The Story Behind Biden’s Trade Failure
When the World Trade Organization meets this month in Abu Dhabi, will anyone from the Biden Administration stand up for U.S. economic interests? It’s a fair question now that Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and leftwing groups are hijacking U.S. trade policy.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai this month explained the Administration’s new anti-trade agenda at a conference on antitrust regulation in Brussels. She said previous Administrations were wrong to promote trade policies that would aid U.S.
businesses and consumers by making markets more efficient. “If we’re only pursuing policies to benefit people as consumers, and those policies are actually impoverishing those people as workers, the entire system doesn’t work," she lamented. No longer does Washington aim to lower trade barriers and expand American access to foreign markets.
It wants trade share and production regulated by governments. *** Ms. Tai last autumn withdrew support for digital trade principles being negotiated at the WTO that would protect cross-border data flows and source code and bar discrimination against U.S.
companies. Ms. Tai also shelved digital trade protections in negotiations over the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework trade deal.
Her stated reason? “To provide enough policy space" for debates over tech regulation to unfold in the U.S. That echoed a memo Lori Wallach, director of Rethink Trade, sent to Ms. Tai on Jan.
19, 2023. Rethink Trade is an arm of the leftwing American Economic Liberties Project, which has led the revival of the anti-consumer antitrust movement. “Officials negotiating the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) and other pacts must not set binding proscriptive rules that could conflict with domestic
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