[MCN] "Burial of the Zombie TPP: Lori Wallach Statement"

[Matthew Koehler]

A huge thank you to people in Missoula and throughout Montana who took
action over the past few years to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP),
the largest corporate 'free trade' pact in world history covering 40% of
the global economy.

The TPP would have negatively impacted every aspect of our daily lives
including our jobs, wages, health care, food safety, internet freedom,
financial regulations, human rights, climate change and many other issues.

Thanks again to those who spoke out and took action to stop the TPP.

- Matthew Koehler


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lori Wallach
Date: Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 3:50 PM
Subject: Burial of the Zombie TPP: Lori Wallach Statement



*For Immediate Release*:                             *Contact*:

Nov. 22, 2016                                            Matt Groch (202)
454-5111, mgroch at citizen.org



*The Burial of the Zombie TPP*



*Statement of Lori Wallach, Director, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch
on President-Elect Trump’s Statement on Withdrawing the U.S. From Being a
TPP Signatory *



The unrelenting push by the Obama administration for the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) right through this election helped to elect Donald Trump,
but Trump himself did not derail the TPP – people power united across
borders accomplished that first by delaying the TPP’s completion beyond its
2012 deadline and then by ensuring that a majority in Congress could never
be built to implement the deal since it was signed 10 months ago.

By declaring he will formally bury the zombie TPP, the president-elect is
merely acknowledging the obvious: The deal died under the weight of its own
terms and could not achieve sufficient support in Congress. Well before
Trump’s election, the presidential primary campaign and the halls of
Congress resounded with the American public’s rejection of trade proposals
that not only failed to live up to the proponents’ promises over the past
20 years, but threatened further damage to working people and the
environment.

The majority of people in the TPP countries will be better off without the
deal, which had little to do with free trade but rather concentrated on
awarding special new powers to multinational corporations. This included
the right to sue governments before panels of three corporate lawyers for
unlimited cash compensation from taxpayers over policies deemed to
undermine the vast new rights the TPP would have granted them.

The false notions that the TPP’s demise helps China or, undermines U.S.
international leadership are merely the echoes of the desperate foreign
policy arguments that the Obama administration made to try to pass the deal
after its economic case failed to convince the American public or Congress.

Managing the U.S. relationship with a rising China is a real challenge, but
the TPP was not the answer. Implementation of the TPP would have allowed
duty free access to U.S. markets for products made with a majority of
Chinese content as long as final assembly was done in low-wage TPP nations
Vietnam and Malaysia without any reciprocal obligations on China. It also
would have allowed access for the many Chinese state-owned enterprises in
Vietnam on equal terms to U.S. firms for all U.S. government procurement
contracts. And the priority focus by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in
his meeting with Trump on defense matters – the Seventh Fleet and U.S.
troops in Asia providing defense for U.S. allies – reinforces that the U.S.
role in the region will remain vital.

The notion that somehow the demise of the TPP is the end of U.S. trade with
the TPP countries is ridiculous given that we already have tariff-zeroing
free trade agreements with the six TPP countries that account for 80
percent of the TPP bloc’s combined GDP. In addition, all of the TPP
countries are in the World Trade Organization, meaning that tariffs among
the TPP nations were already low.

Trying to paint the TPP as a way for America to write the rules in Asia *so
that China does not* was absurd. The TPP was never about establishing
“American” rules in Asia, a fact reinforced by opposition to the deal by
the environmental, human rights and labor organizations that promote
protections for working people and the planet. The TPP was about imposing
rules that would hurt most Americans but are favored by the 500 official
U.S. corporate trade advisers who called the shots on the TPP.

The only way forward is to create new rules of the road
<http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-New-Rules-of-the-Road.pdf>
for globalization that put people and the planet first while harvesting the
benefits of expanded trade. And we must roll back the existing
corporate-captured “trade” deals and extreme investor-state dispute
settlement regime that have caused people and the planet so much damage. The
coalition that stopped the TPP is powerful and united and will fight
forward to deliver that change. And, we will be ready to take on any
attempt to revive the TPP or advance other crony-corporate trade pacts
based on the same failed and outdated model of trade.

For a review of the six-year international campaign against the TPP, please
read https://medium.com/@citizenstrade/no-trump-didnt-
kill-the-tpp-progressives-did-884b534542d#.175otqc1j





Lori Wallach

Director, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
215 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Washington, DC 20003 USA

(1) 202-454-5107   fax (1)202-547-7392

Skype  lori_wallach



++ Check out our blog:  www.EyesOnTrade.org <http://www.eyesontrade.org/> ++

Global Trade Watch’s website is: www.tradewatch.org

Join us on Facebook:  *www.facebook.com/ExposeTheTPP/
<http://www.facebook.com/ExposeTheTPP/>*  www.facebook.com/GlobalTradeWatch
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