Month: September 2019

Thomas Titus handles all the challenges of running his sprawling Elkhart, Illinois, farm, but lately, he isn’t making a lot of money doing it.

“We’re producing corn and we’re producing soybeans at below cost of production almost, and we’re raising pigs at below cost of production,” he told VOA, his voice competing with the sounds of hundreds of hogs housed in one of several nearby buildings. “We’re in a challenging time whenever we get to the end of the year and we need to shore up some of those books.”

It’s not unusual for farmers to diversify their products … but Titus says his pork operation isn’t typical.

“We’re somewhat of a rarity given our size. We’re a 600-sow farrow-to-finish farm, so we raise pigs from birth up to market weight, so our size and what we do is a little more dynamic and diverse,” he said.

Dependent on trade

In total, Titus raises about 12,000 pigs a year, many sent to the international market. He said much of his profit comes from such exports.

“One in every four pigs we raise goes to a foreign country of some kind, so we are extremely dependent on those positive trade negotiations and trade agreements for the success of our business.”

One key buyer of U.S. pork is China, the world’s largest importer, which is dealing with a major outbreak of Asian swine fever. As a result, China’s pig population has decreased about 20%. Some estimates indicate China has culled more than 1 million pigs.

When it was needed most, American pork was more expensive than other sources because of steep tariffs imposed by the Chinese government, one of many Beijing imposed on American agricultural products amid a protracted trade war with Washington.

Now, China has announced a tariff exemption on U.S.-produced pork, relaxing a punishing 72% duty.

Trade war damage done

But economic damage has been done to the U.S. pork industry.

“We’ve lost about $1 billion worth of pork sales, or what Iowa State University has put out a study, $8 per hog is what it’s cost us on the tariffs,” said Karl Setzer, a commodity risk analyst with AgriVisor, who added that even before tariffs, China tended to spread out its purchases.

“China doesn’t like to marry themselves to one commodity supplier, be it pork, beef, soybeans, whatever it is,” he said.

So when American pork couldn’t compete on price because of tariffs, Setzer said China turned more to other suppliers, like the European Union and Brazil.

“Brazil has seen their trade jump 5% in the last year. The trade war isn’t helping us at all. We would likely have a bigger share because we are a bigger pork producer, but it comes down to value and what we are willing to sell our pork for,” Setzer said. “They’re (China) still showing interest in our offerings, but when you look at all the other factors, the trade war on a whole is probably one of the worst ones we’ve been in.”

It’s unclear how much China will increase purchases now that certain tariffs, including those on pork and soybeans, are removed.

Supporting Trump, not tweets

And even though, as with other farmers, Titus has taken direct hits for the price of almost everything he is producing on his farm as the trade war continues, he said he still supports President Donald Trump, but would like to see fewer trade negotiations happen via presidential tweet.

“It takes three tweets and this market takes a crash,” he said.

Which is why Titus hopes upcoming face-to-face negotiations between the United States and China produce tangible, long-term results, creating some stability for commodity markets, and ultimately his bottom line.

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A federal appeals court in New York has restored a lawsuit by restaurant workers, a hotel event booker and a watchdog who say President Donald Trump has business conflicts that violate the Constitution.

The lawsuit tossed out in 2017 by a lower-court judge was restored Friday by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The lower court had concluded that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. The appeals panel rejected that reasoning. Trump has called the lawsuit “totally without merit.”

The lawsuit alleged Trump’s “vast, complicated, and secret” business interests were creating conflicts of interest.

Justice Department lawyers had argued that the plaintiffs did not suffer in any way and thus had no standing to sue.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington first filed the lawsuit.

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A Lebanese-American man was referred Friday to prosecutors after confessing he’d worked for Israel during its occupation of Lebanon for nearly two decades, a Lebanese security agency said.
 
Amer Fakhoury was detained after returning to his native Lebanon from the United States earlier this month. He had worked as a senior warden at the Khiam Prison in southern Lebanon that was run by an Israeli-backed militia, known as the South Lebanon Army, until Israel ended an 18-year occupation of the area in 2000.

Lebanon and Israel have been officially at war since Israel’s creation in 1948.

Human rights groups have said in the past that Khiam prison was a site of torture and detention without trial before it was abandoned in 2000. Israel denies the allegations.

On Thursday, scores of people, including former Khiam prison detainees, held a sit-in in Beirut protesting against Fakhoury, referring to him as “the butcher of Khiam” and adding that he should be put on trial.
 
“We reject facilitating the return of agents to the nation,” former detainee Anwar Yaseen was quoted saying by state-run National News Agency.
 
The Lebanese General Security Directorate said Friday that Fakhoury used an Israeli passport before Israel’s withdrawal to travel from Israel to the U.S.
 
Hundreds of former Lebanese members of the militia had fled to Israel, fearing reprisals if they remained in Lebanon. Others stayed and faced trial, receiving lenient sentences.  
 
Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil, an ally of the militant Hezbollah group, tweeted Friday that the Lebanese people “will not forgive” those who pained them.  
 
Khalil said there are attempts to clear the names of “60 agents for Israel” and “we should take this very seriously” and follow the case.  

Arrest of Hassan Jaber
 
Also on Friday, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry summoned Ethiopia’s charge d’affaires demanding information about Lebanese businessman Hassan Jaber, whom the ministry said was detained in Addis Ababa on Saturday.

The ministry informed the Ethiopian diplomat that Beirut wants “clear answers” by Monday, otherwise Lebanon would take countermeasures.

Some Lebanese media outlets have speculated that Israel or the United States might have been behind Jaber’s arrest.

In 2017, Lebanese businessman Kassim Tajeddine, was arrested in the Moroccan city of Casablanca while on his way from Guinea to Beirut. He later surfaced in the United States, where he was charged with laundering money for Hezbollah.

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House lawmakers investigating the market dominance of Big Tech are asking Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple for a broad range of documents including internal communications.

Letters went out to the four companies on Friday from the leaders of the House Judiciary Committee and its subcommittee on antitrust, which has been conducting a sweeping antitrust investigation of the companies and their impact on competition and consumers.

The companies have said they’ll cooperate fully with the congressional investigation.

The lawmakers set an Oct. 14 deadline for the companies to provide the documents.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler says the documents will help the committee understand “whether they are using their market power in ways that have harmed consumers and competition.”

The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are conducting competition investigations of the companies.

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U.S. President Donald Trump has arrived in Baltimore, the eastern U.S., majority-black city he recently called a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.”

Trump was there Thursday to address Republican congressional leaders attending an annual retreat.

Before he left the White House, Trump ignored a reporter’s question about what he would say to the residents of the city, instead saying only that it was going to be “a very successful evening.”

Ahead of the president’s visit, activist groups planned to protest “racism, white supremacy, war, bigotry and climate change,” organizers told The Baltimore Sun.

On Thursday, several hundred protesters lined the route Trump’s motorcade took to the city’s Inner Harbor area, where Trump was to speak.

Trump has denied charges of racism on his attacks on the city and its congressman, Elijah Cummings.

“There is nothing racist in stating plainly what most people already know, that Elijah Cummings has done a terrible job for the people of his district, and of Baltimore itself,” he tweeted in July.

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With a go-ahead from the Supreme Court, the Trump administration Thursday began enforcing a new rule denying asylum to most migrants arriving at the southern border — a move that spread despair among those fleeing poverty and violence in their homelands. 
  
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security agency that manages asylum cases said the policy would be effective retroactive to July 16, when the rule was announced. 
  
The new policy would deny refuge to anyone at the U.S.-Mexico border who passes through another country on the way to the U.S. without first seeking asylum there. 
 
The Supreme Court cleared the way, for now, to enforce it while legal challenges move forward. 

Previous asylum request is key
 
Migrants who make their way to the U.S. overland from places like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador would be largely ineligible, along with asylum seekers from Africa, Asia and South America who try to get in by way of the U.S.-Mexico border. 
 
Asylum seekers must pass an initial screening called a “credible fear” interview, a hurdle that most clear. Under the new policy, they would fail the test unless they sought asylum in at least one country they traveled through and were denied. They would be placed in fast-track deportation proceedings and flown to their home countries at U.S. expense. 
 
“Our Supreme Court is sentencing people to death. There are no safeguards, no institutions to stop this cruelty,” the immigration-assistance group Al Otro Lado said in a statement. 
 
The Mexican government likewise called the high court’s action “astonishing.” The effects of the new policy could fall heavily on Mexico, leaving the country with tens of thousands of poor and desperate migrants with no hope of getting into the U.S.  

Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan called the Supreme Court’s go-ahead a “big victory” in the Trump administration’s attempt to curb the flow of migrants. 
 
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in statement the policy was important. 
  
“Until Congress can act with durable, lasting solutions, the rule will help reduce a major ‘pull’ factor driving irregular migration to the United States and enable the administration to more quickly and efficiently process cases originating from the southern border, leading to fewer individuals transiting through Mexico on a dangerous journey,” said Jessica Collins, a spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 
  
The American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who is representing immigrant advocacy groups in the case, Lee Gelernt, said: “This is just a temporary step, and we’re hopeful we’ll prevail at the end of the day. The lives of thousands of families are at stake.” 

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The U.S. government’s budget deficit increased by $169 billion to $1.07 trillion in the first 11 months of this budget year as spending grew faster than tax collections.

The Treasury Department reported Thursday that the deficit with just one month left in the budget year is up 18.8% over the same period a year ago.

Budget experts project a surplus for September, which would push the total 2019 deficit down slightly below the $1 trillion mark. The Congressional Budget Office is forecasting a deficit this year of $960 billion, compared to a 2018 deficit of $779 billion.

Going forward, the CBO sees the annual deficit topping $1 trillion in 2020 and never falling below $1 trillion over the next decade.

The government has only recorded trillion-dollar-plus deficits in one other period, during the four years 2009 through 2012 when spending went up to deal with a deep recession and the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

Increased spending 

The higher deficits currently reflect higher government spending, reflecting two budget agreements in 2018 and this year between the Trump administration and Congress that added billions of dollars in extra spending for the military and domestic programs.

In addition, Social Security and Medicare payments are surging as millions of baby boomers retire. Added to the increased spending is the impact of the $1.5 trillion tax cut President Donald Trump pushed through Congress in 2017, reducing individual and corporate tax rates. For this year, revenues are up 3.4%, but spending is up by 7 percent, nearly double the increase in revenues.

Individual tax revenues have risen by 2% in the first 11 months of this year compared to the same period in 2018, while corporate tax revenues are down 2%.

Tariffs

Bucking this slow growth are tariffs which are up $28 billion or 73% over last year, reflecting the higher tariffs Trump has imposed on China and other nations as part of his get-tough trade battles.

On the spending side, the government this year has spent $379.1 billion on interest payments on the debt, up $47 billion from a year ago, reflecting the growing size of the national debt.

Commenting on the new report, Michael Peterson, head of the Peterson Foundation, said, “Absent more responsible budgets, the deficit and interest costs will continue to grow rapidly, diminishing America’s future.”

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KEMMERER, WYOMING — A six-foot-tall plastic Tyrannosaurus rex stands guard outside Robert Bowen’s fossil shop on Pine Street in downtown, Kemmerer, Wyo., in the state’s southwest corner.

“One of the fun things about some of the fossils is, they tell stories,” Bowen said, pointing to a fossilized stingray hanging on the shop wall. The beautifully preserved disc-shaped skeleton has a chunk missing from its left side.

“He got a little too close to a turtle or an alligator,” he explained. “You can see the elongated bite mark.”

The town of Kemmerer calls itself “Wyoming’s Aquarium in Stone.” Quarries just outside town yield schools of fossilized fish with just a few taps of a chisel. A freshwater lake covered the region 50 million years ago.

The backbone of the town’s economy, however, is a different kind of fossil: fossil fuel. A coal mine feeds the Naughton Power Plant just outside town.

“It’s huge for us, as far as our economy,” said Bowen, who sits on the town council. The plant and the mine provide about 400 jobs and the bulk of the tax base in the town of about 3,000 people.

So it sent a shudder through the community late last year when PacifiCorp, the Naughton plant’s owner, announced that closing the plant early would save its customers nearly $200 million on fuel and maintenance costs. 

While coal has powered the industrialized world for centuries, an energy transition is underway around the world. Concern about climate-changing emissions is one factor. But simple economics is pushing coal out of markets it once dominated. The cost of natural gas, wind and solar power have plunged in the last decade or so.

Wyoming reacts

Wyoming has not embraced the energy transition. Environmental arguments for zero-emission wind and solar power don’t get much traction. The state has the nation’s lowest rate of acceptance that humans are the main cause of climate change.

Meanwhile, as markets have changed, the state has not changed with them.

“We’ve been late to the game,” said Robert Godby, director of the University of Wyoming’s Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy. “We have been reticent, or maybe just slow, or maybe we’ve denied the changes that are going on. And so we’ve been slow to react to them. We haven’t been proactive. We’ve been reactive.”

Case in point: A new law puts a wrinkle in PacifiCorp’s plans. It requires the owner of a coal-fired power plant to seek a buyer before it can close the plant. The utility would then have to buy the plant’s electricity back from the new owner.

“We understand that a change is coming, but we’re simply asking that let’s do it with some wisdom,” said State Senator Dan Dockstader, the law’s sponsor. “Let’s not put the plane into a nosedive. Let’s let it glide down easy and sort this out.”

Godby calls it a speed bump.

“If the current owner of a coal fired power plant can’t make money with that plant, why would somebody else buy it?” Godby asked. So far, no buyers have come knocking.

“But on the other side of the coin,” he added, “the devil’s in the details.”

The details are still being written, but Godby said the state may structure the deal so that a new owner can make a profit, despite the fact that PacifiCorp says the plant is uneconomical.

The bill’s main outcome is uncertainty, he added, which companies detest. PacifiCorp may decide to leave Naughton open longer simply to avoid that uncertainty.

Adaptation or extinction

Robert Bowen said the new law will help the town buy time. But he acknowledges that trouble is coming.

“It’s not ‘if,’ it’s ‘when,’” he said. “To prevent some of that, we need to start looking at diversifying our economy here.”

Tourism is one option. Painted wooden signs around town point to the region’s attractions: boating, snowmobiling and, of course, fossils. One sign proclaims Kemmerer the “World Fossil Capital.”

“One of the things that we could be pushing a lot harder is paleo tourism,” Bowen said. The town could do more to promote fossil safaris out to the nearby quarries, where visitors can easily find their own fossils to take home.

Fossil tourism alone won’t save the town, he said, but it would help. The best option would be some kind of manufacturing, he added.

Like the creatures entombed in stone here, Kemmerer must adapt or go extinct.

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On a dirt road past rows of date trees, just feet from a dry section of Colorado River, a small construction crew is putting up a towering border wall that the government hopes will reduce — for good — the flow of immigrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

Cicadas buzz and heavy equipment rumbles and beeps before it lowers 30-foot-tall (9-kilometer-tall) sections of fence into the dirt. 

“Ahi esta!” — “There it is!” — a Spanish-speaking member of the crew says as the men straighten the sections into the ground. Nearby, workers pull dates from palm trees, not far from the cotton fields that cars pass on the drive to the border.

South of Yuma, Arizona, the tall brown bollards rising against a cloudless desert sky will replace much shorter barriers that are meant to keep out cars, but not people.

This 5-mile (8-kilometer) section of fencing is where President Donald Trump’s most salient campaign promise — to build a wall along the entire southern border — is taking shape.

The president and his administration said this week that they plan on building between 450 and 500 miles (724 and 806 kilometers) of fencing along the nearly 2,000-mile (3,218-kilometer) border by the end of 2020, an ambitious undertaking funded by billions of defense dollars that had been earmarked for things like military base schools, target ranges and maintenance facilities.

Two other Pentagon-funded construction projects in New Mexico and Arizona are underway, but some are skeptical that so many miles of wall can be built in such a short amount of time. The government is up against last-minute construction hiccups, funding issues and legal challenges from environmentalists and property owners whose land sits on the border.

The Trump administration says the wall, along with more surveillance technology, agents and lighting, is key to keeping out people who cross illegally.

Critics say a wall is useless when most of those apprehended turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents in the hope they can be eventually released while their cases play out in immigration court.

In Yuma, the defense-funded section of tall fencing is replacing shorter barriers that U.S. officials say are less efficient.

It comes amid a steep increase since last year in the number of migrant families who cross the border illegally in the Yuma area, often turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents. Many are fleeing extreme poverty and violence, and some are seeking asylum.

So far this year, Border Patrol agents in the Yuma sector have apprehended more than 51,000 family units. That’s compared with just more than 14,500 the year before, about a 250% increase.

The Yuma sector is the third busiest along the southern border, with officials building a temporary, 500-person tent facility in the parking lot of the Border Patrol’s Yuma headquarters in June.

It spent just less than $15 million for the setup and services for four months, including meals, laundry and security, but officials are evaluating whether to keep it running past next month as the number of arrivals in Yuma and across the southern border have fallen sharply in recent months.

The drop is largely because of the Mexican government’s efforts to stop migrants from heading north after Trump threatened tariffs earlier this year to force Mexico to act.

The number of people apprehended along the southern border fell by 61 percent between this year’s high point in May and the end of August. In Yuma, it fell by 86 percent, according to government figures. Most people apprehended are either traveling as families or are unaccompanied children.

“Historically this has been a huge crossing point for both vehicles as well as family units and unaccompanied alien children during the crisis that we’ve seen in the past couple of months,” Border Patrol spokesman Jose Garibay said. “They’ve just been pouring over the border due to the fact that we’ve only ever had vehicle bollards and barriers that by design only stop vehicles.”

Victor Manjarrez Jr., a former Border Patrol chief who’s now a professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, was an agent when the government put up the first stretch of barriers along the southern border in San Diego.

He’s seen barriers evolve from easily collapsible landing mats installed by agents and the National Guard to the sophisticated, multibillion-dollar projects now being done by private contractors.

Manjarrez says tall border fencing is crucial in some areas and less helpful in others, like remote stretches of desert where shorter barriers and more technology like ground sensors would suffice.

“One form doesn’t fit in all areas, and so the fence itself is not the one solution. It’s a combination of many things,” Manjarrez said.

The ease of construction varies by place and depends on things like water, Manjarrez said, adding that just because a plot of land is flat “doesn’t mean it’s not complex.”

He said building 450 to 500 miles (724 and 806 kilometers) of fence by the end of next year would be tough if that figure doesn’t include sections of the wall that have been built recently.

“As it stands now, contractors are building pretty fast,” Manjarrez said. The real question is whether the government needs to build that much fencing, he said.

The Trump administration may face those issues along with lawsuits from landowners who aren’t giving up their property so easily and environmentalists who say the barriers stop animals from migrating and can cut off water resources.

The Tohono O’odham tribe in Arizona also has expressed opposition to more border fencing on its land, which stretches for nearly 75 miles (120 kilometers) along the border with Mexico.

Near Yuma, the Cocopah Indian Tribe’s reservation is near the latest fencing project, and leaders are concerned it will block the view to its sacred sites, spokesman Jonathan Athens said.
 

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The House on Wednesday approved two bills that would forever ban drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and to extend a moratorium on drilling off Florida’s gulf coast.

“We’re striking back this week against the Trump administration and their agenda to drill everywhere, every time, with no exception,” House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul Grijalva said.

The White House has said the president will veto the bills if they pass the Senate and get to his desk.

While the opponents say the bill only limits the nation’s energy industry, the supporters of the bill say they will provide protection for vital water ways and help avoid disasters like the 2010 BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“If we’re learning anything from the past, it’s that when you drill, you spill. No one should be comfortable exposing our shorelines to that risk,” South Carolina Congressman Joe Cunningham said.

But the White House said in a statement that the bills “undermine the Administration’s commitment to a prosperous American economy supported by the responsible use of the Nation’s abundant natural resources.”
 

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After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush encouraged a reeling nation to light candles in honor of the victims.

Elaine Greene and two friends joined the hordes in a candlelight vigil, but not before she stopped to grab an old flag that was behind her Maine home’s front door.

With tears in her eyes, she raised the flag tentatively.

Motorists honked their approval.

The simple act has played out weekly ever since, through snow and ice, sickness and health, over 18 years. And it’s playing out for a final time Wednesday.

Dubbed the “Freeport flag ladies,” the trio is reluctantly giving in to age and ending the Main Street tradition. Greene is the youngest at 74 and battles Crohn’s disease. Carmen Footer, 77, recently recovered from open heart surgery. JoAnn Miller, 83, has foot problems.

“It was up to me to call it, and I called it,” Greene said.

Greene described their calling as a mission of love, gratitude and patriotism, and it went far beyond waving their flags on a street corner near L.L. Bean. They mailed care packages to military personnel deployed overseas in the war on terrorism. They greeted military personnel at airports. They visited the wounded. And they attended funerals.

They saw people at their worst while dealing with loss. And they witnessed how tragedy can also bring out the best in many people, Greene said.

Over the years, their work became their lives. They appeared alongside presidents. They spoke to schoolchildren. The home that the three share is full of patriotic memorabilia and letters from military personnel. It’s been years since they dressed in anything other than red, white and blue.

Greene, whose glasses are red, white and blue, said she wouldn’t change a thing. After all, she said, the flag waving was the answer to a prayer.

After 9/11, she knew the nation had come under an attack unlike anything since Pearl Harbor. She said she wanted to do something to help, and something told her to grab that flag behind the door.

She remains in awe that a simple gesture grew into something big.

“You can either bring a light into the room, or walk into a room that’s dark and keep it dark,” she said. “I prefer to bring a light into the room. It takes only but a little match to do that. You don’t have to have a great big idea. You just have to be sincere.”
 

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