quote:Elizabeth Warren released a trade plan Monday that’s closer to Donald Trump’s agenda than Barack Obama’s.
The sweeping trade agenda, posted on Medium ahead of a town hall in Toledo, Ohio, on Monday evening, channels many of the critiques of American trade policy from the left over the past several decades, especially from environmental and labor groups. The approach embraces some of Trump’s protectionist rhetoric and would amount to a dramatic shift in trade policy from Democratic administrations such as the Obama and Bill Clinton White Houses, as well as the George W. Bush administration.
Warren’s plans list nine separate criteria a country would have to meet before negotiating a trade deal with the U.S. Those standards include upholding and enforcing the labor rights laid out by the International Labour Organization, eliminating all domestic fossil fuel subsidies, fulfilling commitments from the Paris Climate Agreement, not running afoul of the State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights, and not being on the Treasury Department’s monitoring list for manipulative currency practices.
The requirements would apply not only to new trade deals but to existing treaties that Warren pledges to renegotiate.
Taken together, Warren's mandates would fundamentally change American trade policy, potentially excluding many countries that would see the requirements as too onerous and transforming existing trade relationships. Warren’s policies would also likely face resistance in Congress from Republicans opposed to her environmental standards and from more moderate, trade-friendly Democrats.
“For decades, big multinational corporations have bought and lobbied their way into dictating America’s trade policy,” Warren wrote, calling the policies across Republican and Democratic administrations a “failed trade agenda.”
“Trade can be a powerful tool to help working families but our failed pro-corporate agenda has used trade to harm American workers and the environment. My plan represents a new approach to trade — one that uses America’s leverage to boost American workers and raise the standard of living across the globe.”
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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb
Bazootiehead-in-training
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If you think looting is bad wait until I tell you about civil forfeiture.