Clinton in 2002: NAFTA a “Fundamental Idea” that “Changed America”

(Hat tip on this game-changing moment to David Sirota via Huffington Post.)

The direct mail flyer that accused Senator Clinton of having supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was at the center of yesterday’s “shame on you” moment in Cincinnati.

Senator Clinton vociferously accused that it is false to say she supported the trade agreement that President Bill Clinton and an army of corporate lobbyists steered to passage in 1993 and signed into law.

In the stroke of a pen, NAFTA put the padlocks on the doors of countless American factories, while at the same time its agricultural provisions drove literally millions of Mexican farmers off their lands. The US factories moved to Mexico, and displaced Mexican farmers trekked to newly built sweatshops to make the products that workers in Ohio and other parts of the US used to make for union wages, but now the Mexican workers receive a minimum wage of six dollars a day: and that’s for a brutal 10, 12 or 14-hour workday.

But those 36,000 decent-paying manufacturing jobs in Ohio - and more in other states - that moved to Mexico didn’t provide jobs enough for the other millions of people that were now economic refugees - much like the Oklahoma dust bowl emigrees of American lore - and so many of them crossed the border into the United States, to work the farms and construction and in the homes and gardens of the comfortable… for substandard wages. And being “illegal” meant that they could not form unions of their own or bargain for better wages or working conditions.

As Ohio and Texas get ready to vote on March 4, we are close to the moment of truth, when it becomes clear to all that NAFTA is the single-most life-changing event for people of both states in decades: It created greater unemployment in both states and, especially in Texas, a greatly expanded “illegal” immigrant underclass persecuted by the very powers that take advantage of the economic exile that NAFTA caused them.

Eight-and-a-half years after its enactment on January 1, 1994 - in July of 2002, after all these harmful effects were crystal clear on both sides of the US-Mexico border, newly elected US Senator Hillary Clinton went to give a speech at an organization of which she has long been a champion: the Democratic Leadership Council, or DLC, the corporate arm of the Democratic party, and the intellectual authors of Bill Clinton’s 1992 candidacy for president.

Sirota has dug up the text of Senator Clinton’s speech, which says that NAFTA, among other legacies of the 1990s Clinton administration, “came out of some very fundamental ideas about what would work. The results speak for themselves. Those ideas were converted into policies programs that literally changed millions of lives and, I argue, changed America.”

Note the use of the word “I.” Not “we.” But “I.”

“I argue,” said Senator Clinton, in clearly personal terms, that NAFTA “would work. The results speak for themselves” and “literally changed millions of lives and… changed America.”

Yes it did, Senator, yes it did.

Is the debate still on for Tuesday night?

Update: MSNBC’s First Read (remember, this is the news organization hosting the debate) writes on Monday morning:

And speaking of Tuesday’s debate, we certainly know which topic might get all the attention: NAFTA. In previous debates, trade has been a back-burner issue. But with the upcoming contest in Ohio — a state devastated by manufacturing job losses — Obama is pointing to the Clintons for being responsible for the trade agreement, while Bill Clinton is blaming the Bush Administration for failing to uphold NAFTA’s worker and environmental protections. As we’ve noted before, nine times out of 10, a Democrat seen as pro-NAFTA in a Ohio primary would be the underdog — which is why Clinton is pushing back so hard on the characterization that she is someone pro-NAFTA. She’d like folks to see her as ambivalent. Of course, neither Dem is calling for cancelling the trade agreement.

Original here