The Daily Background
| Hillary to Mexico: “NAFTA is working, working for you and working for the American people.”
by Arlen Parsa
It is becoming increasingly obvious that on important issues, Hillary Clinton doesn’t get it right the first time around. Barack Obama seems to get these issues right the first time.
For example, Hillary Clinton voted against the Levin Amendment which called for more diplomacy, and instead gave George Bush and Dick Cheney the benefit of the doubt on Iraq without so much as reading the intelligence that supposedly justified the war (another Senator, Bob Graham, read the intelligence and found reasons to vote against the war).
Meanwhile, Obama got Iraq 100% right when he opposed it in 2002, and every prediction he made has been bourne out: it would cost huge amounts of money, and that it was a mistake to go in with no exit strategy, and that it would be used as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda.
Another example: NAFTA.
Obama pointed out recently, “I don’t think NAFTA has been good for America – and I never have.”
Hillary’s history on the infamous Clinton Administration policy that led to millions of US manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas in states like Ohio? Quite different.
She argued to reporters in 2004, “I think, on balance, NAFTA has been good for New York and America.” She went before the DLC in 2002 (long after NAFTA’s downfalls were well known and understood) and extolled the virtues of the failed policy. David Sirota notes at Open Left that in 1998, “she praised corporations for mounting ‘a very effective business effort in the U.S. on behalf of NAFTA.’”
While Bill was president, she went to Mexico and said “NAFTA is working, working for you and working for the American people.”
Now that she’s running for president though, Clinton is running away from vigorous support of NAFTA, awknowledging that it’s responsible for millions of Americans losing their jobs and that it should be “adjusted” and that “we do need to take a deep breath and figure out how we can make it work for the greatest numbers of people.”
Earlier
Video- Hillary seems outraged at Obama
