Trumps Signs Order Withdrawing U.S. from TPP, a Deal That Would Have Greatly Benefitted Donors to the Obama Foundation, But Will He Renegotiate a NAFTA That Expands Protection for Corporate Interests?

Anti-TPP signs seen at the Democratic National Convention in 2016. (Photo: Reuters)

Trump signs order withdrawing U.S. from Trans-Pacific trade deal

On November 21, 2016, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump released a video laying out actions he would take on his first day in office, including withdrawing the United States from a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Trump also said he would issue a rule cutting government regulations, direct the Labor Department to investigate abuses of visa programs, and cancel some restrictions on energy production, including shale oil and gas and coal. [Reuters] 

January 23, 2017

Reuters - President Donald Trump signed an executive order formally withdrawing the United States from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal on Monday, following through on a promise from his campaign last year.

In an Oval Office ceremony, Trump also signed an order imposing a federal hiring freeze and a directive banning U.S. non-governmental organizations receive federal funding from providing abortions abroad.

Trump called the TPP order a "great thing for the American worker."

Barack Obama Readies for Final TPP Push, Which Could Benefit Donors to His Foundation

April 28, 2016

International Business Times - President Barack Obama last week renewed his push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, suggesting that it will be easier to pass the deal after the elections are over. The idea is that lawmakers will then be more insulated from political influence.

Yet Obama has his own potential incentives to push for the TPP: His presidential foundation has been relying on support from industries that could profit from the agreement.

For instance, the TPP offers potential benefits to the finance sector, including expanded access to capital and investment opportunities in emerging markets, as well as what critics say are provisions that could dilute financial regulation in the United States. The progressive advocacy group Public Citizen says the deal “would undermine bans on particularly risky financial products” and “restrict capital controls, an essential policy tool to counter destabilizing flows of speculative money.”

The same financial industry that could benefit from the TPP has forged deep ties to Obama’s foundation. The organization’s current president is J. Kevin Poorman, the CEO of investment firm PSP Capital Partners. PSP was founded by billionaire Penny Pritzker, daughter to a co-founder of Hyatt hotels, a longtime Obama ally and the current head of the U.S. Commerce Department.

Other members of the foundation’s leadership team include John Doerr of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers; Martin Nesbitt, co-founder of the private equity firm Vistria Group; John Rogers of the financial firm Ariel Investments; and Michael Sacks, chairman and CEO of the investment management firm GCM Grosvener.  

Doerr also serves on the board of directors for Google.

In addition to helping steer the Obama Foundation, Sacks has given it somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million.

The foundation also reports that it has received somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million from Mark Gallogly, founder of the investment firm Centerbridge Partners and a former senior managing director at the Blackstone Group. The same goes for James Simons, founder of the investment management firm Renaissance Technologies LLC. Hedge fund founder David Shaw, former UBS President Robert Wolf and Tim Collins, CEO of the private equity firm Ripplewood Holdings, have each given between $250,000 and $500,000. Nicholas Aleskos of the private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners has given up to $100,000.

Similarly, the TPP has been backed by the entertainment industry because of its stronger copyright protections. It has also been supported by producers of equipment for outdoor recreation, whose trade association said the deal’s lower tariffs represent “substantial commercial benefits for outdoor product manufacturers and retailers.”

Key figures in both of those industries are also major Obama Foundation donors: the foundation of director George Lucas recently donated between $500,000 and $1 million to the president’s foundation, and Tom Campion, the co-founder of outdoor retailer Zumiez, gave between $250,000 and $500,000.

Good government activists have been sounding the alarm about presidential library fundraising for years. In a 2013 NBC News article about the George W. Bush library, Sunlight Foundation policy counsel Daniel Schuman described library contributions as “the wild, wild West of influence.”

“Presidents often start raising money for these libraries while they’re still in office, usually two or three years before they leave office, and money can come from anywhere — from foreign governments, from foreign officials, from lobbyists, from anywhere,” he said.

Though few public officials will ever be in a position to launch a presidential library foundation, other politicians have nonprofits with similar disclosure rules and no limits on contributions. For example, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has the McCain Institute Foundation, which in 2014 received $1 million from the government of Saudi Arabia.

By law, the Obama Foundation is not required to disclose all of its donors.

The TPP Is Officially Dead. Thank the People's Movement, Not Trump.

January 23, 2017

CommonDreams.org - President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), marking a new phase for the broad movement that sought to kill the corporate-friendly trade deal.

Progressive groups campaigned hard against the 12-nation trade agreement which they said threatened public health, environmental protections, and human rights while handing a big win to corporate interests.
Indeed, digital rights group Fight for the Future was quick to credit that movement with Monday's victory.

"The victory against the TPP belongs to the people, not to Donald Trump or any other politician," said Fight for the Future campaign director Evan Greer.

"An unprecedented international movement of people and organizations from across the political spectrum came together, and lead nothing short of an uprising that stopped an outright corporate takeover of our democratic process," Greer continued. "Together we sounded the alarm and made the TPP so politically toxic that no presidential candidate who wanted to be elected could support it."

Both Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) made their opposition to the deal and others like it a cornerstone of their election platforms. And Sanders on Monday said he was "glad the [TPP] is dead and gone."

"Now is the time to develop a new trade policy that helps working families, not just multi-national corporations," Sanders said. "If President Trump is serious about a new policy to help American workers then I would be delighted to work with him."

But Trump's record since he won the election—and since he was sworn into office on Friday—don't inspire a lot of confidence on that last count.

"Donald Trump's administration is profoundly anti-worker, and his decision to pull out of the Trans Pacific Partnership doesn't change that," said Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC). "His administration is crammed with bankers and billionaires, and his first actions were to halt overtime pay rules and make it more expensive for middle-class families to buy homes. He may talk a big game, but his actions speak for themselves."

As such, the public must stay vigilant that any "new policy," as Sanders put it, will adhere to the goals of the movement that took down the TPP in the first place. Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, outlined some of those goals in a statement on Monday.

Trump's executive order "will bury the moldering corpse of a deal that couldn't gain majority support in Congress," Wallach said, "but the question is going forward: Will President Trump's new trade policies create American jobs and reduce our damaging trade deficit while raising wages and protecting the environment and public health not just here but also in trade partner nations?"

Noting that Trump has also vowed to renegotiate the Clinton-era North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Wallach warned: "NAFTA renegotiation could be an opportunity to create a new trade model that benefits more people, but if done wrong, it could increase job offshoring, push down wages, and expand the protections NAFTA provides to the corporate interests that shaped the original deal."