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David Sirota doesn't tiptoe around it.
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White House Papers Expose Lies of Clinton, Emanuel & Gergen On NAFTA
By David Sirota
Credo Action, 3/20/08
Finally, the dishonesty is being unmasked. Finally, we see just how
much we're being lied to when it comes to economic policy. Finally, we
see it hasn't just been Hillary Clinton lying about her role in
championing NAFTA, but we see it is the entire Clinton machine.
For the last few weeks, Hillary Clinton has been claiming that she
never supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She
has explicitly claimed "I have been a critic of NAFTA from the very
beginning."
Clinton's record of speeches over the last decade, of course, tells a
much different story. In 1996, she toured Texas to promote NAFTA. In
1998, she visited Davos, Switzerland to thank corporations for mounting
"a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA." In
her memoir a few years ago, she touted NAFTA as one of her husband's
big successes. In 2004, she told reporters that "NAFTA has been good
for New York and America." (read more)
And yet, despite all of this evidence, Clinton has worked to confuse
voters by insisting that she has always been fighting against NAFTA. As
I've written in another post, it is a tactic reminiscent of Joe
Lieberman denying he supported the Iraq War in the lead up to his 2006
election contest with Ned Lamont. And it is a tactic that Establishment
shills have tried to embolden. As just one example, the esteemed David
Gergen has used his television platform to back up Clinton's historical
revisionism - and Gergen has been cited by others as "proof" Clinton's
claims are true - despite, of course, her very own words.
But now with the release of Clinton's White House schedules, the veneer
has been torn off, and the brazen dishonesty is finally on display for
everyone to see. As Reuters reports:
"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton now argues that
the North American Free Trade Agreement needs to be renegotiated, but
newly released records showed on Wednesday she promoted its
passage...Among the thousands of details of daily life for Clinton,
there was a November 10, 1993, entry -- a 'NAFTA Briefing drop-by,' in
Room 450 of the executive office building next door to the White House,
closed to the news media. Approximately 120 people were expected to
attend the briefing, and Clinton was to be introduced by White House
aide Alexis Herman for brief remarks concluding the program."
ABC's Jake Tapper digs even deeper, noting that at one of the
meetings, Gergen "served as a sort of master of ceremonies as various
women members of the Cabinet talked up NAFTA." In other words, Gergen
has been on television deliberately lying for the Clinton campaign, as
he was actually running these NAFTA-promoting events with Clinton.
Tapper goes on to interview people who were in the room.
This revelation comes just as the other appendages of the Clinton
machine attempts to revise history even further. This week, Rahm
Emanuel - the chief White House lobbyist who rammed NAFTA through
Congress - authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed praising candidates for
indicting NAFTA and claiming "I share their concern for Americans who
have lost their jobs to global competition." To quote my book Hostile
Takeover, this is "the same Rahm Emanuel who penned an op-ed in the
conservative Wall Street Journal pressuring Democrats to capitulate and
pass the 2000 China trade deal - a move perfectly timed to help secure
the critical votes that ultimately passed the deal."
The facts are clear: The Clinton machine joined with K Street to
manufacture the very international economic policies that are
destroying the economy. And yet, this same machine now claims to have
had nothing to do with those economic policies - at the very moment,
the machine is pushing a NAFTA-style Colombia Free Trade Agreement in
Congress. We are, in short, experiencing the renaissance of
"Clintonism" - an ideology that treats Americans like we are stupid and
treats basic undebatable facts as commodities to be manipulated and
perverted for personal gain. And that renaissance should make everyone
question all the recent promises by Clinton about changing NAFTA.
Had she simply acknowledged she was for NAFTA and that now she's not
for NAFTA, that might give her some credibility. But, then, this is a
candidate who just a few months ago laughed at a serious question about
NAFTA, claiming "all I can remember are a bunch of charts." In other
words, this is a candidate and a campaign machine that is absolutely
uninterested in how these policies have devastated the middle class -
and hostile to an honest discussion about those policies. So the
question now is simple: Can a Wall-Street backed candidate who denies
the undeniable past be trusted with the future?
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