“It’s worse than we thought”, Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, told reporters on a conference call after examining the full text of the pact, which was unveiled early on Thursday. It’s filled in its element, laying out plans for the dealing with of trade in the whole lot from zinc dust to railway sleepers & live eels.
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“Now that the text is available with all its exhaustive details, corporations should take a look at how they can benefit from the agreement”, writes Trinh D. Nguyen, an analyst at French investment bank Natixis.
President Barack Obama alerted Congress on Thursday that he intends to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Hill reported Thursday.
Without TPA, trade deals would have been subject to amendment and had to have conquer a 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate.
In June, Congress voted to give President Obama fast-track trade promotion authority (TPA) to negotiate trade deals, including the TPP.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said last month that she’s “not in favor of” the TPP deal, noting that she doesn’t believe the deal will meet her “high bar” for creating good American jobs, raising wages and advancing national security.
Obama declared the deal struck with Japan, Australia, and nine other Pacific economies as a pact written to United States standards and interests, warning that the USA would lose out if it is not endorsed by the legislature.
The nations in the accord include the U.S., Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei.
And that it’ll be good for American workers. “If U.S. Congress signs this agreement despite its blatant corruption, they’ll be signing a death warrant for the open Internet and putting the future of free speech in peril”.
The president also said the deal “levels the playing field for our farmers, ranchers, and manufacturers by eliminating more than 18,000 taxes that various countries put on our products”. He will have to rely mostly on Republican votes, while holding on to support from the few Democratic allies willing to confront organized labour and other liberal groups that are skeptical about trade globalization. But negotiators reflected an awareness of those concerns with meticulous references to the rights of each country to protect its own sovereign powers and best interests.
The document also indicates that the Canadian government has the right to cap foreign ownership in certain companies, namely the country’s largest airline Air Canada, uranium miner Cameco Ltd and a few others.
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The agreement stresses that its provisions on patents for medicines “do not and should not prevent a Party (country) from taking measures to protect public health”.
