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Peru: PPK on TPP

The WaPo’s Lally Weymouth interviews Peru’s president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a.k.a. PPK. They talked about Trump, but more importantly, about China and the Trans Pacific Partnership,

Q. Your first foreign trip as president was to China. Are you looking to Asia for growth because Trump is threatening trade barriers?

A. China is our biggest market. It is about 22 percent of Peruvian exports — mostly metals but also some sophisticated agricultural products. We have no issues with China the way others may have with [its claims in the South China Sea].

Q. You are trying to get the Chinese to invest here?

A. The Chinese have two huge copper mines here. They are looking at several other projects.

Q. If the U.S. opts out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership , will China move in and ask TPP countries to join its own Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership?

A. Right. This is a group that will include India, which is important for us because India is the one country we don’t have a trade treaty with. The idea we floated during the recent meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is that the Pacific Alliance countries — that is Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile — join the Free Trade Agreement of Asia and the Pacific (FTAAP). Basically, the FTAAP is the APEC countries without the U.S.

TPP was more ambitious, but it also had its detractors. It didn’t include China, which is the bigger player in the Pacific. Also on pharmaceuticals, the period of tests would have gone from five to 10 years, which might have raised the cost of pharmaceuticals in countries like Peru. So there was some opposition to it. A lot of the business people here love TPP.

Q. How about yourself?

A. I don’t love TPP so much. China is our biggest customer. So how can we support something that excludes them?

Read the whole thing.

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Today’s TPP roundup

Julia Hahn defines Obamatrade:

Obamatrade collectively refers to Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), which is the controversial fast-track mechanism for ramming trade treaties through Congress with minimum scrutiny, and the three major trade deals that would be guaranteed these “fast-track” protections before a page of them had been made public: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) and Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA).

And the reason we can’t find the text of the agreement? (emphasis added)

Because TPP is a “living agreement,” it can be changed subsequent to its adoption. This means that a group of twelve nations– and any new nation member that gets added to the partnership– would be empowered with, what Sen. Sessions has described as, “a sweeping new form of global governance. TPP calls this new global authority the ‘Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission.’”

Hillary backtracks: Hillary Clinton: I Totally Oppose That Trade Agreement I Negotiated In 2012.Despite referring to it as the “gold standard” for trade agreements in 2012, Hillary Clinton says she now opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.

Moe Lane points out that

She’s just coming out against it this publicly because Barack Obama is publicly in favor of it.
. . .
Also, let’s be honest: Barack Obama only supports the TPP because it’s his trade deal.

Hillary Comes Out Against TPP, Pleasing Her Left Flank

Hillary’s not alone: China and Europe may team up to snub TPP, and the director of the Sierra Club says Congress Should Oppose TPP on Environmental Grounds

How TPP cements Obama’s corporatist legacy

The disagreements over the TPP’s provisions are nuanced and complex. But the theme is not. Indeed, the TPP could well be President Obama’s most enduring legacy, because it gives his corporatism its biggest stage yet. It captures the central idea of his presidency — that when big government and big business make policy, the result is good for average Americans, even if it reduces their political freedom, or even their political participation. ObamaCare laid that marker down domestically, triggering a lightning round of health industry consolidation that turned the “big five” insurers — and their $346 billion yearly revenues — into a “big three.” The math is simple: When everyone has to buy the products dominant corporations sell, dominant corporations win. From a liberals’ standpoint, TPP takes the idea global — allowing powerful international corporations to further disadvantage American workers through a complex set of legal, financial, and economic privileges. As Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) put it: “The administration has put big business first, [and] workers, communities, and small businesses last.”

Back to Hahn,

Fast track authority lowers the 67 votes required to pass a treaty to a mere simply majority, it surrenders the 60 vote filibuster, and it forfeits individual senators’ ability to add amendments or changes to the trade deals negotiated by the president. It also allows the President to sign the agreement before Congress even votes.

With that, and the Republicans never finding “a hill to die on,” $5 says TPP is a sure thing.

We talked about the TPP in last night’s podcast,



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Monday’s North American summit: Just how bad was it?

The North American summit that the US media ignored was a disaster that the foreign media reported: IBD explains how Obama Alienates Canada And Mexico At Three Amigos

Obama’s neglect of our nearest neighbors and biggest trade partners has created deteriorating relations, a sign of a president who’s out of touch with reality. Problems are emerging that aren’t being reported.

Fortunately, the Canadian and Mexican press told the real story.
…
Energy has become a searing rift between the U.S. and Canada and threatens to leave the U.S. without its top energy supplier.

The Winnipeg Free Press reported that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper warned Obama the U.S. will have to pay market prices for its Canadian oil after Obama’s de facto veto of the Keystone XL pipeline. Canada is preparing to sell its oil to China.

Until now, NAFTA had shielded the U.S. from having to pay global prices for Canadian oil. That’s about to change.

Canada has also all but gone public about something trade watchers have known for a long time: that the U.S. has blocked Canada’s entry to the eight-way free trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an alliance of the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Peru, Chile, and Singapore. Both Canada and Mexico want to join and would benefit immensely.

With the media’s “layers of fact-checkers,”

U.S. media dutifully reported Obama’s false claim that Canada, our top trading partner, is too protectionist

But the Canadians know the truth,

Canada’s take was far more blunt: “Our strong sense is that most of the members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership would like to see Canada join,” said Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in essence revealing that it’s the Obama administration alone that is blocking Canada, and suggesting that payback on energy was coming.
…
Things were even worse, if you read the Mexican press accounts of the meeting.

Excelsior of Mexico City reported that President Felipe Calderon bitterly brought up Operation Fast and Furious, a U.S. government operation that permitted Mexican drug cartels to smuggle thousands of weapons into drug-war-torn Mexico. This blunder has wrought mayhem on Mexico and cost thousands of lives.

The mainstream U.S. press has kept those questions out of the official press conferences, while Obama has feigned ignorance to the Mexicans and hasn’t even apologized.

In short, the summit was a diplomatic disaster for the U.S. and its relations with its neighbors north and south.

It should have been the easiest, most no-brainer diplomatic task Obama faces.

Go read the whole thing, while at the same time keep in mind that Obama diverted the press conference into the issue of Obamacare and the SCOTUS.

And he got his Constitution facts wrong.

UPDATE,
Linked by Moe Lane, and Instapundit. Thank you!
Linked by HACER. Thank you!

And now,
Canadian PM Harper: The Price The US Pays For Canadian Oil Is About To Go Up, Up, Up, Thanks To President Ladies’ Tee. AFTER KEYSTONE, WE’D RATHER SELL OIL TO CHINA (h/t Instapundit)

“Smart diplomacy”, folks, “smart diplomacy”…


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The wasted 1-day summit

In case you missed it, yesterday a summit took place between the three largest economies of North America: Canada, Mexico, and the USA. You would think this would be news as of itself, since it involves membership on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free-trade zone.

Instead, Obama diverted the press conference into the issue of Obamacare and the SCOTUS, by cautioning the justices, to whom he referred to as “an unelected group of people,”

“I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,”

Video:

This was an attack on the court’s standing and even its integrity in a backhanded way

It is outrageous enough that the president’s protest was inaccurate. What in the world is he talking about when he asserts the law was passed by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress”? The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act barely squeaked through the Congress. In the Senate it escaped a filibuster by but a hair. The vote was so tight in the house — 219 to 212 — that the leadership went through byzantine maneuvers to get the measure to the president’s desk. No Republicans voted for it when it came up in the House, and the drive to repeal the measure began the day after Mr. Obama signed the measure.

It is the aspersions the President cast on the Supreme Court, though, that take the cake. We speak of the libel about the court being an “unelected group of people” who might “somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.” This libel was dealt with more than two centuries ago in the newspaper column known as 78 Federalist and written by Alexander Hamilton. It is the essay in which Hamilton, a big proponent of federal power, famously described the Court as “the weakest of the three departments of power.” It argued that the people could never be endangered by the court — so long as the judiciary “remains truly distinct from both the legislature and the Executive.”

It was precisely the separation of the courts from the other two branches, Hamilton argued, that gives the court its legitimacy.

With his statement, President Obama Goes on Record Opposing Marbury v. Madison.

Q&O:

it isn’t the job of the Supreme Court to do the job of Congress. Instead, its job is to determine whether or not what Congress has done is compliant with the limits the Constitution places on it. That’s it. There is nothing which requires the Supreme Court to “fix” laws that Congress has passed.

Ruth Marcus:

Obama’s assault on “an unelected group of people” stopped me cold. Because, as the former constitutional law professor certainly understands, it is the essence of our governmental system to vest in the court the ultimate power to decide the meaning of the constitution. Even if, as the president said, it means overturning “a duly constituted and passed law.”

So the joint press conference with Felipe Calderón and Stephen Harper accomplished…what?
1. Obama’s going after the Supreme Court as his bête noire, knowing they cannot respond.

2. It showed that the President needs a remedial course in judicial review.

and,
3. It demonstrated to Mexico and Canada that they are mere side ornaments when it comes to Obama’s priorities: Critical issues that involve the three countries count for nothing.

Why is the TPP critical now?

Canadian officials have said that they have been willing to put everything up for negotiation—including, some officials say, dairy products and other issues such as a U.S. push for Canada to increase intellectual-property protections.

TPP joins a list of recent points of tension in the world’s largest trade relationship. Canadians were angered by “Buy America” provisions in last year’s U.S. stimulus plan, new surcharges imposed on Canadians traveling to the U.S. and regulatory delays in approval for the Keystone pipeline, a massive project to move crude from the oil sands of Alberta to U.S. refineries.

But hey, after his next election Obama will have more flexibility.

As a side note,
When you read the full transcript, note the condescending tone towards Calderón (“Felipe, Stephen and I are proud to welcome you here today”).

UPDATE,
Don’t miss Judidical activism for me, but not for thee


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