Obama becoming ‘lame duck’ president over trade deal

US President Barack Obama is fighting to persuade Congress to pass a bill that would expand trade between the US and countries bordering the Pacific Ocean and designed to be the legacy of his foreign policy shift toward Asia.

However, the biggest challenge to securing that legacy has come from Washington, as Obama’s fellow Democrats last week voted against legislation crucial to finalizing the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement on the grounds that it would hurt instead of helping American workers.

Obama administration officials maintained Sunday that they still expected Congress would find a way to pass legislation increasing Obama’s trade-negotiating powers as the US tries to wrap up the sweeping deal with 11 other countries around the Pacific.

But Republican lawmakers, who have been more supportive of the proposed trade deal, said the burden would rest with the president to gain support for the TPP after Democrats defected late last week, despite intense lobbying by Obama himself.

US Representative Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who has worked with the White House to secure trade negotiating authority, said on Sunday that if Obama wanted to avoid being a “very lame-duck president,” he would have to win over members of his own party.

But there were few signs over the weekend that many minds had been changed on the political left.

“If the president cannot get” trade promotion authority “through Congress, it is a disaster for his Asia policy,” said Michael J. Green, a former Asia adviser to former president George W. Bush and now at Georgetown University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The administration will be dismissed as lame duck at a time when China is flexing its muscles.”

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Sunday that, “We need to regroup and come up with a trade policy which demands that corporate America start investing in this country rather than in countries all over the world.”

Critics of the TPP have strongly criticized the potential trade deal as largely benefiting corporations at the expense of workers in the manufacturing and service industries.

In 2014, renowned scientist Noam Chomsky warned that the TPP is "designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximize profit and domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity."

In 2013, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warned that based on leaked drafts of the TPP, it presented "grave risks" and "serves the interests of the wealthiest."

The Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Economic Policy Institute argued that the TPP could result in further job losses and declining wages.

AHT/HRJ

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk