Will China’s Gambit to Undermine the Trans-Pacific Partnership Succeed?

[antigop]

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/will-chinas-gambit-to-undermine-the-trans-pacific-partnership-succeed.html

While eyes in the US have remained focused on the budget cliffhanger in Washington, in Bali, two sets of meetings were taking place. The first was the latest set of Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. The US, led by John Kerry (Obama was supposed to make an appearance but the budget drama kept him away) met with representatives of the 12 nations it is pressing to agree to this deliberately mis-branded “trade deal”. The reason the label is misleading is that trade is already substantially liberalized; the real point of the TPP and its cousin, the pending EU-US trade agreement, is to weaken the power of nations to regulate, which will allow multinationals to lead a race to the bottom on product and environmental safety. As we wrote earlier this year:

By way of background, the Administration is taking the unusual step of trying to negotiate two major trade deals in the same timeframe. Apparently Obama wants to make sure his corporate masters get as many goodies as possible before he leaves office. The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the US-European Union “Free Trade” Agreement are both inaccurately depicted as being helpful to ordinary Americans by virtue of liberalizing trade. Instead, the have perilous little to do with trade. They are both intended to make the world more lucrative for major corporations by weakening regulations and by strengthening intellectual property laws. The TPP has an additional wrinkle of being an “everybody but China” deal, intended to strengthen ties among nations who will then be presumed allies of America in its efforts to contain China…

Baker describes in scathing terms why these types of deals are bad policy:

…these deals are about securing regulatory gains for major corporate interests. In some cases, such as increased patent and copyright protection, these deals are 180 degrees at odds with free trade. They are about increasing protectionist barriers..

These deals will also lead to more upward redistribution of income. The more money that people in the developing world pay to Pfizer for drugs and Microsoft for software, the less money they will pay for the products that we export, as opposed to “intellectual property rights”….

This is yet another case where the government is working for a tiny elite against the interests of the bulk of the population.

[starroute]

1. I wish you'd posted the part that explains the headline

I already know why the TPP is bad news. I don't need to hear all that again. But this thing about China having a gambit to undermine it is new, and it's why I clicked on the thread.

The link to the original story is timing out, though, and not loading, so I guess I'll never know. Too bad.

[antigop]

2. Link works for me. nt

[starroute]

3. It works for me now -- it wasn't earlier

But the real point is that it's frustrating to post a headline that promises a new wrinkle to a familiar story and then not give any indication of what the new wrinkle actually is.

[antigop]

5. I can't assume that everyone who comes to DU knows what the TPP is.

Is it really that difficult to click on a link? Really?

[pscot]

4. However, the US has been ruffling the potential signatories. For instance:

The last full TPP negotiating session in Brunei witnessed USTR Froman violating protocol and good manners by muscling into the chairmanship (which by rights was the host country’s) so as to command everyone to dash to the Obama administration’s yearend finish line. That action, and virtually everything else done with the TPP by the USTR (and Obama himself), evidence an arrogant and bullying style that we see all too often in the Obama administration.

And the State Department Q&A also indicated that Indonesia, which was also hosting the APEC leaders’ meeting, had the US trying to upstage that session.

Now bruised official egos are likely not enough in and of themselves to derail a trade deal. But the Asian nations are also playing a careful balancing act between the current hegemon, the US, and its presumed successor, at least in the region, if not globally, China. Now remember, the whole point of the TPP is that it is an “everybody but China” deal. So what did China do at the APEC summit when Obama was detained in Washington? Step up its efforts to undermine the TPP. From Agence France-Presse:


The United States stepped up efforts to reinforce its economic might in the Asia-Pacific at a regional leaders’ summit in Indonesia on Tuesday, amid warnings from an increasingly bold China….

But China and even some developing nations included in the TPP have expressed concern that it will set down trade rules primarily benefiting the richest countries and most powerful firms.

“China will commit itself to building a trans-Pacific regional cooperation framework that benefits all parties,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a speech following Kerry at the Apec business forum….

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/will-chinas-gambit-to-undermine-the-trans-pacific-partnership-succeed.html#tK9YVkP0A2SzxWkF.99