Wednesday on PBS “NewsHour,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) urged President Barack Obama to make his Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal public and said that President George W. Bush made the details of his trade negotiations public.
“What worries me here is about the whole process around this trade agreement,” Warren said. “You know, it has been negotiated in secret, but there have been 28 working groups that have worked on specific parts of it. But those 28 working groups, they have all together more than 500 people who are involved in them. 85 percent of those people are either senior executives in the industries that will be affected or they’re lobbyists for those industries. In other words, the people who’ve been whispering in the ear of our negotiators, who have been helping shape it, who have read every draft and helped mark it up, all represent big, multinational corporations, not the American worker. And my view on this is when you have a tilted process, you end up with a tilted outcome.”
“The president should let that trade deal be public,” she added. “Let the American people see it before we vote this week, next week, the week after, to grease the skid, to make it much easier to pass this deal with no amendments, make it much harder to be able to slow down this deal or block this deal.”
“The president could make it public,” Warren said in comparing this trade negotiation to Bush’s trade negotiation. “In fact, I want to make clear—President Bush, when he negotiated a trade agreement, he posted it months in advance of asking Congress to give him even partial trade promotion authority to move this thing through quickly.”
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