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Rootstrikers Submits FOIA Request for Emails Between Top Trade Negotiator and Wall Street
Request comes on the heels of USTR's unwillingness to voluntarily disclose correspondence
WASHINGTON
Today, Rootstrikers submitted a request to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for all correspondence between USTR Michael Froman and the 10 largest U.S. financial institutions.
On May 28, Rootstrikers and nine other organizations called on Ambassador Froman to voluntarily disclose this correspondence. The FOIA request comes on the heels of his refusal to do so and increased scrutiny of trade deals such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Trans-Pacific Partnership following the passage of Trade Promotion Authority by the U.S. Congress.
"Publicly, the Administration has denied that upcoming trade agreements like TTIP pose a potential threat to strong financial regulation, but when they were asked for documents showing what Ambassador Froman has been saying privately to the big banks, the Administration has stonewalled," said Kurt Walters of Rootstrikers. "It's concerning that Ambassador Froman chose not to build credibility and trust by voluntarily disclosing these communications, but he now has an obligation to do so under FOIA."
Froman, himself a former executive of Citigroup, received a golden parachute worth more than $4 million upon leaving the large financial institution to go into government. In 2008, he served as a senior official on President Obama's transition team while still on the Citigroup payroll. In that position, he successfully pushed to install Tim Geithner - the Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve and architect of the bailout - as Treasury Secretary at the same time that Citigroup received record-shattering cash infusions as part of the bailout to prevent it from collapsing.
"Under the FOIA statute, USTR has 20 business days to comply with this request," said Walters. "If it turns out that Ambassador Froman's correspondence with the big banks is too voluminous for USTR to comply promptly - a fact that would confirm our concerns about Wall Street's influence on the trade negotiation process - we will be willing to narrow our request. Otherwise, we expect prompt compliance as the statute requires."
Rootstrikers is a project of Demand Progress dedicated to reclaiming our government so it works for everyone and not just the wealthy and the well-connected.
LATEST NEWS
Trump 'Openly Flaunting His War Crimes' as US Bombs Iran's Civilian Infrastructure
"The president of the United States would like everyone to know that he is acting with criminal intent, in case there was any ambiguity," a US law professor said of his social media post with bridge bombing footage.
Apr 02, 2026
After pledging in a prime-time address that the United States and Israel would bomb Iran "back to the Stone Ages where they belong," President Donald Trump on Thursday shared a video of the US blowing up an Iranian bridge and promised, "Much more to follow!"
"The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, sharing footage of an attack on the B1 highway bridge that connects Iran's capital, Tehran, to the city of Karaj.
Trump added a message to the Middle East nation's government, writing, "IT IS TIME FOR IRAN TO MAKE A DEAL BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE, AND THERE IS NOTHING LEFT OF WHAT STILL COULD BECOME A GREAT COUNTRY!"
Citing an unnamed source, Israel's i24NEWS reported that the bridge's "destruction was intended to cut off supply routes that bring drone parts and missiles to Iranian firing units that launch them at US and Israeli forces."
According to Reuters national security correspondent Idrees Ali, "Iranian state media says eight people were killed and 95 wounded in the attack."
While war cheerleader Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) welcomed Trump's social media post, anti-war activists, journalists, and legal experts called out the US president for not only engaging in war crimes, but promoting them with his "atrocity propaganda."
Progressive US-Middle East policy analyst Omar Baddar said that Trump was "openly bragging about destroying civilian infrastructure to force the Iranian government to meet his political demands."
Rutgers University law professor Adil Haque said in a series of social media posts that "the president of the United States would like everyone to know that he is acting with criminal intent, in case there was any ambiguity."
"Attacking civilian infrastructure—to create political pressure or punish civilians—is both illegal and stupid," Haque added, blasting Trump's post as "obscene," and stressing that "states must act now to end this lawless war."
British writer Owen Jones declared that "Donald Trump is openly flaunting his war crimes. Journalists who won't call them that are complicit."
Zeteo editor-in-chief Mehdi Hasan said that "this is what terrorism looks like, state terrorism, we do it to others, and then we act shocked when others do it back to us."
Drop Site News co-founder Ryan Grim described Trump's post as, "An extremist group in Washington, DC has claimed credit for the terrorist attack on the Iranian bridge."
Earlier Thursday, Grim noted that Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman that's a key shipping route for fossil fuels. Oil prices have surged, as Americans have already seen at the gasoline pump.
"The more civilian infrastructure we destroy in Iran and the more we set back their economy, the more determined Iran will be to extract the maximum possible toll from oil passing through what is now their strait," Grim wrote. "That toll will be paid by us and the rest of the world through a higher cost of living. So just be aware that every video of a bridge being blown up, a pharmaceutical [plant] destroyed, a medical clinic flattened, is a video of something *you* are going to pay to rebuild."
As Common Dreams reported earlier Thursday, online retailer Amazon is planning to add 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge for vendors that use its fulfillment service in the United States and Canada, and fresh food distributors have been adding such fees to deliveries, due to increased fuel costs caused by the Iran war.
Responding to the bridge attack, Iran's foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, said that "striking civilian structures, including unfinished bridges, will not compel Iranians to surrender. It only conveys the defeat and moral collapse of an enemy in disarray. Every bridge and building will be built back stronger. What will never recover: damage to America's standing."
Since launching the war in late February, the US and Israel have also bombed at least tens of thousands of other civilian locations, including homes, schools, medical facilities, energy installations, courthouses, and UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization World Heritage sites.
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‘A System Rigged’: Untaxed Wealth of Richest 0.1% Is More Than Assets of World’s Poorest Half
A decade after the Panama Papers, the global rich are still hiding more than $2.8 trillion in tax havens. Just a fraction of that money could end extreme hunger and provide clean water to everyone on Earth.
Apr 02, 2026
The richest 0.1% of people on Earth are hiding more than $2.8 trillion in offshore accounts to avoid taxes. That money alone is more wealth than is owned by the entire bottom half of humanity, more than 4.1 billion people.
These findings were published in a report released Thursday by Oxfam International on the 10th anniversary of the 2016 Panama Papers, which provided an unprecedented look at how the world's most powerful capitalists, financiers, political leaders, celebrities, and criminals exploited offshore tax havens to stash their money.
"Ten years on, the superrich are still sequestering oceans of wealth in offshore vaults,” said Christian Hallum, Oxfam International’s tax lead.
The percentage of untaxed wealth in offshore accounts has dropped in the past 10 years, in large part due to global reforms like the adoption of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Automatic Exchange of Information framework (AEOI), which allows revenue authorities around the world to easily share information and crack down on cheats.
However, many nations in the Global South are excluded from this system, even though they need the tax revenue the most.
Oxfam found that a staggering $3.5 trillion, more than 3.2% of the global gross domestic product, still remains in untaxed accounts. That's more than the entire GDP of France and is more than twice the combined wealth of the world's 44 poorest nations.
And while the percentage of untaxed wealth is shrinking, that doesn't mean inequality has shrunk.
On the contrary, the December 2025 "World Inequality Report" found that the richest 0.001% of humanity—fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires and billionaires—now have three times as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population combined.
Inequality has surged around the world in part due to taxation policies and pandemic recovery packages that overwhelmingly favor the rich. The most glaring was adopted in the world's financial hub, the United States, last year.
The megabudget passed by Republicans and signed into law by President Donald Trump handed a $1 trillion tax cut to America's wealthiest 1% while slashing more than $1 trillion in spending from Medicaid, food assistance, and other safety net programs. It has been described by some economists as the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history.
While the global top 0.1% holds about 80% of untaxed offshore wealth, an even smaller group of uber-wealthy individuals does most of the cheating. The world's richest 0.01%, who hold at least $50 million apiece, control about half of all money in global tax shelters—$1.7 trillion.
According to the Tax Justice Network's Corporate Tax Haven Index, Caribbean islands under UK ownership, including the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda, are among the worst offenders. Other notable tax havens include Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, and the Netherlands.
A February Oxfam report on Elon Musk, who is well on his way to becoming the world's first trillionaire, found that his company, Tesla—which managed to pay zero dollars on its $2.3 billion income in 2024—has not published a country-by-country report on its taxes and that it has subsidiaries in many countries considered to be tax havens.
Big Pharma companies, including AbbVie and Merck, also used tax shelters to lower their total tax expense in 2025 by more than $1 billion, according to a report released earlier this month by the Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency Coalition.
"This isn’t just about clever accounting—it’s about power and impunity," Hallum said. "When millionaires and billionaires stash trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens, they place themselves above the obligations that bind the rest of society."
"The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating," he continued. "We see our public hospitals and schools starved of funds, our social fabric shredded by rising inequality, and ordinary people forced to shoulder the costs of a system rigged to enrich a tiny few.”
Even a fraction of the money currently stashed away by the world's wealthiest could alleviate untold amounts of suffering.
In November, the United Nations' World Food Program estimated that extreme hunger, which currently affects more than 318 million people around the world, could be eradicated by 2030 with investments of about $93 billion per year, but that global hunger programs instead remain “slow, fragmented, and underfunded."
According to a 2021 UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report, investments of around $114 billion per year would similarly be enough to ensure that everyone on Earth has access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
Oxfam called on governments around the world to increase coordination to prevent the wealthy from hiding their riches from tax authorities. It also urged them to adopt more aggressive policies to tax the 1%'s wealth at home, including taxes on income and on extreme wealth.
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Amazon Cites Oil Price Spike Caused by Trump's Iran War to Justify New 3.5% Surcharge
The retail giant said the surcharge was needed due to "elevated costs in fulfillment and logistics" that "have increased the cost of operating across the industry."
Apr 02, 2026
Americans having been paying more for gasoline since the start of President Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran, and now it seems the war's costs are spreading to other areas of the economy.
Amazon announced on Thursday that, beginning April 17, it would add a "3.5% fuel and logistics-related surcharge" to vendors that use its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service in the US and Canada.
The company said that it needed to add the surcharge due to "elevated costs in fulfillment and logistics" that "have increased the cost of operating across the industry."
"We have absorbed these increased costs so far," Amazon said. "However, similar to other major carriers, when costs remain elevated, we implement temporary surcharges on our fulfillment fees to recover a portion of the actual cost increases we are experiencing."
Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek told CNBC that the company's surcharge will be "meaningfully lower" than rival carriers, and insisted that "we remain committed to our selling partners' success and to maintaining broad selection and low prices for customers."
Tahra Hoops, director of economic analysis at Chamber of Progress, said that Amazon's surcharge is "yet another example of more increased costs to come," as "the ongoing supply shock" caused by the Iran war "has lasted longer than expected."
Amazon isn't alone in adding surcharges due to the war's impact on fuel costs.
According to a Tuesday report in The New York Times, fresh food distributors across the US have been adding surcharges to deliveries to make up for the increased fuel costs caused by the Iran war, with the result being that "grocery stores, restaurants, hospitals, and even schools are most likely seeing costs for their food shipping climb."
John Ross, the chief executive of the Independent Grocers Alliance, told the Times that the increased shipping costs from the surge in diesel fuel costs have come at a particularly inopportune time since many Americans were already stretched thin financially before Trump attacked Iran.
"For people who spend every nickel they have on daily expenses, if grocery prices go up $5, that $5 has to come from something else," Ross said. "But it’s hard for the grocers to eat it also. For every $1 that consumers spend at the register, the grocery store is keeping about two pennies. There’s very little room there."
The price of fuel isn't the only factor seen driving food prices higher, as CNBC on Thursday reported that experts expect to see a spike in food prices later this year thanks to the Iran war's impact on fertilizer prices.
University of Minnesota economist Kjetil Storesletten told CNBC that "the price of food is going to move quite a lot" in the coming months, predicting that "all of the increased price in fertilizer is going to be passed through to food."
Storesletten said that food prices won't jump immediately, but warned that coming grocery sticker shock will grow more severe if Iran keeps its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz for the foreseeable future.
"Imagine [the strait] remains closed until the summer," the economist said. "We will see substantial increases in food prices."
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