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Hillary Clinton has developed good talking points on trade and
China. She hits China currency manipulation/misalignment head
on. She wants a pause on trade agreements, which is sensible
because those agreements miss the mark of what is wrong with
trade.
Obama recently said that free trade is good, but we
need labor and environmental protections. Fine, as far as it
goes. And is free trade, as practiced for the last 20 years,
good? The economic results have been horrendous, from trade
balance, to foreign debt, to job loss, etc. Trade is good when
conforming to the national
interest, which it did for about 200 years before running off the rails
with Fast Track, NAFTA and their progeny. But free trade in its
current form? Good? Not so much.
McCain is still a wacko free trader. Don't call me
partisan, look at his record. Duncan Hunter, the Republican
candidate that dropped out, was very good on many core economic trade
issues.
Both Obama and Clinton, last week, agreed to co-sponsor S. 796 which is
a currency manipulation bill introduced by Senators Bunning, Stabenow and Bayh.
That is very good news.
But what to make of Hillary? Is she for real?
She is behind in the nomination race and must be aggressive in courting
the blue collar voters in Indiana and North Carolina... people who
rightly think trade agreements just benefit the outsourcing
multinationals and the Wall Street international finance guys.
She
supported NAFTA and refuses to admit it now. She could say that
she supported NAFTA and was wrong, but she has not. Bill Clinton, in
2005, promised Colombia President Uribe that he supports
the Colombia FTA that Hillary opposes. Mark Penn, her former
campaign manager and current pollster, works for the Coloumbia
government to lobby for the FTA here in DC.
Today, we find out, from McClatchy, that Bill Clinton has a multimillion dollar stake in a company controlled by the Chinese government.
He also received $2.6 million, some of it in ``guaranteed
payments,'' from the Cayman Islands-based Yucaipa partnership, which
invested in Xinhua Finance Media Ltd., China's leading,
government-controlled financial and entertainment media company.
I want to believe Hillary. And I want Obama to be stronger on
sensible trade change that addresses the fundamentals. And I want
McCain to convert. And I want a pony. But can we believe
Hillary?
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