Obama Administration Promises "Thorough Review" of USTR Policies

After all of the uproar surrounding some of the Obama administration's recent decisions, trade officials have promised a thorough review of the USTR policies regarding transparency. In an effort to ensure that the review includes all possible angles, the USTR is urging groups to make other proposals as well. "KEI is very impressed with the USTR decision to undertake a review of USTR transparency efforts. They are taking this much further than simply reviewing policies on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), or recent controversies over the secrecy surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations. The review offers the possibility of more transformative changes, including pro-active measures to enhance transparency, covering all aspects of USTR operations, including multilateral, plurilateral, regional, bilateral and unilateral trade policies and negotiations. We are also grateful that USTR is offering to have a continuing dialogue on this issues. KEI will offer additional suggestions on transparency to USTR, and we encourage others to do so also."

Comments

Right, change my ass

[Reality Master 201]

Blah blah. Fill in typical slashdot posting about how he's the same as the old boss, etc.

What the fuck is with this site? Was there this much focus on every single fucking thing the Bush administration did? Or did the coverage then just focus on the really egregious shit?

Re:Right, change my ass

[HiThere]

There was a great deal of criticism of Bush...but we never had any expectations that he'd pay any attention. With Obama there's hope that he'll notice. So some of the criticism is louder.

Also some people don't like other people accepting that there might be some chance of change. Such people don't tend to be very nuanced in their thought processes, so their comments tend to be loud and abrasive.

I'll admit to being a bit of a cynic myself, but at least Obama isn't conducting an outright war on the citizenry. There might be a chance of something happening. I don't expect the government to roll back any of it's previous incursions on our rights, but it might slow down the advance, or even roll things back in a few places where people are made really unhappy.

OTOH, where Bush would have either stone-walled or fought aggressively, Obama says that he's conduct a review of policies. Now this review may take so long that it's just a sneakier form of denial...but it might not. So this is one place where we get a chance to find out what kind of change was made. Is he going to push ahead with the secret treaties, and only decide that the secrecy was unnecessary when it's too late to make reasoned comments on the treaties? We'll find out. And THEN it will be reasonable to condemn him for a traitor or praise him as an honorable man.

Remember, there's a lot of inertia in politics, and a few people at the top can only push things so hard. I may think that it would be desirable to have the A.G. go searching for a few blatant cases of misfeasance or malfeasance among the high level bureaucrats...but I'm not certain that I'm right. (And it's even possible that I'm wrong about them being there to be found.)