http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/donald-trump-milk-tariffs-fact-check-1.4709326

Trump's fixation on 270% milk tariffs, FBI texts shows how he 'cherry-picks' truths to justify actions

'He takes that kernel of truth, he cherry-picks something — and it's repetition, repetition, repetition'

 
Evan Mulligan


  
Jackson Thomson

  
Alex Matheson


  
Neal Larter







  
Charles Beale









  
Jason Martin



  







Paul Pedersen










 
Bob Lashram







 http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-supply-management-explainer-1.4708341

It's been blamed for inflating food prices - but a lot of American producers wish they had something like it

 
Roland Reimer



  
Paul O'Donovan













 
Rod Begin











  
Evan Mulligan















 
Buford Wilson

  
Miles Long

Trump's fixation on 270% milk tariffs, FBI texts shows how he 'cherry-picks' truths to justify actions

'He takes that kernel of truth, he cherry-picks something — and it's repetition, repetition, repetition'

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on the lawn of the White House on Friday. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)


When Donald Trump has a point, expect him to pound it into submission.

From the White House lawn on Friday morning, the U.S. President mischaracterized the findings of a new Department of Justice report about misconduct in the FBI during the Hillary Clinton emails probe. But he also told some selective truths — chiefly about some inappropriate anti-Trump texts between FBI officials outlined in the inspector general's report.

That's arguably trickier to untangle.

And that's likely just the way the president likes it, says Republican strategist Evan Siegfried.
"He takes that kernel of truth, he cherry-picks something — and it's repetition, repetition, repetition," he said. "It's all about strategically positioning himself."

The same tactic of zeroing in on one point to imply massive systemic cheating was apparently used to justify a trade war with Canada. While the larger subtext was warnings by most economists that a trade war would be self-harming, Trump latched on to an alarming-sounding statistic about Canada's levies on some dairy products.

It's misdirection disguised as conservative talking points, Siegfried said.

When it succeeds, it seems it's the only talking point that matters to the Trump faithful, pundits say, and the argument often alludes to a "deep state" conspiracy alleging a secret plot by government agents to curtail Trump's power.

Here's how Trump's selective truths have worked for him so far:

---

Trump's chosen fact: FBI officials exchanged biased text messages.

 

The new Justice Department report revealed that two FBI officials — an agent and a lawyer — were found to have exchanged inappropriate text messages regarding Trump in the lead-up to the 2016 election. When lawyer Lisa Page expressed concerns Trump would be elected president, agent Peter Strzok wrote back: "We'll stop him."

Trump alleged "total bias" toward him and that it's possible the entire bureau was therefore "plotting against my election."
The mental leap for the Trump faithful: An example of anti-Trump sentiment two years ago in the FBI means special counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing probe into possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign is compromised. Mueller should be suspended.

How it's playing to Trump voters: "It's the establishment. What do they call it? The deep state," said Bill Berdan, 68, a Trump supporter from Folsom, Calif. "That's the whole intent of the whole thing: is to get in the way and thwart Trump's ability to govern or implement change."

To Berdan, the text messages are "displaying evidence of" malicious actors in the government eager to bring down Trump, he said. His wife, Kimala, added that the conspiracy "has been going on for a long time — before his presidency." She said she believes anti-Trump elements have been operating from "within the FBI, the CIA, the Senate and Congress, everybody."

Why it's not so simple: The inspector general who authored the report concluded there was no evidence Strzok abused his position to persecute the president. The report also found there was no evidence that "improper considerations, including political bias" directly affected specific investigative decision by the FBI as a whole.

Mueller removed Strzok from his team upon learning about the messages. Page told investigators the conversation was carried out on their work phones because she and Strzok were having an extra-marital affair that they were trying to keep secret from their spouses.

Critics have noted that an effort to use the highly improper text messages as evidence to suggest the entire Department of Justice is corrupt and that the FBI is out to get Trump is disingenuous.

---

Trump's chosen fact: Collusion is not a crime.

 

Trump has repeated this claim in regards to questions about whether his campaign became involved with Russian agents to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential race. In an interview with The New York Times last December, Trump said: "No. 1, there is no collusion, No. 2, collusion is not a crime, but even if it was a crime, there was no collusion."
And it is true that collusion on its own is not a crime.

The mental leap for the Trump faithful: The subtext is that Mueller's probe into the potential Russian meddling in the 2016 election is a meaningless "witch hunt," and should therefore not be happening.

How it's playing to Trump voters:"There probably was some collusion going on" with the Russians, said Neal Forte, a restaurant owner and Trump voter from Hazleton, Pa., during an interview with CBC News last summer. "But is it even a crime?"

Why it's not so simple: It's still a political scandal. Whether or not collusion with the Russians can be found, the Mueller probe has, in the last 13 months, found evidence of enough crimes to lead to 20 people being charged so far. (Thirteen of those are Russian nationals.)

Also among them is former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who admitted to lying to the FBI, and Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, charged with conspiracy to launder money and failing to register as a foreign agent, among other things. No one on Trump's campaign team has been charged with a crime directly related to Russian attempts to sway the election.

---

Trump's chosen fact: Canada levies a 270 per cent tariff on U.S. dairy products.

 

Trump tweeted last week that the U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods is "in response to" the high dairy tariffs. For example, Trump tweeted on June 10: "Fair Trade is now to be called Fool Trade if it is not Reciprocal. According to a Canada release, they make almost 100 Billion Dollars in Trade with U.S. (guess they were bragging and got caught!). Minimum is 17B. Tax Dairy from us at 270%. Then Justin acts hurt when called out!"

The mental leap for the Trump faithful: The figure seems outrageous and the U.S. should apply tariffs to Canada to retaliate. U.S. tariffs are one way to put things back on a level playing field due to a Canadian "cartel" that fixes prices on dairy, proponents of the tariffs say.

How it's playing to Trump voters: "There's an oversupply in the United States of milk. Many of our dairy producers are falling on very tough times," said Dennis Beavers, a former Alabama state director for Trump and a U.S. Department of Agriculture appointee in Tennessee. "I can tell you, we have about 230 mom-and-pop dairies being nearly driven out of the marketplace. And in Tennessee, some of it is because of unfair competition, and some of it is because of how they're being treated in the world marketplace."
Why it's not so simple: Canada operates a complicated"supply management" quota system that's meant to control prices and shelter some dairy products from competition. But it's also true that the U.S. has subsidies and protectionism.

Even if Canada's program seems unfair to Americans, using the "270 per cent" statistic to justify a trade war between two allies ignores a lucrative commercial relationship. Economists warn that a trade war will harm all involved.

---

---

Trump's chosen fact: The Trump campaign was surveilled by the FBI in 2016.

 

While the FBI reportedly sent in an informant to speak with campaign advisers during Trump's 2016 campaign, the contact was only made to investigate possible links between the members of Trump's team and the Kremlin. It was not, as the president asserted, an effort to "spy" on him.

The mental leap for the Trump faithful: Trump dubbed the incident #Spygate anyway, purporting without evidence that his campaign was being targeted in order to help rival Clinton win the presidential election. Trump has tried to use the made-up scandal to bolster his argument that Mueller's investigation into his campaign's ties with Russia should be put to an end.

How it's playing to Trump voters: Although Trump's spying claims are false, the conspiracy has gained traction. On Twitter, one Trump supporter and steel fabricator from New Hampshire shared the far-right "deep state" conspiracist Tom Fitton's calls to shut down Mueller's probe. The Justice Department and FBI, the user commented, "are out of control."

Why it's not so simple: Even South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy, a Republican firebrand who often supports Trump, dismissed the controversy after seeing some of the background documents as a member of the House Oversight Committee.

"Donald Trump was never the target of the investigation," Gowdy told Fox News, adding that the "FBI did exactly" what Trump already stated he wanted investigators to do, which was find out whether anyone connected with his campaign had colluded with Russia. "I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump," Gowdy said.

How Canada's supply management system works

It's been blamed for inflating food prices - but a lot of American producers wish they had something like it

Chris Ryan walks dairy cow Ninja on Wellington Street as dairy farmers protest on Parliament Hill on Thursday, June 2, 2016 in Ottawa. (Justin Tang/Canadian Press)



Canada's system of supply management has been the target of heated political debate for the better part of half a century — but very few Canadians outside of the affected farm sectors actually understand how it works, or who foots the bill for stabilizing farmers' incomes.

Supply management is a system that allows specific commodity sectors — dairy, poultry and eggs — to limit the supply of their products to what Canadians are expected to consume in order to ensure predictable, stable prices.

While the federal government has played a role in supporting agricultural pricing policies for more than a century, the current system of supply management traces its origins to the 1960s — a period of overproduction due to technological advances that resulted in low prices for farmers.

While the federal government was keen to support farmers' incomes — and the votes that come with them — direct financial supports became too heavy a burden for the federal treasury to bear.

Bruce Muirhead, a historian at the University of Waterloo who has written extensively about supply management, said the government of the day felt that $50-55 million in annual support payments "would seriously upset the balance of the budget."

"This is one of the reasons we moved to a supply-managed system — government wanted to make farming sustainable on its own," Muirhead writes in his research paper 'Crying Over Spilt Milk'.

The United States, in contrast, has largely maintained support for the farming sector through subsidies. So Americans foot the bill for farm supports indirectly, through the taxes they pay, while Canadians pay for those supports directly, through higher prices for supply-managed products.

According to a Library of Parliament study of supply management, the system rests on three pillars: production control, pricing mechanisms and import control.

First pillar: quotas

Under supply management, a national marketing agency determines production amounts for each commodity and then sets production quotas for each province.

In order to sell their products, a farmer must hold a quota — basically a license to produce up to a set amount. The quota prevent market gluts that would cause prices to dip and disrupt farm incomes.
As of 2015, there were just over 16,000 quota holders in Canada — most of them dairy farmers in Ontario and Quebec. The quotas initially were given away for free but quickly became quite valuable; Canada's total quota is now valued at over $32 billion.

Muirhead told CBC News that while U.S. President Donald Trump has pushed Canada to dismantle the system to help U.S. farmers, many dairy farmers south of the border look at Canada's system of supply management with envy.

He said Wisconsin farmers in particular are beset by production issues that have caused prices to tank; the state has more cows than all of Canada and produces more milk.

"Those guys are massively in favour of supply management. It would stabilize their industry," he said.

Second pillar: minimum prices

Supply-managed producers are guaranteed a minimum price for their products. Through provincial marketing boards, farmers negotiate minimum "farm gate prices" with processors.

Critics maintain that Canadians pay too much for supply-managed products because the system inflates prices beyond what an open market would impose in order to keep farmers afloat.
But not everyone agrees — and the research is by no means unanimous in its conclusions.

In 2014, a Nielsen Company study commissioned by the Dairy Farmers of Canada showed that the price of Canadian dairy products compared favourably with prices in other countries.

The Montreal Economic Institute, a centre-right think tank, maintains that millions of Canadians are paying artificially high prices to benefit a few thousand farmers. A recent University of Manitoba study concluded that supply management costs wealthy families an average of $554 a year, with lower income families facing an average bill of more than $339 a year as a result of the policy.

"Supply management hurts all 35 million Canadian consumers by forcing them to pay consistently more for milk, chicken and eggs, as well as for other products that use these foodstuffs as ingredients," the institute wrote in a recent report on the matter. "Importantly, supply management disproportionately hurts poor Canadians."

Former Conservative leadership candidate Maxime Bernier, who nearly bested Andrew Scheer in the party's leadership contest last year, has become one of the country's most vocal opponents of supply management.

"The worst aspect of supply management, however, isn't that all Canadians who buy these products must pay more. It's that the poor, and households with children, are affected the most," Bernier wrote in a chapter from his forthcoming book.

"It should be clear that this is a transfer of wealth from the poorest to some of the richest in our society. Farming families working under supply management are indeed far richer than most Canadian families. Average after-tax income of all households in Canada is $69,100. By comparison, the average dairy farming household income is $147,800, and the number is $180,400 for poultry-farming households."

But dairy farmers point to retail prices for milk in jurisdictions that have deregulated their dairy industries, like the United Kingdom and Australia, as proof that supply management strikes the right balance.

In Australia, for example, prices for milk in the major cities rose 27 cents per litre in the three years after deregulation.

In New Zealand, the largest dairy exporting country in the world, milk prices are higher than they are here in Canada.

Third pillar: high tariffs

The third pillar of supply management is the imposition of high tariffs on foreign imports, a policy that makes these goods prohibitively expensive for Canadians, leaving domestic supply as virtually the only option for consumers.

It's this policy in particular that annoys Trump, who has said the policy is unfair to American farmers.
In fact, the main source of the financial problems plaguing some U.S. dairy operations is overproduction.

Canada sets tariff-rate quotas, meaning some foreign goods — about 10 per cent of Canada's domestic dairy market, for example — enter tariff-free, but all other imports face high tariffs to prevent foreign foods from flooding into the country.

In comparison, the United States gives foreign dairy products access to only 2.75 per cent of its domestic market. Europe offers just 0.5 per cent access for foreign poultry.



 http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-trump-dairy-stunningly-hypocritical-1.4701046

Trump's tearing into Canada's agricultural policy. Does he have a point?

Defenders of supply management say Trump' is 'stunningly hypocritical', given U.S. subsidies

President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at the G7 summit Saturday, June 9, 2018, in La Malbaie, Que. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)



Canadian defenders of the supply management system say U.S. President Donald Trump is "stunningly hypocritical" for attacking dairy supports while politicians in Washington hand out billions in subsidies to American farmers — and levy punishing tariffs of their own on some commodities.

The Canadian dairy industry is at the centre of a brewing trade war between the two allies, in part because of Trump insisting that the decades-old system that uses quotas to ensure dairy supply and stabilize farmers' income is a "disgrace" that is "hurting our Farmers, killing our Agriculture!"

"Looking forward to straightening out unfair Trade Deals with the G-7 countries. If it doesn't happen, we come out even better!" Trump tweeted before touching down in Quebec last week for the G7 summit— a meeting that ended with Trump directing a Twitter tirade against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

"Canada charges the U.S. a 270% tariff on Dairy Products! They didn't tell you that, did they? Not fair to our farmers!"

It's an issue that's been irritating the president since the 2016 election campaign — thanks in part to the savvy lobbying efforts of some dairy farmers in swing-state Wisconsin, who have Trump convinced that Canada's supply-managed dairy system is to blame for hardship in the farm belt.

American hypocrisy knows no bounds. They do exactly the same thing … that they accuse us of doing.- Bruce Muirhead

Bruce Muirhead, an associate vice-president and professor of history at the University of Waterloo, said U.S. woes are not due to a tight Canadian market but rather to massive overproduction that has depressed the prices farmers can fetch for their products.

"They thought they could just produce their way into dairy farmer happiness, which hasn't happened, of course," he said in an interview with CBC News.

Traditionally, U.S. dairy farmers focused on producing for the domestic market, but in the pursuit of growth, producers have ramped up production for export, Muirhead said.

"There is an absolute glut of dairy products around the world. It's a tsunami of milk that is washing over the world and yet the Americans are still increasing production by 1.5 to 2 per cent a year."

More than 100 million gallons of milk were dumped into American farm fields in 2016. The U.S. government bought more than $20 million worth of cheddar cheese because the market was glutted. Dairy farmers, meanwhile, have been drawing on millions of dollars of support from the Dairy Margin Protection Program, a federal initiative that provides catastrophic coverage at a marginal cost to the producer.

Muirhead said Canada shouldn't be expected to dismantle its supply management system (which costs government nothing, since it relies instead on consumers paying more for the product) to accommodate the bad business practices of overzealous U.S. dairy producers.

Alfons Weersink, a professor of agricultural policy at the University of Guelph, said the Americans are desperate for further foreign market access — which explains why they have encouraged Trump to turns the screws on Canada.

"U.S. dairy farmers are experiencing low returns and any way to increase demand, however slight, could help their cause," he said.

These U.S. producers were also wounded by the introduction of new Canadian prices for some products in 2016 — mainly on ingredients used in the production of cheese, yogurt and ice cream. Some American producers have argued the new prices put them at a competitive disadvantage,

"Wisconsin farmers have been particularly vocal," Weersink said. One major Wisconsin processor blamed that price drop for ending buying agreements with dozens of family farms. "There are political reasons for Trump taking it up."

But the Dairy Farmers of Canada, the powerful lobby group that vocally defends supply management at every turn, said Canada is simply too small a market to help ease U.S. overproduction concerns.

"Canada already produces enough milk to fill Canadian demand. As Canada has less population than the state of California, and Wisconsin alone produces more milk than all Canadian farms combined, clearly, the Canadian market is too small to make a dent in U.S. overproduction," the president of DFC said in a statement Monday.

On paper, Canada's tariffs on U.S. and other foreign dairy imports — 270 per cent on milk, 245 per cent on cheese and 298 per cent on butter — seem steep.

In fact, dairy is a relatively minor trade issue between Canada and the United States, accounting for just a fraction of the $628 billion in trade the two countries do with each other every year, Weersink said.

"In the big scheme of trade overall, dairy is a minor player (with or without tariffs) but it is an easy target now," he said.

The entire Canada-U.S. dairy trading relationship is valued at just over $750 million a year, according to the latest figures, with American exports to Canada — worth more than $631 million a year— accounting for the vast majority of the goods that cross the border.

In 2016, Canada imported dairy products from the U.S. worth five times more than the small amount it exported.

Muirhead also pointed out that even though Canadian dairy farmers are protected by these high tariffs, imports still make up 10 per cent of the country's domestic dairy consumption, while in the U.S., imports are restricted to just 3 per cent of the dairy market.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has levied its own tariffs on a host of commodities in an effort to keep foreign imports out.

While the United States — historically an ardent free trader — doesn't levy tariffs on many of the goods entering the country, it has been turning to such measures to strategically boost politically sensitive industries like agriculture since long before Trump launched his "America First" agenda.

"American hypocrisy knows no bounds. They do exactly the same thing ... that they accuse us of doing," Muirhead said.

Take smoking tobacco, for example: it's slapped with a 350 per cent ad valorem tariff as it enters the U.S.

Canadian agriculture is no more subsidized than agriculture in the U.S.- Daniel A. Sumner, University of California

Or unshelled groundnuts (163.8 per cent), or shelled peanuts and oilseeds, which face a 131.8 per cent tariff. Many other farm products face a high tariff wall at the U.S. border: European meats, truffles and Roquefort cheese (100 per cent); processed fruits and vegetables (132 per cent); processed fish (nearly 40 per cent); dates (30 per cent); and asparagus and sweet corn (21.3 per cent), to cite just a few examples out of dozens.

Sugar, too, is sold at double the world price in the U.S. because the industry's politically connected backers have demanded high tariffs to protect it from a flood of cheap imports from Brazil.

'They should just leave us Canadians alone'

"In terms of overall farm subsidies, we just do it somewhat differently," Daniel A. Sumner, an agricultural policy professor at the University of California's Davis campus, said in an interview. "Canadian agriculture is no more subsidized than agriculture in the U.S."

The difference is that while U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for farm protections, in Canada, the cost is carried by consumers at the cash register, Sumner said.

Washington spends more than $20 billion a year on subsidies for farm businesses. About 39 per cent of the 2.1 million U.S. farms receive some form of a subsidy, with most of those handouts going to producers of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice.

Those subsidies come partly in the form of crop insurance premiums (the U.S. Department of Agriculture pays 62 per cent of their premiums, on average, for a total cost of $6.7 billion a year). The Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) program also provides funds if revenue per acre falls below a certain level, while the Price Loss Coverage (PLC) program subsidizes producers if prices sink below a certain benchmark price set by the U.S. Congress. The United States even subsidizes manure remediation programs.

"I have zero problem with farmers getting subsidies. Agriculture is one of those areas where producers and farmers cannot make money consistently, small and medium-sized farms are often just eking out a living," Muirhead said.

00:0002:20