Saturday, June 6, 2015

Are There Rules for Trade?

By Laurence Vance

Barack Obama has been lobbying Congress for Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), also known as “fast-track authority,” so the executive branch can work in secret on trade deals before submitting them to Congress for a quick up-or-down vote with limited time for debate, no provision for amendments, and no possibility of a Senate filibuster.

The president has made passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) a top priority of his second term. The TPP is a proposed trade agreement between the United States and the Pacific Rim countries of Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. The TTIP is a proposed trade agreement between the United States and the 28 member states of the European Union. Opponents of these two managed-trade agreements have referred to them as “ObamaTrade” and “NAFTA on steroids.”

Read the rest here.

2 comments:

  1. Nice article but when the president says if the US doesn't write the rules, China will he is reflecting the fears of many citizens in both countries. Its important for free market advocates to expose this myth. This myth that if the US doesn't write the rules and some other country does, that country 's citizens will benefit. The truth is that whatever country writes rules it is being done by an elite group within their government and the rules are designed to benefit that elite group at the expense of their own citizens. Its important for the citizens of the US to realize that President Obama is talking about rules that will benefit his crony friends and the expense will fall most heavily on the citizens of the US. Let some other country write rules and their citizens will bear the cost. Free trade is a policy that can be implemented unilaterally and the citizens who implement it reap all the benefits.

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