Trans-Pacific Partnership Fizzling?

by JASmius

This is the way the world ends.  This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang....but with a whimper.

-T.S. Eliot


And so, apparently, astonishingly, does the Trans-Pacific Partnership:

Japan has expressed concern about a loss of momentum in talks on a pan-Pacific trade pact after participants failed to agree to meet again this month to try to clinch a deal that would cover 40% of the global economy.

Ministers from the twelve nations negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would stretch from Japan to Chile, fell short of a deal at talks last month on the Hawaiian island of Maui, despite early optimism.

Japanese Economy Minister Akira Amari, in a blog circulated on Tuesday, also questioned why the United States appeared to have lacked its usual “stubborn persistence” at those talks, despite a willingness of some countries to stay to try to reach an agreement.

“The reason I stressed … that we should meet again this month was because each country might lose interest and (the talks) would go adrift,” Amari wrote.

Whatever constitutionalists thought of the constitutionality of giving Obama Trade Promotion Authority, and whatever protectionists on the Left and the Right thought of TPP for their own respective reasons, it was generally agreed that the Obama White House wanted this trade deal, for whatever secret, nefarious reasons.  Heck, it's the only thing on which all warring factions in this pointless fight could agree.  And now Obama, flush with his Republican-supplied TPA victory, is letting TPP founder out of....what?  Disinterest?  Boredom?  Couldn't wait to get to his annual August golf & shrimping at Martha's Vineyard?  A change of ideological heart?

My guess?  Some of his "partners" in the Trans-Pacific Partnership were resisting his insertion of secret side "deals" that would inject all manner of trade-sabotaging "progressive" stipulations that would defeat the whole point of a multinational trade deal.  Which The One will leak in the very near future to pander to his Nutroot base and preempt Mrs. Clinton's overtures to them at the same time.

One thing's for sure: The losers will be American consumers and the American economy.  Something every leftwingnut should be able to celebrate.

That some Tea Partiers will be popping bubbly as well is a maddening conundrum for another day.


UPDATE (8/12): Might Red China's latest round of currency manipulation have had something to do with this?  Better to let the TPP quietly expire from the White House's point of view than to have to try and spin away the vindication of every point TPP opponents ever made about the "deal".