12.11.27 - President Obama Wants TPP Finished by End of 2013

Regarding President Obama’s November 17-20 junket to southeast Asia, Investors Business Daily (IBD) wrote:

So amid all the colorful and flirty photos from President Obama's first tour of Southeast Asia, what did he actually accomplish? As usual, he served himself politically in what was largely a Potemkin mission abroad.

While IBD’s assessment was of the more-sizzle-than-steak aspect of the trip, the president did manage to finesse the next huge trade agreement onto the fast track.

At a meeting last week in Cambodia chaired by President Obama, leaders from all the countries participating in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) approved a motion to set the end of 2013 as an informal deadline for the completion of the TPP in preparation for the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP)....

Ambitious and audacious even in his second term, President Obama adamantly insisted at the meeting in Cambodia that the TPP (and the FTAAP that would eventually be created by it) should be comprehensive — meaning, as the New Zealand Herald reports, that “no area is off limits and that all tariffs on all goods and services would need to be eliminated.”

Such a scope is certainly an ambitious and audacious attack on the sovereignty of the United States (as well as that of all member nations), in addition to being an assault on the right of Americans to have a say through their elected representatives in the laws that govern them.