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THREAD: Why should progressives care about the Commerce Dept? It's often gone to a wealthy businessperson...which means we don’t really know what a populist Commerce Dept would look like. The same powers which enforce the unequal status quo could be turned against it. (1/x)
Commerce oversees a number of offices which have a direct role in fighting climate change, enforcing trade deals, enforcing (or not) intellectual property rights and regulating surveillance technology. Let’s take a closer look at what is at stake: (2/x)
The Patent and Trademark Office sets and enforces IP rules, a field important enough to tech and other industries that 50 trade groups begged Trump to keep Obama appte Michelle Lee on at PTO. (She later left for a job at Amazon Web Services.) (3/x) https://thehill.com/policy/technology/336621-michelle-lee-resigns-from-top-spot-at-patent-office
Our @ceprdc colleague @DeanBaker13 has written extensively about the under-discussed and over-important role of patent monopolies on drug pricing. Imagine what a committed public servant could do overnight to slash drug prices from PTO! (4/x) https://www.cepr.net/replace-patent-monopolies-with-direct-public-funding-for-drug-research/
Then there’s NIST, which sets standardized metrics across the federal government.
Sounds boring?
Well, that means NIST helps develop biometrics like fingerprint scans and facial recognition tech. (5/x)
Sounds boring?
Well, that means NIST helps develop biometrics like fingerprint scans and facial recognition tech. (5/x)
This will be a crucial four years for the state of American domestic surveillance — will we allow corporate forces and/or law enforcement to abuse new surveillance tech? The next NIST Director will play a role in many important decisions in this field. (6/x)
Commerce also houses the International Trade Administration, which researches the effects of international trade agreements. It’s hard to think of a more political and fraught job responsibility in 2020 — trade touches EVERYTHING, from labor to climate to financial reform. (7/x)
Un-intuitively enough, NOAA is also housed within the Commerce Dept. For a sense of the importance of NOAA’s climate-change research and data, remember that under Trump, it was forced to release incorrect info about Hurricane Dorian to the public. (8/x) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/climate/hurricane-dorian-trump-tweet.html
Then of course, there’s the census bureau. One of the biggest tasks facing the next admin will be undoing Trump’s damage to our government — and the census bureau is one of the most important elements therein. (9/x) https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-10-16/trump-2020-census-citizenship-immigrants-supreme-court-congress
So there’s no shortage of reasons to pay attention to the Commerce Department, and some genuinely exciting opportunities available for the next Commerce Secretary to take bold and necessary action. But all of that could disappear under yet another CEO-Secretary. (10/x)
