Recent Pacts Take Global Trade Back To Dark Ages

The swirl of acronyms describing various free-trade proposals around the world is enough to drive anyone to distraction. But the bottom line of all this nonsense populating public discourse is that they're really not about creating a level playing field allowing nations to compete freely for a piece of the global marketplace. They're merely euphemisms striving unsuccessfully toward the ideal of free trade.

American Jobs Alliance Board Member Clyde Prestowitz recently returned from an Asian tour, dizzy from all the trade pact acronyms flying around -- from the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) to the China-South Korea-Japan Free Trade Agreement (FTA) to the prospective EU-Korea FTA.

It's all a bunch of bureaucratic word-slinging creating headaches by the number and little progress toward free trade in return. Some are just provincial trade pacts designed to give certain nations preferential treatment over others, argues the Economic Strategy Institute president and former Reagan administration trade official in his latest Foreign Policy magazine blog.

These new agreements set global trade back to pre-Great Depression days before the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) were around to govern on a non-preferential basis in which nations treated foreign participants in their economies the way they treated their own and conferred equal trading benefits and concessions on all its most favored nation trade partners.

"The new deals and those being proposed are, in fact, a repetition of the pre-war, pre Great Depression regime. As such they are undermining global free trade and the WTO rather than enhancing it," wrote Prestowitz ."More importantly, these deals are mostly not about trade."

TPP and other FTAs frauds? We told you so here. Repeat after us -- TPP is a fraud.

Read all about it: http://prestowitz.foreignpolicy.com.