Excerpt: The Obama administration will not submit three pending trade deals for congressional approval until lawmakers agree to renew an aid program for U.S. Workers… The administration can turn to business groups for support for renewal of TAA. Lobbyists for several trade associations have said that the aid program needs to be reauthorized alongside the pending free trade deals. Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, said business groups have long favored renewing TAA and have made the case repeatedly to lawmakers to reauthorize the aid program. “There’s an obvious deal to be made here, and our message to both sides has been to get on with it. That message won’t change either, and you can expect us to encourage both the administration and the Congress to move on the FTAs, TAA and the expired preference programs,” Reinsch said. “If they don’t, the consequences are lost jobs and exports for America, more hardship for our unemployed workers and lost opportunities for poor people in developing countries,” Reinsch said. “This is a no-brainer!”

About NFTC
Advancing Global Commerce for Nearly A Century- The National Foreign Trade Council (www.nftc.org) is a leading business organization advocating an open, rules-based global trading system. Founded in 1914 by a broad-based group of American companies, the NFTC now serves hundreds of member companies through its offices in Washington and New York.
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Excerpt: Corporate America stepped into the political battle over the US debt limit, pleading for congressional leaders to raise the country’s borrowing authority in a “timely fashion” to avoid damaging the economy. On Wednesday, a group of the largest business trade associations and lobby groups sent a letter to Republican and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill saying it was critically important for the US to stand by its financial promises and preserve its creditworthiness…In the letter, the business groups – which also included the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Foreign Trade Council, and the Organisation for International Investment – said they were not seeking to diminish the need to restore the country’s public finances. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/93553596-7c33-11e0-a386-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1M9uaSNXF

Under increasingly unified pressure from the U.S. private sector, the Obama administration is attempting to craft a proposal for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations that would place binding international disciplines on the activities of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and other government-influenced entities to ensure they do not gain an unfair advantage over private firms at home and abroad… Worried that bureaucratic infighting and the complexity of the issues involved could prevent the administration from achieving a unified U.S. position in advance of the Vietnam round, six U.S. trade associations on April 15 pressed Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs and Development Michael Froman to forge ahead. Froman has been coordinating the inter-agency process, they said… Signing the letter were the Coalition of Service Industries, the Emergency Committee for American Trade, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Foreign Trade Council, the U.S. Council for International Business, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

U.S. business groups are pressing President Barack Obama to use trade negotiations with nations ringing the Pacific to tighten regulations on state-owned companies that serve as government-subsidized competitors… “We need to find how we make the playing field level,” said Alan Wolff, a lawyer at Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP in Washington. U.S. trade officials are “quite concerned because the business community is quite concerned about the role of state-owned enterprises.”… Wolff will speak on state-owned businesses today at a forum on the issue in Washington hosted by the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents companies such as Boeing of Chicago, the world’s largest aerospace company, and JPMorgan of New York, the second-largest U.S. bank by assets after Bank of America Corp.

Excerpt: The White House is considering new sanctions against Syria amid a crackdown by that country’s government against pro-democracy demonstrators… The administration imposed a similar strategy with Libya, said Richard Sawaya, director of USA Engage, which promotes alternatives to unilateral U.S. sanctions. He also noted that Iran sanctions legislation approved by Congress in 2010 targeted individuals in Iran… Few if any U.S. companies are still doing business with Syria, which could put a limit on the effect of any U.S. sanctions, said Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council. “For the most part, companies doing business there pretty much unilaterally decided to get out,” he said. http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/157645-obama-mulls-more-sanctions-for-much-sanctioned-syria