Trading with Trump What we can expect from a US-UK trade dealApril 2017

Campaign briefing

A free trade deal between the US and the UK is likely to include all the elements that made the earlier trade negotiations between the EU and the US on TTIP so controversial, but in a more extreme form – TTIP on steroids:

• ‘Corporate courts’ that allow foreign corporations to sue governments outside of the national legal system to challenge things like environmental protection or public health policy.

• Locking in privatisation of public services, including of the NHS.

• Undermining our climate commitments.

The Trump administration’s ‘America first’ economic nationalism is leading the most powerful country in

the world to tear up international rules around trade for its own self-interest and threaten trade wars.

Not only does the US hold all the cards, the current Trump administration is taking an aggressive approach to trade. The UK will be walking into a negotiating room that is on a war footing, with a weak hand.

Brexit has revealed a huge democratic deficit in trade policy in the UK – deals are already being made behind closed doors and even our MPs are excluded. If trade is to work for people and not solely for big business, we have to ensure that the way deals are struck is open, honest and democratic.

The lure of a free trade deal between the US and the UK is one of the selling points that UK government ministers have held up for our post-Brexit future. However it poses huge risks. This kind of trade deal with the US would affect our public services, our ability to fight climate change and even how our laws are made.

What would be in a US-UK trade deal?Donald Trump has spoken of putting us somewhere vaguely toward the front of the queue for a trade deal – although it is clear that that means somewhere after dealing with China and NAFTA (the trade agreement between the US, Canada

Photo: Gage Skidm

ore

and Mexico). Nonetheless, while formal negotiations cannot begin until the UK leaves the EU, a ‘high level dialogue’ has been set up to start discussing a US-UK trade deal. So what would be in it?

A deal with the US would be about far more than tariffs on buying and selling goods – tariffs between the US and the UK are already low and trade levels are high. The deal would be all about making sure laws and regulations don’t obstruct the free flow of trade and investment (capital).

This was exactly what made earlier attempts to negotiate an EU-US trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, so controversial. Within the EU, the UK has always been one of the strongest supporters of TTIP, and a deal between the US and UK alone is likely to be similar to TTIP but more extreme – TTIP on steroids.

Like other trade deals, the rules will be written with the assumption that increasing levels of privatisation and reliance on the market is good, and that any step back from that will count as breaking the rules. Privatisation thus becomes locked in and the hands of future governments are tied. There will be pressure to agree to a lowest common denominator in standards. It is likely that the deal would include a ‘necessity test’ so that laws and regulations will have to ultimately be judged not on whether they serve a socially useful purpose, but on whether they are ‘minimally trade distorting’.

Corporate courtsA deal between the US and the UK would likely include ‘investor state dispute settlement’ (ISDS), also known as ‘corporate courts’. This allows foreign corporations to sue governments for passing regulations that could affect corporate profits, through an international arbitration process that completely bypasses our own national justice system. In practice, this means corporations will be able to sue Britain for doing almost anything they don’t like – environmental protection, regulating finance, renationalising public services, anti-smoking policies – you name it.

• Public health: Cargill sued Mexico over a tax on sugary drinks; Ethyl sued Canada over a ban on MMT, which is a suspected neurotoxin, in petrol

• Energy: Vattenfall sued Germany for deciding to phase out nuclear power; Lone Pine sued Quebec over a fracking moratorium

• Employment: Veolia sued Egypt over the introduction of a minimum wage

Governments can never win from an ISDS case – even if the judgement is in their favour they have legal costs which on average are just under £5 million for each case. If the state loses, it can be forced to pay much more in compensation. Under ISDS cases in NAFTA, the trade agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico, the Canadian government has paid US companies more than US$200 million, and is facing claims of over US$2.6 billion in new cases.1 The system can only be used by companies suing governments, not vice versa. The winners from ISDS have been the richest – over 95% of all compensation awarded in ISDS cases has gone to companies with over US$1 billion in annual revenue and super-rich individuals with over US$100 million in wealth.2

Because the amounts are so large, both in legal costs and compensation, even the threat of being taken to arbitration can be enough to persuade governments to abandon plans to introduce new rules – creating a regulatory chill.

The current US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was formerly CEO of ExxonMobil. Under his watch, ExxonMobil brought several ISDS cases against countries that the US has trade and investment agreements with. For instance, the Canadian state of Newfoundland and Labrador had experience of massive natural resource extraction projects that brought little benefit to the local economy, and sought to change this with the introduction of guidelines requiring that investors in such projects must also contribute some investment in local research and development. ExxonMobil challenged this and has so far won US$17 million.3

What would this mean in practice for …

NHS and public servicesA US-UK trade deal could be disastrous for public services, including the NHS. The impact on healthcare was one of the most controversial parts of the earlier US-EU trade deal, TTIP, and it is likely to be so again. Those negotiations used a ‘list it or lose it’ approach to public services where unless a sector is specifically excluded, it will be opened up to private companies. Although on paper the deal might pay lip service to the right of governments to run public services, in practice this is defined extremely narrowly, applying only when there is no competition – the NHS competes both with private healthcare and through the introduction of an internal market. The UK government did not

explicitly protect the NHS in TTIP and so might well not do so in a US-UK deal.

This is one of the key things that US business would like to get out of a deal with the UK. Its massive private healthcare industry would love to get its hands on more of the NHS. During the TTIP negotiations the powerful business organisation, the Alliance for Healthcare Competitiveness, lobbied US negotiators to make sure that healthcare was included.4 US senators have already said they hope a future US-UK deal could open up the NHS – asked about a potential US-UK deal, Republican senator Todd Young said he was: “always looking for opportunities to open up foreign markets.”5

Risks from a trade deal include:

• ‘Standstill’ clauses which prevent public services that have already been privatised or opened up to private finance initiatives from ever being brought back into public hands.

• ‘Ratchet’ clauses which specify that if any further services are privatised, they also cannot afterward be returned to public ownership.

• Requirements for cheaper generic medicines to be used when possible could be challenged under market access rules.

ClimateTrump is already rolling back even the modest improvements the US had made toward combatting climate change. He has given the green light to the previously-blocked Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines,6 rolled back Obama’s climate and water rules,7 and has packed his cabinet with climate change deniers.8

In a trade deal therefore, we are likely to see rules, already proposed in other deals, that make discriminating between different sorts of fuels impossible. In other words, supporting renewable technologies when fossil fuels could do the job could become the basis for a trade dispute. Similarly earlier trade negotiations between the US and the EU proposed a requirement to get rid of existing restrictions on the trade of natural gas between the US and EU, entrenching fossil fuel use.9

BankingTraditionally the US has been less lax on financial regulation than the UK, but Trump has already started the process of sweeping away Barack Obama’s post-crash financial laws.10 That will be welcomed by the City of London, which will

want to use a trade agreement to lock in financial deregulation – making proposals to break up big banks or impose a financial transactions tax extremely difficult. US Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren highlights the risks:

“We did this kind of [de]regulation before and it resulted in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We cannot afford to go down this road again.”11

Food and farmingThe US government has always been clear that our food and farming regulations, which prevent the sort of high-intensity, high-chemical, low-animal welfare farming common in the US, are a ’trade barrier‘. Any deal will likely look at stripping away regulations on pesticide, antibiotic and hormone use in farming.

In turn, this will open up our small farmers to devastating competition with US agribusiness. The US farming lobby group, the American Farm Bureau Federation is already seeing a US-UK deal as an opportunity to open up the UK market to food produced with technologies currently banned in the EU such as genetic engineering and chlorine washes for meat, saying: “We’re asking for our chance to compete”.12 And the UK is open to making concessions in agriculture in hope of gains elsewhere – on banking for instance. While agriculture was a controversial issue in the earlier EU-US trade negotiations on TTIP, the UK ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch, has said agriculture: “would simply not be anything like that big a problem for us”.13

Photo: Rick Danielson

Standing Rock protest camp against the Dakota Access pipeline which has restarted under Trump.

What does Trump want from trade?On the campaign trail Trump exploited anger over the damage that trade deals have done, denouncing the neoliberal approach of previous US governments. Now he is in office, though, we are seeing a battle within the White House over trade policy between the economic nationalists of his campaign and neoliberals staging a fight back.

Both would be hugely damaging for people and planet.

Neoliberals now in Trump’s cabinet, such as Gary Cohn, the ex-Goldman Sachs executive who is director of the National Economic Council, want business as usual in trade – opening up more and more of our lives to the market, locking in privatisation, deregulating and entrenching the power of globalised corporations.

Who’s who in Trump’s trade team?In the past, US trade policy was centralised in the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), but Trump has changed this in order to draw a line between himself and previous trade policy. While the USTR will still exist, Trump has created a new National Trade Council reporting directly to the White House and has also decided that the commerce secretary will now take the leading role on trade policy.

Wilbur Ross, commerce secretaryRoss is a billionaire investor. He originally worked for Rothschild Inc, but then became known for asset-stripping failing companies and selling them on without regard for jobs, pensions or safety standards – from which he gets the nickname ‘the bankruptcy king’. He is a longstanding friend of Trump’s, having in the 1980s helped him strike a deal over problems with his casinos.

As an investor he expertly used trade rules to his advantage. For instance, he bought bankrupt US steel companies in 2002 just as the US introduced 30% tariffs on steel imports, which led to a 25% increase in the price of American steel. When the tariffs were done away with at the end of 2003, he sold the companies to foreign investors for US$4.5 billion.24 Although Trump’s rhetoric is highly critical of sending jobs offshore, Ross was fully part of such globalised trade practices and responsible for offshoring thousands of jobs.25

He was fined US$2.3 million in 2016 for breaking financial regulations.26 In 2006, 12 people died in an explosion in a mine ultimately owned by Ross’s company, which had a long history of safety violations.27 He was sued for negligence

and settled.28 He made millions during the financial crisis, both from mortgage foreclosures29 and from bank bailouts – including £172 million from buying the bailed out remains of Northern Rock from the UK government and selling it on.

Peter Navarro, director of the National Trade CouncilNavarro is an economist who has for many years dogmatically made alarmist warnings of the threat that China poses to the US.30 His books and documentaries have titles like The coming China wars, Death by China and Crouching tiger: what China’s militarism means for the world. He considers the US’s support for China’s entry into the WTO as “the worst political and economic mistake in American history in the last 100 years”31 and talks of competition with China in terms of both cold and hot war.32

Navarro also focusses on reducing the US’s trade deficit, and along with China has specifically singled out Germany for attack on this point.33

Robert Lighthizer, US trade representative nomineeLighthizer is a trade lawyer who previously worked as deputy USTR under President Reagan in the 1980s, where he was known for an aggressive approach to negotiations.34 As a private lawyer he has often represented US steel companies in trade disputes, seeking to get the US government to raise tariffs against steel imports, particularly from China. He is another ‘trade hawk’ who has said that China presents a threat to the US economy and the US government must take a more aggressive attitude.35

Trump’s ‘America first’ approach sums up the economic nationalists, such as Peter Navarro, the director of the National Trade Council. Trump’s problem with trade is not about injustice or the damage it can cause to the planet, but simply that he felt the US was not absolutely always the winner. He also has no concerns about corporate power and is offering US corporations a bargain tying them in to his policies: deregulation and corporate tax cuts in exchange for support for ‘America first’.

This leads to a beggar-my-neighbour approach to trade. While Trump has repudiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal that Obama had negotiated with eleven other countries, his problem with it was not the trade deal as such but the view that the US was at a disadvantage negotiating with several other countries at once.

Wilbur Ross, the US commerce secretary, who will lead trade policy for Trump, has said Trump’s trade team wants to only negotiate bilateral deals, with one country at a time, so that it will always have the advantage. There is no sense of trade as being for mutual benefit. Ross has spoken of a need for a take-it-or-leave-it approach to negotiations because he considers that the US has made too many concessions compared to other countries 14 (not necessarily a belief shared outside of the US).

Instead he thinks the US:“should treat ourselves as the world’s biggest customer and treat nations that are selling to us as suppliers to us.”15

Sanctions and trade wars

“There’s not a lot of point making trade deals if you don’t enforce them.”16 Wilbur Ross, US commerce secretary

The highest profile focus of Trump’s trade team is enforcing trade rules in the US interest. This includes a disregard for international rules and the determination to be able to impose unilateral trade sanctions regardless of the risk of trade wars.

Trump’s Trade Policy Agenda17 actually has a fair amount of continuity with earlier US trade policy, but it notably no longer even pays lip service to the need for a multilateral rules-based trading system. Specifically the US is looking at bypassing the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) system of settling disputes between countries, and instead considering imposing its own trade sanctions according to its own discretion.18

While there are fundamental problems with the WTO, which Global Justice Now has campaigned on for many years, multilateral rules in and of themselves need not necessarily be bad. There could be benefits from a set of international rules that were human rights-based, were compliant with commitments on climate, workers rights and other policy priorities, and which provided a framework within which governments could make pragmatic choices about trade policy suited to their needs. None of this however is an issue for Trump.

Trump’s trade team is concerned simply that the WTO dispute settlement system has sometimes not found in favour of the US and does not always move fast enough or allow strong enough penalties to be imposed for its liking.19 For the most powerful country in the world to tear up the rules for its own self interest is incredibly dangerous.

The US is now willing to start trade wars. Hostility to China is longstanding in US trade policy – the US has brought 21 dispute cases against China at the WTO. However Trump’s trade team is now also speaking of trade wars more broadly and openly. Speaking about the NAFTA trade deal between the US, Canada and Mexico, Ross has said:

“We’re in a trade war, we’ve been in a trade war for decades, that’s why we have a deficit. The difference is our troops are now coming to the ramparts.”20

Ross boasts that threats like this are now an overt part of US trade policy:

“The Mexicans know, the Canadians know, everybody knows: times are different … they will have to make concessions. The only question is the magnitude and the form of the concessions. I have told the president repeatedly: he has made my job a lot easier by softening up the adverse parties. What could be better than going into a negotiation [when] the fellow on the other side knows he has to make concessions?”21

Usually, deciding if trade rules have been broken is a long and technical process, however the Trump trade team is simply referring to the existence of a trade deficit as sufficient proof of fault. This has been mainly discussed so far in the context of China, NAFTA and Germany, but Ross has also said this type of enforcement would apply to

‘everybody’.22 Trump’s trade team is concerned with any competitor which could threaten

‘America first’, and that includes Europe – over the

past two decades, the only WTO member that the US has brought a similar number of cases against compared to China, is the EU. In this context, the UK is vulnerable to such threats from the US, while at the same time the plans for a US-UK trade deal are a tool the US can use as part of its attempts to weaken the EU.23

Who will be in control?Since the EU referendum the talk has been of

‘taking back control’ and the ability to make trade deals much more easily outside of the EU. But it won’t be that simple.

US or UK?

A potential US-UK trade deal is far more important to Theresa May’s government than it is to Trump’s. It would be at any time, because the US is a far more powerful economy and the US is a much more important trading partner for the UK than the UK is for the US.36 But all of this is massively exaggerated by the Brexit context, when May’s government desperately needs the political credibility of this deal. Meanwhile US businesses have highlighted that the UK can no longer offer entry to the European market.37 The UK will be in a weak position to secure its demands.

Not only does the US hold all the cards, the current Trump administration is taking an incredibly aggressive approach to trade, openly speaking of trade wars. The UK will be walking into a negotiating room that is on a war footing, with a weak hand.

People or corporations?

People have a right to know about the plans for something with such a broad scope, and be part of shaping it. This should not be a concession - trade policy would actually be improved by robust debate and contributions from a broad range of knowledge and expertise. Yet everything is being done behind closed doors, in secrecy.

It’s not even just the public who are excluded, parliament is too. There is a huge democratic deficit in the UK around trade policy, which means we actually have even less chance of raising concerns through our democratically elected representatives than in the EU. Already MPs have asked to be updated on initial plans for similar trade deals and been told the government has no intention of sharing information.38

The lack of democratic accountability is shocking. MPs in Westminster:

• Are not able to set any objectives, framework or limits for negotiations on a deal (a mandate)

• Will not be consulted on its progress and they cannot make any amendments if they think it is going in the wrong direction.

• May not even get to have any debate on the deal

In addition:

• Only when a deal is finalised and signed will it be brought to parliament for ratification Even at this point, MPs cannot actually reject a deal outright – they can only at most delay it.

The devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do not have any input on trade deals, even though they will affect vital issues over which they have devolved powers such as health, environment and farming.

In contrast, big business usually has a direct line to the trade negotiators through their lobbyists. US companies have already formed a US-UK Business Council that they say “will be a powerful conduit for inputs into complex trade negotiations”.39

There is also often a revolving door between big business and trade negotiators. In Trump’s trade team Ross is a billionaire investor with ongoing commercial ties to foreign companies who may be affected by the trade rules he is setting.40 Navarro was previously a government trade negotiator, then worked as a lawyer representing big business in trade disputes and is now returning to be a government trade negotiator.

We need real accountability in trade deals, otherwise they will just end up handing more control to corporations. This must include:

• The right of parliament to set a detailed mandate to govern each trade negotiation, with a remit for the devolved administrations

• The right of citizens to be consulted as part of setting that mandate

• Full transparency in negotiations

• The right of parliament to amend and to reject trade deals, with full debates guaranteed with a remit for the devolved administrations

1 Maude Barlow, Fighting TTIP, CETA and ISDS: lessons from Canada. Council of Canadians, 2015, https://canadians.org/sites/default/files/publications/report-ceta-ttip-isds-1015.pdf

2 Gus Van Harten & Pavel Malysheuski, “Who has benefited financially from investment treaty arbitration? an evaluation of the size and wealth of claimants” Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper No. 14/2016, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2713876

3 Mobil Investments v Canada I & II4 Alliance for Healthcare Competitiveness, Transatlantic

Trade and Investment Partnership. AHC, 2013, http://healthcare-competitiveness.com/media/AHC_Submission_on_TTIP_to_the_US_Trade_Representative_Office.pdf

5 Jim Waterson, “Republican Senators hope trade deal will open up the NHS To American companies”, Buzzfeed, 27 Jan 2017, www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/republican-senators-hope-trade-deal-will-open-up-the-nhs-to

6 Conservative Party. (2010). One world Conservatism: A Conservative agenda for international development.

7 Athena Jones et al, “Trump advances controversial oil pipelines with executive action”, CNN, 24 Jan 2017, http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/24/politics/trump-keystone-xl-dakota-access-pipelines-executive-actions/

8 Mazin Sidahmed, “Climate change denial in the Trump cabinet: where do his nominees stand?”, Guardian, 15 Dec 2016, www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/15/trump-cabinet-climate-change-deniers

9 EC, EU textual proposal: energy and raw materials. 2016, http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2016/july/tradoc_154801.pdf

10 Ben Protess and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Trump moves to roll back Obama-era financial regulations”, New York Times, 3 Feb 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/business/dealbook/trump-congress-financial-regulations.html

11 Bloomberg, “Sen. Warren says facts prove Trump wrong on Dodd-Frank” Bloomberg, 14 Feb 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-02-14/sen-warren-says-facts-prove-trump-wrong-on-dodd-frank

12 Venessa Wong, “American chlorine-dipped chicken could make it to the UK”, Buzzfeed News, 1 Feb 2017, www.buzzfeed.com/venessawong/brexit-trade-deal-could-bring-chlorine-dipped-chicken

13 “Fears agriculture could be sacrificed in US-UK trade deal” Farmers Weekly, 26 January 2017, http://www.fwi.co.uk/business/fears-agriculture-could-be-sacrificed-us-uk-trade-deal.htm

14 Inside US Trade, “Ross pledges to design ‘model trade agreement,’ calls for systematic re-examination of deals”, IUST, 18 Jan 2017,

15 Geoff Dyer, “Donald Trump expected to pick Wilbur Ross as commerce secretary”, Financial Times 24 Nov

2016, www.ft.com/content/bb739d58-b25e-11e6-9c37-5787335499a0

16 David Tweed & Kevin Cirilli, “Ross pledges to fix NAFTA, get tough with China on trade”, Bloomberg, 1 Mar 2071, www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-01/ross-pledges-to-fix-nafta-get-tough-with-china-on-trade-rules

17 Office of the US Trade Representative, 2017 Trade policy agenda and 2016annual report. Washington DC, USTR, 2017. https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/files/reports/2017/AnnualReport/AnnualReport2017.pdf

18 Shawn Donnan & Demetri Sevastopoulo, “Trump team looks to bypass WTO dispute system”, Financial Times, 27 Feb 2017, www.ft.com/content/7bb991e4-fc38-11e6-96f8-3700c5664d30

19 Office of the US Trade Representative, 2017 Trade policy agenda and 2016annual report. Washington DC, USTR, 2017 §IIB1&2. ustr.gov/sites/default/files/files/reports/2017/AnnualReport/AnnualReport2017.pdf

20 Bloomburg, “Sec. Ross on NAFTA, China, and border adjustment tax”, Bloomburg, 8 Mar 2017, www.bloomberg.com/politics/videos/2017-03-08/sec-ross-on-nafta-china-and-border-adjustment-tax

21 Bloomburg, “Sec. Ross on NAFTA, China, and border adjustment tax”, Bloomburg, 8 Mar 2017, www.bloomberg.com/politics/videos/2017-03-08/sec-ross-on-nafta-china-and-border-adjustment-tax

22 David Tweed & Kevin Cirilli, “Ross pledges to fix NAFTA, get tough with China on trade”, Bloomberg, 1 Mar 2071, www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-01/ross-pledges-to-fix-nafta-get-tough-with-china-on-trade-rules

23 Samuel Osborne, “Donald Trump’s likely EU ambassador Ted Malloch wants to tame the bloc ‘like he brought down Soviet Union’” Independent, 27 Jan 2017, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/donald-trump-eu-ambassador-ted-malloch-tame-european-union-like-brought-down-soviet-union-russia-a7549696.html ; Linette Lopez, “Trump repeated a delusion about Germany that’s been floating around the White House” Business Insider UK, 18 Mar 2017, http://uk.businessinsider.com/trump-repeats-claim-that-germany-can-negotiate-trade-outside-of-eu-2017-3

24 Michela Tindera, “How Wilbur Ross made a fortune in blue-collar industries”, Forbes, 18 Jan 2017, www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2017/01/18/how-wilbur-ross-made-a-fortune-in-blue-collar-industries/

25 Andy Sullivan, “Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Commerce pick, offshored 2,700 jobs since 2004”, Reuters, 17 Jan 2017, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-jobs-idUSKBN1510FM

26 CNN Library, “Wilbur Ross fast facts”, CNN, 2 Mar 2017, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/30/us/wilbur-ross-fast-facts/

27 Roddy Boyd, “N.Y. exec knew of problems: ex-honchos”, New York Post, 5 Jan 2006, http://nypost.com/2006/01/05/n-y-exec-knew-of-problems-ex-honchos/

Notes

28 CNN Library, “Wilbur Ross fast facts”, CNN, 2 Mar 2017, http://edition.cnn.wwwwwwcom/2013/05/30/us/wilbur-ross-fast-facts/

29 David Dayan, “Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin—profiteers of the great foreclosure machine—go to Washington”, Nation, 30 Nov 2016, www.thenation.com/article/wilbur-ross-and-steve-mnuchin-profiteers-of-the-great-foreclosure-machine-go-to-washington/

30 Jacob Heilbrunn, “The most dangerous man in Trump world?”, Politico, 12 Feb 2017, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/peter-navarro-trump-trade-china-214772

31 Paul Solman, “What is the Trump trade doctrine? His economic adviser explains”, PBS Newshour, 25 Aug 2016, www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/trump-trade-doctrine-economic-adviser-explains/

32 Shawn Donnan, “Trump’s trade team yearns for the battling 1980s”, Financial Times, 8 Mar 2017, www.ft.com/content/53c23e04-0316-11e7-aa5b-6bb07f5c8e12

33 Shawn Donnan, “Trump’s top trade adviser accuses Germany of currency exploitation”, Financial Times, 31 Jan 2017, www.ft.com/content/57f104d2-e742-11e6-893c-082c54a7f539

34 Matthew Korade, Adam Behsudi & Louis Nelson, “Trump picks Lighthizer to serve as U.S. trade representative”, Politico, 3 Jan 2017, www.politico.com/blogs/donald-trump-administration/2017/01/robert-lighthizer-us-trade-representative-trump-233116

35 Keith Bradsher, “What Trump’s nominee for trade representative has said about China and the W.T.O.”, New York Times, 13 Jan 2017, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/13/business/document-lighthizer-2010-china-two-trade-testimony.html

36 US GDP is £13.3 trillion; UK GDP is £2.2 trillion. The US is the long term main export destination for the UK and one of its top three trading partners (HM Revenue & Customs Overseas Trade Statistics), whereas the UK is seventh in the list for the US (US Census Bureau, Foreign Trade).

37 Daniel Boffey, “US businesses warn the UK over loss of access to EU single market”, Guardian, 8 Mar 2017, www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/08/us-businesses-warn-uk-loss-access-eu-single-market-american-chamber-commerce

38 Trade Agreements:Written question – 60938. Asked 19 Jan 2017, answered 26 Jan 2017, www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-question/Commons/2017-01-19/60938/

39 Inside US Trade, “U.S. companies, eyeing trade, form ‘U.S.-UK Business Council’” IUST, 26 January 2017

40 Jean Eaglesham & Lisa Schwartz, “Commerce nominee Wilbur Ross will keep his stake in Chinese-government-backed company”, Wall Street Journal, 13 Feb 2017, www.wsj.com/articles/commerce-nominee-wilbur-ross-will-keep-his-stake-in-chinese-government-backed-company-1486990800

Take action To find out how you can help tackle corporate power and become part of a movement for real change visit globaljustice.org.uk or call 020 7820 4900.

Global Justice Now campaigns for a world where resources are controlled by the many, not the few. With thousands of members around the UK, we work in solidarity with global social movements to fight inequality and injustice.Global Justice Now, 66 Offley Road, London SW9 0LS t: 020 7820 4900 e: offleyroad@globaljustice.org.uk w: globaljustice.org.uk