Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 30, 2007 23:37:03 GMT -6
Below are excerpts from an interesting article by Ralph Nader on Hillary Clinton's describing Hillary Clinton's lack of conviction in opposing unrestricted free trade, contrasted with her total conviction about accepting big money and Corporate campaign contributions. The title of the article is The NAFTA Two-Step: Hillary's Stock and Trade
By RALPH NADER
"Is Hillary Clinton a political weather vane or a political compass?
Consider her latest detour from the NAFTA and WTO policies of her husband. Last week she announced her opposition to the proposed trade agreement between the U.S. and South Korea. The place for her remarks was a town hall meeting in Michigan organized by the AFL-CIO.
She described the agreement between Bush and the South Koreans, requiring Congressional approval, as "inherently unfair." "It will hurt the U.S. auto industry, increase our trade deficit, cost us good middle-class jobs and make America less competitive."
No kidding! Where has she been for the past fifteen years? For those words could have described the consequences of both NAFTA and the WTO. The U.S. auto industry has been emigrating to Mexico and China. The trade deficit has gone off the charts, nearing nine hundred billion dollars in 2007 and is four times greater than what it was ten years ago. Industrial job loss is being joined by the outsourcing of white collar jobs in even larger numbers....
Corporate managed trade-mis-named free trade-is draining our country's competitiveness, as U.S. corporations take their factories and jobs abroad to authoritarian or dictatorial nations, especially China. Imagine modern capital equipment, and 50¢ an hour for workers who are making things for the U.S. market, without fair labor standards, pollution controls and other standards companies here have to comply with....
A politician like Hillary Clinton has her finger to the wind. The workers and domestic companies are providing her with the wind. Still, she has not supported the renegotiation of NAFTA and WTO which the U.S. can force by utilizing the Treaties' 6 month notice of withdrawal from each of these autocratic systems of transnational governance and secret courts known as NAFTA and WTO. Not enough organized citizen wind power compared to the corporate power behind those trade pacts.
If Senator John F. Kennedy's best-selling book Profiles in Courage was updated, nothing Hillary Clinton has done in the Congress would come close to being a footnote.
As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, she has not challenged the many GAO documented boondoggle military contracts. One gigantic weapon system the F-22 aircraft has been privately denounced by people in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who believe this aircraft is clearly unnecessary and saturated with cost over-runs.
Whether the causes are wasteful, corrupt military contracts or generally the corporate crime wave from Enron to Wall Street, Senator Clinton has not been there in the Congress to advance comprehensive corporate crime legislation and larger enforcement resources.
Nor has she taken on the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare-subsidies, giveaways, handouts and bailouts for big business-that consume the contributions of millions of small taxpayers....
Some of her paucity of candor is not going unnoticed, however. In explaining why she voted for George Bush's Iraq War resolution in 2002, she said she believed that it called for an attempted diplomatic solution. There were no words in that resolution to support that belief. She is a lawyer. She also knows that an amendment by Senator Carl Levin, a fellow Democrat, demanded just such a prior diplomatic effort. She voted against the Levin proposal.
Still, Hillary, with Bill right there, is the frontrunner for the Democratic Party's nomination. The money from commercial interests, which the Clintons have favored and coddled for years, is pouring into her campaign coffers....
The full article can be found at:
The NAFTA Two-Step: Hillary's Stock and Trade
By RALPH NADER
"Is Hillary Clinton a political weather vane or a political compass?
Consider her latest detour from the NAFTA and WTO policies of her husband. Last week she announced her opposition to the proposed trade agreement between the U.S. and South Korea. The place for her remarks was a town hall meeting in Michigan organized by the AFL-CIO.
She described the agreement between Bush and the South Koreans, requiring Congressional approval, as "inherently unfair." "It will hurt the U.S. auto industry, increase our trade deficit, cost us good middle-class jobs and make America less competitive."
No kidding! Where has she been for the past fifteen years? For those words could have described the consequences of both NAFTA and the WTO. The U.S. auto industry has been emigrating to Mexico and China. The trade deficit has gone off the charts, nearing nine hundred billion dollars in 2007 and is four times greater than what it was ten years ago. Industrial job loss is being joined by the outsourcing of white collar jobs in even larger numbers....
Corporate managed trade-mis-named free trade-is draining our country's competitiveness, as U.S. corporations take their factories and jobs abroad to authoritarian or dictatorial nations, especially China. Imagine modern capital equipment, and 50¢ an hour for workers who are making things for the U.S. market, without fair labor standards, pollution controls and other standards companies here have to comply with....
A politician like Hillary Clinton has her finger to the wind. The workers and domestic companies are providing her with the wind. Still, she has not supported the renegotiation of NAFTA and WTO which the U.S. can force by utilizing the Treaties' 6 month notice of withdrawal from each of these autocratic systems of transnational governance and secret courts known as NAFTA and WTO. Not enough organized citizen wind power compared to the corporate power behind those trade pacts.
If Senator John F. Kennedy's best-selling book Profiles in Courage was updated, nothing Hillary Clinton has done in the Congress would come close to being a footnote.
As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, she has not challenged the many GAO documented boondoggle military contracts. One gigantic weapon system the F-22 aircraft has been privately denounced by people in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who believe this aircraft is clearly unnecessary and saturated with cost over-runs.
Whether the causes are wasteful, corrupt military contracts or generally the corporate crime wave from Enron to Wall Street, Senator Clinton has not been there in the Congress to advance comprehensive corporate crime legislation and larger enforcement resources.
Nor has she taken on the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare-subsidies, giveaways, handouts and bailouts for big business-that consume the contributions of millions of small taxpayers....
Some of her paucity of candor is not going unnoticed, however. In explaining why she voted for George Bush's Iraq War resolution in 2002, she said she believed that it called for an attempted diplomatic solution. There were no words in that resolution to support that belief. She is a lawyer. She also knows that an amendment by Senator Carl Levin, a fellow Democrat, demanded just such a prior diplomatic effort. She voted against the Levin proposal.
Still, Hillary, with Bill right there, is the frontrunner for the Democratic Party's nomination. The money from commercial interests, which the Clintons have favored and coddled for years, is pouring into her campaign coffers....
The full article can be found at:
The NAFTA Two-Step: Hillary's Stock and Trade