[CTC] Trade Justice During the Biden-Harris Administration

[Arthur Stamoulis]

https://medium.com/@citizenstrade/trade-justice-during-the-biden-harris-administration-51436267054c

Trade Justice During the Biden-Harris Administration
 <https://medium.com/@citizenstrade?source=post_page-----51436267054c-------------------------------->
Arthur Stamoulis
 <https://medium.com/@citizenstrade?source=post_page-----51436267054c-------------------------------->
 <https://medium.com/@citizenstrade/trade-justice-during-the-biden-harris-administration-51436267054c?source=post_page-----51436267054c-------------------------------->


First in 2016 and again in 2020, Donald Trump was able to convince large swathes of the working-class electorate that he had their backs on trade policy. A classic Trump con job, he did this mainly through tough talk, flag waving, appeals to xenophobia and leveraging corporate media freakouts over tariffs.
In reality, Trump not only refused to use his executive authority to remove the United States from its most damaging trade agreements, but many of his largest policy initiatives — from the 2017 tax law to the 2020 US-China trade deal — were gifts to corporations that served to accelerate the offshoring he railed against. In key swing states like Michigan and Georgia, the number of jobs lost to offshoring more than doubled during the Trump presidency.
One of the reasons Trump was able to frame himself as a workers’ champion on trade despite his shoddy record was obviously the even-more abysmal trade records of previous administrations. Earlier Democratic and Republican presidents alike had long pushed a corporate-centered, neoliberal trade model responsible for offshoring millions of American jobs, driving down wages in the jobs that were left, accelerating inequality and destroying middle-class communities. As one-time boosters of these awful trade policies, the candidates who faced Trump were often easy foils.
Unfortunately, a “first do no harm” approach to trade — in which the incoming Biden-Harris administration simply stops negotiating new trade agreements — is not going to be sufficient to winning back the fair-trade mantle for the Democratic Party, regardless of how sensible the President-elect’s promised moratorium on new trade deals is in the short term.
Americans desperately need policies that will reverse the harm caused by existing trade pacts that continue to bleed more-and-more good-paying jobs overseas week-after-week. Failure to deliver here would undermine the economic recovery of cities and towns across the country, while also leaving the door wide open for the next, potentially more-dangerous, Trump-like character who comes along in 2024 and beyond.
More broadly still, Americans also desperately need a positive vision for international trade that provides a real alternative to both the business-as-usual, “free trade” deals of recent decades and the “America First,” corporate nationalism that Trump promoted as their counter.
Donald Trump came dangerously close to winning re-election this year, and he and his supporters’ flirtations with authoritarianism must be taken seriously. At this moment in U.S. history, allowing the political narrative on trade to be further dominated by nationalists and used to build support for their movement risks bringing us further down the road to actual fascism.
The internationalism that the Biden-Harris administration seems prepared to embrace is certainly a step in a better direction, but to truly counter the hard right, international cooperation must be re-focused on delivering benefits to working people, family farmers, consumers and the environment across borders, rather than just to corporate elites.
It’s hard to overstate just how important recognizing this is for the incoming administration.
Key elements of the President-elect’s “Build Back Better” agenda — especially with respect to the major Buy American investments in the energy grid, transportation, telecommunications and public health needed to fulfill the President-elect’s economic recovery, climate change, racial equality and COVID-19 plans — will require changes to existing U.S. trade agreements.

Rather than trying to shoehorn Build Back Better programs into the constraints that existing trade policies impose, the incoming administration should take the executive actions needed to dismantle those restrictions, while also developing a new model of trade that not only eliminates those restrictions moving forward, but instead advances the Democratic Party’s stated economic, environmental and public health goals.
Getting trade policy right is not just critical to ending offshoring and improving wages and working conditions in the U.S. and around the world. It’s also needed to get COVID-19 treatments, vaccines and other equipment into the hands of front-line public health workers across the planet, and to building the just and sustainable global economy needed to prevent the worst of the looming climate catastrophe.
As we head into 2021, trade justice activists should do their best to avoid falling reflexively back into a defensive posture on trade when it comes to the Biden-Harris administration. Our goal for the months and years to come cannot just be stopping reanimation of the dead-and-buried Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), for instance, or stopping Trump’s US-UK Free Trade Agreement and US-Kenya Free Trade Agreement from being completed. Instead, we need to be doing the much harder work of advancing a “Medicare for All,” “Employee Free Choice Act” or “Green New Deal”-scale fair trade alternative, and building public support for such a vision.
Getting a cross-sector “movement of movements” made up of literally thousands of organizations to agree on what we’re for, as opposed to what we’re against, certainly has its challenges. But many of the progressive groups that lead on trade policy have spent decades building strong relationships with each other, and considerable work towards building a consensus vision on fair trade policy has already been done.
Things campaigners can use in our favor to build demand for a new model for trade include: the ongoing public anger over offshoring; the clear lack of resilience in our economy during the COVID-19 crisis; the growing understanding of the connections between trade policy and climate change; the Trump administration’s breaking of beltway conventional wisdom; and certain Biden-Harris campaign promises on trade.
One danger, insofar as there is a moratorium on new trade agreements during the early years of the Biden presidency, is that many busy organizations and activists will naturally need to devote attention on the immediate fires in front of them. The yeoman’s work of building support for a positive trade agenda and moving it forward must continue, however, in order to shift the politics of this issue back to the left’s advantage and to deliver much-needed relief for working people and the environment.



Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826




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