Fight for the Future Celebrates Apparent End of TPP

Fight for The Future was celebrating Tuesday on reports that the Trans-Pacific Partnership was now dead after members on both sides of the aisle in Congress signaled it would not get a vote in the lame duck session.

President-elect Donald Trump has been a big opponent of the deal and threatened to drop out of the agreement in the first 100 days of his Administration. But even though most reports were giving Trump at least some credit, Fight for The Future, which has been organizing protests of TPP for years, wasn't handing him the laurel.

"Let’s make one thing clear," said Evan Greer, campaign director for Fight for the Future, "Donald Trump didn’t kill the TPP. We did...An unprecedented grassroots movement of people and organizations from across the political spectrum came together to spark an uprising." Fight for the Future had branded it a rigged deal struck in secret.

The Motion Picture Association of America had said it would "allow the U.S. film and television industry to better compete in foreign markets and create even more economic growth and American jobs."

There was much industry celebration a year ago at the news that an agreement on the TPP trade deal had been struck after years of negotiations.

TPP was a historic Pacific Rim agreement with 11 other countries that TV and film producers have been pushing as a way to expand trade and access to Asia-Pacific markets.

It was signed last February, but Congress had to sign off on it and never did.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.