TPP: Full text of Trans-Pacific Partnership released

The Obama administration is crowing about the labor protections in the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the full text of which were finally released last week.

“TPP has the strongest protections for workers of any trade agreement in history,” the administration claims in its introduction to its labor chapter. Officials say they’ve made huge strides for workers abroad — particularly in getting Vietnam’s repressive government to agree to recognize workers’ rights and allow independent unions, and Malaysia’s government to agree to reforms aimed at preventing forced labor.

Due primarily to Elizabeth Warren’s joint role as a leading critic of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a critic from the left of the Obama administration’s approach to bank regulation, it’s natural that the financial services chapter of TPP has been at the center of much discussion.

TPP critics have repeatedly raised the specter of a trade deal broadly undermining American financial regulation. The Obama administration responded to this concern by including a number of pieces of treaty language — including a backstop to the much-debated investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process — but it’s left critics entirely unmollified. The issue essentially amounts to a complete breakdown of political trust, with critics basically rejecting the idea that any sort of safeguard is adequate.

Agricultural products have always been one of America’s major export industries, and improving American farmers’ access to foreign markets was a key negotiating objective for the United States in putting together the Trans-Pacific Partnership. At the same time, no domestically focused agriculture industry is cheering the TPP as an unmitigated victory. But the most powerful domestic industries in particularly rich TPP countries fared a lot better than others.

“In part because there was such a last-minute push and desire to get it all done, there was a degree of settling,” says Phil Levy of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Bernie Sanders is, I think it’s fair to say, not a fan of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

“Now that the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership has finally been released, it is even worse than I thought,” Sanders said in a Thursday statement.

In 1998, the United States Congress granted a 20-year extension of copyright terms — from the life of the author plus 50 years to the life of the author plus 70 years. Economists like Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman were incredulous, arguing that such long terms couldn’t possibly increase the incentive to produce creative works.

Now, through the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, the US is trying to force nations ranging from New Zealand to Vietnam to do the same.

After nearly eight years of negotiations, the United States and 11 other countries have finally reached consensus on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the biggest US trade deal since the 1990s.

On Thursday, the full text was finally published online. The sprawling deal would affect a variety of issues, including tariffs, labor rights, and international investment. But some of the deal’s most controversial provisions had to do with health.

Right now governments often use “buy local” rules: the Canadian government might require that Canadian agencies buy exclusively Canadian-made furniture even if cheaper Australian-made furniture is available. It’s a bit of economic stimulus, and an expression of local pride. The Trans-Pacific Partnership deal doesn’t quite end all that, but it lays down the principle that this kind of local preference should be brought to an end:

The controversial trade deal’s government procurement chapter hasn’t attracted much notice, but it’s actually a great example of the way modern trade deals are now about much more than trade.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

The Obama administration has finally released the full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial deal that would knit together the economies of a dozen Pacific Rim nations. Now Obama just needs to win one more vote in Congress for the US to accept the agreement.

But while the Obama administration says that the deal will boost the US economy and boost America’s influence in Asia, critics have portrayed it as a package of giveaways to corporate interests. They’re mobilizing to deny Obama the congressional majority vote he needs to get the deal over the finish line. The fight over the TPP has pushed Obama and Republican leaders into an unusual alliance against congressional Democrats who vehemently oppose the deal.

In 2011, Australia enacted a tough new anti-smoking law that requires cigarette companies to distribute their wares in plain green packages. Anti-smoking activists see Australia’s law as a model for the world. They hope that replacing logos with graphic health warnings will make them less appealing to consumers, especially minors.

Trade negotiators in Atlanta reached an agreement Monday that could affect everything from American exports of pharmaceuticals to New Zealand milk, Japanese rice, and Vietnamese textiles.

The deal, known at the Trans-Pacific Partnership, would more closely link the economies of 12 Pacific Rim nations and have sweeping global implications. President Obama has portrayed it as essential to cementing America’s relationships in Asia, but critics such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have portrayed it as a giveaway to corporate interests and a threat to US sovereignty.

Congressional Republican leaders are considering a legislative maneuver that could salvage President Barack Obama’s trade agenda, senior GOP aides said late Tuesday.

Obama has been pushing the House to grant him fast-track trade negotiating authority, which would guarantee an up-or-down vote on the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership deal (TPP) he’s negotiating. The Senate has already passed a bill that combines fast-track authority with an extension of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), a program traditionally backed by Democrats that compensates workers who’ve lost their jobs due to foreign trade competition. In the House, leaders split TAA and fast track into two proposals, hoping they’d get Democratic backing on the latter and Republican backing on the former. Fast track passed, but since most House Democrats oppose TPP, and knew a vote for TAA was a vote for the trade deal, the overwhelming majority of them voted on Friday to kill the TAA bill.

Larry Summers has written a very peculiar op-ed on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. If you just read the top, you would think Summers is a rabid supporter of the trade deal who is furious over its struggle in Congress. But if you keep reading, you find something that looks a whole lot like a case for why Congress should reject the TPP and simply move on to more pressing matters.

Summers begins by framing the House’s rejection of Trade Adjustment Assistance as a “catastrophe for US leadership,” comparing it to the defeat of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. He worries that “repudiation of the TPP would neuter the U.S. presidency for the next 19 months” and “reinforce global concerns that the vicissitudes of domestic politics are increasingly rendering the United States a less reliable ally.”

Just a few hours after Barack Obama pleaded with House Democrats to “play it straight” on his trade agenda, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — his most consistent ally in Congress — told them it was okay to ignore the request.

And did they ever.

In the wake of Friday’s failure of a key part of Barack Obama’s trade agenda, most people are blaming House Democrats, who voted 144 to 40 against Trade Adjustment Assistance. TAA, which helps workers who lose their jobs as a result of foreign competition, is a program that Democrats traditionally support. Obama traveled to Capitol Hill to personally lobby in favor of the legislation, so the lopsided vote against the program was an embarrassment to the president.

But it’s worth remembering that Democrats are in the minority in the Republican-controlled House. And Republicans voted against the TAA by a margin that was only slightly less lopsided: 158 to 86.

The House of Representatives just voted down a crucial piece of President Obama’s trade agenda in a 302-126 vote. The vote is bad news for the Trans Pacific-Partnership, the controversial trade deal Obama is currently negotiating.

The House rejected a bill that would have extended funding for trade adjustment assistance programs, which help workers who have lost their jobs due to foreign competition find new work. The program is traditionally supported by Democrats, but Democrats voted no because they knew passing it would advance the TPP, which most Democrats opposed.

President Obama made an eleventh-hour push to save his trade agendaFriday, addressing skeptical House Democrats before a decisive series of House floor votes on fast-track trade authority and assistance for workers adversely affected by trade.

He specifically asked them not to play games with trade authority by sinking the related Trade Adjustment Assistance bill, which Democrats typically support as a salve for workers in the wake of trade deals, according to several sources in the room. Unions and some liberal Democrats have targeted that bill for defeat because a loss would kill the fast-track bill. And Obama gave the argument a partisan edge.

Big labor is getting tougher with Democrats on trade, but that tack may backfire in the long run.

With the House expected to vote this month on Trade Promotion Authority for President Obama — which would clear the way for the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal — the AFL-CIO is running ads against New York Democrat Kathleen Rice, who represents a very competitive Long Island-based House district.

The Obama administration is confused by the breadth and depth of opposition to its Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal among Democrats. Administration officials feel opponents are throwing up bad-faith arguments, relying on outlandish hypotheticals, and seizing on minor side issues. They don’t just think critics are mistaken — they profess to be baffled as to what is driving the hostility.

To understand the big picture, as opposed to the specific debating points, they could do worse than read an op-ed former Representative Barney Frank did for the Boston Globe over the weekend. As an ex-politician, Frank has a certain freedom that his colleagues still in Congress lack to advance a politically sophisticated argument that gets away from talking points.

The case for the Trans-Pacific Partnership strikes me as fairly weak (though, of course, it is hard to know for sure until a full text is available). But on the main legislative fight happening right now, I think the correct conclusion is pretty clear and TPP critics are in the wrong — the Obama administration deserves its fast-track authority, something the Clinton and Bush administrations had and something that isn’t tied specifically to the details of TPP or any other trade deal.

Essentially nobody in Washington is currently willing to regard the fast track vote as anything other than a proxy vote on the merits of the underlying agreement, meaning that the two debates have gotten mushed together and blended. But the question of fast-track authority is legally and conceptually distinct from approving the TPP. It is worth analyzing separately. And since, unlike TPP, we actually know — specifically, finally, and in detail — what fast track does, it makes more sense to debate it now.

Trade promotion authority, also known as “fast track,” is legislation that guarantees trade deals will get an up-or-down vote in Congress without amendments. Obama’s predecessors, including George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, have enjoyed the authority, which allowed them to negotiate a number of trade deals. But the authority expired in 2007, and Obama has struggled to get Congress to renew it.

The White House says fast track is needed to get trade deals done because other countries will be reluctant to bargain knowing that Congress might try to modify a deal after it has been negotiated.

Trade Promotion Authority, a key first step to concluding a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, was filibustered to death Tuesday afternoon in the US Senate by Democrats bucking the Obama administration over its key policy priority for 2015. Recognizing the nature of the uphill battle, over the past week the White House has made the battle over TPP with Elizabeth Warren two-sided, starting with a presidential interview with Matt Bai, in which Obama called Warren “absolutely wrong” about the law’s implications for the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. (For the record, she’s partially wrong and partially right.)

But even though Warren has positioned herself in the press as TPP’s leading opponent, and her name helps drive clicks to otherwise dreary trade policy stories, Obama’s problems securing Democratic votes for his trade agenda have very little to do with her. Indeed, if anything, the focus on Warren as a personality helps cover up the biggest holes in the administration’s case, and may help them secure the votes of the crucial bloc of swing Democrats they need.

While the Trans-Pacific Partnership is usually described as a trade agreement, it includes a number of provisions that have little to do with promoting international trade. One of the most important examples: provisions championed by big pharmaceutical companies that would delay the introduction of low-cost, generic versions of life-saving medicines. That could have significant and potentially dangerous ramifications for global public health.

A new report from the prominent AIDS research group amfAR argues that these changes would drive up the price of some drugs that are desperately needed in the developing world. The group says that would hamper the global fight against AIDS (and other diseases) in a way that would ultimately cost lives.

Before Brad DeLong was known to the internet for his feisty blogging style, he was deputy assistant secretary for economic policy in the early years of the Clinton administration. In that capacity he worked on, among other things, trade policy, including the NAFTA deal with Mexico and Canada.

And he has a fascinating take on what he learned from that experience — how the consequences of the deal turned out to be drastically different from what he forecast:

One problem with this argument is that it’s not clear the TPP would accomplish many of these objectives. China isn’t a party to the TPP, so the agreement wouldn’t stop China from subsidizing its exports or stealing American technology. And the Obama administration has pointedly refused to include currency manipulation language in the TPP, arguing that insisting on it would cause countries like Japan to walk away from the table.

But the larger problem with this argument is the assumption that if “we” — American negotiators — write the rules, then it must be good for the American people. But that’s not necessarily true.