Same Rhetoric, Different Administration: TPP Leak Proves

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman doesn’t mean a word he speaks about trade policy, according to former Reagan administration trade adviser Clyde Prestowitz. The latest leak of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact draft proves it.

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman doesn’t mean a word he speaks about trade policy, according to former Reagan administration trade adviser Clyde Prestowitz. The latest leak of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact draft proves it.

During recent congressional hearings, Froman assured U.S. lawmakers he would put “every available tool” to use to bring down the nation’s trade deficit, which strikes Prestowitz as “laughable” because of all the issues USTR fails to address -- currency manipulation, indirect export subsidies, etc.

Froman is not the first USTR to play the avoidance game. All Froman’s predecessors have made promises they didn’t intend to keep. What the Wikileaks leak showed was that the White House considered invoking fast-track authority more a way to get around Congress on TPP than to expedite the proposed pact.

“Clearly what is afoot is that the non-transparent TPP talks are being used to make an end run around the Congress and the parliaments and publics of many countries to achieve far reaching special rights in the guise of free trade,” he wrote in a recent Foreign Policy magazine blog 

Read more here: http://atfp.co/1c1yMMb.