Banyan has a primer on the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations:
Some analysts fear that the compulsion to get the deal done may result in a lowest-common-denominator agreement, whereby each country’s sacred cows are respected and the potential benefits (estimated at nearly $300 billion a year to global income) squandered in advance.
That risk may have increased following the biggest of the many setbacks TPP has suffered recently: it now seems highly unlikely that Barack Obama will persuade Congress to grant him “fast-track” authority (also called Trade Promotion Authority, or TPA), to negotiate trade agreements before the mid-term elections in November (if ever). Without fast-track, agreements can be unpicked line-by-line by Congress, and other TPP countries will be reluctant to sign up.
James Traub looks at the big picture:
The TPP is the Obama administration’s bid to shape an Asia more in America’s image than China’s — which is precisely why it’s the pivot of the Asia pivot.
The traditional objection to trade pacts — and the default position of all too many Democrats — is that they do more harm than good to American workers. But the public-interest critique of the TPP focuses much more on harms that the United States will allegedly be perpetrating upon citizens elsewhere (even though the political representatives of those citizens will have signed the deal). The fear it reflects is a fear of the globalization of U.S. principles. For groups like Public Citizen, one of the most vocal opponents of the pact, the TPP’s hidden agenda is advancing “corporate policy goals, rights and privileges.” The domestic debate over the TPP is thus very largely a debate over the merits of the American economic model.
Noam Scheiber criticizes the priorities of the administration:
What we do know, based on leaked text of negotiations, is that U.S. officials are hard at work on priorities other than U.S. jobs. Many of them look like the priorities of the financial sector, as well as big energy, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies. For example, [Trade Representative Michael] Froman’s team, like the U.S. trade reps that came before him, is pressing to make it harder for countries to restrict the flow of capital across their borders, regulations that helped insulate the likes of Malaysia and Chile from recent financial crises, but which are unpopular on Wall Street. The U.S. negotiators also favor provisions that would make it easier for companies to challenge a variety of financial, consumer, and environmental regulations in foreign countries, and which could help, say, European banks to chip away at Wall Street reform in this country.
The Dish 