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Trump Proposes Rejoining Trans-Pacific Partnership
President Trump, in a surprising reversal, told a gathering of farm state lawmakers and governors on Thursday morning that he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal he pulled out of within days of assuming the presidency.
Rejoining the 11-country pact could be a sharp reversal of fortune for many American industries that stood to benefit from the trade agreement's favorable terms and Republican lawmakers who supported the pact. The deal, which was initiated by the Obama administration, was largely viewed as a tool to prod China into making the type of economic reforms that the United States and others have long wanted.
Both Democrats and Republicans attacked the deal during the president campaign, but many business leaders were disappointed when Mr. Trump withdrew from agreement, arguing that the United States would end up with less favorable terms attempting to broker an array of individual trade pacts and that scrapping the deal would empower China.
Republicans in Congress have also been skeptical of Mr. Trump's tendencies on trade, and 25 Republican senators sent a letter to Mr. Trump urging him to re-engage with the pact "so that the American people can prosper from the tremendous opportunities that these trading partners bring."
Previously: Donald Trump to Withdraw US from Trans-Pacific Partnership
Renamed TPP Signed, Without the IP Rules, Without the USA
Related: "Legal Scrub" of TPP Makes Massive Change to Penalties for Copyright Infringement
US Government's Own Report Shows Toxic TPP "Not Worth Passing"
Australia Leads Charge to Revive TPP While Canada Abstains
(Score: 5, Informative) by jb on Friday April 13 2018, @07:21AM
No it wasn't. The IP Chapter remains in CPTPP. Sure, the provisions on copyright and on ISP enforcement have been "suspended", but almost all the other provisions of the IP Chapter (including most of the ones on patents) still remain.
Also, "suspended" doesn't mean dropped. It means put in hold "until the parties decide otherwise"...
CPTPP is a scam, much as the original TPP was. The degree to which it is a scam is, or at least should be, irrelevant.
Frankly, deceptively marketing a highly restrictive, mostly anti-free-trade treaty like TPP/CPTPP as being "about free trade" (which is exactly what the AU, CA, JP & NZ govs are doing now, as was the US back when they were involved) really should be made a hanging offence. Trouble is, if it were, there'd be almost no politicians left at all in AU, CA, JP, NZ or US (possibly in some of the other TPP parties too, but I don't know enough about them to comment).
Don't believe me? Read the text [dfat.gov.au] for yourself (it's been available publicly since February this year; the original TPP text for a couple of years longer). Chapter 2 (out of 30 chapters) is the only part of TPP that's pro free trade and even it would achieve very little -- the World Bank modelled its economic impact as so close to zero as to be within margins for error (except for VN, who it seems will actually get a few percentage points of growth).
Why do we collectively go on rewarding our politicians for lying to us?
One can only hope (and I admit it's a pretty slim hope) that when Trump talks about free trade, he's talking about actual free trade, not the mountains of restrictions masquerading as free trade that TPP's peddlers have been pushing for so long...