Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton pushed hard dozens of times for the Pacific Rim trade deal she now opposes as a presidential candidate.
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I still believe that’s the high bar we have to meet.
In a statement released on Wednesday, Clinton argued new trade agreements can not be given the benefit of the doubt due to the high risk they will end up doing more harm than good for hard-working American families.
“This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field”, Clinton said.
If ratified by all parties, the TPP – which stretches from Chile and Canada to Japan and Singapore – would be the largest pact governing global commerce in more than two decades, encompassing 40 per cent of the world’s economic output. And since Biden is still in the administration, he, unfortunately, will have less room to pretend to hate TPP.Will anyone find Clinton’s position convincing? Her opposition also leads to questions on the resistance the deal is likely to encounter from Obama’s own political party when the US Congress debates it.
The series of shifts marks another way that Clinton has recalibrated her campaign strategy after her failed president bid eight years ago. “Any one of those should have been a red flag, but instead, she continued to solicit Blumenthal for advice”.
In addition, over the summer, Clinton spoke out against off-shore drilling in the Arctic Ocean one day after the Obama administration gave Shell the go ahead to drill for oil and gas there.
However, the finalized TPP agreement includes fewer benefits for the pharmaceutical industry than the Obama administration was pushing for while Clinton supported the trade deal.
“That means we have to have more middle-class jobs, more people being in the middle class, more people being able to get into the middle class. And we haven’t looked at this from a competitive perspective, because the Republicans have stood in the way”, she added.
Emily Schillinger, a spokeswoman for House Speaker John Boehner said in response to the ad, “This is a classic Clinton attempt to distract from her record of putting classified information at risk and jeopardizing our national security, all of which the FBI is investigating”. There are critical issues that were raised not only by Hillary, but also with other presidential candidates such as Donald Trump, talking about the currency manipulation. Second, the final version of the TPP wound up being less friendly to big drug companies than the version U.S. negotiators proposed. In her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices, Clinton called it “a strategic initiative that would strengthen the position of the United States in Asia”.
During that campaign, Clinton also spoke out against a free trade agreement with Colombia, citing concerns about threats of violence against workers attempting to organize.
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“The president has been extraordinarily effective in making as strong a case as could be made, but I do worry we have an equation here, how do we raise incomes in America?”
