Tag: panama trade deal
Donald Trump

Trump Escalates Threats Against Greenland, Panama And Canada

At a press conference on Tuesday, Donald Trump said that it’s possible that he’ll use military force to control Greenland and the Panama Canal once he’s president.

A reporter asked Trump if he could assure that he would not use military or economic coercion to assume control of the two territories, of which he previously said he wants to seize control.

“No. I can’t assure you on either of those two, but I can say this: We need them for economic security,” he said, later adding that “it might be that you’ll have to do something.”

Trump can’t seem to stop bringing up the potential purchase of Greenland, which his son Donald Trump Jr. is currently visiting to reportedly record a podcast.

“Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland. The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The “reps” Trump referred to are conservative activist Charlie Kirk of Turning Point and his incoming personnel director Sergio Gor.

“I am hearing that the people of Greenland are ‘MAGA.’ My son, Don Jr, and various representatives, will be traveling there to visit some of the most magnificent areas and sights,”Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday evening.

Trump ally and financier Elon Musk has expressed support for the fixation on Greenland.

“The people of Greenland should decide their future and I think they want to be part of America!” he wrote on X.

Greenland is an autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark. At a press conference on Tuesday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that the island is not for sale, referencing a previous statement from Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Egede.

“[Egede] has been very, very clear … that there is a lot of support among the people of Greenland that Greenland is not for sale and will not be in the future either,” Frederiksen said.

Trump’s fixation on Greenland isn’t new. As president in 2019, Trump canceled a planned trip to the island when Frederiksen rebuked his proposal, calling it “absurd.”

“Pissing everybody off by saying we’re just going to buy them outright really bruises our bilateral relationship with the Danes and more importantly ruins any kind of way for us to work this out with Greenlanders,” Jim Townsend, a former senior Pentagon official who has worked on issues related to NATO and defense policy in the Arctic region, told Politico,

Trump has also complained about control of the Panama Canal, which was turned over to the Panamanian government to fulfill a treaty in 1999. After Trump claimed that China controls the canal and that the United States needs to reassert control of the vital shipping lane, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino rebuffed him.

“Every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent zones is part of Panama, and it will continue to be,” he said in a video released in December.

Before even taking office, Trump has already set off international friction with Denmark, Panama, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Who will be next?

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Sanders Was Wrong: Panama Trade Deal Shut Down Tax Shelters

Sanders Was Wrong: Panama Trade Deal Shut Down Tax Shelters

Ever since the ‪#‎PanamaPapers‬ exploded into public consciousness, many observers have waited with excitement (or trepidation) for the names of Bill and Hillary Clinton to appear somewhere in those millions of pages. So far they haven’t, and frankly I don’t expect they ever will.

Yet Bernie Sanders and his campaign nevertheless labored to tar Hillary Clinton with the offshore shelters anyway, going so far as to call her “unqualified” to be president for supporting the Panama free trade agreement (which she did as President Obama’s Secretary of State, of course).

Today’s Washington Post editorial page argues that if anything, the Panama Papers show the trade agreement improved tax transparency:

Data culled from the documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and presented in several charts on the group’s website, show that the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, which specialized in setting up offshore accounts and shell companies for wealthy people, has been steadily reducing its activity in Panama for about a decade. As it happens, the decline began about the time the Bush administration and Panama began discussing a free-trade pact — and accelerated after the deal took effect during Mr. Obama’s first term.

Specifically, the number of offshore incorporations fell from 4,741 in 2005 to 835 in 2015. Most important, as of last year Mossack Fonseca appeared to have nearly completely ceased incorporating the least transparent form of company — known as “bearer shares” — which often don’t need to register an owner’s name.

Incidentally, last year — like every year since the trade agreement was signed — the United States marked a big trade surplus with Panama, about $7.5 billion.

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World