Has currency manipulation had been raised in the TPP talks? Although Congress has been pushing the administration to bring up currency provisions in the negotiations for years, doing so would significantly alter, and perhaps torpedo, the deal with Japan.
Of course, currency manipulation is difficult to combat with a domestic law — since unlike trade pacts, domestic laws are not agreements with other nations that include internationally binding enforcement mechanisms. The bill would require the Department of Commerce to include currency manipulation subsidies in its calculations of unfair trade practices prohibited under other trade pacts, making it easier for the U.S. government to win trade cases against other countries, and to secure heftier judgments.
Both Republicans and members of the Obama adminsitration stress that they are seeking a “high-standards” agreement that would counter the power of China to weaken global regulations. Three of the countries involved in the talks — Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam — are serial human rights abusers. They simply do not have the institutional infrastructure in place to enforce strong protections.
Is there a strong intellectual property proivision included in TPP. Those copyright, patent and other provisions, however, are the subject of hot debate, with many tech experts warning they will crimp the development of new digital applications.
By granting pharmaceutical companies long-term monopolies on prescription drugs, moreover, those policies dramatically inflate the cost of medicine. The Indian government, for instance, recently authorized a generic version of a patented cancer medicine for $157 a month.
Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, points out the human cost of these provisions.
A fast-track bill would not only apply to TPP talks, but also to another pending deal with the European Union and any other future trade pacts covered by the timeframe of the bill. Any EU deal must include a financial services chapter. European negotiators have pressed U.S. regulators to loosen financial regulations for years in other international forums. Meanwhile, Republicans seeking to roll back the 2010 Dodd-Frank bank reform law have crafted bills to help banks dodge U.S. oversight by substituting weaker European rules and overseers.
Froman, Obama’s representative who worked at Citigroup before joining the Obama administration in 2009, pushed back against Hatch on that issue, saying USTR did not support a bank regulatory chapter in the EU deal.
