Dems Flunking Trade 101

[Joanne98]

Barack Obama may have introduced America to the audacity of hope. But in the Democratic primary debate on the pivotal issue of trade policy, it is the audacity of Hillary Clinton that is remarkable. Obama has been troublingly tentative when it comes to articulating the smart progressive response to the challenges of globalization that the voters in the nation’s industrial heartland await. Clinton has shown no such caution. As she did before Ohio’s March 4 primary, where blue-collar votes renewed her candidacy, the New York senator is campaigning in the next big-primary states as a fierce critic of failed trade deals. Incredibly, for a woman who has been caught inflating her populist credentials more than once this year, Clinton is moving way beyond the vague rhetoric about renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement that became a centerpiece of her Ohio campaigning. Borrowing pages from Ralph Nader, she’s telling Pennsylvania and Indiana voters that America’s national security is threatened by trade and investment policies that make the stability of the US economy “dependent upon decisions made in other countries’ capitals.” Clinton warns that the US trade deficit with China–which rose last year to a record $252 billion–has given Beijing too much financial leverage over us. And she’s linking her “slow erosion of our own economic sovereignty” theme with a claim that she has opposed the free-trade regime since 1992–implicitly suggesting that workers who have been let down by other Democrats can count on her to battle Wall Street on behalf of Main Street.

Clinton’s latest line rewrites her history. Shortly before her campaign began airing NAFTA-bashing television ads in Pennsylvania, the National Archives released 11,046 pages of previously classified documents of her tenure as First Lady. The smoking gun buried within contradicts Clinton’s claim that “I have been a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning.” The papers confirm that Clinton worked against labor, farm and environmental groups in 1993 to pass NAFTA–and in so doing initiated a new era in trade relations that would see the United States help form the World Trade Organization, pressure Africa and Latin America to open themselves to new forms of economic colonialism and remove restrictions on trade with China. Clinton participated in strategy sessions and headlined a closed-door rally that prepared 120 women business leaders to lobby Congress. Clinton aides claim she was secretly pushing back against the free-trade orthodoxy of her husband’s administration, but those who heard her at the rally say that’s “ludicrous.”

“There was no question that everyone who spoke, including the First Lady, was for NAFTA,” says Laura Jones, executive director of the US Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel. This is not the only inconvenient trade truth for Clinton. After she capitalized in Ohio on reports that an Obama aide told Canadians not to take seriously the Illinois senator’s criticisms of NAFTA, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff was quoted in Canadian media saying that Canadians got similar assurances from the Clinton camp.

After so many stumbles, why is Clinton opening a discussion about the trade deficit with China, which ballooned after her husband’s administration “ormalized” trade relations with that country in 2000–a move Hillary Clinton openly supported, despite warnings that it would speed the exodus of US jobs and undermine the ability of Washington to pressure Beijing on human rights? It’s a sly calculation. To win delegates from states like Pennsylvania and Indiana–which according to the Economic Policy Institute have lost, respectively, 78,200 and 45,200 jobs because of the US-China trade imbalance–Clinton must establish herself as a credible critic of free trade. And she is betting that reporters who rarely cover trade issues seriously won’t press her on her past positions.

For the most part, Obama has let her get away with it... Continued>>
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/04/8082/

[baldguy]

1. Misleading headline. It should read "Clinton Flunking Trade 101"

[OhioChick]

2. My Thoughts Exactly. n/t