Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations completed in Atlanta, says White House

Nego­ti­a­tions on the Trans-Pacif­ic Part­ner­ship, an unprece­dent­ed trade pact that has been devel­oped in secret by diplo­mats rep­re­sent­ing eleven nations as well as lob­by­ists for large, multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions, have final­ly been com­plet­ed, the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion announced this morning.

“This part­ner­ship lev­els the play­ing field for our farm­ers, ranch­ers, and man­u­fac­tur­ers by elim­i­nat­ing more than 18,000 tax­es that var­i­ous coun­tries put on our prod­ucts,” claimed Pres­i­dent Oba­ma in a statement.

“It includes the strongest com­mit­ments on labor and the envi­ron­ment of any trade agree­ment in his­to­ry, and those com­mit­ments are enforce­able, unlike in past agree­ments. It pro­motes a free and open Internet.”

“It strength­ens our strate­gic rela­tion­ships with our part­ners and allies in a region that will be vital to the 21st cen­tu­ry. It’s an agree­ment that puts Amer­i­can work­ers first and will help mid­dle-class fam­i­lies get ahead.”

“Once nego­tia­tors have final­ized the text of this part­ner­ship, Con­gress and the Amer­i­can peo­ple will have months to read every word before I sign it.”

Reac­tion to the announce­ment poured in, and much of it was negative.

The Ford Motor Com­pa­ny, one of Amer­i­ca’s tra­di­tion­al Big Three automak­ers, said it would oppose the pact, and law­mak­ers from Michi­gan echoed the com­pa­ny’s con­cerns that the TPP does­n’t address cur­ren­cy manipulation.

“To ensure the future com­pet­i­tive­ness of Amer­i­can man­u­fac­tur­ing, we rec­om­mend Con­gress not approve TPP in its cur­rent form,” Ford said in a statement.

Doc­tors With­out Bor­ders issued a state­ment harsh­ly crit­i­ciz­ing the TPP.

“Doc­tors With­out Borders/Médecins Sans Fron­tières (MSF) express­es its dis­may that TPP coun­tries have agreed to Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment and multi­na­tion­al drug com­pa­ny demands that will raise the price of med­i­cines for mil­lions by unnec­es­sar­i­ly extend­ing monop­o­lies and fur­ther delay­ing price-low­er­ing gener­ic com­pe­ti­tion,” the respect­ed non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion (NGO) said.

“The big losers in the TPP are patients and treat­ment providers in devel­op­ing coun­tries. Although the text has improved over the ini­tial demands, the TPP will still go down in his­to­ry as the worst trade agree­ment for access to med­i­cines in devel­op­ing coun­tries, which will be forced to change their laws to incor­po­rate abu­sive intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty pro­tec­tions for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal companies.”

U.S. Sen­a­tor Bernie Sanders of Ver­mont, who is seek­ing to suc­ceed Barack Oba­ma as the next Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, blast­ed the pact almost imme­di­ate­ly and said he would do all he could to defeat it in Congress.

“Wall Street and big cor­po­ra­tions just won a big vic­to­ry to advance a dis­as­trous trade deal. Now it’s on us to stop it from becom­ing law,” Sanders said in an email to his sup­port­ers, going on to explain what is known about the TPP.

“Not a lot of pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates would use their cam­paigns to influ­ence leg­is­la­tion being con­sid­ered in Con­gress,” Sanders not­ed. “Some can­di­dates haven’t even expressed an opin­ion on this crit­i­cal issue, which, frankly, I don’t real­ly under­stand. But as I’ve said before, this cam­paign is not about Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clin­ton, or Jeb Bush — it’s about the needs of the Amer­i­can people.”

“And we need a new approach to trade in this coun­try — one that ben­e­fits work­ing fam­i­lies and not just the CEOs of multi­na­tion­al corporations.”

The Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion (EFF), also vowed to oppose the TPP.

“We have no rea­son to believe that the TPP has improved much at all from the last leaked ver­sion released in August, and we won’t know until the U.S. Trade Rep­re­sen­ta­tive releas­es the text,” said the EFF’s Maira Sut­ton in a blog post.

“So as long as it con­tains a retroac­tive 20-year copy­right term exten­sion, bans on cir­cum­vent­ing DRM [dig­i­tal restric­tions man­age­ment], mas­sive­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate pun­ish­ments for copy­right infringe­ment, and rules that crim­i­nal­ize inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ists and whistle­blow­ers, we have to do every­thing we can to stop this agree­ment from get­ting signed, rat­i­fied, and put into force.”

The AFL-CIO indi­cat­ed it would wait to pro­nounce final judg­ment until the text was released, but expressed its dis­plea­sure with the way the TPP was draft­ed.

“We are dis­ap­point­ed that our nego­tia­tors rushed to con­clude the TPP in Atlanta, giv­en all the con­cerns that have been raised by Amer­i­can stake­hold­ers and mem­bers of Con­gress. The Admin­is­tra­tion had a hard time reach­ing this deal for good rea­sons: it appears that many prob­lem­at­ic con­ces­sions were made in order to final­ize the deal. We ask the Admin­is­tra­tion to release the text imme­di­ate­ly, and urge leg­is­la­tors to exer­cise great cau­tion in eval­u­at­ing the TPP.”

“As we’ve said, rush­ing through a bad deal will not bring eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty to work­ing fam­i­lies, nor will it bring con­fi­dence that our pri­or­i­ties count as much as those of glob­al cor­po­ra­tions. We will eval­u­ate the details care­ful­ly and work to defeat this cor­po­rate trade deal if it does not mea­sure up.”

Top Sen­ate Repub­li­can Mitch McConnell, who helped secure pas­sage of leg­is­la­tion to fast-track the TPP for Oba­ma, pledged to sub­ject the pact to “intense scruti­ny”.

Repub­li­cans con­trol Con­gress, so if they want­ed to, they could pass TPP on their own. Sen­ate Democ­rats would not be able to fil­i­buster, because fast-track guar­an­tees a vote in both hous­es of Con­gress, and pre­cludes any amendments.

How­ev­er, it’s unlike­ly that Repub­li­cans will be unit­ed on TPP. In the House, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of Repub­li­cans refused to vote for fast-track leg­is­la­tion, both on the first go-around (which failed) and the sec­ond (which succeeded).

If the tea par­ty wing of the Repub­li­can Par­ty with­holds its votes on final pas­sage of the Trans-Pacif­ic Part­ner­ship, the admin­is­tra­tion would need some Democ­rats to cross over and vote yes in order to win approval for the agreement.

We have no doubt the admin­is­tra­tion will vig­or­ous­ly lob­by the same Democ­rats who vot­ed for fast-track (like Suzan Del­Bene, Rick Larsen, Derek Kilmer, Maria Cantwell, and Pat­ty Mur­ray) to sup­port the Trans-Pacif­ic Partnership.

But because the TPP is behind sched­ule (nego­ti­a­tions were fin­ished lat­er than the admin­is­tra­tion want­ed), a vote will not hap­pen until 2016 — smack in the mid­dle of the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nat­ing sea­son, and in an elec­tion year.

As the old adage goes, in pol­i­tics, tim­ing is every­thing, and the TPP will be land­ing in Con­gress at a time when con­gres­sion­al and pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates are look­ing to secure sup­port from the respec­tive bases of their par­ty for the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. The Repub­li­can base can’t stand Barack Oba­ma and is reflex­ive­ly opposed to any­thing he pro­pos­es. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic base, mean­while, is sick of los­ing jobs to grand trade schemes that failed to live up to their billing (like NAFTA).

That will make it very hard for the admin­is­tra­tion to pro­cure votes.

Hillary Clin­ton could play a deci­sive role. She has already announced her oppo­si­tion to the Key­stone XL pipeline, hav­ing got­ten tired of the White House­’s dither­ing on the mat­ter. If she comes out against the Trans-Pacif­ic Part­ner­ship, it could make it extreme­ly dif­fi­cult for the White House to sell TPP to skep­ti­cal Democrats.

As Oba­ma has said sev­er­al times, he’s nev­er going to face the vot­ers again. He’s run his last cam­paign. In a year and a half, he’ll be out of office, nev­er to return. He can pur­sue what­ev­er agen­da he wants with­out wor­ry­ing about the elec­toral fall­out. Democ­rats in Con­gress sim­ply don’t have that luxury.

Even if they did, though, their alle­giance should be to the peo­ple of this coun­try, not to pow­er­ful cor­po­ra­tions. Trade deals that fat­ten the bot­tom lines of giant firms at the expense of work­ing peo­ple should not even mer­it con­sid­er­a­tion from any Demo­c­rat who tru­ly believes in the val­ues expressed in the par­ty’s platform.

Pres­i­dent Oba­ma claims TPP is not like NAFTA. We agree that TPP is dif­fer­ent — it’s unprece­dent­ed in size and scope — but that does­n’t mean it’s bet­ter. In fact, we believe it has the poten­tial to be worse. It all depends on what’s actu­al­ly in it.

The admin­is­tra­tion pumped out mul­ti­ple pro-TPP “fact sheets” this morn­ing which were fair­ly light on facts, but very heavy on plat­i­tudes and pro-trade rhetoric.

We are not inter­est­ed in those mate­ri­als. We want to see the actu­al text of what will be sub­mit­ted to Con­gress so we can eval­u­ate it for ourselves.

If it turns out the agree­ment is what we sus­pect it to be (anoth­er give­away to pow­er­ful multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions) we will be unequiv­o­cal­ly opposed.