What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[11B4V]

Fivemilesofbadroad comes out of the woodwork to spew shit.

[CountDeMoney]

Who has the power to appoint a special prosecutor?  Heard some Dem Senator saying he was going to introduce legislation to that effect but I always thought it was the AG's job and that the Senator was just posturing.

Yup, the Attorney General can do it. I doubt any Dem-introduced legislation would ever work, even if it could.   

Meanwhile, Russia's win streak continues in the North American bracket despite the most recent setback versus France.

[CountDeMoney]

Fivemilesofbadroad comes out of the woodwork to spew shit.

So hilarious.


You know, he was so incredibly furious about yesterday, he fired Comey because he couldn't fire Yates twice.   

[CountDeMoney]

FBI Director James B. Comey's termination: Letters from the White House, Attorney General

I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

  Asshole.

[11B4V]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/09/politics/grand-jury-fbi-russia/index.html

[Ed Anger]

Lavrov may be going to the WH tomorrow.

PREPARE FOR INTERNET SHITSTORM.

[DontSayBanana]

FBI Director James B. Comey's termination: Letters from the White House, Attorney General

I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

  Asshole.

The Director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General's authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution

Are Sessions and his deputy AG living in a parallel universe where Loretta Lynch didn't say she was leaving the decision up to the FBI after getting cornered on a plane by Bill Clinton?

[11B4V]

Those are facts and don't count now.

[viper37]

Can you elaborate about this, because while it's been a while, my impression is that supply management is the opposite of protectionist as I understand that term. Supply management artificially inflates the cost of certain goods to support the suppliers of that industry at the expense of the consumers.

It's because these are seperate issues.  Three seperate issues, in fact.

1st: Protectionism.
There are (very) high tariffs on dairy and poultry products.  They make it so that even with lower production costs, Americans can't outsell our local producers.
The main diatribe of Trump was about the diafiltered milk, it's a proteine extracted from milk and used by mass cheese producers like Kraft (the orange slice thing they call cheese and Velveeta and the other liquid pasty disgusting stuff sold in small jards) and Saputo and others big generic cheese producers.  Since it's not milk, it wasn't subject to import quotas and tariffs until mid-2016, so the big producers use this for a fraction of the cost of whole canadian milk leading to angry protests by farmers.
What is diafiltered milk?

Since the Feds decided it was milk and subject to the same restrictions, sales of this product in Canada have fallen.  Afaik, cheese prices haven't increased, but I'm a cheese snob (French heritage and all ) and I usually don't buy generic cheese like that as I prefer local products, either made of cow milk or sheep or crude (non pasteurized) milk.
These ones haven't moved.


2nd: Minimum prices
Some provinces have a minimum and maximum price at wich milk can be sold to the retailers and a minimum price at which it can be sold to consumers.  In February, the minimum price the grocery store could sell me a 2L 2% milk pint was 3,41$.  The actual price I paid this winter was (and still is) 4.79$.  The grocery store pays between 3.30$ and 3.60$.  That gives them between 33% and 45% gross profit margin on this product.  Since they usually don't deliver individual pints to their stores and they are delivered globally with other refrigerated merchandise, the transporation costs aren't significant.
http://www.rmaaq.gouv.qc.ca/index.php?id=118
http://tinyurl.com/kveomfy
https://www.pressreader.com/canada/ottawa-citizen/20170121/281496455992221

Producers are paid the same in Quebec and elsewhere, but in Quebec (at least), groceries are forbidden to use milk as a loss leader.  Again, this does not affect the price the producers are receiving

3rd: Supply management
Here's the funny thing about agriculture: it's never a free market.  There are all kind of tricks various countries use to support their farms.  Cheap borrowing costs, supply management, direct government grants, guaranteed loans, crop insurance, govt insurance against commodity prices falling, govt insurance against weather damages, etc.

The system used in Canada, for better or for worst is the supply management, or quota systems, for poultry and milk.  Others are traded on the commodity market, like pork and wheat.  Traders look at the derivatives market to estimate future prices and plan accordingly.  Local farmers live or die depending on how good they are at managing cash reserves.  In the case of wheat and other cereals, they have a crop insurance for which they pay 25% of the costs.  Can't remember if it's the province or the federal or both paying for it.

Anyway, supply management.

The farmers finance it.  They buy quota for how much units they want to produce.  For dairy farmers, it's kg of milk.  Others, I don't know as much.  It used to be that if they went overboard with their production, they would get a penalty for as much as they oversold: miss the target by +20%?  You get a 20% penalty on your yearly producton starting next year.  Then we would see in the news farmers sending their milk production to the ditch to avoid the penalty.  Accompany the news reports by poor, outraged families and orphanages and schools complaining about the high costs of milk, that was a reciped of pr disaster.  So now, they simply don't get paid.  You buy 1000kg, you produce 1200kg, you are still paid for 1000kg.

So, in Quebec, they pay roughly 24k$ per cows right now (it's really based on the kg of milk fat your cows can produce in a day, so it varies from cow species to cow species and producer to producer, but let's keep it simple, shall we? ).  It used to be publicly traded and the dairy farmers complained the speculation was causing the high prices, so they stopped the practice and only "real" dairy producers* can buy it for real production, not for later trade.  It used to sell for 31k$ in 2003, now it's 24k$.  Meh.  Not a huge improvement, considering they artificially dropped it below 20k$ before resuming transactions.  It usually oscillates between 25k$ and 30k$ each month since 2003.

*In Quebec, you need to be a member of the Union des Producteurs Agricoles to benefit from the quota system, and without the quota system, you can not sell your products for transformation, unless you could manage to get a dispensation to sell to a unique client (say a cheesemaker).  Otherwise, you are considered a "gentleman farmer" and you get totally shut out of the system and face very heavy restrictions on what you can sell, where you can sell it (directly at the farm and you can't transform anything at the farm, that includes killing an animal and butchering meat on place or having seperate buildings for the cheese making and the milk producing with two different companies).  I do not know of the specifics of other provinces.  But if an American producer wanted to sell milk in Quebec, he would need buy quota from the Milk Federation who would not sell him because he is not a member of the UPA and he could not be a member of the UPA because his place of business is not in Quebec.


It exists in this form, more or less, since 1970.  The producers say it guarantees them a mimimum price, but it's more that it avoids over-production and a subsequent drop in prices, like you would see in the US, or over here with pigs.  When there is over production in the US, they slaughter cows and sell them for basic meat to recover a part of their costs and make the milk production drop.  Something similar is done with pigs when there is a surplus, but then the government, Federal and provincial, will step in to compensate producers with some special measures.  There's usually no over production with cereals, because it can easily be hoarded from year to year and re-used the next year when the production is lower.

So, back to our cows.  The system started as free, then increased in costs up to 31k$, back to 24k$ now, and let's make it 25k$ for simplicity's sake.  Average farm size for Quebec is 60 (milk producing cows, that excludes juveniles) so that makes investments, on average, of 1,5M$ per farm.  Before you have the right to produce 1kg of milk fat.

The farmer pays for that, but the governments offers financial incentives and/or loan guarantees via the Financière Agricole du Québec and Farm Canada, so they end up paying a lesser interest rates than the real market rates for similar SMBs.  It's close to half the usual rate I would pay for my construction company, but of course, they need to borrow 10x more than I do, and their market is considered more secure than mine, so it's hard to give a definite figure.

So any way, I have clients ranging from 40 something cows to 250-300 cows.  Smaller farms, under 3 employees do not need to bother with the construction rules the industrial sector does, but as soon as they hit the magic four, construction costs goes from 45$/hr to 80$/hr.  One more thing limiting their growth.  But thanks to mechanization and automation of the processes (long live globalization!! ), even large farms can manage with relatively few employees.

So how much does this overhead reflects on the prices?  I can't tell you.  Farmers says it does not matter at all, since there is a huge margin between what they are paid for their milk and the price sold in groceries.  Given the fluctuations in the milk prices paid to producers and the lack of said fluctuations in the price the milk is sold in the groceries, I would tend to err on the side of caution and give them the benefit of the doubt on this one: the actual price they sell their milk is not really relevant in the end price the consumer pays, so the quota system does not affect this and it is untrue that Quebec&Canada's poor families are held hostage by viscious evil, greedy pitchfork farmers.
Other studies have said that on average, Quebec families pay 339$/year more on milk than other families, but given the loss leader status of milk in Ontario and the very close prices of Newfoundland, I find that hard to believe.


Problems
When it comes to the problem it creates though, they are numerous.  It gives stability to the farmers, but it hampers entry into the industry.  While true that the "Fédération des Productions de Lait" and the "Union des Producteurs Agricoles" will loan a young one some quotas to start his production, it still represent massive costs to start.  You have the prices of the buildings, as you need insulated buildings over here, the price of equipments for the farm itself, the price of equipments for the crops, that's huge.  Comparatively, I am beginning construction of two projects.  One industrial and on agricultural.  The industrial one is 400k$ for nearly everything, and they will employ a dozen people once done.  The agricultural one is 1.5M$ + 500k$ in equipments&electricity + 2-3M$ more on quota and that will be for 3 people, 2 shareholders and one employee.  That's some huge costs to begin an enterprise.  You can't exactly start small either, 40 producing cows is about the minimum you can do for a family of 4-5 with two working salaries.

While it may seem that there are "unfair" government incentives, in the first scenario, the city is paying me for the entire construction costs and they will loan the building to the entrepreneurs at a reduced costs.  All in all, it's fair for both.  I do not like subsidies at all, but I can't blame farmers for using the same system available to all other entrepreneurs out there.  Heck, Bombardier received 1B$ in guaranteed loans and they used that money to increase the wages of their top earners.

I'm certainly not opposed to changing the system under which our farms operate, but I wouldn't single them out, they are no worst than other industrials, and they face constraints (weather) others do not.  And I highly doubt the claim the consumers are getting the worst of the deal.  We might be paying more for milk at some point in time, we might be paying more for milk, but overall, in a long period of time, I haven't seen evidence that citizens of Quebec and Canada get shafted considering everything we buy in a grocery store and our relatively low lodging costs.

So, starting is hard and increasing volume above a certain point becomes very hard in the lifetime of one individual.  Really, you need to be lucky to see your enterprise growing because you either need a member of your family (let's not hide the facts, usually the boy(s) of the family are taking over, rarely the girl unless the boyfriend/husband really wants to become a farmer too) or someone else who can buy your land, you quota your building.  The first one is getting rarer, due to a certain decrease in birth since the priests aren't travelling the countryside to remember our fine Quebec ladies of their marital duties.  They must have forgotten, somehow.
Less babies = less probability that one of the sons will be interested in taking over the farm.
High entry price = less probability that an outsider will be able to afford your farm.  Unless you agree to sell it way below market value.  Say you paid 60k$ in 1960, it's now worth 6M$, you let it go for 1.5M$ everything included.

That leads us to the next problem.  No entirely unique to our system, but it's becoming a problem: financialisation of agriculture and city expansion into agircultural territories.
Two things are happening here.  Cities make money from taxing lands&buildings.  A building is worth more than an empty land.  A land with 2000 citizens is worth more than an "empty" farm land. There is no incentive for a city to let farm lands be cultivated.  There is no incentive for a city to densify, so they expand toward somewhat cheap agricultural land.  An highway is built splitting the land in two.  Than a bus/train statio near there.  Than they capitalize on the plus value of the lands by letting promoters buy them and build condos.  Then they generate more traffic and buy the remaining lands to expand the roads.

But why are the farmers letting go of their lands for this?  Well, simply put, there is no one that can afford to buy back their farms if they don't have family willing to.  Even if they want to keep producing, the city expands around them, raises the taxes until they can't afford it anymore, then they have someone buy the land, build a new development of ranged houses or condos.  I've seen it happening to a few of my clients over the years, one notably in Quebec city, an ancestral farm (first farmed lands of Quebec) where the owner was eventually pushed out by increased development surrounding him.

The other problem: financialisation of agriculture.  Well, that one is hard to corner.  It's again similar to what is happening in the cities, there is no one that can afford to take back the business, unless they grew with it, know it's inside outs, studied in a agricultural school (there are two in Quebec) and manage to get some government help to retake the business.  It's not as easy as it sounds for someone not gifted with numbers for whom accounting and finance are akin to sorcery.

So, here comes a big company.  A bank, like the National bank.  A Chinese corporation with deep pockets.  A Quebec company funded by government and artificially sustained financially corrupt investment funds.  They all promise to keep agriculture their priority.  They all swear they will work with local producers to maintain farming activities.  The old or not so olf farmer becomes an employee until he is totally retired, or someone else is hired to take care of it.

It's very recent, so for now, they are keeping their promises.  But will the Chinese produce for Canada or for China?  At the rate the country is developping, it will soon lack farmable lands.  If they buy lands in the US&Canada, won't they be tempted to supply their home country before ours?  Will they always keep the land, for better or for worst, until death to them part?  Or will they use their deep pockets and cheeply acquired funds to outbuy everyone else, keep the lands for 20-25 years than resell them to constructors as the cities inevitably expand in these areas?  Truth is, we do not know either way.  Pangea is the target right now, because it's funded by the Caisse de Dépôt et de Placement (similar to Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan) and the corrupt union investment fund affiliated with organized crime "Fond de Solidarité de la Fédération des Travailleurs du Québec"?  Farmers are hoping to appeal to some sense of civic duty by corrupt union leaders.  Good luck with that


Conclusion and parting thoughts
So there it is.  The system is a mess.  It could be fixed, but there's no easy way out.  I'd take a "wait and see approach" over idelogy, left or right anytime.  Europe has just abolished its quota systems.  New Zealand and Australia too.  Things aren't working too well.  Is it simply an adjustment period? Is it an indication of a long term trends?  In all cases, the government had to step in to support it's agriculture in another way.  Of course there are other problems mixed with this, like local weather conditions, whom would have affected the producers either way.  Again, wait and see, at this moment, is not a bad approach.  CETA is in the bag.  TPP is dead.  NAFTA is way beyond repairs with Trump's rethoric, it either passes, or it fails entirely.  I'm unwilling to make any compromise with the US at this time, they haven't proven they can be an honest and fair trade partner.  There is not supply management for softwood lumber (there is one for some hardwood used to produce paper, but it's not like the milk system at all).  And since canadian companies importing US lumber to make their products still get slapp with a retro-active tariffs, we can safely rule out the "legitimate complaint" of Yi&co. It's nothing but bullyism and we shouldn't endure that.  If they want a commercial war, so be it, we'll stop selling them coal and oil and all ship it to China.  Long live Trans Canada's pipe-line for gaz, and let's build another one through BC for oil.  Sweeten the deal to BC if need be, and let KMEP build a bigger pipe.  Fuck Trump and his cronies.  As long as there's no tariffs on Californian wines, I'll be allright. 

Somewhat anecdotal, but I recall when NAFTA was being negotiated there was a lot of gloom and doom about how free trade would wipe out supply management because the US would flood the market with cheap eggs, dairy and poultry.

It happens every time Canada wants to negotiate a new trade agreement.  It happenned for FTA. It happenned for NAFTA. It happenned for FTAA. It happenned for TPP.  It happenned for CETA. "We will destroy our agriculture".  "We will privatize our hospitals".  "Our cheap kindergarden system in in peril".  "Foreigners will build our roads" (I say let 'em do it, it can't be worst than now.  Everytime, it was total bullocks.  Yet, they want us to believe trade deals are horrrible just because they say so.

[viper37]

What the hell?

Nothing makes sense.

The Penguins are losing a 3-1 lead to the Caps and you still wonder about the reality of this universe???   

[CountDeMoney]

Those are facts and don't count now.

You know, it's simply a lot easier to digest this administration if you think about it in terms of organized crime.  When you break it down to its fundamentals, this is really no different than how the mob operates.

[Eddie Teach]

Loretta Lynch didn't say she was leaving the decision up to the FBI after getting cornered on a plane by Bill Clinton?

?

[dps]

Who has the power to appoint a special prosecutor?  Heard some Dem Senator saying he was going to introduce legislation to that effect but I always thought it was the AG's job and that the Senator was just posturing.

Yup, the Attorney General can do it. I doubt any Dem-introduced legislation would ever work, even if it could.   

Yeah, while Congress could in theory pass a law appointing a Special Prosecutor if they wanted, I doubt if the Democrats could get any Republicans to vote in favor of such a bill, certainly not enough to over-ride the inevitable veto.

[CountDeMoney]

The Pussygrabber-In-Chief is tweet-raging on a school night. So sad!

Donald J. Trump ‏Verified account
@realDonaldTrump 3m

Cryin' Chuck Schumer stated recently, "I do not have confidence in him (James Comey) any longer." Then acts so indignant.  #draintheswamp

[Oexmelin]

Banana Republicans.