Democrats in Congress are pumping the brakes on negotiations of a multinational trade pact, worried that a significant bloc of their base would leave the party should the agreement be approved before the November elections.
Reports out of Ottawa, where the latest round of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations wrapped up on July 12, indicate that members of President Obama’s own party are pressuring him to slow progress on the pact until after the November 4 elections for fear that environmental activists and labor unions who traditionally support Democrats would abandon the party over their opposition to the controversial 12-nation trade deal.
Before the eight-day meeting began, President Obama told U.S. negotiators that he hoped an initial agreement could be hammered out by the time the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum gets underway on November 10.
During the Ottawa meetings, reports indicated that many of the representatives in attendance were anxious to accelerate agreement on basic points of the TPP, but when word came from Washington, D.C., that plan came to an immediate halt.
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The New American has reported since March of this year that key congressional Democrats have pressured the president to, in the words of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), “not push this [the TPP] right now.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) joined Reid in encouraging Obama to hold off beating the TPP drum until the elections were over.
After being ordered to put off even preliminary approval of key provisions of the pact, negotiators from all member nations decided to aim to reconvene sometime between the day after U.S. election day and the APEC meeting.
Even if Democrats manage to hang on to a majority in the Senate, there are still sticking points that could potentially indefinitely stall the signing of the TPP. One of the main hang-ups is the tariff negotiations between the U.S. and Japan.
As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:
Officials in the negotiations echoed the view that unless the Japan-U.S. negotiations are concluded by the end of August, the whole of the TPP talks will be significantly delayed. This is because Canada, which wants to avoid opening its dairy product market as much as possible, and some other participating countries intend to decide their stances after seeing the final outcome of the Japan-U.S. negotiations.
In April, the Japanese and U.S. sides reached an effective agreement on lowering Japan’s tariff rates on beef, pork and other key agricultural products. But work to decide such details as conditions to allow safeguard measures, which are emergency actions to raise the tariff rates to original levels if imports increase too rapidly, has been postponed because the U.S. side has been reluctant to reach a final-stage agreement due to strong pressure from the U.S. farming sector, including the livestock industry.
The Japanese and U.S. governments will resume their working-level negotiations in Washington. On Tuesday, Koya Nishikawa, chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party’s TPP affairs committee, will hold a meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman.
Compromise on the tariff issue will likely be the fulcrum upon which ultimate TPP approval turns.
Americans of all political persuasions need to understand particulars of the TPP that threaten not only the economic vitality of the United States, but the fundamental principles of elective government, as well.
In November 2013, portions of the TPP draft agreement published by WikiLeaks contained sketches of President Obama’s plans to surrender American sovereignty to international tribunals.
Another WikiLeaks disclosure in January 2014 revealed that the president was attempting to surrender sovereignty over U.S. environmental policy to international bureaucrats interested in lowering those standards to mirror those of our TPP partner nations. Naturally, the green lobby criticized this concession, organizing demonstrations opposing the agreement.
U.S. copyright laws, Internet freedom, and web-based publishing would also be obliterated by the TPP, and, although it hasn’t been widely reported, the TPP would give the global government sweeping surveillance powers, as well.
Although the American people (and the people of all nations involved in the pact) are prevented from seeing or commenting on the treaty being ostensibly negotiated on their behalf, multinational corporations have seats at the trading table.
While the TPP grants corporate giants such as Walmart and Monsanto the power to bypass Congress and the courts, the elected representatives of the American people are kept from even seeing the draft version of the agreement.
As with the multitude of similar trade pacts the United States has formed, the ultimate aim of the TPP is the creation of a regional super government, thus the stonewalling of federal lawmakers who dare seek to assert some sort of oversight.
In the case of the TPP, the zone would be called the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP). Members of the proposed “free trade” bloc include all the current TPP participants: Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Vietnam, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Mexico, Chile, Canada, and the United States. The regional trading partnership is intended to establish “a comprehensive free trade agreement across the region.”
The ultimate goal of the TPP isn’t just the creation of an FTAAP, though. Supporters of the deal insist that the TPP is a “trade agreement designed to achieve broad liberalization and a high degree of economic integration among the parties.”
Integration is a word that is painful to the ears of constitutionalists and those unwilling to surrender U.S. sovereignty to a committee of globalists who are unelected by the American people and unaccountable to them. Integration is an internationalist tool for subordinating American law to the globalist bureaucracy at the United Nations.
Economic and political integration will push the once independent United States of America into yet another collectivist bloc that will facilitate the complete dissolution of our country and our states into no more than subordinate outposts of a one-world government.
Equally significant is that 600 industry lobbyists and “advisors,” as well as unelected trade representatives, are at the table, while representatives from the public at large and businesses other than huge monopolies are conspicuously absent.
Each of the “partners” to the pact, including foreign corporations, would be exempted from abiding by American laws governing trade disputes. Moreover, the sovereignty of the United States and the Constitution’s enumeration of powers would once again be sacrificed on the altar of global government by subordinating U.S. laws passed by duly elected representatives of the people to a code of regulations created by a team of unelected transnational bureaucrats.
Americans who study the subject realize that the redrawing of national boundaries and domestic legal processes being carried out in secret by the globalists sitting around the TPP negotiating table is an attack on American laws, American courts, American freedom of expression, American sovereignty, and the American Constitution.
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels nationwide speaking on nullification, the Second Amendment, the surveillance state, and other constitutional issues. Follow him on Twitter @TNAJoeWolverton and he can be reached at [email protected].
