Free Trade Disagreement

FEB. 4, 2014

Thomas B. Edsall [1]

The Obama administration’s negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade agreement, have become a test of the compatibility of globalization with the increasing expectation among democratized populations of transparency in government.

The secrecy surrounding the current discussions, which began in 2010, has angered traditional critics of free trade, including the AFL-CIO, Public Citizen and the Sierra Club, but also some of its most ardent backers, including Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, Darrell Issa, a Republican congressman from California, and Jagdish Bhagwati, a professor of law and economics at Columbia who is a leading expert on world trade.

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Continua: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/opinion/edsall-free-trade-disagreement.html

[1] Tom Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of “The Age of Austerity.” His column on demographic and strategic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. During the year leading up to the 2012 elections, he wrote for The Times as a weekly contributor to Campaign Stops. He covered American politics at The Washington Post from 1981 to 2006, and before that at The Baltimore Sun and The Providence Journal. He has written four other books: “Building Red America,” “Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics,” “Power and Money: Writing About Politics” and “The New Politics of Inequality.” He splits his time between Washington and New York.