Is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) dead or not? The President-elect says he is against TPP. TPP may be the thing that cost Clinton the election. The voters obviously were against it. The head of the Senate says he won’t bring it up for a vote. But House Speaker Paul Ryan hasn’t said a thing. And, of course, Wall Street and the giant multinational corporations want TPP and they want it bad.

Trump, Senate Leaders, Voters Opposed To TPP

Donald Trump campaigned and won on opposition to past trade agreements and the upcoming TPP. Because of this the leaders of the Senate are saying there won’t be a TPP vote in Senate during the “lame duck” session of Congress. This week Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Obstruction) said that there will be no Senate vote on TPP before next year. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street), who is expected to be the next Senate Minority Leader, told the AFL-CIO executive council the same.

Further confirming the importance of trade in the election, some are saying that TPP may have cost Clinton the presidency. Friday’s Politico Morning Trade quotes Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT),

DELAURO: TPP PUSH MAY HAVE COST CLINTON THE ELECTION: The White House’s push for approval of the TPP may have cost Hillary Clinton the election, even though both she and Donald Trump opposed the pact, Rep. Rosa DeLauro said.

“In those states, where we lost by a point or two, it was all about trade,” the Connecticut Democrat said in an interview, arguing that the possibility of Congress voting on the agreement in the lame duck may have motivated a higher turnout in industrial swing states — to the benefit of Trump.

Clinton’s refusal to say she would push hard to get democrats to oppose TPP certainly didn’t help her with voters concerned about the effect of trade policies on their jobs and communities.

So Is TPP Dead Or Not?

With all of that opposition it would seem that TPP is dead. But TPP is at the very top of the “corporate agenda” because it moves those pesky governments and voters and their interference with corporate goals out of the picture. Wall Street and the giant multinational corporations want TPP and Wall Street and the giant multinational corporations get what they want.

Morning Trade explains how this can still happen,

“I’m not so sure TPP is in the dustbin,” Susan Ariel Aaronson, a research professor of international affairs at George Washington University, told Morning Trade. The argument – which she stressed was “not likely, but a possibility” – is that Republican leaders in Congress could feel pressured to move by two important constituencies: multinational businesses that have value chains in Asia, and the military.

“If Congress is willing to move quickly … there’s a lot of pressure on Republicans from those two sources,” she said. “And I do think that it’s possible that all this pressure to move quickly on trade will lead to some sort of collaboration between internationalist-minded Republicans who will have NAM, the Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, the tech sector, who really want TPP to happen. Plus the military.”

Remember, Republican opposition was based on trying to keep President Obama from getting things he was asking for. Now Obama is out of that equation, while the true owners of the Republican Party — Wall Street and the giant multinational corporations — want TPP and want it bad.

House Speaker Paul Ryan is the key. Ryan has not yet said that there will not be a vote on TPP in the coming “lame duck” session of Congress.

But wait, there’s more. Trump said what he needed to say to get elected. Not he’s elected and he doesn’t need to keep saying it. It’s not like he isn’t himself a huge supporter of the agenda of Wall Street and the giant multinational corporations. His tax plan cuts their taxes dramatically and lets them off the hook for taxes already owed on profits stashed in tax havens. He wants to gut the Dodd-Frank legislation that reined in Wall Street a tiny bit. He will also help gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). And, of course, he says he will gut government regulation of corporations. So next year it’s quite possible that Trump could endorse a (possibly renamed) TPP agreement that has been modified a bit, saying it’s fixed. Because that is what Wall Street and the giant multinational corporations want.

So until the lame duck session is over we are still in wait-and-see mode. A TPP vote could still happen before next year.

This post originally appeared on ourfuture.org on November 11, 2016. Reprinted with Permission.

Dave Johnson has more than 20 years of technology industry experience. His earlier career included technical positions, including video game design at Atari and Imagic. He was a pioneer in design and development of productivity and educational applications of personal computers. More recently he helped co-found a company developing desktop systems to validate carbon trading in the US.