About Rethink Trade

Rethink Trade was established to intensify analysis and advocacy regarding the myriad ways that today’s trade agreements and policies must be altered to undo decades of corporate capture and to deliver on broad national interests. This includes resilient supply chains and fair markets, the creation and support of good jobs with workers empowered to earn decent wages, public health and safety delivered by strong consumer and environmental protections and the ability for those who will live with the results to decide the policies affecting their lives.

Rethink Trade builds synergies between trade justice and anti-monopoly work to create and implement policies that can harvest the benefits of trade and promote healthy economies and local businesses without undermining our democracy, livelihoods and labor rights, health, or environment.

Some of the select issues Rethink Trade is currently prioritizing:
  • Stopping Big Tech efforts to hijack “trade” agreements and policies to lock in monopoly power and evade governments’ efforts to safeguard the rights of workers, consumers’ safety and privacy, civil rights and fair competition.
  • Reversing Big Pharma’s use of trade pacts to protect monopolies over essential medicines and promoting production of more generic medicines domestically, so there are more producers in more countries to bring down prices and ensure resilient supplies.
  • Replacing dominant corporations’ hyperglobalization agenda with pro-worker, pro-resilience rules for the global economy to repair the supply chain meltdown now causing prices to spike and that undermines reliable access to some essential goods.
  • Repealing the extreme corporate-power and taxpayer-money of the Investor-State Dispute Settlement regime.
  • Helping workers to use the revised North American Free Trade Agreement’s new labor rights enforcement mechanisms.
  • Advocating for strategic uses of tariffs to enforce strong labor and environmental standards, to defend against mercantilist trade distortions that undermine domestic production, and to develop industries vital to economic and national security while also pushing for the complementary competition, tax, investment, procurement, and other industrial policy tools needed for tariffs to deliver for working people, consumers and small businesses.
  • Closing the de minimis loophole that now allows four million packages daily to evade tariffs and inspection so as to stop imports of unsafe and forced labor products and deadly fentanyl-laced pills and e-commerce retail monopolists like Shien, Temu and Amazon from crushing domestic manufacturers and retailers. em

Rethink Trade is a division of the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP). AELP, a non-profit research and advocacy organization, is a thought leader in the anti-monopoly movement and promotes policy changes to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power.

Rethink Trade Team

Lori Wallach

DIRECTOR

Lori is the director of the Rethink Trade program at AELP and a 30-year veteran of international and U.S. congressional trade battles starting with the 1990s fights over NAFTA and WTO. She is also Senior Advisor to the CTC.

Read Lori’s full bio

Daniel Rangel

RESEARCH DIRECTOR

Daniel specializes in international trade and investment law and policy and he is an expert in trade and labor matters. He was one of the lawyers that drafted the first stakeholder petition to activate the USMCA rapid response mechanism.

Read Daniel’s full bio

Katie Hettinga

POLICY ANALYST

Katie Hettinga graduated from the University of Idaho with degrees in Political Science and Agricultural Economics, where she was a legislative scholar for the McClure Public Policy Research Center.

Read Katie’s full bio

Jess Huang

DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER

Jess has more than a decade experience of working in politics, and holds graduate degrees in Global Security and Intelligence. 

Read Jess’s full bio

Madi Morrow

Policy Associate

Madeline Morrow is a recent graduate of the University of Georgia with a degree in Political Science. Prior to graduating, she served as an intern in the office of U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff (GA). Additionally, she served as Director of Operations for New Voters, a nonprofit focused on youth civic engagement. In her free time, she enjoys running, reading, and exploring DC!

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