USA TODAY COLUMN: … Without some assurance that Congress won’t pick to death any final document that 12 disparate nations finally agree upon, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement is dead. Indeed, for nearly a decade, negotiators have been bogged down in their efforts to create a trade and tariff pact that quite pointedly excludes China. Now China is fighting back with a vehicle intended directly, and pretty much unabashedly, as a counterweight to the TPP.
China’s initiative — the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank — has been structured as a counterweight to the TPP, but also to the Asian Development Bank and even the International Monetary Fund, both of which Beijing sees as dominated by the United States…
Indeed, China has already started to line up European members for the AIIB. Britain was the first wedge, followed quickly by Germany, France and Italy. In all, about 60 countries have signed up, including 16 of the world’s 20 largest economies — though most pointedly not the United States, Japan, Canada nor Mexico, all members of the TPP process. India, Australia, South Korea, and even Israel and Iran are among the founders. The list includes Russia, despite all the boycotts the West has organized in reprisal against its actions in Ukraine and Crimea… (more)
EDITORIAL: The rest of the world is catching on to the rapid decline of the USA due to the waste of its resources on health care (18% of GNP, about 8% higher than other advanced nations) and unnecessary wars.
Without the Trans Pacific Trade Pact, the USA may simply fade away to irrelevancy in the Far East Yet is the Far East is where lie our most vital interests for containing China.
Yes, TPP will harm some workers while benefiting others. Those who lose jobs need to be retrained and subsidized. We may even need to lower the Social Security eligibility age for certain workers. But in the long run the nation will be better off economically and, even more important, future generations will be a lot safer.
We need close alliances with Japan, Korea, Viet-Nam, Indonesia and the other Pacific Rim nations.
