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    Bidenomics 101: Inside the White House’s Plans to Bring Jobs Back

    Credit…Rose WongFeatureBidenomics 101: Inside the White House’s Plans to Bring Jobs BackIn public and private, Biden and his advisers have signaled some dramatic interventions to revive U.S. manufacturing. Will they really happen?Credit…Rose WongSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETListen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Anyone searching for an economic road map to the Biden presidency might find hints of one in a 40-page research paper written, appropriately enough, by the United Automobile Workers union. The document, originally published in 2018 and titled “Taking the High Road: Strategies for a Fair E.V. Future,” argued that even in the face of foreign competition, the American automobile industry could continue to provide well-paying manufacturing jobs — but only if the government invested huge sums in electric vehicles. The technology highlighted in the report, like prismatic cells for storing electrical charges, was cutting-edge, but the economic thinking behind it was decidedly old-school. Some passages, in their America First-ness, read as if they could have appeared in a Ross Perot ad from 1992 — or, for that matter, a Trump ad from 2016. The U.A.W.’s researchers insisted, for example, that critical parts like batteries must be produced at home, not by rival industrial powers. “The economic potential of E.V.s will be lost if their components are imported,” they wrote. “Advanced vehicle technology should be treated as a strategic sector to be protected and built in the U.S.”Last spring, the document drew the attention of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. Biden had begun his run with fewer sweeping economic proposals than his rivals: His would in many ways be a return-to-normalcy campaign, offering to take voters back to some vague status quo ante, when the steady hand of the Obama administration guided the country. Then the pandemic struck, and millions were fired or furloughed. By last April, the economy was in free fall, and Biden’s policy ambitions were growing. He wanted a plan that felt big enough for the moment. Campaign aides began to spitball. Biden had already suggested initiatives in areas like infrastructure, claiming that spending on highways and broadband would lift the economy. Now they wondered: Should he continue in this vein? Emphasize longstanding concerns like working families? The middle class? Before long, Ron Klain, a senior adviser and now President Biden’s chief of staff, intervened to urge that they focus primarily on jobs. Trump’s approval rating on the economy had stayed improbably high even as the pandemic raged, and Klain believed that a jobs plan would allow Biden to attack Trump’s perceived strength. Biden agreed and instructed his team to think both expansively and practically. In Zoom call after Zoom call, he pleaded with them to identify jobs in manufacturing and energy that would not require workers to undergo years of retraining or uproot their families. When aides eventually described the ideas in the U.A.W. paper, Biden became animated. The notion that spending billions to upgrade plants and subsidize car-buying could save the livelihoods of today’s workers — not merely create jobs for their kids — excited him. It promised a marriage of present and future. “His view matched up so well with the U.A.W. paper,” says Gene Sperling, a former top White House economic adviser who helped Biden develop his economic plan. “It fit his view that a ‘jobs of the future’ strategy had to include retooling factories and giving current workers a path to keep working.” In the end, the paper’s ideas weren’t just endorsed by Biden. Its ethos came to suffuse the entirety of his broader economic agenda, known as Build Back Better. This plan, unveiled by the campaign last July, called for $400 billion in government procurement to go to American-made equipment and $300 billion for research and development, with hundreds of billions more in subsidies to promote the making and purchase of domestic products. “I do not buy for one second that the vitality of American manufacturing is a thing of the past,” Biden said in his speech introducing the agenda.After the election, it became clear that these themes had been more than mere campaign flourishes. One of Biden’s first high-profile meetings of the transition included Mary Barra, the chief executive of General Motors, and Rory Gamble, the U.A.W. president. “He took a very strong position on electric vehicles,” Gamble told me. “He said we had to keep manufacturing in this country. I was really happy to hear that.”If Gamble sounded pleasantly surprised, it was for good reason. The prospect of using the government to bring about a major economic transformation is something of a departure for Biden. Throughout his career, he has kept to the center of the road. News coverage and political opponents alike have long noted the way he stakes out positions that are overwhelmingly popular within the Democratic Party. As the party has moved to the left on economic issues since the Obama era, so has Biden, putting forward a gigantic pandemic-relief bill, for example, and a call for a $15-per-hour minimum wage. But resolving to invest vast amounts in American industries isn’t an exercise in difference-splitting, like positioning yourself halfway between those who would spend $1 trillion and $3 trillion. For that matter, it isn’t even an obvious lurch to the left. It’s a shift toward the kind of economic nationalism that has, over the decades, found support across the ideological spectrum. What Biden wants to do represents a rethinking of the country’s economic posture: seeking to promote certain sectors — like green-energy production and the manufacture of wind turbines, say — so as not to cede them to competitors in Europe and Asia. It is a deviation from the free-trade gospel that the two most recent Democratic presidents preached and that Biden embraced at earlier points in his career. It is a form of chauvinism in some ways more ambitious than Trump’s, as manifested through haphazard tariffs and trade wars. “The package that they put together is the closest thing we’ve had to a broad industrial policy for generations, really,” says Scott Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a trade association founded by the United Steelworkers union and a handful of large manufacturers.The approach is far from riskless, even within Biden’s own base: A focus on building up American industry can conflict with other progressive priorities, like addressing climate change more immediately or reining in corporate power. And it might encounter resistance from some of Biden’s own advisers and much of the party’s policymaking elite, who tend to consider such economic nationalism counterproductive and passé. Biden’s new Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said just last year that the manufacturing diaspora has been a major boon for the global economy. As one of few people to both lead Treasury and serve as the chair of the Federal Reserve, she is likely to exert enormous influence, both through her public utterances and her private recommendations. But if Biden and his more activist advisers are able to make good on their promises, the White House’s economic policy over the next four years will look very different from that of the most recent Democratic administration. They hope to modernize key industries and counter an economic threat from China, swiftly emerging as the world’s other superpower. They may even scramble political coalitions at home. “There are a lot of areas of potential overlap,” says Oren Cass, a former Republican policy aide and the founder of American Compass, which pushes to make conservatism more worker-friendly. Cass, whose research and advocacy group has argued for rebuilding manufacturing and reducing Wall Street’s influence over the economy, adds: “There’s a hypothetical governing majority to be drawn around the things we’re talking about that doesn’t exist within either party.”Janet Yellen, Biden’s new Treasury secretary, was previously the Federal Reserve chair.Credit…Getty ImagesRelief and recovery. They sound vaguely synonymous, but in the months since Biden and his aides began using them to describe their economic agenda, they have invested each term with a distinct meaning. Relief refers to the money Biden has proposed to spend in order to end the pandemic and tide over the millions of people suffering through it. Recovery describes the administration’s hopes for transforming the economy after the health crisis so that it is cleaner and more equitable than before.The phrasing goes back at least to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who promoted a similar agenda of relief and recovery during the Great Depression. (He included a third variable in his equation: “reform.”) The terms as Biden deploys them hint at a distinction that runs deeper than just short-term versus long-term: They signify two very different philosophies of government. Biden’s relief plan, an opening offer in the current legislative negotiations, is largely an expression of modern liberalism, which holds that the federal government must spend more and expand its influence during times of acute need. The proposed plan, which totals $1.9 trillion, allocates money to fight the pandemic and its depredations in various ways: to accelerate vaccinations; to increase access to testing, health care and child care; to help schools reopen safely; to prop up small businesses; to enable the hardest hit to stay in their homes; and to make unemployment benefits and food stamps more generous. (The plan also includes a few unorthodox ideas, like hiring 100,000 public-health workers.)Seen in that light, it is mostly the size of Biden’s Covid-relief plan that is truly remarkable. Back in 2009, President Barack Obama proposed to address what was then the worst economic crisis since the 1930s with a relief plan less than half as large as what Biden has asked for. Yet even many Democrats at the time worried about its effect on the deficit. Two of the top figures on Obama’s economic team, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, urged Obama to demonstrate, after its passage, that he was reducing the deficit.Today, while it’s likely that Congress will shave money from Biden’s relief package, there is broad agreement in his party and among a wide range of economists that there is little risk from running a substantially larger deficit to end the crisis. “Fiscal room is not the constraint,” says Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard and former White House aide, using economist-speak to mean deficit concerns. “I was always in favor of more stimulus in 2009. I don’t think fiscal space was a constraint then. But it was more of a constraint then than now.” (Furman’s White House colleague Lawrence Summers recently said in a column that Biden should consider shrinking his relief bill to avoid the risk of inflation, though Summers agrees that a large bill is helpful.)After the relief, however, the Biden team will put forward a recovery plan that includes some uncontroversial ideas, like fixing roads and bridges, but also contains elements that go beyond the comfort zone of many center-left economists. The sticking point is what’s known as industrial policy, meaning large-scale efforts to build up particular industries or sectors. While industrial policy is by no means foreign to the United States — any federally subsidized or managed expansion of an industry might qualify (think military contractors) — the caricature that comes to mind, even for many liberals, is Soviet-era central planning. The term carries with it a whiff of stigma. The prospect of using industrial policy to shrink the economy’s carbon footprint has circulated for years as a kind of theoretical ambition. The phrase “Green New Deal” has been around since at least 2007, when the New York Times opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman used it to describe a hypothetical “huge industrial project” to slow climate change. The Obama administration took a modest first step, spending about $90 billion on green-energy projects in its 2009 stimulus package. But in recent years, the notion has gathered momentum on the left flank of the Democratic Party. In early 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York introduced a resolution calling for a Green New Deal that would put the economy on a path to zero net greenhouse-gas emissions while investing in the “industry of the United States” and creating “millions of good, high-wage jobs,” though it was vague on details. Later that year, a plan from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, then a presidential candidate, said the government should spend $1.5 trillion over a decade to buy American-made clean-energy technology. The same day, Biden announced a climate plan that referred favorably to the Green New Deal, although it was not as focused on manufacturing and jobs.That such proposals migrated, in the span of less than a year, from the party’s left to its centrist nominee underscores how quickly Biden’s economic philosophy has been evolving. They are also somewhat controversial, even on the left, unlike the relief portion of his agenda. In part, that’s because these provisions would most likely increase the price of clean technologies, which can be imported more cheaply from abroad. “My view is, if you think climate change is the biggest challenge facing the country, you’d want to have the most efficient and cheapest infrastructure to deal with it,” Furman says. “You should want to make sure a lot of solar and wind energy is produced in the United States. You shouldn’t care nearly as much where panels and turbines are produced.”When mainstream economists question the idea of singling out particular businesses, sectors or industries, as a widely cited 1990 paper by the economist Anne O. Kruger did, they argue that government intervention is likely to prop up companies that can’t otherwise justify such investment or to pad the margins of those that can succeed on their own. Yet recent research — a study of government support for British manufacturers, for example, or a study of government support for Chinese industries like plastics and computers — has found that subsidies can make industries healthier or more productive even over the long term.“Manufacturing has an outsize contribution to overall innovation and productivity,” says Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard. He is part of a small group within the profession’s mainstream that clashed for decades with fellow economists by detailing the drawbacks of free trade and the benefits of industrial policy. A growing body of evidence on the harm done to workers by a trade agreement with China, which other economists played down at the time, has increasingly vindicated him. The idea of spending government funds to preserve or create domestic manufacturing jobs has a well-documented political appeal, especially among blue-collar workers, even as economists insisted that it was futile or self-defeating. But now, Rodrik says, even some economists are more open-minded: “Lo and behold, people start to do research on Chinese policy, and it turns out some of it is quite effective.” Brian Deese, Biden’s top economic aide, was previously Obama’s senior adviser on climate and energy policy.Credit…Getty ImagesAs a rising political star in the 1980s, Biden sometimes channeled the self-consciously centrist thinking that was then coming into vogue among Democrats like Gary Hart. He warned about the risks of micromanaging the economy and chided unions that defended the status quo. But even when he aligned with the new centrists — Biden and Hart shared a political strategist — Biden retained a distinctly blue-collar sensibility. He called for a “new era of American economic nationalism” in the speech that framed his 1988 presidential campaign. He derided fundamentalist beliefs in free trade and proposed using tariffs on imports to fund retraining for workers. He consistently backed pro-union legislation. “If you came into our waiting room in 1973 or 1978,” says Ted Kaufman, Biden’s longtime Senate chief of staff, “you’d see a group of people from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. on one side of the room and a group from the Chamber of Commerce on other side.”In the 2000s, as globalization coincided with significant job losses and the decline of industrial towns in the United States, Biden’s populist sympathies appeared to gradually supplant the centrist instincts that had led him to back — albeit without much passion — the major trade agreements of the Clinton era. “Everybody who was involved in business or government in the 1980s or 1990s has seen some of the promise of globalization come through, but a lot of the harm has been unexpectedly broader, sharper, deeper,” says Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a longtime Biden friend and ally. “He believes we need to change direction on trade.” That view now appears to be ascendant, if not yet the consensus, among the Democrats’ policymaking class. Indeed, one lingering divide within the party is between those who have undergone a similar evolution as Biden and those who have not; Biden’s economic advisers come from both camps.Gene Sperling exemplifies those who have, like Biden, moved left. As President Bill Clinton’s top economic adviser in the late ’90s, he shared Clinton’s view that free-trade deals would benefit the country if accompanied by worker training and a more generous safety net. After Republicans largely rejected such spending, Sperling and Clinton believed it was still worth expanding trade with China, as long as the deals included ways to protect against floods of cheap imports. But when it became clear in the 2000s that the rise in Chinese imports was producing “such devastating impacts,” as Sperling writes in a recent book, he changed his position.As Obama’s top White House economic adviser, Sperling began making the case in 2011 for directing support to manufacturers through government subsidies. In 2016, he encouraged Hillary Clinton to campaign in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-country trade deal that the Obama administration had spent years negotiating, later saying on television that Clinton wanted to “put T.P.P. in the rearview mirror” and prioritize “clear job-creating measures.” “I got a lot of [expletive] for that,” Sperling says, alluding to the reaction of his former White House colleagues. While Sperling has not joined the Biden administration, he has been a mentor to several senior economic aides who have.One of them, also in what might be called the more nationalist camp of advisers, is Brian Deese; he now fills the role that Sperling did for Obama, as the top economic aide in Biden’s White House. Deese got his start in Democratic policy circles as an assistant to Sperling in the early 2000s. As a member of Obama’s auto-industry task force in 2009, he was responsible for establishing a program that would help hundreds of suppliers threatened by the looming collapse of the American auto industry. “I got to see up front what the stakes were,” Deese says. “If you let go of this industrial company, it directly employs about 50,000 hourly employees. But you also have more than one million jobs and a bunch of spillover economic benefits at stake.” He helped persuade Obama to save Chrysler over the opposition of some of the president’s economists.When Deese became Obama’s senior adviser on climate and energy policy in the final years of the administration, it began to dawn on him that two of his interests were merging: government support for manufacturing, and forestalling the climate apocalypse. “Some of the biggest opportunities,” he says, “were at the intersection of strategic procurement, what some people would call straight-out industrial policy, and the work we needed to do as a country to scale markets for clean-energy innovation.” A number of Biden’s advisers have arrived at similar positions. Jennifer Granholm, who was the governor of Michigan during the auto bailout and who has close ties to both organized labor and manufacturers, is Biden’s pick for energy secretary. Katherine Tai, Biden’s choice for U.S. trade representative, helped negotiate the stricter worker protections in the revision of the North American Free Trade Agreement that passed Congress last year, a priority for labor. Stef Feldman and Jared Bernstein, two current White House officials who helped shape the campaign’s economic proposals, worked for Biden during his days as vice president, when he oversaw the implementation of Obama’s stimulus package and had close contact with unions. The other camp of Biden advisers, though, seems to be more sanguine about the benefits of globalization and more skeptical about indulging populist economic ideas. Wally Adeyemo, for example, who is Biden’s pick for deputy Treasury secretary, helped negotiate a provision in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and was defending the pact even as Sperling was panning it on TV in 2016. Adeyemo, who started in the Obama administration as an aide to Geithner at Treasury before rising to become a top White House official, made the rounds in Washington that year arguing the benefits of free trade and raising concerns about protectionism. He has appeared to shun the idea of the government investing directly in domestic industries: “It’s critical that the private sector play the leading role in deciding how to allocate capital,” he said at a forum in 2016. Still, Adeyemo has also worked for Elizabeth Warren and, colleagues say, has close relationships with figures on the left.One early answer to the question of where Biden will come down on these issues is his promise to tighten rules requiring the government to buy American-made goods. In January, he signed executive orders directing his administration to review the waivers that let agencies to do business with foreign suppliers and contractors. The most consequential of these loopholes, known as the trade-pact waiver, is one that allows federal agencies to essentially treat companies in dozens of countries as American suppliers if they have trade relations with the United States. When the U.S. government buys cars from Japan or washing machines from Mexico, for example, it is satisfying current federal Buy American requirements.Those who support revoking the waiver — which could create a backlash among many allies who see the move as a form of protectionism — are cheered by Biden’s initial action but worry that he might lose his nerve, at a moment when the government is about to spend trillions of dollars. “This is a fine first step: It lays out the right vision,” says Lori Wallach, a trade expert at the liberal group Public Citizen. “But it would be a huge policy problem and political liability to offshore a chunk of the Covid stimulus because of the Buy American trade-pact waiver.”Wally Adeyemo, Biden’s deputy Treasury secretary, was previously a top White House official.Credit…Getty ImagesThe fear that Biden might recoil from more activist policies dates back to the campaign. Last spring, when aides became concerned that Biden might get sticker shock from the price of the economic plans his advisers were floating, one of them had an idea: He reached out to the most recent Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, and asked her what she thought about spending a few trillion dollars to prop up the economy, end the health crisis and ignite a recovery. She answered promptly. “What I told the campaign,” Yellen recalled to me recently, “was this is something we can afford, and in a way, we can’t afford not to do it.” Biden was reassured. Yellen, a former economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the first woman to serve as either Fed chair or Treasury secretary, is in some respects a typical Biden appointee: acceptable to both the establishment and liberal wings of the party, admired for her competence and experience. Unlike many of her colleagues, however, she often inspires genuine enthusiasm across the ideological spectrum. Hedge-fund managers concerned about the overall lack of financial-market experience on Biden’s team were effusive in praising her to me. At the same, she also warms many hearts on the left, a rarity in a Treasury secretary, whose job is to oversee areas like tax policy, bank regulation, the sale of government debt and economic ties with other countries. “You had to have somebody in the Treasury role who could look the American people in the eye as an incredibly esteemed, gravitas-wielding macroeconomist,” says Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive nonprofit. She has also, Wong notes, “done a lot to try diversifying the economics profession.”Yellen may even be the rare technocrat with feminist-icon meme potential, in the tradition of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“Notorious R.B.G.”) and Elizabeth Warren (“Nevertheless, she persisted”). A few days after Yellen’s Senate confirmation hearing, a “Hamilton”-esque tribute by the rapper Dessa premiered on public radio; it has since been played online more than 200,000 times. (“She’s 5-foot-nothing, but hand to God/She can pop a collar, she can rock a power bob.”) The comparison with Warren is instructive. Just as Warren, from her perch atop a congressional panel overseeing the Wall Street bailout in 2008 and 2009, second-guessed the insiders who ran the banks, Yellen has made her reputation partly through dissenting from the groupthink of the financial establishment. A few years earlier, at the Fed, where she ran its West Coast regional bank, Yellen pointed out to colleagues that the housing boom looked increasingly like a mania. “One of the reasons she actually had a much better ability to see what was happening was that she was in San Francisco; she was an outsider; she was not in the Washington bubble,” says Dennis Kelleher, the chief executive of Better Markets, a Wall Street watchdog group. Warren appeared to recognize a fellow traveler when, in 2013, she led a group of senators who publicly urged Obama to elevate Yellen to the Fed chair over Lawrence Summers. She also backed Yellen’s appointment to Treasury last fall. In this way, Yellen has become the most visible edge of Warren’s personnel-based strategy of nudging the party leftward; she has quietly lobbied to place sympathetic policymakers in key administration positions, often with former Warren aides serving beneath them. (Neera Tanden, a former Hillary Clinton aide who is Biden’s pick for budget director, is also a sometime Warren ally; Yellen has hired a former Warren aide as a deputy chief of staff.) The efforts of politicians like Warren have been abetted by a network of increasingly vocal groups — including the Roosevelt Institute and the Revolving Door Project — clamoring for progressive nominees over more business-friendly choices.The way Yellen has used her bully pulpits over the years suggests that her priorities overlap with Warren’s, even if her views are not quite as populist. In one of her early speeches as Fed chair, a position Yellen held from 2014 to 2018, she dwelled on the topic of rising inequality and “whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history.” The speech prompted criticism from a prominent House Republican, who accused Yellen of “sticking your nose in places that you have no business.” But like many center-left economists, Yellen tends to emphasize the struggles of those near the bottom more than the excesses of the 1 percent. When I spoke with her in January, she riffed at length about policies like training that could help workers without a college degree, but she didn’t mention raising taxes on the wealthy, a major goal of progressives. (Yellen, who earned more than $7 million giving speeches to large banks and other businesses as a private citizen over the past two years, appeared during her confirmation process to embrace Biden’s proposal to raise taxes on investment income for those making more than $1 million.) Yellen has struck a similar stance — that of the reformer rather than the revolutionary — when it comes to regulating Wall Street. In 2017, she was in her third year as Fed chair, and Trump said he was considering reappointing her to a second four-year term. If she was intent on keeping the job, it might have suited her to muse publicly about a possible rollback of Obama-era financial reforms, which the Fed played a central role in implementing — and which Trump had derided. Yellen leaned mostly in the opposite direction instead, arguing in a speech that the reforms had made the financial system much safer. Still, Yellen has stopped short of championing certain progressive causes, for example resisting calls from the left to break up large banks. But the issue on which Yellen has arguably been most out of step with both the left and her new boss is globalization, particularly the questions of whether to subsidize the building of domestic factories or to let American firms outsource their manufacturing needs to workers abroad. At an event with the World Bank president in February 2020, Yellen, a self-proclaimed free-trader, worried that a populist backlash was threatening the benefits of globalization and said that “the growth of trade that we have seen over the last 50 years in development of global supply chains has been one of the most important factors boosting growth all around the world.” Biden has essentially called for slowing this 50-year trend, so it’s easy to imagine a rift opening between them that could deprive him of Yellen’s greatest asset as Treasury secretary — her ability to confer credibility on his main economic initiatives, both with financial markets and among wavering legislators.Even as she has risen in the world of government, Yellen has retained a distinctly academic sensibility. She speaks in the language of medians and distributions and will refer to investment returns that are “far in excess of” zero (as opposed to, you know, “high”). She is not a professorial prude, however, oblivious to shifting realities. One topic that consumed her days as the chief economist in the Clinton White House was the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 global agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. At the time, many economists were concerned about how much it would cost to lower emissions as quickly as environmentalists recommended and were skeptical about committing to formal targets. Clinton’s own Treasury Department was initially resistant. But Vice President Al Gore and Clinton himself were enthusiastic about the agreement, and Yellen was eager to make the economic case. “I definitely saw the need to do it,” she told me. “There were debates about what was the right pace.”When I asked Yellen whether she had concerns about Biden’s Buy American agenda, which didn’t seem to square with her opinions about international trade, she emphasized views that were more in line with the president’s. “The trend toward globalization has resulted in losses for workers, and the time has come to really remedy that — the impact has been simply so negative on such a large share of the population,” she said. “The focus needs to be on inequality and low-wage workers and improving their lot.”And what about the sort of industrial policy that would entail large government backing for, say, making electric-car batteries domestically? “One would want to look at the specifics of any particular proposal,” she said, “but generally, I think there is a case for it.” Katherine Tai, Biden’s choice for U.S. trade representative, helped negotiate stricter worker protections in the revision of NAFTA. Credit…Getty ImagesIn the days after the Democrats clinched control of Congress by winning two Senate seats in Georgia, Representative Peter DeFazio of Oregon, the powerful chairman of the transportation committee, exchanged several texts with Steve Ricchetti, who would soon be a top Biden White House aide. Biden’s team had spent the transition gaming out legislation, but the exercises had an air of unreality as long as Republicans appeared likely to control the Senate. Now the plans were suddenly viable, and DeFazio wanted to gauge the timetable that Ricchetti and his colleagues had in mind. “I originally said, ‘I can be ready to go by March or April,’” DeFazio recalls. “He said, ‘We want to go faster than that.’”DeFazio is one of a small handful of lawmakers who will have an outsize influence on what Biden is able to accomplish economically. To call him a supporter of far-reaching economic legislation would be an understatement. He was one of the few members of Congress who voted against Obama’s stimulus package because he found it too timid, and last year he helped shepherd a $1.5 trillion bill through the House that included large pots of money for rail, broadband internet, zero-emission buses and charging stations. (It did not pass the Senate.) As big as that price tag was, he was not averse to increasing it. When I pointed out that Biden’s campaign proposal appeared to call for spending more on equipment like electric vehicles, he quickly proclaimed himself open to the amount. But powerful allies invariably have their own priorities too, and DeFazio is no exception. He rhapsodized to me about new bridges and tunnels and talked up the benefits of pedestrian-friendly streets. Then he added this pitch: For less than $10 billion, the U.S. Postal Service could convert its delivery vehicles to an all-electric fleet. “The fleet is decrepit, dirty, falling apart,” he said. “It’s over 30 years old.” With Democrats in control of Congress, the problem for Biden may not be passing some version of his economic agenda so much as sorting through the sheer volume of asks suddenly pouring in from hundreds of members and industry groups. Representative Ro Khanna of California, for one, has introduced a bill that would spend $100 billion over five years to fund research in industries like quantum computing, robotics and biotechnology and to situate tech hubs in areas hit hard by deindustrialization. Most of “the top 20 universities in the world are American — places like the University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, which are dispersed across the country,” says Khanna, who represents parts of Silicon Valley and was a co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. “There’s no reason we can’t see innovation and next-generation technology in these communities.” Wind-turbine manufacturers, whose supply chain goes through Europe, Asia and Canada, are seeking tax breaks for domestic production. So is the solar industry, which currently imports most of its assembled panels from Malaysia and Vietnam. The semiconductor industry has lobbied for tens of billions of dollars to upgrade production facilities and build new ones, on the grounds that semiconductors are a foundational technology — sort of like mechanically engineered stem cells that power everything from 5G mobile networks to autonomous vehicles and the internet of things. John Neuffer, the chief executive of the Semiconductor Industry Association, says supply shortages during the pandemic have focused minds in Washington on the importance of domestic production. Many of these proposals — and dozens more, like money to manufacture medical equipment, to buy e-scooters and other “micromobility” vehicles, to build “smart” pavement that can digitally connect cars to roads — made cameo appearances in Biden’s campaign, and the administration has expressed interest in pursuing them.Deese, who has been overseeing Biden’s economic plans, told me that the priority when it comes to industrial support will be those areas where subsidies can encourage companies to spend money on factories and technology in the near term that they might not otherwise spend for years — “pulling forward” their investments, as he puts it.Rodrik, the Harvard economist who is sympathetic to industrial policy, says the practice should really be seen as a way to ensure that American companies continue to innovate, more than as a means of vastly increasing employment. But Deese argues that the transition to a cleaner economy — installing solar panels, plugging abandoned oil wells, retrofitting buildings to make them more efficient — will generate lots of new jobs, even if manufacturing equipment doesn’t produce as many as desired. And he adds that we shouldn’t underestimate the job-creation potential of new equipment either.As a rough model, he points to a Senate bill, based partly on the U.A.W. electric-vehicles paper, that would spend some $400 billion over a decade on cash rebates for consumers who buy U.S.-assembled electric or hybrid cars. The bill, proposed by Senators Chuck Schumer of New York and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, would also spend close to $50 billion funding the construction of charging stations nationally and provide nearly $20 billion in subsidies to help manufacturers build new plants and upgrade existing ones. “It’s the basic theory of the case,” Deese says. “Significant consumer incentives coupled with retooling for factories and a build-out of infrastructure.” The deal for manufacturers would become still more compelling with regulations mandating lower vehicle emissions and a commitment by the government to buy clean energy and clean equipment — a process Biden initiated with an executive order he signed in late January. Or, put another way, the Postal Service may soon be in luck. “It’s the largest fleet operator in the federal government,” DeFazio says. “It would be a huge boost to get production going on made in America, from the little delivery vans up through the semis.”Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s energy secretary, was the governor of Michigan during the auto bailout.Credit…Getty ImagesEven as Biden emphasized “unity” at the very start of his presidency — he used the word eight times in his inaugural speech, precisely seven times more than his predecessor on the same occasion — he has been prepared all along to pass his agenda on a party-line vote if necessary. David Kamin, now a White House aide, spent time during the campaign figuring out how to enact key economic plans through a maneuver known as reconciliation, in the event that Democrats came to control the Senate. This allows spending- and tax-related legislation to pass the chamber with a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. (It is a quirk of Senate nomenclature that “reconciliation” expressly does not require a party to make nice with the other.) Still, as Biden knows well from his decades as a senator, it would almost certainly behoove him to expand the coalition beyond his partisan ranks. Given the party’s threadbare margin — which literally comes down to Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote — it’s far from assured that he can secure his agenda with only Democratic support. It’s not hard to spot the possible defections. On the left, Biden may face grumbling from environmentalists who favor a more aggressive timetable for reducing emissions, which would mean importing a large supply of solar panels and car batteries from abroad, not the more pedestrian pace that would allow American manufacturers to scale up. “It’s a very real tension,” says Jason Walsh, a former Obama Energy Department official who now leads the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of unions and environmental groups that advocates a low-carbon economy that also increases the number of union workers. “You’re describing my job.” Even with electric cars, the problem is clear: Schumer’s bill provides the bulk of its incentives for vehicles assembled in the United States, even if the battery — the most valuable component — comes from abroad. That’s partly out of necessity, because it could take years to build up the capacity of domestic battery plants. A growing number of progressives have also been focusing, in recent years, on reining in corporate giants like Google and Amazon; their position is that these companies abuse their market power to kneecap competitors and take advantage of consumers. Some of the activists and politicians involved in this effort are skeptical that industrial policy will amount to much more than funneling taxpayer money to wealthy corporations. “I worry about it,” says Matt Stoller, the research director for the American Economic Liberties Project, an antimonopoly advocacy group. “I hope when they put this together, they’re not just giving money to monopolists.” Stoller concedes that industrial policy can be effective, but only if designed and implemented correctly. He cites the successful creation of coronavirus vaccines as an example. In that case, the pharmaceutical companies that produced a viable vaccine stood to earn far bigger profits than those that didn’t. “The government didn’t just write checks to Pfizer,” Stoller says. “It told seven companies: ‘Go develop a vaccine — it’s a competition. Compete.’”And then there is the near-inevitability that one or two senators will use their decisive vote to dictate the terms of a bill — most likely when a conservative Democrat balks at the cost. By contrast, says Rahm Emanuel, who served as Obama’s first chief of staff, the possibility of passing legislation with Republican votes shifts power back into Biden’s hands. “If they think you’re assembling something bigger,” Emanuel says, “you slightly dilute their leverage.”There is a pool of Republicans who, at least in theory, may support investments in emissions-reducing technologies. Several Republican senators hail from states that would directly benefit, including Kansas and the Dakotas, located in one of the largest wind corridors in North America. And as fossil-fuel companies continue losing wealth and stature, their influence over the Republican Party may recede. For the moment, it’s much easier to imagine Republicans backing industrial policy that steers clear of climate change. Several Republicans have partnered with Democrats on legislation that promotes other fields, like robotics and biotechnology, including Khanna’s research-and-development funding bill. Last year, Schumer, now the Democratic majority leader, worked with Republicans to add a measure to the annual military spending bill in order to create multiple programs that will invest in advanced semiconductors. The amendment passed 96 to 4, though the government has yet to allocate money to the new programs, which would cost tens of billions to fund fully. “The idea of keeping America No.1 in cutting-edge technology does not have a partisan division,” Schumer told me. “It’s sort of like the old days on defense.”Neera Tanden, Biden’s budget director, was previously a Hillary Clinton aide.Credit…Getty ImagesThe analogy is even more apt than he suggests. When Republicans think about American industry, they tend to invoke a single geopolitical adversary: China. “The emergence of China as an economic power, as well as a military and geopolitical power, is perhaps the greatest issue we face in this decade and the next one,” Senator Mitt Romney of Utah told me in late January. “We innovate; they steal innovation. We play by the trade rules; they play by their own rules.”A handful of other Republican senators, including Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida, have taken similar positions. At times they have made statements and put out reports that, with only minor alterations, could have been issued by an industrial union. Two years ago, the Senate’s small-business committee, which Rubio led, produced a report arguing that manufacturing jobs are better-paying and more stable than the service-sector alternatives for typical workers, and that manufacturing brings greater economic benefits to communities. Romney and other Republican hawks on China tend to tell a story about American passivity. There is data that supports their view. From 2001 to 2007, the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs, which had hovered near 18 million for more than a generation, dropped by more than three million. According to a 2012 paper titled “The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment,” the plunge was most likely a result of the U.S. decision to permanently normalize trade relations with China in 2000. This allowed the Chinese to ramp up production of export goods without fear that they would be abruptly locked out of American markets.Many economists argue that the so-called China shock was a historical anomaly, driven by the rapid industrialization of a very large and very poor country, and that it was mostly over by the early part of the last decade. “Since then, one also sees that trade growth slowed down considerably, at the same time as in the U.S. the loss of manufacturing jobs basically ended,” says David Dorn, an economist at the University of Zurich. But that doesn’t mean Chinese companies can’t continue to seize market share from their American rivals. A 2012 book by the Harvard business professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih made the case that when it comes to manufacturing, strength yields strength, and weakness yields weakness. They showed that the offshoring to Asia of the consumer-electronics industry, which executives believed was becoming too commoditized to be worth keeping entirely in the U.S., had weakened America’s so-called industrial commons — the ecosystem of research, engineering and manufacturing know-how that creates innovative products. In effect, getting out of the business of making stereos and TVs in the 1960s and ’70s made it harder for American manufacturers to produce more sophisticated technologies like advanced batteries. The Chinese, of course, took the other side of the bet — gaining know-how by starting with simpler products, which then led to the making of more sophisticated ones. That’s partly why the China shock started with exports of products like textiles and steel and eventually included smartphones. Rubio has noted with alarm that the Chinese government is now poised for far more ambitious conquests — robotics, electric vehicles, biotech — through a program called Made in China 2025. In his committee’s report, Rubio referred to this as “a foreign actor’s plan for the domination of critical commercial sectors at the expense of American industries.” A RAND study describes the Chinese effort to compete with companies like Boeing by partnering with suppliers to develop rival products that Chinese customers are then required to buy. “They have the ability to pressure Chinese airlines, which are state-owned, into buying the COMAC product,” Shih says, referring to the state-owned airplane maker.Biden has raised similar concerns about China’s industrial ambitions, while Yellen, at her confirmation hearing, called out China’s “illegal subsidies to corporations,” among other practices. And yet the response favored by Biden and even some Republicans is not so different from the subsidies that Yellen denounced. China is effectively forcing other countries to adopt some of its own industrial policies, because a free market in which only one side plays by the rules isn’t so much a market as a sucker’s game. “In a world of state competition for valuable industries, a domestic policy of neutrality is itself a selection of priority,” Rubio’s report concluded.There is good reason to doubt whether these bipartisan concerns will result in cooperation on actual policy. It may be revealing that in my correspondence with Rubio’s office, his aides showed no interest in commenting on the substantial overlap between Biden’s extensive manufacturing agenda and their boss’s.Still, after decades of free-market orthodoxy in which protectionism became taboo among both parties’ elites, it is the rise of China, above all else, that is bringing nationalistic management of the economy back into the political mainstream. “Twenty years ago, we would have had a huge ideological fight that this was ‘industrial policy,’” Chris Coons told me, referring to Biden’s economic agenda. “Today our No. 1 competitor globally is — look up ‘industrial policy’ in the dictionary: It’s a unitary, state-controlled economy.”Noam Scheiber is a Chicago-based reporter for The Times who covers labor and the workplace. He is the author of “The Escape Artists,” a book about Barack Obama’s first term.Headshots: Mark Wilson/Getty Images; Alex Wong/Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Jim Watson-Pool/Getty ImagesAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Biden Appointments Signal a Trade Approach That Hews to the Left

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential InaugurationHighlightsPhotos From the DayBiden’s SpeechWho Attended?Biden’s Long RoadAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBiden Appointments Signal a Trade Approach That Hews to the LeftMany appointees who will fill the ranks of the Office of the United States Trade Representative have close ties to congressional Democrats and a focus on worker rights and enforcing trade deals.Several new appointees have worked closely with Katherine Tai, the Biden administration’s nominee for United States trade representative.Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York TimesFeb. 8, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Biden administration announced a number of personnel appointments on Monday for the Office of the United States Trade Representative with close ties to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, in a signal that the new administration is likely to pursue what it calls a “worker focused” approach to trade.Biden officials have said they want to seek a trade policy that benefits economically disadvantaged Americans. But it has remained unclear whether the administration would cater more to unions and the left wing of the party, which emphasize strong labor rights and trade rules that protect American workers, or to the moderate Democrats, who typically prefer lower trade barriers and a freer approach to trade.The personnel appointments, which were first viewed by The New York Times, are one of the strongest signs yet that the Biden administration is seeking to take a different approach to trade policy than past Democratic administrations, which focused more on promoting American exports and geopolitical influence through striking trade deals. Mr. Biden, by contrast, has said he does not intend to begin negotiating new free-trade agreements until his administration has helped to subdue the coronavirus pandemic and made major investments in American industry and infrastructure.Instead, his trade staff may focus more on ensuring that American trade rules are adequately enforced and that they promote rather than impede other parts of Mr. Biden’s agenda, including fighting climate change and encouraging domestic investment. The picks include several key staff members to congressional Democrats who helped to revise and pass the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. That suggests that a major task in the coming months will be ensuring that the North American Free Trade Agreement’s successor, which raises labor standards and requires new unions at Mexican factories, is fully put in place and enforced.The team will also have to decide what to do about the legacy of higher trade barriers and large tariffs on a variety of foreign products, including goods from China, left behind by President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Biden has said his administration is still reviewing the effects of those tariffs and other trade policies issued by Mr. Trump. But on Feb. 1, Mr. Biden reinstated tariffs on aluminum from the United Arab Emirates, a move that pleased unions but disappointed industries that have argued that the tariffs raise costs.Several of the appointees worked closely with Katherine Tai, the Biden administration’s nominee for United States trade representative, on revising the new North American trade deal, which was negotiated by the Trump administration and replaced NAFTA last year.That includes Nora Todd, a former adviser for Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who will serve as chief of staff, and Greta Peisch, a former counsel to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who has been appointed general counsel. Shantanu Tata, a former adviser to Representative Suzan DelBene of Washington, will serve as executive secretary and adviser, and Samuel Negatu, a former legislative director for Representative Jimmy Gomez of California, will serve as director of congressional affairs.Other appointments include Sirat K. Attapit, who previously worked for Attorney General Xavier Becerra of California, as assistant U.S. trade representative for intergovernmental affairs, and Adam Hodge, a former Obama administration official, as assistant trade representative for media and public affairs. Jan Beukelman, a staff member for Senator Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, will serve as assistant U.S. trade representative for congressional affairs, while Jamila Thompson, who served on the staff of Representative John Lewis of Georgia, will be senior adviser.The administration also named Brad Setser, an Obama administration Treasury official, as counselor to the U.S. trade representative. Mr. Setser has written extensively on the role of both currency and taxation in trade, suggesting that the new administration could take a more expansive view on changing tax and currency policy to boost American exports and benefit workers.Mark Wu, a professor and vice dean at Harvard Law School with an extensive background in intellectual property, digital trade issues and China, was appointed as senior adviser to the U.S. trade representative. In the position, he could help the office create new trade rules to govern the digital economy and constrain trade practices from China that the United States deems unfair.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Set to Become W.T.O.’s First Female Leader

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNgozi Okonjo-Iweala Set to Become W.T.O.’s First Female LeaderHer path was cleared after Yoo Myung-hee, the South Korean trade minister, announced she was withdrawing from consideration to head the World Trade Organization.Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of Nigeria is poised to become the World Trade Organization’s first Black and first female leader.Credit…Martial Trezzini/EPA, via ShutterstockFeb. 5, 2021Updated 6:08 p.m. ETNgozi Okonjo-Iweala, an economist and former finance minister of Nigeria, appears set to become the next director general of the World Trade Organization, with the Biden administration announcing its “strong support” for her candidacy on Friday. She would be the first woman and the first African national to lead the organization.Yoo Myung-hee, the South Korean trade minister who was also a finalist for the role, said on Friday that she planned to withdraw herself from consideration, leaving the path open for Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, The Associated Press reported.The two women were announced as finalists for the trade organization’s top job in October, whittled down from a group of eight candidates over several months, with Dr. Okonjo-Iweala emerging as the person with the broadest support, the W.T.O. said at the time.But because the organization, a trade-regulation body that has existed in its current form since 1995, requires that none of its 164 members oppose the choice, President Donald J. Trump, who supported Ms. Yoo and said he would not back the candidacy of Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, was able to hold up the process, according to the W.T.O. statement.In a statement on Friday, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said Dr. Okonjo-Iweala “is widely respected for her effective leadership and has proven experience managing a large international organization with a diverse membership.”“It is particularly important to underscore that two highly qualified women made it to the final round of consideration for the position of W.T.O. director general — the first time that any woman has made it to this stage in the history of the institution,” the statement said.The New WashingtonLive UpdatesUpdated Feb. 5, 2021, 6:53 p.m. ETA Lincoln Project co-founder resigns after allegations that a former colleague sent unsolicited, lurid messages to young men.Biden won’t restore the American Bar Association’s role in vetting judges.Pence accepts two fellowships from conservative groups — and starts a podcast.Dr. Okonjo-Iweala served twice as Nigeria’s finance minister, spent 25 years at the World Bank as a development economist and now is the chairwoman of the Center for Global Development, according to the center’s website.Molly Toomey, a spokeswoman for Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, said on Friday that she “congratulates Yoo Myung-hee on her long campaign and welcomes South Korea’s commitment to rebuilding and enhancing multilateralism.”“Dr. Okonjo-Iweala is eager to focus on the many needed reforms at the W.T.O.,” Ms. Toomey said. “She is humbled by the support she has received from W.T.O. members and of champions in Nigeria and other parts of the world.”The search for someone to fill the top job started after the former director general, Roberto Azevêdo of Brazil, announced last May that he would be leaving the job a year early, citing personal reasons and a desire to give W.T.O. members a head start on choosing his replacement. He left on Aug. 31 without a successor, The A.P. reported.If approved, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala would enter an organization that has been crippled by actions of the Trump administration, which had refused to approve nominees to fill vacancies on a panel charged with resolving trade disputes.Mr. Trump defied the organization’s principles by starting a trade war with China. He also threatened to pull the United States out of the trade body, which he repeatedly accused of unfair treatment of the United States.Global trade has been severely affected by the coronavirus pandemic, and Ms. Toomey said that Dr. Okonjo-Iweala was eager to conclude the selection process so the trade group could “turn its focus to the Covid-19 pandemic and global economic recovery.”In its statement, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said the Biden administration “looks forward to working with a new W.T.O. director general to find paths forward to achieve necessary substantive and procedural reform of the W.T.O.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Biden Reinstates Aluminum Tariffs, Reversing Trump's Decision

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBiden Reinstates Aluminum Tariffs in One of His First Trade MovesThe move suggests the Biden administration may be inclined to maintain President Trump’s hefty tariffs, a decision that will please unions but disappoint manufacturers.President Biden at the Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry in Manitowic, Wis., in September. The tariffs on foreign aluminum, which were imposed by the Trump administration, aim to protect American producers.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFeb. 2, 2021Updated 5:36 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — President Biden reinstated tariffs on aluminum exported from the United Arab Emirates on Monday evening, reversing President Donald J. Trump’s decision to lift them on his last day in office.The decision is one of Mr. Biden’s first significant moves on trade and suggests that his administration may be inclined to maintain the type of hefty tariffs Mr. Trump imposed on foreign metals to protect domestic industry. That position found favor with unions, but disappointed industries and businesses that have argued the tariffs raise costs.Mr. Biden and his deputies have so far declined to say whether they would keep or remove the spate of tariffs Mr. Trump imposed on a range of products, from steel and aluminum to Chinese imports. Instead, his top officials have said that the administration plans to carry out a comprehensive review of the tariffs’ economic effects before making any decisions.The tariffs on foreign aluminum are designed to protect American producers, which have struggled to compete with low-priced foreign products and been forced to shut down many domestic smelters.In March 2018, Mr. Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports from a variety of countries, including the United Arab Emirates, saying their metal exports had put American aluminum producers out of business and therefore threatened national security. He subsequently exempted aluminum from Argentina, Australia, Canada and Mexico and, just hours before his term ended, lifted the aluminum tariffs on the UAE.Mr. Trump’s decision appeared to be motivated more by political than economic considerations. The decision to lift tariffs on the United Arab Emirates was led by White House officials, including Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had just carried out extensive negotiations to normalize relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. It was made without the support of many specialists in the Commerce Department and the United States Trade Representative, according to a person familiar with the deliberations.Before coming into office, Mr. Trump also pursued various real estate projects in the United Arab Emirates, including hotels and golf courses. The Trump International Golf Club in the city of Dubai opened for business in early 2017, soon after Mr. Trump became president.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in a briefing on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s decision to lift the tariffs on the U.A.E. “at the last hour was made clearly, in our view, on the basis of foreign policy issues unrelated to trade.” She said the Biden administration was still reviewing other tariffs to determine what steps need to be taken.In lifting the tariffs, Mr. Trump said the United States and the U.A.E., a major exporter of aluminum, had an important security relationship, and had carried out talks to find another way to address the threat to American national security. The Trump administration replaced the tariffs on aluminum with a quota, which would limit export surges from the country.But in a proclamation issued late Monday evening, Mr. Biden said the concerns that had fueled the tariffs in the first place still existed. “In my view, the available evidence indicates that imports from the U.A.E. may still displace domestic production, and thereby threaten to impair our national security,” Mr. Biden said.Tom Conway, the president of the United Steelworkers International union, applauded the move, saying that Mr. Trump’s actions had constituted “a blatant attack on American workers.”“Trump’s plan to lift tariffs on imports from the United Arab Emirates would undermine the effectiveness of the program and essentially exempt the vast majority of aluminum imports,” Mr. Conway said.The United Arab Emirates is one of the world’s largest aluminum exporters, the result of an abundant petroleum supply that keeps the cost of the energy-intensive aluminum production process low. Between January and November of last year, it exported more aluminum to the United States than any other country except Canada.American aluminum producers have struggled to compete with a surge in production from state-funded factories in countries like China, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as growing aluminum production in countries with a lower cost of energy, like Canada. Because of various trade curbs, the United States imports a limited amount of aluminum directly from China, but China’s massive production still pushes down metal prices worldwide, making it harder for American businesses to compete.The United States went from being the world’s top producer of aluminum two decades ago to to being surpassed by China, Russia, the U.A.E., Canada and other countries. It produced 741,000 metric tons of primary aluminum in 2017, the lowest level since 1951 and just 1.2 percent of the global supply.But the tariffs have sparked an outcry from downstream American industries that use steel and aluminum to make products like cars, boats, recreational vehicles and cans. These producers say the tariffs have increased their costs, narrowing their profit margins and making it more difficult for their products to compete on the global market.Some critics have also denounced the national security rationale for the tariffs, pointing out that the bulk of American aluminum imports come from Canada, a close military ally.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    As Senate Weighs Biden’s Commerce Pick, Here’s What to Watch

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The New WashingtonliveLatest UpdatesMilitary Ban on Transgender People LiftedBiden’s CabinetPandemic ResponseAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAs Senate Weighs Biden’s Commerce Pick, Here’s What to WatchA Senate committee will question Gina M. Raimondo, President Biden’s pick for commerce secretary, at a hearing Tuesday morning.Governor Gina M. Raimondo is the Biden administration’s pick to lead the Commerce Department.Credit…Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesJan. 26, 2021Updated 7:34 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Commerce Department has taken on new importance in recent years, with wide-ranging authority over issues as broad as technology exports and climate change. On Tuesday, President Biden’s nominee to run the sprawling agency, Gina M. Raimondo, will appear before the Senate Commerce Committee for a confirmation hearing. Ms. Raimondo, the current governor of Rhode Island, is a moderate Democrat and former venture capitalist.Here are five things to watch for as the hearing gets underway at 10 a.m.Countering China’s growing technological reachSenators of both parties are likely to question Ms. Raimondo on how she plans to use the Commerce Department’s powers to counter China’s growing mastery of cutting-edge and sensitive technologies, like advanced telecommunications and artificial intelligence.The Trump administration made heavy use of the department’s authorities to crack down on Chinese technology firms, turning often to the so-called entity list, which allows the United States to block companies from selling American products and technology to certain foreign firms without first obtaining a license. Dozens of companies have been added to the Commerce Department’s list, including telecom giants like Huawei and ZTE, which many American lawmakers see as threats to national security.“You can be reasonably confident that the members will demand a tough line” on China, said William Reinsch, a trade expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who was a high-level commerce official during the Clinton administration.The Commerce Department was also given responsibility for outlining President Donald J. Trump’s U.S. ban on the Chinese-owned social media apps TikTok and WeChat — actions that were subsequently halted by a court order — and for studying bans against other Chinese apps. Mr. Biden has said he sees TikTok’s access to American data as a “matter of genuine concern,” but it’s unclear how the new administration will address these issues.But the Commerce Department has other capabilities that some tech experts say were underutilized in the Trump administration, like the role it plays in setting global technology standards that private firms must operated under. China has taken an increasingly active role in global standards-setting bodies in recent years, helping to ensure adoption of technologies that are made in China, Mr. Reinsch said, and senators may press Ms. Raimondo on the issue.Jump-starting the economic recoveryMr. Biden has emphasized Ms. Raimondo’s role in helping to promote small businesses while serving as the governor of Rhode Island — both before and during the pandemic.As commerce secretary, she would wield certain authorities that could help struggling businesses and advance the Biden administration’s goals of building up domestic industry and revitalizing American research and development.That includes economic development programs and manufacturing partnerships that the Commerce Department offers to small and midsize enterprises, as well as its core mission of promoting American exports.The department could also play a bigger role in expanding high-speed internet access for rural and low-income communities, a particularly critical issue as the pandemic has forced much commerce and schooling online. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency within the Commerce Department, leads the government’s efforts on broadband access.The New Washington More

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    U.S. Bans All Cotton and Tomatoes From Xinjiang Region of China

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyU.S. Bans All Cotton and Tomatoes From Xinjiang Region of ChinaThe sweeping ban, which was based on concerns about forced labor in the region, could compel companies to reorganize their multinational supply chains.Cotton fields in the Xinjiang region of China. A new ban on imports of cotton from the area could have sweeping implications for apparel makers.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJan. 13, 2021Updated 6:32 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Wednesday announced a ban on imports of cotton and tomatoes from the Xinjiang area of China, as well as all products made with those materials, citing human rights violations and the widespread use of forced labor in the region.The measure could have sweeping implications for makers of apparel and food products, many of whom have sought to distance themselves from atrocities in Xinjiang but have struggled to ensure their supply chains are free of all raw materials from the region. The area is a major source of cotton, coal, chemicals, sugar, tomatoes and polysilicon, a component in solar panels, that are then fed into factories around China and the world.The ban allows customs officials to stop imports that they suspect are made with raw materials from Xinjiang, regardless of whether they travel into the United States directly from China or through another country.China has carried out a vast crackdown on predominantly Muslim minority groups in the far west Xinjiang region, including detaining a million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs and other groups in camps and closely surveilling the rest of the population, human rights groups say.Forced labor also appears to be widespread in the region. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection said an investigation found numerous indicators of forced labor in Xinjiang, including debt bondage, restriction of movement, withheld wages, and abusive living and working conditions. The Chinese government denies the existence of forced labor in Xinjiang, saying all arrangements are voluntary.Scott Nova, the executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, a labor rights group, called the ban “a high-decibel wake-up call to any apparel brand that continues to deny the prevalence and problem of forced-labor-produced cotton” in the region.“This ban will redefine how the apparel industry — from Amazon to Nike to Zara — sources its materials and labor,” Mr. Nova said. “Any global apparel brand that is not either out of Xinjiang already or plotting a very swift exit is courting legal and reputational disaster.”The Workers Rights Consortium estimates that American brands and retailers import more than 1.5 billion garments that use Xinjiang materials every year, representing more than $20 billion in retail sales. China is also the world’s largest tomato producer, with Xinjiang accounting for most of that production, the group says.Independent researchers and media reports have linked dozens of the world’s most prominent multinational companies to workers or products from Xinjiang, including Apple, Nike, Kraft Heinz and Campbell Soup. Campbell said it no longer sources products from the Xinjiang region.Some textile and apparel companies that used cotton or yarn from Xinjiang have announced that they are severing ties, including Patagonia, Marks and Spencer and H&M. But many firms have found it difficult to trace the origins of all the products used by their Chinese suppliers, especially given the lack of access for independent auditors to facilities in Xinjiang.The order will “send a crystal-clear message to the trade community: know your supply chains,” said Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Importers are required to ensure that their own supply chains are free from forced labor, he added. “It’s the law.”The Trump administration has added increasingly restrictive measures on Xinjiang, including placing sanctions on dozens of companies and individuals over alleged human rights violations.In December, customs officials announced a ban on cotton products made by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, an economic and paramilitary group that produces much of the region’s cotton. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has already detained 43 shipments valued at more than $2 million under that ban, officials said Wednesday.Congress is also considering sweeping legislation that would block imports from Xinjiang, unless companies are able to prove that supply chains that run through the region are free of forced labor.While the United States has taken the most forceful action on this front, both Canada and Britain introduced rules this week to limit goods linked to Xinjiang from entering their countries.Despite growing concerns over Chinese practices in the region, exports from Xinjiang to the United States and Europe grew significantly from 2019 to 2020, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.But trade experts say the new measures will raise questions about whether customs officials are equipped to fully enforce such a wide ban, which will require tracing Xinjiang materials through supply chains around the world.A report published in October by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that customs suffered from staff shortages and other issues despite a new division and resources devoted to blocking goods made with forced labor.In a call with reporters on Wednesday, Brenda Smith, the executive assistant commissioner at Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Trade, said it was “a challenge to be able to link what we see arriving in a port of entry back to the raw materials produced in Xinjiang.” The department is applying new tracking methods to uncover products made with forced labor, she said.The department is increasingly making use of new technologies, like pollen analysis, to try to identify cotton and other materials from Xinjiang in foreign products, officials said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Chinese Solar Companies Tied to Use of Forced Labor

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyChinese Solar Companies Tied to Use of Forced LaborA new report shows some of the world’s biggest solar companies work with the Chinese government to absorb workers from Xinjiang, programs that are often seen as a red flag for forced labor.Solar panels in Clovis, Calif. Together, the solar companies named in the report supply most of the raw materials for solar panels on rooftops and utility energy projects in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesAna Swanson and Jan. 8, 2021, 1:47 p.m. ETIn a flat, arid expanse of China’s far west Xinjiang region, a solar technology company welcomed laborers from a rural area 650 miles away, preparing to put them to work at GCL-Poly, the world’s second-largest maker of polysilicon.The workers, members of the region’s Uighur minority, attended a class in etiquette as they prepared for their new lives in the solar industry, which prides itself as a model of clean, responsible growth. GCL-Poly promoted the housing and training it offered its new recruits in photographs and statements to the local news media.But researchers and human rights experts say those positive images may conceal a more troubling reality — the persecution of one of China’s most vulnerable ethnic groups. According to a report by the consultancy Horizon Advisory, Xinjiang’s rising solar energy technology sector is connected to a broad program of assigned labor in China, including methods that fit well-documented patterns of forced labor.Major solar companies including GCL-Poly, East Hope Group, Daqo New Energy, Xinte Energy and Jinko Solar are named in the report as bearing signs of using some forced labor, according to Horizon Advisory, which specializes in Chinese-language research. Though many details remain unclear, those signs include accepting workers transferred with the help of the Chinese government from certain parts of Xinjiang, and having laborers undergo “military-style” training that may be aimed at instilling loyalty to China and the Communist Party.The Chinese government disputes the presence of any forced labor in its supply chains, arguing that employment is voluntary. The companies named in the report either did not respond to requests for comment or denied any role in forced labor.In a statement, a representative for the Chinese Embassy in Washington called forced labor in Xinjiang “a rumor created by a few anti-China media and organizations,” adding that all workers in Xinjiang enter into contracts in accordance with Chinese labor law. “There is no such thing as ‘forced labor,’” the representative said.The report adds to a growing list of companies that have been accused of relying on coerced labor from Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in China, either in their own factories or those of their suppliers.The United States and other governments have become increasingly vocal about forced labor in Xinjiang, including naming and shaming major corporations that operate in the region. The Trump administration has imposed sanctions on dozens of companies and individuals for their role in Xinjiang, including banning some exports from the region, which is also a major producer of cotton. On Dec. 2, it banned imports made with cotton produced by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary group that American officials say uses forced labor.Congress is also considering sweeping legislation that would ban all products with materials from Xinjiang unless companies certify that the goods are made without forced labor.John Ullyot, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that China’s campaign of repression in Xinjiang involved “state-sponsored forced labor” and that the United States would “not be complicit in modern day slavery.”“The administration has taken unprecedented actions to prevent China from profiting off of its horrific human rights abuses,” he said.Together, the solar companies named in the report supply more than a third of the world’s polysilicon, which is refined from rock and turned into the solar panels that end up on rooftops and utility energy projects, including those in the United States and Europe.Government announcements and news reports indicate that solar companies often take in assigned workers in batches of dozens or fewer, suggesting that the transfers are a small part of their overall work force. Still, the assertions from Horizon Advisory imply that much of the global solar supply chain may be tainted by an association with forced labor. Such charges could hurt its progressive image and risk product bans from Washington.GCL-Poly, Daqo New Energy, Xinte Energy and East Hope Group did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Ian McCaleb, a spokesman for Jinko Solar, said the company “strongly condemns the use of forced labor, and does not engage in it in its hiring practices or workplace operations.” He said that it had reviewed the claims in the Horizon report and “found that they do not demonstrate forced labor in our facilities.”Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 7, 2021, 12:58 p.m. ETElon Musk has become the world’s richest person, as Tesla’s stock rallies.Simon & Schuster drops Senator Hawley’s book.Daimler responds: ‘We depend on a reliable and stable political framework.’China carries out a vast program of detention and surveillance of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities in Xinjiang. Up to a million or more minorities may have been detained in indoctrination camps and other sites where they are forced to renounce religious bonds, and risk torture, assault and psychological trauma, Uighurs abroad and human rights groups say.The Xinjiang government has promoted the labor transfer programs in parallel with the re-education camps, efforts that have ramped up drastically under the current leader, Xi Jinping. The government has uprooted many from farms to work in factories and cities, in the belief that steady, supervised work can pull minorities out of poverty and break down cultural barriers. Workers may have little choice but to obey local officials who oversee their move to distant towns and industrial zones to fulfill government-set quotas.An internment camp in Xinjiang that local officials have portrayed as a vocational training center.Credit…Thomas Peter/ReutersThe growing scrutiny of the region has already prompted changes among some companies whose supply chains are entangled in these programs. Many textile and apparel companies that use cotton or yarn from Xinjiang have severed ties, including Patagonia, Marks and Spencer and H&M.The solar sector could face similar pressure. The industry has deep ties to Xinjiang, which accounts for about 40 percent of global polysilicon production, said Jenny Chase, the head of solar analysis at BloombergNEF. Xinjiang’s polysilicon production increased rapidly over the past decade, mostly because of cheap electricity from local coal plants and other government support, Ms. Chase said.That expansion has helped Chinese companies dominate foreign competitors, including in the United States. China produced 82 percent of global polysilicon in 2020, up from 26 percent in 2010, according to data from IHS Markit, while the U.S. share of production shrunk to 5 percent from 35 percent.“I am concerned that forced labor may have been used in Xinjiang,” said Francine Sullivan, the vice president for business development at REC Silicon, a Norwegian polysilicon manufacturer with operations in the United States. The company shut a facility in Washington State, despite surging overall U.S. demand.Xinjiang is known for low safety and environmental standards, Ms. Sullivan said, and forced labor “may be just part of the incentive package.”Xiaojing Sun, a senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said solar companies were starting to investigate their exposure to Xinjiang and reconfigure their supply chains to avoid the region if possible.In a note to investors in October, analysts at Roth Capital Partners said the solar sector faced a “heightened risk of disruption” because of its ties to Xinjiang.“Investors are getting nervous,” Ms. Sun said.The Solar Energy Industries Association, the largest industry association in the United States, has called human rights abuses in Xinjiang “reprehensible” and strongly encouraged companies “to immediately move their supply chains out of the region.”Since unfettered on-the-ground access to Xinjiang for foreign journalists and researchers is virtually impossible, the Horizon Advisory researchers do not provide direct testimony of forced labor. Instead, they present signs of possible coercion from Chinese-language documents and news reports, such as programs that may use high-pressure recruitment techniques, indoctrinate workers with patriotic or military education, or restrict their movement.The report documents GCL-Poly accepting “surplus labor” from a rural region of Xinjiang last year. In 2018, according to an article on China Energy Net, a local news site, one of GCL-Poly’s subsidiaries also accepted more than 60 such workers.A local subsidiary of Jinko Solar, Xinjiang Jinko Energy Co., received state subsidies for employing local Xinjiang labor, including at least 40 “poor workers from southern Xinjiang” in May, according to a local government announcement from July 2020 cited by Horizon Advisory.On its public WeChat account, East Hope Group said that it had “responded to the national Western Development Call and actively participated in the development and construction of Xinjiang,” including constructing a polysilicon project in Changji prefecture in 2016, the Horizon report said.That same year, according to a Chinese news report cited by Horizon, Xinjiang’s Yarkand County signed a “labor export cooperation framework agreement” with a subsidiary named East Hope Group Xinjiang Aluminum Company.Another subsidiary of East Hope, Xinjiang East Hope Nonferrous Metals Co., “accepted 235 ethnic minority employees from southern Xinjiang,” who were given training to make up for “low educational qualifications, weak national language skills and insufficient job skills,” according to a report on the company’s website.According to Horizon Advisory, several solar companies also have ties to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which has been penalized by the Trump administration. In its 2018 financial report, Daqo New Energy said its Xinjiang facilities benefited from a lower cost of electricity because the regional grid is operated by a division of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.Amy Lehr, the director of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that work programs that draw on Xinjiang minorities and offer companies subsidies for employing them are a “red flag” for forced labor.These programs may restrict workers from quitting, traveling or participating in religious services, pay less than minimum wage, and involve harsh or unsafe work conditions, as well as the threat of detention, according to Ms. Lehr’s research.“The concern is that there is a potential for coercion, because of the level of surveillance and fearfulness,” Ms. Lehr said. Companies that source products from the region have “no way of knowing that you’re not being connected to forced labor,” she said.Nathan Picarsic, a founder of Horizon Advisory, said what the firm had documented was likely “just the tip of the iceberg.” If Americans are buying solar panels made with materials from these Chinese companies, he said, “I would say you are complicit in perpetuating this Chinese industrial policy that suppresses and disenfranchises human beings.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More