations have already demonstrated that many questions around our withdrawal are inextricably linked to our future relationship,” Davis wrote in the Sunday Times newspaper.

“Both sides need to move swiftly on to discussing our future partnership, and we want that to happen after the European Council in October,” he wrote, saying the clock was ticking.

EU officials have said there must be “sufficient progress” in the first stage of talks on the rights of expatriates, Britain’s border with EU member Ireland and a financial settlement before they can consider a future relationship.

That has frustrated British officials, who say that until there has been discussion of future ties, including a new customs arrangement and some way of resolving any future

disputes, they cannot solve the Irish border issue or financial settlement, two of the more difficult issues in the talks.

“There are financial obligations on both sides that will not be made void by our exit from the EU,” Davis wrote. “We are working to determine what these are – and interrogating the basis for the EU’s position, line by line, as taxpayers would expect us to do.”

He said the Brexit ministry would “advance our thinking further” with the new papers next week.

On the role of the ECJ, Davis said Britain’s proposals would be based on “precedents” which do not involve the “direct jurisdiction” of the court, which is hated by many pro-Brexit ministers in the governing Conservative Party.

EU officials say the court should guarantee the rights of EU citizens living or working in Britain after Brexit.

“Ultimately, the key question here is how we fairly consider and solve disputes for both sides,” Davis wrote.

 
…

Sometimes, it just doesn’t pay to manufacture in the United States. Labor and land are expensive. It is why most consumer products sold here come from overseas. But a multinational electric guitar manufacturer still produces one-third of its instruments near where it started decades ago. Arash Arabasadi names that tune from Maryland.
…

Hansaben Rasid knows what it is like to live without a water tap or a toilet of her own, constantly fearful of being evicted by city officials keen on tearing down illegal settlements like hers in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad.

The fear and lack of amenities are but a memory today, after she became a community leader in the Jadibanagar slum and pushed residents to apply for a program that gave them facilities and a guarantee of no evictions for 10 years.

“We didn’t even have a water tap here — we had to fetch water from the colony near by, and so much time went in just doing that. People kept falling sick because there was just one toilet,” she said.

“Now that we have individual water taps and toilets, we can focus on work and the children’s education. Everyone’s health has improved, and we don’t need to be afraid of getting evicted any day,” she said, seated outside her home.

Jadibanagar, with 108 homes, is one of more than 50 slums in Ahmedabad that have been upgraded by Parivartan — meaning “change” — a program that involves city officials, slum dwellers, a developer and a nonprofit organization.

Every household pays 2,000 rupees ($31) and in return, each home gets a water tap, a toilet, a sewage line and a stormwater drain. The slum gets street lights, paved lanes and regular garbage collection.

Each home also pays 80 rupees as an annual maintenance fee, and the city commits to not evicting residents for 10 years.

Negotiation skills

A crucial part of the program is the involvement of a woman leader who brings residents on board, deals with city officials and oversees the upgrade.

Nonprofit Mahila Housing Trust has trained women residents to be community leaders in a dozen cities in the country, including more than 60 in Ahmedabad.

“Women are responsible for the basic needs of the family, and most also work at home while the husband works outside, so the lack of a water tap or a toilet affects them more,” said Bharati Bhonsale, program manager at Mahila Housing Trust.

“Yet they traditionally have had little influence over policy decisions and local governance. We train them in civic education, build their communication and negotiation skills, and teach them to be leaders of the community,” she said.

About 65 million people live in India’s slums, according to official data, which activists say is a low estimate.

That number is rising quickly as tens of thousands of migrants leave their villages to seek better prospects in urban areas. Many end up in overcrowded slums, lacking even basic facilities and with no claim on the land or their property.

Yet slum dwellers have long opposed efforts to relocate them to distant suburbs, which limits their access to jobs. Instead, they favor upgrading of their slums or redevelopment.

Earlier this month, officials in the eastern state of Odisha said they would give land rights to slum dwellers in small towns and property rights to those in city settlements in a “historic” step that will benefit tens of thousands.

In Gujarat state, as Jadibanagar is on private land, it is not eligible for the city’s redevelopment plan.

“These homes are all illegal, but that doesn’t mean the people cannot live decently,” said Bhonsale.

“With redevelopment, there is demolition and a move, and that can take longer to convince people of, with the men usually making the decision. But with an upgrade, the women make the decision very quickly by themselves,” she said.

Bottom up

Elsewhere, in Delhi’s Savda Ghevra slum resettlement colony where about 30,000 people live, nonprofit Marg taught women residents to demand their legal right to water, sanitation and transport.

A group of women then filed Right to Information petitions, to improve their access to drinking water, buses and sanitation.

“The women bear the brunt of not having these amenities, and are therefore most motivated to do something about the situation,” said Anju Talukdar, director of Marg.

“The leaders are the ones who show up for meetings, are engaged and keen to learn how to use the law to improve their lives,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Contrary to perceptions that slums are run by petty criminals who resist efforts to redevelop or upgrade, women leaders in Jadibanagar and Savda Ghevra are actively engaged in bettering everyone’s lives.

Leaders often emerge from a bottom-up process, with reputations for getting things done — in particular, resisting evictions and securing basic services, according to research by Adam Auerbach at the American University and Tariq Thachil at Vanderbilt University.

“They are themselves ordinary residents, living with their families and facing the same vulnerabilities and risks as their neighbors; they, too, want paved roads, clean drinking water, proper sanitation and schools for their children,” they said.

Women leaders, while still a minority, are “rarely token figures” serving male heads of households, and are “just as active, assertive and locally authoritative as their male counterparts,” they said in an email.

Rasid in Jadibanagar, whose two sons and their families live in homes alongside hers, is certain her leadership helped residents improve their homes and their lives.

“Everyone wants security and nicer homes, and they are willing to pay. Someone just has to get it done,” she said.

“I am illiterate, I cannot read, but I know now how to talk to officials and the developer and tell them what we want, and make sure they deliver,” she said.
…

Like all North Korean adults, Song Un Pyol wears the faces of leader Kim Jong Un’s father and grandfather pinned neatly to her left lapel, above her heart. But on her right glitters a diamond-and-gold brooch. 

 

Song is what a success story in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea is supposed to look like. Just after Kim assumed power in late 2011, she started managing the supermarket floor at a state-run department store, which has freezers stocked full of pork and beef and rows of dairy, bakery and canned goods. She watches as customers fill their shopping carts, take their groceries directly to be scanned at the checkout counter and pay with cash or bank debit cards. 

 

Song is part of a paradigm shift within North Korea: Three generations into the Kim family’s ruling dynasty, markets have blossomed and a consumer culture is taking root. From 120 varieties of “May Day Stadium’’ brand ice cream to the widespread use of plastic to pay the bills, it’s a change visibly and irreversibly transforming her nation.

Market forces will out

While Kim has in recent weeks gained attention for his threat to fire missiles near Guam, his trademark two-track policy focuses on the development of both nuclear weapons and the economy. His acceptance of a more consumer-friendly economy is meant to foster economic growth and bring profits into the regime’s coffers. But like his pursuit of nuclear weapons, it’s a risky business. 

 

Facing even more international sanctions and a flood of Chinese imports that has generated a huge trade imbalance, there are good reasons to believe the North Korean economy is in a bubble that could soon burst. Prices for gasoline imports have soared more than 200 percent in less than six months, the AP has found. The price of rice is also believed to be sharply rising, although harder to independently confirm because of the difficulty in visiting local markets.

 

The new round of sanctions announced by the U.N. earlier this month will make it harder for the North to export its goods, cap the number of laborers it can send abroad — an important source of foreign currency for the regime — and limit the growth of joint ventures. North Korea will be hit particularly strongly by a Chinese ban on several key products, including coal, iron ore and seafood.

 

The problem, however, goes deeper than that. 

 

Market forces bring new forms of competition, uncertainty and change that are the antithesis of the centrally controlled, state-run economy of the North Korea of old. Markets are like a genie offering to grant the wish of wealth, but at the potential cost of political instability. 

 

Once the genie has been released from its bottle, it’s very hard to put it back in.

Guns and butter

 

The North Korean consumer landscape has evolved dramatically under Kim Jong Un. 

 

In keeping with his father, whose motto was “Military First,’’ Kim devotes nearly a quarter of North Korea’s estimated $30 billion GDP to defense spending, which is a far higher military burden than any other country in the world. But his new slogan of “Parallel Development’’ — guns and butter, so to speak — reflects an inescapable reality of his era.

 

In the 1990s, North Korea nearly imploded when the Soviet Union and its satellite empire collapsed. Reeling from floods, famine and an overwhelmed bureaucracy, it could no longer afford the public distribution system many North Koreans had depended on for their basic needs. This change sparked a wave of grassroots barter and trade, which has swollen into the burgeoning market economy today. 

Life in rural North Korea is still marked by far more hardship and scarcity than in its urban areas, and is hard even to compare to the showcase capital, Pyongyang. Yet there is, surprisingly, a bustling, almost booming, feeling in many parts of the country. 

Local control and entrepreneurs

Under a five-year plan for the economy Kim Jong Un announced last May, North Korean factories are putting a new priority on making more and better daily-life products. Managers, meanwhile, have more freedom to decide what to make, how much to pay their workers and how to forge profitable partnerships. 

 

Along the roads into virtually every city, street vendors, usually weather-beaten old women, sell fruits, vegetables and other food. In the cities, bazaar-style markets, shops and department stores are full of people. The shelves are lined with dozens of brands of domestically made cigarettes, sugary soft drinks and colorfully packaged chips or canned soups. 

 

In specialty shops, the latest “Pyongyang’‘ model smartphones, probably Chinese-made but rebranded to have a locally made appearance, go for $200. Apps to put on them, like the popular “Boy General’’ role-playing game, are $2 a pop. Pyongyang’s premier brewery, Taedonggang, just added an eighth kind of beer to its product line, which already includes beers dark and light, and even one that is chocolatey. 

 

Despite the ever-tightening sanctions, consumer products are still coming in from around the world. Buying a can of Pokka coffee from Japan is easy, and costs about 80 cents. Purchasing a Mercedes-Benz Viano might require some connections, but it is doable, for a $63,000 sticker price. 

 

Trade, yes; advertising, no

On the country’s bumpy highways, caravans of cram-packed long-distance buses and trucks hauling goods from city to city are common. More products made in Pyongyang are found in rural areas these days, and vice versa. Although the use of U.S. dollars or Chinese yuan remains widespread, more people are using prepaid cards or local bills at the checkout counter, suggesting greater buying power in general and more confidence in the stability of the national currency.

 

Some blatant manifestations of commercialism remain taboo. There are only three billboards in Pyongyang, a city of about 3 million. They advertise the local automaker, Pyonghwa Motors, and are more for the benefit of impressing foreign visitors than selling cars. There are no advertisements on television or in the newspapers. 

 

But stores are under instructions to be more consumer-friendly.

 

“At first, we opened the store from 10 in the morning to 6 in the evening,’’ said Song. “But in 2015, our dear respected Marshal Kim Jong Un made sure that we serve from 10 in the morning to 8 in the evening so one can use late night at any given time, as many working people often used the shop during the evening after work.’’

Stores now commonly offer buy-two-get-one-free type sales and discounts on products the management wants to move off the shelves. Posters for new medicines or sports drinks can be seen inside shops and customers can sign up for “loyalty cards’’ to get points toward ever more discounts.

 

“In today’s North Korea there is a growing competition between the domestic companies themselves as they try to attract customers and establish reputable brands,’’ said Michael Spavor, a Canadian entrepreneur who visits the North frequently and is one of the only Westerners to have ever met Kim Jong Un. 

 

Spavor calls it a “brilliant strategy.’’ 

 

But the emphasis on locally produced consumer goods isn’t just because Kim wants to make good on his promise to give his people a higher standard of living. 

 

It’s also an attempt to counter the gravitational pull of China.

The power of China

 

As sanctions advocates rightly point out, cutting off trade with China would be catastrophic for Pyongyang. But North Korean leaders, including Kim Jong Un, have shown a great deal of concern over the flip side of that coin: What might happen to their country if trade continues, or grows larger. 

 

The expansion of trade increases Chinese leverage on the ground and feeds market forces that are hard for Pyongyang to keep under control. China accounts for nearly all of North Korea’s trade and its fuel. While the North has minimal dealings with the rest of the world, it did $2 billion worth of business with China in the first five months of this year alone.

 

During Kim Jong Un’s first three years in power, North Korea’s exports to China of coal, garments, minerals and seafood were all growing. But what North Korea was able to sell to China fell far short of what it needed to buy, particularly because of its need for oil and fuel products. 

 

That imbalance has widened dramatically this year as China cut back on buying from the North. The new U.N. sanctions will further squeeze the North’s main sources of export income.

​Signs of trouble

 

Georgetown University economist William Brown estimates the North is suffering an outflow of $200 million in foreign exchange every month. This is crucial because the more Pyongyang owes Beijing, the less it has to spend on other things. But it still needs essential commodities like food and fuel, which can deepen the problems of both shortages and inflation.

 

Right around April, according to data compiled by the AP, gasoline prices started to soar. Many stations either closed their gates or restricted the amount they would sell each customer. As of late July, the price surge had yet to abate.

 

Few North Koreans have their own cars. But gasoline, virtually all of which comes from China, fuels the transportation of goods and people in the new economy. 

 

Brown said the price of rice was also up nearly 20 percent in July from May and was significantly higher than a year ago. There could be a trickle-down effect, since tractors and even the fertilizer used to grow rice require petroleum products. Fears of a poor harvest in the fall could send prices shooting up.

 

“This may represent the greatest near-term threat to the regime stability,’’ Brown said.

 

North Korea has proven it is nothing if not resilient, often finding a way out of its economic problems. Even so, the longer-term changes to society won’t be easy to address.

 

The goods and trading opportunities spilling across the Chinese border are also spurring the growth of profitable enterprises, which has substantial financial benefits for well-connected individuals and, at least initially, the regime’s elite. For this tier of North Korean society — and for farmers who can profit from their excess produce — the new economy has opened up a way to get money from sometimes under-the-table businesses.

 

Loyalty to the regime and party ties remain an important means of social advancement. But, in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea these days, so is a good sense for how to run a proper side hustle to augment what are often paltry official paychecks.

 

However, the same opportunities have widened the gap between the rich by North Korean standards and the poor. The haves benefit disproportionately from the new economy, while a far larger number of have-nots live mostly outside the Pyongyang bubble of affluence. Ambiguity over what officials will overlook and what they will strictly enforce has also created a gray area that opens the door to corruption and bribery. 

 

Double-edged sword

 

The regime is not blind to what’s happening. It knows the new consumerism can be a destabilizing force. But it also knows it needs the markets.

 

North Korean officials insist markets are a stopgap coping measure for the economy that will be overcome. Kang Chol Min, a researcher with the Economics Institute of the Academy of Social Science, said the regime is trying to produce more, and better, goods to woo consumers away from the markets and back to state-run businesses. 

 

“The number of people relying on the state-run commercial networks is increasing,’’ he said in an interview with AP Television News. 

 

But many outside experts believe state enterprises and farms are too inefficient to provide enough goods and services for the whole nation without the help of markets and private activities. 

 

If they are right, it’s hard to imagine North Korea’s economic future will lie in Kang’s vow to produce more goods locally. Nor is it likely to be model worker Song, the state-sanctioned success story.

 

It might, however, be a Miniso store. 

 

Miniso is decidedly not trying to appeal to the shoppers by filling its shelves with products made in North Korea. It’s an international brand name — found in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney — selling bargain-priced goods such as backpacks and consumer electronics. Its Pyongyang store just opened in April, near two of the capital’s most prestigious universities in a newly built high-rise district appropriately called Ryomyong Gori, the “Avenue of Dawn.’’ 

 

It’s the trendiest shop in town.

 

And it’s a joint venture. With China.
…

Steps away from this week’s NAFTA trade negotiations, business unified in hopes of sending a singular message: do no harm.

Representatives from the United States, Canada and Mexico convened behind closed doors at a Washington hotel in an effort to strike a new North American Free Trade Agreement. And not far away, industry representatives from all three nations sat waiting and hoping to influence the talks.

After two days of meetings, lobbyists admitted privately that they remained mostly in the dark, swapping rumors about dates and times of future meetings but unsure what progress was being made in the first round of discussions. The meetings were largely expected to be procedural, with little discussion on substance in the early days.

The decision to renegotiate NAFTA has largely been driven by politics, chiefly U.S. President Donald Trump, who earlier this year threatened to withdraw entirely.

Business, on the other hand, has largely praised the agreement and hopes to persuade all three governments to make minimal changes to the pact.

More than $1 trillion in trade

U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade has quadrupled since NAFTA took effect in 1994, surpassing $1 trillion in 2015.

“We’re all in the same boat,” said Flavio Volpe, president of the Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association. “In the end we all serve primarily the U.S. consumer. So if you’re going to raise the cost structure, or if you’re going to change the dynamic flow of goods or people in those three countries, you’re really hurting the cost to market for the U.S. customer.”

The U.S. had an autos and auto parts trade deficit of $74 billion with Mexico last year, without which, there would have been a U.S. trade surplus

The United States had a much smaller $5.6 billion automotive trade deficit with Canada last year, but autos was the still a major component of an $11.8 billion overall U.S. goods trade deficit with Canada last year. But including services trade, the United States ran an overall surplus with Canada.

Volpe’s counterparts from the United States and Mexico were also on hand, with hopes of presenting a united front not to see a disruption to the auto industry.

Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council, which represents General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, stopped by the talks hotel to chat with negotiators, answer questions and “glean information” about U.S. negotiating objectives.

However, he said insights into the talks were hard to come by, as negotiating teams had not yet revealed details of their proposals to each other.

“There are a lot of poker-faces around here,” he said.

Lobbyists always nearby

He wasn’t the only American lobbyist floating in and out of the hotel. Some held lunch meetings in the hotel restaurants and then returned to their downtown offices. From mining, to textiles to dairy farmers, various groups held sideline meetings.

About 100 business representatives from Mexican companies waited in a meeting room to see if there were any questions negotiators might have for them. And Canadian industry groups mostly worked on their own.

For the most part, the business groups presented a united front.

Juan Pablo Castanon, president of the Mexican business group Consejo Coordinador Empresarial, said his group has been working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for three years. After the November U.S. elections, they began working to tout the benefits of NAFTA.

“The level of contact and communication is intense and one of collaboration,” Castanon said.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby in Washington that represents companies big and small across the country, confirmed they plan to attend all the sessions, where they expect to hold sideline meetings with other business groups and government officials. The Chamber may also hold sideline events or briefings during future discussions.

Even industry groups who weren’t in agreement with their North American counterparts found other stakeholders to discuss common ground.

The Canadian Dairy Farmers are at odds with their American counterparts, but still found a chance to talk, said the Canadian group’s spokeswoman Isabelle Bouchard.

“To have discussions with counterparts within our own industry and even different industries who are in similar situations than us, it’s important, and we have seen though past trade negotiations how important it is,” Bouchard said.

 
…

Auto industry groups from Canada, Mexico and the United States are pushing back against the Trump administration’s demand for higher U.S. automotive content in a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement.

At talks underway this week in Washington, automaker and parts groups from all three countries were urging negotiators against tighter rules of origin, said Eduardo Solis, president of the Mexican Automotive Industry Association.

But U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer confirmed the industry’s fears that the administration of President Donald Trump was seeking major changes to these rules to try to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico.

“Rules of origin, particularly on autos and auto parts, must require higher NAFTA content and substantial U.S. content. Country of origin should be verified, not ‘deemed,’” Lighthizer said on Wednesday in opening remarks.

Fiat Chrysler, Ford, GM represented

Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland both said they were not in favor of specific national rules of origin within NAFTA — a position that the industry agrees with.

“We certainly think a U.S.-specific requirement would greatly complicate the ability of companies, particularly small- and medium-size enterprises, to take advantage of the benefits of NAFTA,” said Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council.

The trade group represents Detroit automakers General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler.

His comments were echoed by Flavio Volpe, president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association.

“Anytime you say this list or a part of this list has to come from one specific country you’re going to hurt all three countries,” he said.

Deficits can’t continue to grow

The United States had an autos and auto parts trade deficits of $74 billion with Mexico and $5.6 billion with Canada, both major components of overall U.S. goods trade deficits with its North American neighbors — deficits that Lighthizer said could no longer continue.

Lighthizer’s mention of tightening verification requirements is a reference to expanding the parts tracing list, which is used to determine whether companies meet the 62.5 percent North American content requirement for autos and 60 percent for components.

Devised in the early 1990s, the tracing list covers almost none of the sophisticated electronics found in today’s cars and trucks, most of which come from Asia. Putting these on the tracing list could force suppliers to source these components from North America or pay tariffs on them.

Software content a new issue

Volpe said any changes to this must also capture the North American system design work and software content for these components that is not currently included.

“A car today probably has 25 to 30 percent advanced electronics, software content in it. In 1994, it had zero or 1 percent,” Volpe said. “Could you address the tracing to help you get to NAFTA compliance level by capturing some of the work that’s being done in Silicon Valley or Waterloo, Canada? Yes.”

John Bozzella CEO of the Association of Global Automakers, which represents international-brand carmakers, said NAFTA has allowed a major expansion of auto exports, with more than 1 million more vehicles built annually in the United States than in 1993.

“Negotiators should be mindful of this success as they work to modernize the agreement,” Bozzella said, whose organization represents international brand carmakers with U.S. plants, including Toyota, Honda and BMW.

 
…

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said on Thursday that Washington wants more trade and investment with Latin America, pushing back against perceptions in the region that the Trump administration has an isolationist agenda.

Speaking during a visit to the Panama Canal at the end of a Latin American tour, Pence said the United States was seeking to keep the spirit of the original North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the pact now being renegotiated in Washington.

Pence said he wanted a NAFTA deal that was a “win, win, win” for the United States, Mexico and Canada, taking a more conciliatory tone than U.S. negotiators who have warned the deal needed a major overhaul to favor U.S. workers.

Pence later reiterated the United States’ concerns about the tense political situation in Venezuela, but took a more measured approach than U.S. President Donald Trump.

Last week, Trump said the United States had “many options for Venezuela including a possible military option if necessary.”

Pence said on Thursday that Venezuela was becoming a dictatorship and that the United States would not stand by while it was destroyed.

He said he was sure the United States, with its allies in Latin America, would find a peaceful solution to the situation in Venezuela.

Panama’s President Juan Carlos Varela voiced concern over Venezuela and said that Panama would in the coming days announce measures against it, including immigration actions, to pressure Caracas into restoring democratic order.
…

At CareerLink, the state job agency in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, custodial worker and former welder Glenn Hendrickson was looking to change careers. Hendrickson was just beginning his search for a new line of work and he did not yet know what would pique his interest.

But he for sure wasn’t interested in farm work, except as a last resort.

“I’ve had a lot of friends who have had summer jobs, like when they were in high school, picking fruit but I doubt anyone would make a career out of it,” he said.

According to local farm sector employers, most workers are paid well above Pennsylvania’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Crew chiefs and foremen on some orchards earn close to $19 per hour. Yet few native-born Americans are willing to do this work, even if unemployed says Alan Dudley, administrator of the Gettysburg CareerLink office.

“The work is difficult, especially in the fields, and it’s not necessarily unskilled work,” he said. “Orchard owners want skilled people to harvest apples so they get the best return on their crop.”

Adams County’s farms, orchards, and processing plants are where the jobs are. The so-called “fruit belt” of vast peach and apple orchards extends across the region’s rolling green hills, along with the packing and processing companies and other agricultural-related businesses.

Tourism, with the 3 million visitors drawn annually to the historic Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, is the other main economic generator.

Adams County’s $580-million fruit industry depends heavily on immigrant labor, which is why the country may be facing an unintended consequence of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Businesses in the agricultural-based economy are experiencing labor shortages, and orchard owners are bracing for the possibility of not having enough workers for the fall harvest.

Fleeing workforce

Last month, six Hispanic employees of a county fruit-packing company, which does not want to be identified, were picked up by local police and turned over to immigration agents, who sent them to a detention facility. These and other detentions have had a chilling effect on the county’s Hispanic residents, who make up 6.5 percent of the population of some 100,000 people.

Yet because of the immigration crackdown, workers are not showing up or in some instances, have fled. The local plant of Hillandale Farms, a major national egg producer and distributor, was desperately seeking to fill vacant jobs this summer, according to a company official, because much of its Hispanic work force had disappeared.

As the autumn harvest approaches, the demand for labor is accelerating, Dudley says, not just in the orchards but also in the fruit processing and other agriculture-related industries.

“So they’re coming into their busy hiring season right now. For instance, Knouse Foods just last week posted about eight new positions on our job search website.”

‘No roving checkpoints’

Adams County voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in last November’s presidential election.

At the Latimore Valley fair in June, which attracted several thousand people to watch antique car races, trucking company secretary Kim Sanders expressed strong support for President Trump’s policy of arresting and deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.

But, echoing the views of others at the fair who were asked the same question, Sanders wants the law-abiding undocumented immigrants to be able to stay.

“I hate to say it but there are not enough American people to go out and work on a farm, or do planting and pick vegetables like they will,” she said.

Republican Congressman Scott Perry, whose district includes Adams County, has heard the concerns of orchard owners and other businesses in the fruit industry. Perry told VOA his message to them is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has assured him nothing has changed in its enforcement actions.

“There’s not like roving checkpoints,” he said. “They’re targeted enforcement.”

But ICE has changed its policies somewhat. Acting-ICE chief Tom Homan told reporters at the White House last month that “…no populations are off the table. So non-criminals, those who have got a court order from a judge that refuse to leave, we’re looking for.”

Under the last two years of the previous Obama administration, non-criminals were not a priority and were often let go if detained.

Growers such as Kay Hollabaugh are running out of patience. She met last month with Congressman Perry and local lawmakers to express her concerns about the future of the Adams County fruit belt if the immigrant labor force is driven out.

“Those people who are making the laws of our land, eat every day,” she said. “If we could simply stop producing food for a month – OK, no food, no food – I think perhaps that would make some bells go off.”

Ripening fruit

The Trump administration’s immigration policy has galvanized activists in Adams County to press for immigration reform and to lobby local lawmakers to vote against measures that would target immigrant communities.

Jenny Dumont, a Spanish professor at Gettysburg College who leads the immigration lobbying effort for a grassroots group called “Gettysburg Rising, blames the Trump administration’s rhetoric for creating unwarranted fears about the undocumented.

“It’s pretty well documented that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans,” Dumont said. “My sense is that people, if they’ve had contact with immigrants here, that they understand the contributions that they make, they’re able to see them as people not just the label immigrant, the other.”

But Congressman Perry said the border would have to be secured before Americans would agree to any immigration reform measure.

“If you just seal the border without doing some of these other reforms, we’re going to have problems from a business standpoint as well, and I think they get that but again there’s this mistrust,” he said. “They want to see action not words,” the congressman said referring to border security.

As the push and pull over immigration policy plays out, farmers may get some relief as the federal government issues more visas for temporary agricultural workers, mainly from Mexico. The U.S. Labor Department has issued 20 percent more H-2A visas in 2017, compared to last year. Those visas are for seasonal agricultural work, such as harvesting berries, fruit or other crops.

But the visas require require farmers to demonstrate that no Americans will take the jobs they offer. In the meantime, the apple crop is ripening on the trees in Adams County. With harvesting about to begin in less than a month, orchard owners are not sure if enough workers will show up.

Kay Hollabaugh repeated what a top executive of a major food processor told her recently: “’If fruit goes, the Adams County economy falls and we’re out of business.’”
…

Here’s how much hope and expectation has been built into the stock market: Big companies are healthy and making fatter profits than Wall Street expected, yet it’s barely enough to keep the market from falling.

Consider Home Depot, which gave an earnings report on Tuesday that was seemingly fantastic. The retailer made more in profit from May through July than in any other quarter in its history, and its 14 percent rise in earnings per share was stronger than analysts expected. Home Depot at the same time raised its profit forecast for this year and reported higher revenue than Wall Street forecast, all of which should be kibble for investors ravenously looking for growth.

Even still, Home Depot’s stock slid 2.7 percent after the report.

That reaction hasn’t been too far off the norm recently, as companies have lined up to report how much they earned during the spring.

Very solid quarter

Companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index are on pace to report one of their strongest quarters in years. Earnings per share were likely up more than 10 percent from a year earlier, better than the 7 percent that analysts had penciled in when the quarter ended, according to FactSet.

Despite those gains, S&P 500 index funds are nearly exactly where they were before the heart of earnings reporting season began in mid-July.

“Equity markets have greeted positive earnings reports largely with indifference,” strategists at BlackRock wrote in a recent report. “Investor sentiment shows more signs of fatigue than euphoria, even as stock markets have repeatedly reached new heights this year.”

Usually, when a company reports better earnings than analysts expected, it sends the stock higher, at least for a day. Since 2006, such companies have typically done 1.14 percentage points better than the S&P 500 the day following a report’s release, according to Goldman Sachs. But through mid-August of this reporting season, the performance edge has been virtually nil at 0.03 percentage point. That’s the lowest level in at least a decade.

When a company has reported better-than-expected earnings but fallen short of forecasts for revenue, its stock has tended to do worse than the rest of the S&P 500, according to BlackRock. And when a company has missed on both measures? Much worse.

Surprising?

At first blush, such a reaction may be surprising. Stock prices can move up and down for many reasons in the short term: whatever the president is tweeting about, what central banks in far-flung corners of the world are doing or the latest change some hedge fund has made to its trading algorithm. But over the long term, stock prices tend to track closely with corporate profits. When companies are making more money, investors are willing to pay more for each of their shares.

This time may be different because stock prices had already climbed so much in anticipation of higher profits ahead. Even when profits were falling early last year, the S&P 500 index was still holding steady or rising.

One of the main ways analysts use to measure whether stocks are expensive is to compare their price to corporate profits. The S&P 500 is now trading at 20.7 times how much its companies have earned over the last 12 months, according to FactSet. That’s more expensive than its median price-earnings ratio of 15.6 over the last decade.

Now that strong profit growth has returned, it may be mere validation for the gains S&P 500 index funds have already made. And if corporate profits continue to rise faster than stock prices, they’ll look less expensive.

With the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, many analysts expect the market’s price-earnings ratio to creep lower from its lofty heights. At the least, many are telling investors to expect the stock market to rise no faster than corporate earnings.

More growth seen

The good news is that Wall Street is expecting profit growth to continue in the second half of this year, though maybe at a slower rate.

Some of the biggest profit gains this year have been coming from companies that do lots of business overseas. That’s because, despite Washington’s push for “America first” policies, companies are seeing some of the strongest growth in markets like Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

In part, it’s because those markets are finally accelerating out of the doldrums they’ve been stuck in for years. The sinking value of the dollar is also helping, because it makes each euro or Mexican peso of sales worth more in dollars than before.

When Ecolab, a company that gets nearly half its revenue from abroad, reported its quarterly results on August 1, it told analysts that global economies in general looked “OK to good” and that it was anticipating a very solid 2017. The company, which provides water, hygiene and other services, reported both earnings and revenue that topped analysts’ expectations for the quarter. Its stock fell 0.2 percent that day.
…

Maribel Resendiz and her husband came to the U.S. from Mexico, sold cool drinks to workers in the tomato fields of South Florida and eventually opened a bustling shop in a strip mall offering fruit smoothies and tacos. Now she is preparing for the possibility she’ll have to leave it all behind.

Resendiz, who is not a legal U.S. resident, recently turned over control of the business in Florida City to her daughter, a citizen. The once-proud shop owner is so afraid of deportation these days that on a recent morning she was keeping out of sight of customers while her husband was not there at all.

“I am afraid the police will stop me, call immigration, and they will take me away to Mexico,” Resendiz said while cutting fruit for smoothies.

The couple, who came to the United States in 1992 and have not become legal residents, are among a growing number of business owners with the same status who are scrambling to get their affairs in order amid a crackdown on illegal immigration under President Donald Trump.

As many as 10 percent of the 11 million or so immigrants in the United States without legal residency own businesses in the country by some estimates, and many are selling their enterprises, transferring them to relatives or closing altogether to avoid a total loss if they are abruptly deported.

They include people like Mauro Hernandez, a native of Mexico who operates a small chicken takeout and delivery restaurant along immigrant-heavy Roosevelt Avenue in the borough of Queens in New York City. He is now trying to sell.

No hope left

There is Carmen and Jorge Tume, a couple from Peru, who have scaled back their mobile car wash business in Miami because they are so afraid of getting stopped by police and turned over to immigration.

“We don’t have any hope left,” said Carmen Tume, 50. “Everything we built is coming down.”

Hernandez, whose business was registered in the name of a friend who is a legal resident, said he is selling because he doesn’t want his partner to get stuck with it if he is deported.

“Since Trump won, I have been very nervous,” he said.

It’s impossible to say exactly how many are taking such measures, but Jorge Rivera, a lawyer who advises immigrant clients in California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, Texas and other states, sees a clear trend.

“Everyone is taking precautions,” Rivera said. “They don’t want their business to disappear overnight and be left with nothing.”

Several other business owners interviewed by The Associated Press shared similar stories on condition that their names and identifying details not be disclosed, not wanting to alert immigration authorities.

They included a 40-year-old from Mexico who runs a marketing firm in Los Angeles that he said employs 50 people and has annual revenues of about $5 million. He’s making plans to transfer it to relatives who are citizens and move with his family to Spain.

Those selling often see no choice but to take a loss. Under Trump, detentions of immigrants in the country illegally rose 37 percent over the first six months of the year compared with the same period in 2016. The administration says it is focused on those with criminal records, but the number of detainees who do not have a criminal history has more than doubled.

Billions in taxes

The businesses in question range widely from one-person cleaning services to restaurants and other operations that employ dozens of people. While hard figures on this hidden part of the economy don’t exist, the Washington-based Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates immigrants in the country without permission contribute $11.7 billion annually in state, local and federal taxes.

People without legal residency can obtain an individual taxpayer identification number and an employer identification number, enabling them to open bank accounts and operate businesses among other things.

Despite the boon for government coffers, advocates for controlling illegal immigration argue that the costs outweigh any benefits and that U.S. law should be enforced.

“They are trying to keep their ill-gotten gains, and the U.S. government should not allow illegal immigrants to own properties or businesses nor transfer them,” said William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said it’s incumbent on business owners without legal residency to prepare for the worst: “If they want their business to survive, they are going to have to put a plan in place.”

For Resendiz that meant handing over legal and financial control of the juice store in Florida City, which lies at the southernmost edge of Miami sprawl where strip malls fade into farms and nearby Everglades National Park produces a clientele of thirsty tourists. It has been thanks to that business the family gets by without government assistance, she said.

“I don’t receive food stamps or Medicaid. … I pay my taxes,” Resendiz said. “I don’t live off the government and don’t ask them for anything.”

She said she and her husband never tried to become citizens because they didn’t feel it was necessary — until Trump was elected president. She has since applied and is awaiting a response, nervous over the possibility of having to return to a homeland she left 25 years ago and now barely knows.

“My dreams became my reality because I had my own business,” she said. “Now, I have nothing in my name.”
…

A rural county in Pennsylvania is facing the consequences of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants, as businesses in the agricultural-based economy experience labor shortages. Some orchard owners and local pro-immigrant activists are lobbying state and federal lawmakers to raise awareness of the contributions by immigrants in a county that voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump in November. Bill Rodgers has this report on what is happening in Adams County, Pennsylvania.
…

After many false starts, plans to resurrect a railway in Pakistan’s teeming metropolis of Karachi are moving ahead with the help of Chinese cash. Not everyone is happy.

The Chinese-funded $2 billion project to revive Karachi Circular Railways (KRC), nearly two decades since it was shut down, has been touted as a way to ease pollution and chronic congestion in the port city of 20 million people.

It is also viewed with suspicion by Pakistanis who have built homes and businesses along the 43-km route connecting Karachi’s sprawling suburbs with the industrial and commercial areas of the megacity.

In April, a push to remove shanty towns near the rubbish-strewn railway track was met with violence as residents clashed with police and set fire to machinery used for demolishing homes.

Officials say nearly 5,000 houses and 7,650 other encroaching structures have been erected along the route of the old KRC, which closed in 1999 after 29 years of shunting passengers across the sweltering city.

Three-wheel auto-rickshaws and mini-buses, often cramped and with no air conditioning, have filled the transport gap on Karachi’s streets despite grumbling from commuters.

Work on the new KRC is scheduled to begin later this year, with financing from the $57 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project, part of Beijing’s wider Belt and Road initiative to build trade routes from Asia to Europe and Africa. Beijing’s cash is building motorways and power plants to alleviate Pakistan’s energy shortages, but Karachiites hope it could also modernize their city at a time when traffic appears to be spiraling out of control.

“Let’s hope under CPEC, KCR is revived and people will get an alternate to miserably public transport,” said Manzoor Ahmed Razi, chairman of the Railway Workers Union.
…

Brazilian prosecutors plan to investigate last year’s controversial sale of the Argentine subsidiary of Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, a lawyer representing some Petrobras shareholders said on Wednesday.

Petrobras, formally known as Petroleo Brasileiro SA , sold its 67.2 percent stake in Petrobras Argentina SA for $892 million to Pampa Energia SA, Argentina’s largest power company.

The sale has already drawn scrutiny from Brazil’s Congress and a federal audit court, and lawyer Felipe Caldeira said prosecutors were now looking into it as part of Brazil’s sweeping “Car Wash” anti-corruption investigation.

Caldeira, representing a group of minority Petrobras shareholders, told Reuters he spoke on Tuesday to prosecutors on a task force in Curitiba leading the Car Wash probe and gave them information on the sale.

“They are very interested and will investigate this,” said Caldeira, who filed a civil case in a Rio de Janeiro court in May alleging that the sale fetched a below-market price and was harmful to the interests of minority shareholders.

Federal prosecutors in Curitiba said the task force had not met with Caldeira but said that any relevant information about the case would be studied.

Petrobras bought the Argentine unit from energy conglomerate Perez Companc in 2002 for $1 billion, plus $2 billion in debt.

The sale 14 years later for much less sparked controversy in Brazil and led lawmakers to call on Petrobras and Pampa executives, and lawyer Caldeira, to testify before a committee hearing on Wednesday.

The controversy has grown since, Aldemir Bendine, chief executive officer of Petrobras at the time of the sale, was jailed last month on suspicion he received bribes from construction conglomerate Odebrecht in a political graft scandal that has led to the arrest of dozens of executives and politicians.

Pampa’s executive vice president and legal director Diego Salaverri told the committee the sale was transparent and competitive and his company made the best offer that was a “fair” price in a depressed market.

Oil prices had dropped drastically from $100 to $30 and a climate of uncertainty prevailed in Argentina, which had currency controls and a ban on remittances, he said.

Petrobras’ legal manager for acquisitions and divestment, Claudia Zacour, told the committee the sale of Petrobras Argentina was part of the Brazilian oil company’s divestment plan to reduce debt and focus on core activities.

The net positive result for Petrobras of owning and selling the Argentine unit was $1.6 billion when taking into account intercompany loans, the sale of some of its assets and the distribution of dividends, Zacour said.

Brazil’s federal audit court has said it was investigating the sale of Petrobras Argentina at the request of a senator but has not concluded its findings.

In response to Caldeira’s lawsuit, a federal judge in Rio de Janeiro sent Argentine authorities a request that the chairman of Pampa Energia, Marcos Marcelo Mindlin, testify in the case.

With a majority stake, Pampa SA, Mindlin’s holding company, continued its takeover of Petrobras Argentina in November by acquiring 11.85 percent held by the Argentine state pension system ANSES.

The transaction is being investigated by Argentine judge Claudio Bonadio, who ordered the search and seizure of documents from government offices in May in a case brought by center-left lawmaker Victoria Donda.

“The fund’s shares were sold very cheap, and we want to know why, because thousands of pensioners lost money,” Donda told Reuters in Brasilia, where she traveled to attend Wednesday’s hearing.
…

Scorched by a 10-month drought that has killed crops and reduced residents to buying trucked-in water, Adigama’s young people are voting with their feet.

At least 150 youth have left this agricultural village 170 kilometers northwest of Sri Lanka’s capital since the drought began, looking for jobs in the country’s cities, or overseas, village officials say.

Few are expected to come back, even when the rains end.

“If they get the lowest-paying job overseas, or in a garment factory, they will not return,” Sisira Kumara, the main government administrative officer in the village of 416 families, said as he walked through a dried and long-abandoned maize plot. “They will work at construction sites or as office helpers — anything they can get their hands on.”

W.M. Suranga, 23, who left his family’s withering rice paddy six months ago for Colombo, said working for low wages in the city is preferable to struggling with no rain at home.

“At least I am sure of a paycheck at the end of the month. This uncertainly of depending on the rains is too much of a risk,” he said.

As Sri Lanka struggles with its worst drought in 40 years, farmers in the hardest-hit areas are migrating for work — with some wondering whether farming remains a viable career as climate change brings more frequent extreme weather.

“There is no income here. All the crops have failed in the last four seasons,” Kumara said.

Little to harvest for a year

Paddy rice and vegetables are usually the main source of income in Adigama. But since the last big rains in July 2016, there has been little to no harvest.

Older villagers like Rajakaruna Amaradasa, 55, say that at their age they don’t have the option of looking outside the village for a new life.

After four decades of harvesting rice and herding cattle, he abandoned his paddy fields earlier this year when his harvest failed, and now spends his days moving his cattle around, looking for scarce water.

“It will take us another two to three harvests to recover our losses and pay off any debt. Even then it all depends on the rain,” Amaradasa said.

With average rains, Amaradasa said he used to make between 30,000 and 40,000 rupees a month ($200-$260). Now his income has fallen to a third of that, he said.

Sri Lanka’s drought, which by mid-August had affected 19 of the island’s 25 districts, has particularly devastated arid regions that lie outside the country’s wet western plains and mountains.

A joint report by the World Food Program and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, released in mid-June, classified the drought as worst in 40 years.

It predicted rice production this year in Sri Lanka would be almost 40 percent less than last year, and 35 percent lower than the five-year average. That amounts to the lowest harvest since 2004, it said.

Climate change

It also warned that Sri Lanka “is highly susceptible to climate change, and therefore the frequency of the weather hazards will likely increase as the earth warms.”

The impact on Sri Lanka’s economy is also likely to be substantial, with more than a quarter of the country’s labor force working in agriculture, a sector that contributes 8 percent of gross domestic product, the report said.

The situation is worst in villages like Adigama that rely almost entirely on rain to grow crops.

Suranga, the Adigama youth now working in Colombo, said he has no plans to return home. Instead he dreams of traveling to the Middle East as a construction worker.

“What is the guarantee there will be no more droughts or floods?” he asked. “When my father was my age, maybe the rains were much more predictable. Now only a fool will bet on the rains.”
…

U.S. President Donald Trump continues to face a barrage of criticism for his contention that both white supremacists and counterprotesters were to blame for the deadly violence that erupted last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.

On Wednesday, the president announced that he had dissolved two business advisory committees made up of top American corporate executives, after at least seven CEOs announced they were resigning from the councils because of his remarks.

Trump said that “rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople … I am ending both. Thank you all!” A day ago, Trump had branded those quitting the panels as “grandstanders” and said they could be easily replaced with more corporate chieftains.

In announcing her resignation from Trump’s manufacturing jobs initiative before he disbanded it, Campbell’s Soup CEO Denise Morrison said, “Racism and murder are unequivocally reprehensible and are not morally equivalent to anything else that happened in Charlottestville. I believe the president should have been — and still needs to be — unambiguous on that point.”

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters in Washington, D.C., that he condemns the “hate and violence” displayed on Saturday in Charlottesville, adding, “There is just simply no place for that in our public discourse.”

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, speaking at an event in Miami, Florida, said, “In no way can we accept [or] apologize for racism, bigotry, hatred, violence, and those kind of things that too often arise in our country.”

Also Wednesday, two former U.S. presidents, George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, the last two Republicans elected to the White House before Trump, said in a joint statement, “America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms.”

The two former presidents added, “As we pray for Charlottesville, we are reminded of the fundamental truths recorded by that city’s most prominent citizen in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights,” a reference to Thomas Jefferson, one of the country’s Founding Fathers. “We know these truths to be everlasting because we have seen the decency and greatness of our country.”

President Trump’s remarks have been roundly criticized by a broad range of U.S. leaders, including top Republican party officials and business executives.  U.S. military commanders spoke out against racism following the death in Charlottesville.

As the violence unfolded last Saturday, Trump initially blamed it on “many sides.” By Monday, he condemned the neo-Nazis, white supremacists and the racist Ku Klux Klan for their role in the unrest.

But on Tuesday, at a news conference in his Trump Tower skyscraper in New York, Trump reverted to his initial assessment of the violence that killed one woman and wounded 19 others when a Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters.

“I think there’s blame on both sides,” Trump said. “You look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it.” He said there were “fine people” among the white nationalists and counterprotesters at the rally 160 kilometers southwest of Washington.

David Duke, the one-time Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, immediately praised Trump’s remarks, saying, “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists.”

U.S., global reaction

But key Republicans took immediate offense at Trump’s contention there was equivalency in who was to blame for the hours of street violence, as demonstrators squared off with makeshift clubs, engaged in fist fights, and fired bursts of chemical irritants at each other.

The leader of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Speaker Paul Ryan, said, “We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.”

Senator Marco Rubio, defeated last year by Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, said, “Mr. President, you can’t allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of blame.”

Ohio Governor John Kasich, who also lost to Trump in 2016, said, “The president of the United States needs to condemn these kind of hate groups. This is about the fact that now these folks are apparently going to go other places and they think that they had some sort of a victory.

“There is no moral equivalency between the KKK, the neo-Nazis, and anybody else,” Kasich said. “Anybody else is not the issue. These folks went there to disrupt.”

The Senate Democratic leader, Senator Charles Schumer, said, “When David Duke and white supremacists cheer your remarks, you’re doing it very, very wrong. Great and good American presidents seek to unite, not divide. Donald Trump’s remarks clearly show he is not one of them.”

Trump’s remarks also drew a rebuke from an ally, British Prime Minister Theresa May.

May said, “I see no equivalence between those who propound fascist views and those who oppose them. I think it is important for all those in positions of responsibility to condemn far-right views wherever we hear them.”

Earlier this week, the German government of Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the white nationalists at the rally. Her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said “there was outrageous racism, anti-Semitism and hate in its most despicable form to be seen, and whenever it comes to such speech or such images it is repugnant.”

He said the rally was “completely contrary to what the chancellor and the German government works for politically, and we are in solidarity with those who stand peacefully against such aggressive extreme-right opinions.”
…

President Donald Trump is renewing his attacks on e-commerce giant Amazon, and he says the company is “doing great damage to tax paying retailers.”

 

Trump tweets that “towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt — many jobs being lost!”

The president has often criticized the company and CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.

 

Many traditional retailers are closing stores and blaming Amazon for a shift to buying goods online. But the company has been hiring thousands of warehouse workers on the spot at job fairs across the country. Amazon has announced goal of adding 100,000 full-time workers by the middle of next year.

 

 
…

The impact of the latest round of U.N. sanctions leveled against North Korea could be greater than the projected $1 billion cut in its export revenue if fully implemented, a high-profile North Korean defector told VOA’s Korean Service, and this would deal a significant financial blow to a regime intent on advancing its nuclear and missile programs.

“The new U.N. restrictions are perhaps the strongest sanctions ever imposed on Pyongyang because they demand a complete shutoff of markets for its most lucrative exports,” said Ri Jong Ho, who previously served various high-level roles in central agencies of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, overseeing the country’s overall production and trade and replenishing the Kim regime’s foreign currency reserves. “They certainly could threaten the Kim Jong Un regime’s lifeline.”

In response to North Korea’s two tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles in July, the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed another round of sanctions earlier this month — the seventh since the regime’s first nuclear weapons test in 2006. Many experts in Washington welcomed the measure, calling it the biggest diplomatic victory of the Trump administration, which has been seeking to build international pressure on North Korea.

“I think the latest U.N. resolution is yet another good, incremental step toward increasing pressure on North Korea,” said Bruce Klingner with the Heritage Foundation Asian Study Center. “Each U.N. resolution is better than its predecessor and each one is the strongest in history against North Korea.”

The sanctions call for, among other things, a total ban on the North’s principal exports, including coal, iron, iron ore, lead, lead ore and seafood. The goal is to slash a third of the regime’s annual revenue, which total about $3 billion by U.N. estimates in the August 5 resolution drafted by the United States.

Garment production

Ri said North Korea’s annual export earnings are in fact significantly lower averaging about $2 billion in recent years. Pyongyang’s garment production, which on the record brings up to $1 billion, actually yields $100 million at best, he said, covering only labor and costs incurred in maintaining production facilities and equipment.

Garment processing not included in the U.N. sanctions has been one of the country’s biggest exports, with many firms, particularly based in China, taking advantage of low-cost labor available in the North to produce various kinds of clothing. Suppliers often send fabrics and other raw materials to North Korean factories where garments are assembled and exported with a “Made in China” label.

From 2014 until 2016, Pyongyang exported some 15 to 22 million tons of coal and 2.5 million tons of iron ore per year, worth roughly $1.1 billion and $200 million respectively, Ri said, adding lead and lead ore exports in the same period averaged about $100 million and seafood sales $300 million a year.

If countries — including China, which accounts for nearly 90 percent of North Korean trade — “thoroughly implement the recent ban on these principal exports, addressing all the potential loopholes, the North may face up to $1.7 billion a year in losses — or more than 80 percent — not just a third — of its annual export revenue,” Ri said. “This is a country whose economy is heavily reliant on its exports of natural resources — a major source of hard currency for the regime — and banning its coal, iron and iron ore, lead and lead ore, and seafood exports is tantamount to a total blockade on all trade.”

Natural resources exports

The effects of sanctions aren’t limited to these key exports, Ri said. Prohibiting North Korea’s exports of natural resources would cut off its supply of foreign currency, with an anticipated resulting drop in imports of strategic goods including fuel, food and fertilizers as well as various other raw materials and equipment necessary to keep production and construction activities going, said Ri.

 

“In that case,” he added, “the North Korean regime will inevitably experience financial strains, which would put a damper on its pursuits” such as building a nuclear-tipped missile that can strike the U.S mainland.

The new sanctions omit crude-oil supplies from Russia and China, which Ri said would be a crippling measure for the regime, one that Pyongyang’s traditional allies would not want to take. But because the current sanctions are expected to further diminish North Korea’s limited holdings of hard currency, the regime would be unable to purchase as much oil as it did before.

In an earlier interview with VOA, Ri said North Korea imports up to 200,000 to 300,000 tons of diesel from Russia and some 50,000 to 100,000 tons of gasoline from China every year. China also supplies the North with roughly 500,000 tons of crude oil by pipeline, all of which though goes toward Kim’s massive military, all of which is free of charge.

Ri added the sanctions could also result in an increase of the already rampant smuggling activities across China’s border and a fierce competition for survival within North Korea.

For three decades, Ri worked in “Office 39,” which the U.S. Treasury Department once described as a North Korean government branch that engages “in illicit economic activities and managing slush funds and generating revenues for the leadership.” His last posting was in Dalian, China, as the head of the Korea Daehung Trading Corporation.

Ri defected to South Korea in October 2014, and came to the United States in March 2016.

Jenny Lee contributed to this report which originated with VOA’s Korean service (www.voakorea.com ).
…

The United States, Mexico and Canada are opening negotiations Wednesday to reform the North American Free Trade Agreement, a 1994 trade deal that was a major target in U.S. President Donald Trump’s run for office.

Trump has called NAFTA “the worst trade deal in history,” and one that has unfairly swollen the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico while allowing manufacturing jobs to migrate there.

Addressing the imbalance is a key U.S. goal in the talks, along with seeking to do away with a dispute mechanism the three countries use to resolve disagreements.

Negotiators will use multiple sessions to try to come up with reforms, with the aim of finishing their work before the end of the year. If the process stretches into 2018, there are concerns it could be complicated by a presidential election in Mexico and U.S. congressional elections.

Mexico and Canada

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said ahead of the talks, “We are looking forward to a productive, constructive conversation.”

She spoke alongside Mexican Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal before a meeting in Washington Tuesday.

“I have always said that the negotiators cannot be unoptimistic, has to be realistic with a positive approach,” Villarreal said.

A U.S. trade official who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity said the U.S. is seeking a “more balanced, reciprocal trade agreement that supports high-paying jobs for Americans and grows the U.S. economy.”

Vow to cause no harm 

Gary Hufbauer, an economist with the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics told VOA that renegotiating NAFTA will not bring back U.S. manufacturing jobs.

“Most economists don’t think that’s possible, but obviously the president does and he’s the president,” Hufbauer told VOA.

He said the topics under discussion will be ones such as state-owned enterprises, digital commerce, labor and environment. He also said U.S. negotiators have promised to work in a way that will “cause no harm.”

“What that means is that if they’re doing anything which causes Mexico or Canada to limit for example U.S. agricultural exports, which are quite substantial to both countries, that would be harm. And that would be harm to red states. So that’s a line they don’t want to cross,” Hufbauer said.
…

Negotiators from Canada, Mexico and the United States will kick off an ambitious first round of trade talks Wednesday as the countries try to fast-track a deal to modernize the North American Free Trade Agreement by early next year. The key issues facing negotiators include:

RULES OF ORIGIN: NAFTA says that in order for a good to be traded duty-free within the three countries, it must contain a certain percentage of North American content, which differs for various products. The rule of origin is most contentious in the auto industry; cars must contain at least 62.5 percent American, Canadian or Mexican content. The United States wants to increase the content threshold for NAFTA goods in a bid to return manufacturing jobs to the United States, and the auto industry has conceded that the rules should be updated to account for auto components that did not exist when the original deal was signed. Canada has said it is prepared to discuss some strengthening of rule of origin in the auto sector, but that any change must apply equally to all three countries. Mexico is willing to look at strengthening rules, but warns that going too far will make the region less competitive.

DISPUTE RESOLUTION: The United States has sought to ditch the so-called Chapter 19 tool, under which binational panels hear complaints about illegal subsidies and dumping and then issue binding decisions. The United States has frequently lost such cases since NAFTA came into effect in 1994, and the mechanism has hindered it from pursing anti-dumping and anti-subsidy cases against Canadian and Mexican companies. Washington also argues that Chapter 19 infringes on the sovereignty of its domestic laws. Canada has said Chapter 19 can be updated, but said a dispute settlement mechanism is its “redline” and must be part of any updated NAFTA. Mexico also says dispute settlement mechanisms are a vital part of the deal to give investors security.

SUPPLY MANAGEMENT: Quotas are a feature of NAFTA in several agricultural commodities including dairy and sugar, but Washington is seeking to eliminate non-tariff barriers to U.S. agricultural exports. Most notably, U.S. President Donald Trump has called Canada’s restrictions on dairy imports a “disgrace.” Although dairy was excluded from the original 1994 deal, the United States is seeking to eliminate nontariff barriers to its agricultural exports.

CURRENCY MANIPULATION: The United States is seeking a provision to deter currency manipulation. While Washington wants a mechanism to ensure the NAFTA countries avoid tinkering with exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, neither Canada nor Mexico is on the U.S. Treasury’s currency manipulation watchlist. Critics say the U.S. demand is an attempt to get currency manipulation into a global trade agreement to establish a precedent with other trading partners, including China.

GOVERNMENT PROCUREMENT: The United States is pushing for national, state and local governments in Canada and Mexico to open up their tender processes to U.S.-made products but at the same time is defending existing “Buy American” procurement laws. The Buy American provisions have blocked the use of Canadian steel to build U.S. bridges, and Canada is pushing for a freer market for government procurement. Mexico says it expects government procurement, already included in NAFTA, to be part of the renegotiation.

INVESTOR-STATE DISPUTE SETTLEMENT: The United States has proposed minor tweaking of the NAFTA Chapter 11 provisions, which are designed to ensure firms that invest abroad receive “fair and equitable” treatment by foreign governments. As with Chapter 19, opponents of the provisions argue they infringe on sovereignty, which benefits multinational corporations. Canada wants to update the mechanism to allow governments to regulate in the interest of the environment or labor, as in the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement that Canada recently negotiated with the European Union.
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Brazilian lawmakers facing a dearth of financing for their re-election campaigns next year proposed on Tuesday creating a fund of 3.6 billion reais ($1.1 billion) in taxpayer money to help their parties foot the bills.

The Supreme Court banned corporate donations to campaigns in 2015, drastically reducing political fund-raising.

On top of that, a massive investigation into endemic corruption in the country has uncovered a web of political bribes and kickbacks that effectively shut off under-the-table payments that politicians also relied upon.

The taxpayer fund proposed by a special committee of the lower house of Congress is part of an effort to reform Brazil’s discredited political system by reducing the proliferation of parties and making politicians more accountable to voters.

The constitutional amendment is expected to face the first of two floor votes next week in the lower chamber. It must also be approved twice by two-thirds of the Senate.

Creation of the fund was backed by most parties, despite public criticism that lawmakers should not be appropriating public money for campaigning in the midst of a budget crisis and deep recession.

The proposed legislation includes replacement of a proportional system for electing congressmen based on party lists by one where candidates with the most votes get elected.

Smaller parties opposed the change, saying it will favor the bigger established parties and the re-election of better-known politicians, while hindering the emergence of fresh faces in Brazilian politics.

Backers of the so-called “district” system say it would stop highly popular candidates from pulling in unknown politicians by party lists.

Another reform bill that has already passed the Senate establishes a minimum of votes that parties need to continue existing, a move to reduce the number of parties, now at 35.

The proliferation forces governments to forge complex coalitions to stay in power by distributing jobs, influence and pork barrel projects, which critics say is fertile ground for graft.

The proposals must be approved in Congress by Oct. 7 to apply for next year’s elections.

Individual campaign donations are allowed, but lawmakers are discussing limits of self-financing to even out the playing field and avoid rich Brazilians getting elected with their own money as millionaire Sao Paulo Mayor Joao Doria did last year.
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Herbie Mays is 3M proud, and it shows — in the 3M shirt he wears; in the 3M ring he earned after three decades at the company’s plant in suburban Cincinnati; in the way he shows off a card from a 3M supervisor, praising Mays as “a GREAT employee.”

But it’s all nostalgia.

 

Mays’ last day at 3M was in March. Bent on cutting costs and refocusing its portfolio, the company decided to close the plant that made bandages, knee braces and other health care supplies and move work to its plant in Mexico.

 

At 62, Mays is unemployed and wants to work, though on the face of it he has plenty of opportunities: Barely 10 miles from Mays’ ranch-style brick home in this blue-collar city, GE Aviation has been expanding — and hiring.

 

In the state-of-the-art laboratory in a World War II-era building the size of 27 football fields, workers use breakthrough technology to build jet engines that run on less fuel at higher temperatures. Bright flashes flare out as GE workers run tests with a robotic arm that can withstand 2,000 degrees (1,090 Celsius).

 

The open jobs there are among 30,000 manufacturing positions available positions open across Ohio. But Mays, like many of Ohio’s unemployed, lacks the in-demand skills.

 

“If you don’t keep up with the times,” he said, “you’re out of luck.”

 

This is the paradox of American manufacturing jobs in 2017. Donald Trump won the presidency in great measure because he pledged to stop American jobs and manufacturing from going overseas, winning Rust Belt votes from Mays and other blue-collar voters.

 

It’s true that many jobs have gone overseas, to lower-wage workers.

 

But at the same time, American manufacturers have actually added nearly a million jobs in the past seven years. Labor statistics show nearly 390,000 such jobs open.

The problem? Many of these are not the same jobs that for decades sustained the working class. More and more factory jobs now demand education, technical know-how or specialized skills. And many of the workers set adrift from low-tech factories lack such qualifications.

 

Factories will need to fill 2 million jobs over the next decade, according to a forecast by Deloitte Consulting and the American Manufacturing Institute. Workers are needed to run, operate and troubleshoot computer-directed machinery, including robots, and to maintain complex websites

 

Last year, software developer was the second-most-common job advertised by manufacturing companies, behind only sales, according to data provided by Burning Glass Technologies, a company that analyzes labor market data.

 

Yet the United States for now remains a follower, not a leader, of the trend. Workers in many European and Asian countries are more likely to be working with robots than U.S. workers, studies show. In such countries as Japan and Denmark, robotics and advanced automation have created solid jobs while increasing efficiencies for manufacturers.

Trump continues to make promises about adding U.S. manufacturing jobs. In blue-collar Youngstown, Ohio, he talked about passing by big factories whose jobs “have left Ohio” on his way to a July 25 rally, then told people not to sell their homes because the jobs are “coming back. They’re all coming back.”

 

But Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican and a former U.S. trade representative, conceded in an interview: “We’re not going to see the kind of manufacturing renaissance that we all want in this country unless we focus on skills training.”

 

Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, in a visit to a Detroit factory in June, acknowledged the need to address the skills gap by developing advanced computing skills. And when Trump visited Pewaukee, Wisconsin, in June, he touted the value of training while doing.

 

“Apprenticeships teach striving Americans the skills they need to operate incredible machines,” Trump said. “This is not the old days. This is new and computerized and complicated.”

 

Of the 146 million jobs in the United States, only about 0.35 percent were filled by active apprentices in 2016. Filling millions of open jobs through apprenticeships would require a substantial increase in government resources. So far, the Trump administration has called for more funding but hasn’t made any progress securing the funding from Congress.

Apprenticeships are much more common at some European companies, notably German firms. At Germany-based Stihl Inc.’s plant in Virginia Beach, Virginia, for example, A.J. Scherman is learning to be a “mechatronics technician.” Mechatronics combines electrical and mechanical engineering as well as computer skills.

 

Stihl makes chain saws, leaf blowers and weed trimmers at the factory. Once he’s completed his final year in Stihl’s four-year apprenticeship program, Scherman will read diagnostic software on computer screens attached to each robot to repair and upgrade them. If necessary, he’ll hook up a laptop to program changes.

 

Scherman, 37, is also earning a college degree as part of the apprenticeship. Thanks to financial aid from Stihl, he’ll finish with zero debt.

 

Skip Johnson, Stihl’s apprenticeship coordinator, said it’s critically important to bring bright students into the plant, where they can see that the grime and dust they associate with factories are giving way to clean operations using futuristic technology.

 

“They just come in here, and they’re wide-eyed,” Johnson said.

 

U.S. manufacturing workers, excluding managers, make an average of $44,000 a year, according to government data. That’s just 2.8 percent higher, adjusted for inflation, than a decade ago after years of shifting of jobs overseas or to nonunion states. And it compares with a much higher 8 percent gain for the labor force as a whole over the past decade.

 

But a typical mechatronics engineer with a four-year degree can earn $97,000 a year; a typical software developer makes just over $100,000.

 

Festo Didactic, the education arm of Germany-based Festo, last year launched two-year mechatronics apprenticeship programs in Ohio with Sinclair Community College, and is already expanding its U.S. apprenticeship offerings. At Festo’s plant in Mason, workers monitor a robotic distribution system that self-adjusts its work flow to prevent backups.

 

“This kind of factory has nothing to do with the factory we knew in the 1960s or 1980 or even 2000,” said Yannick Schilly, who heads global supply for Festo’s North American business.

 

But there’s not much demand locally these days for the kind of repetitive tasks done in those factories by workers such as Herbie Mays.

 

He acknowledged that there are “plenty of jobs out here.

What you have to do is get training or education.”

 

 

 
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Amazon.com Inc is rolling out pickup points in the United States where shoppers can retrieve items immediately after ordering them, shortening delivery times from hours to minutes, the company said on Tuesday.

The world’s largest online retailer has launched “Instant Pickup” points around five college campuses, such as the University of California at Berkeley, it said. Amazon has plans to open more sites by the end of the year including one in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.

Shoppers on Amazon’s mobile app can select from several hundred fast-selling items at each site, from snacks and drinks to phone chargers. Amazon employees in a back room then load orders into lockers within two minutes, and customers receive bar codes to access them.

The news underscores Amazon’s broader push into brick-and-mortar retail. The e-commerce company, which said in June it would buy Whole Foods Market Inc for $13.7 billion, has come to realize that certain transactions like buying fresh produce are hard to shift online. Its Instant Pickup program targets another laggard: impulse buys.

“I want to buy a can of coke because I’m thirsty,” said Ripley MacDonald, Amazon’s director of student programs.

“There’s no chance I’m going to order that on Amazon.com and wait however long it’s going to take for that to ship to me.”

“I can provide that kind of service here,” he said of the new program.

Instant Pickup puts Amazon in competition with vending machine services. Yet the larger size of the Amazon sites means they are unlikely to pose a threat to those selling snack and drink vending machines to offices and schools. MacDonald said Amazon considered automating the Instant Pickup points but declined to say why the company had not pursued the idea.

Amazon’s ability to shorten delivery times has been a sore point for brick-and-mortar retailers, who have struggled to grow sales as their customers have turned to more convenient online options. Until Instant Pickup, Amazon shoppers could expect to have their orders within an hour at best via the company’s Prime Now program, or within 15 minutes for grocery orders via AmazonFresh Pickup. Amazon has made two-day shipping standard in the United States.

Instant Pickup prices may be cheaper than those on Amazon.com, MacDonald said. He declined to detail how the items are priced, however.

Other locations in the program now open include Los Angeles, Atlanta, Columbus, Ohio and College Park, Maryland.
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First it was the leader of a major U.S. pharmaceutical, then the CEO of an athletic gear company, and before the day had ended, the chief executive of a $170 billion tech giant. Three of the nation’s top executives resigned from a federal panel created years ago to advise the U.S. president.

Now, others are pushing for more executives to refuse to serve President Donald Trump after what many believe to be an inadequate response to a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one dead and dozens injured.

 

Announcing his resignation Monday, Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier cited the president’s failure to explicitly rebuke the white nationalists.

He wrote on Twitter that “America’s leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which runs counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal.”

The response from the president was swift, throwing a jab at Frazier, a highly respected executive and one of only four African Americans to head a Fortune 500 company, according to the Executive Leadership Council.

 

Trump tweeted that at least Frazier will now “have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!”

The response, and the speed in which it arrived, caught many off guard.

 

William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said he couldn’t “think of a parallel example” of any president responding as viciously as Trump to a CEO departing an advisory council.

 

“Usually, certain niceties are observed to smooth over a rupture,” said Galston, who served as a domestic policy aide in the Clinton administration.

 

Within hours, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank, who has felt some blowback for his support of the president, resigned from the same panel, saying his company “engages in innovation and sports, not politics.”

Plank did not specifically mention Trump or Charlottesville, but said his company will focus on promoting “unity, diversity and inclusion” through sports.

 

But Intel CEO Brian Krzanich was more specific when he resigned a short time later, writing that while he had urged leaders to condemn “white supremacists and their ilk,” many in Washington “seem more concerned with attacking anyone who disagrees with them.”

The president followed up later in the day, tweeting that Merck “is a leader in higher & higher drug prices while at the same time taking jobs out of the U.S. Bring jobs back & LOWER PRICES!”

 

Drugmakers have come under withering criticism for soaring prices in the U.S., including by Trump, though he has yet to act on a promise to contain them.

 

The exchange lit up social media, with many people lauding Frazier and blasting the president. There was also a push online seeking more resignations from the remaining executives on the same panel, just over 20 of them.

 

Trump eventually made a statement condemning bigotry Monday afternoon at a press conference, but already, other executives came to Frazier’s support.

 

Unilever CEO Paul Polman wrote on Twitter, “Thanks @Merck Ken Frazier for strong leadership to stand up for the moral values that made this country what it is.”

Frazier was not the first executive to resign from advisory councils serving Trump.

 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk resigned from the manufacturing council in June, and two other advisory groups to the president, after the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.

Walt Disney Co. Chairman and CEO Bob Iger resigned for the same reason from the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum, which Trump established to advise him on how government policy impacts economic growth and job creation.

 

The manufacturing jobs council had 28 members initially, but it has shrunk since it was formed earlier this year as executives retire, are replaced, or, as with Frazier, Musk, Plank and Krzanich, resign.

 

“We’ve learned that as president, Mr. Trump is behaving exactly as he did as a candidate,” Galston said. “He knows only one mode: When attacked, hit back harder.”

 
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The first round of negotiations between the US, Canada and Mexico begins this week on what President Donald Trump has called “the worst trade deal ever.” He blames the 2-decades-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs in the US. Trump has vowed to scrap the agreement, unless the US gets a ‘fair deal.’ But trade experts warn that failure is not an option, especially when the stakes are so high. Mil Arcega reports.
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