Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren is out with her new trade plan. Trade is likely to be one of the policy areas with the least unanimity among Democratic contenders, and Warren's version seeks considerably more aggressive changes than some of the other candidates will be willing to endorse. It follows Warren's overarching campaign theme: Corporate capture of government has resulted in such abusive economic practices that wide-ranging reforms are needed not just to relevel the playing field among corporations, Wall Street finance powerhouses, consumers, and workers, but to avoid future catastrophic economic meltdowns seeded by those abuses.
Toward that end, the focus of Warren's trade proposals is on greater public disclosure of trade proposals as they are negotiated, including avenues for public comment, and on setting minimum standards that must be met before the United States may enter into new trade agreements. (Each existing trade agreement should also be renegotiated to uphold the same standards, Warren says.)
Nations seeking trade agreements with the United States must, under Warren's plan, enforce International Labor Organization core labor rights; uphold international human rights and religious freedoms, as reported by the U.S. State Department; comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act; comply with international anti-bribery and anti-tax-evasion standards; and not be marked by the Treasury Department among the nations being monitored for currency manipulation practices.
Two remaining requirements mandate that the United States enter trade agreements only with nations that are committed to the now-urgent battle against climate change. Trade partners must be signatories to the Paris climate agreement, and must be pursuing plans that adhere to the goals of the agreement. And they must eliminate all domestic fossil fuel subsidies.
It goes without saying that the current version of the United States does not meet some of those required standards itself. Warren calls for us to do so.
Warren's trade proposal piggybacks on her previous proposal for a $100 billion "Green Marshall Plan" to assist other nations in purchasing U.S.-manufactured clean energy technology. It also singles out weakened labor rights and consumer protections, prescription-drug pricing discrepancies, agricultural monopolies, and corporate consolidation as key trade concerns.
And it blasts "Investor-State Dispute Settlements," a now-preferred arbitration method between corporations and nations that has allowed individual corporations to retaliate against nations that pass new public health or labor protections (Warren cites, for example, Philip Morris' efforts to block a national anti-smoking campaign in Uruguay) that interfere with the corporation's profit interests. Warren's plan would eliminate ISDS usage entirely.
The rigorous standards Warren lays out for U.S. trading partners (and the United States itself) will face widespread opposition from "free market" adherents who have long insisted that the markets themselves decide what labor practices, environmental protections, and other protections are deemed tolerable in trade agreements; they will face herculean lobbying efforts against them if Warren wins the presidency. But presidents have, as each modern president has demonstrated, wide-ranging authority to craft trade policies as they see fit.