Vincent J.
Curtis
13 Oct 2016
WikiLeaks is
the gift that keeps on giving. Among the
nuggets of Hillary’s policy positions are these that she made to a Brazilian
bank: Hillary called for open borders, a hemispheric common market, and green
energy.
The quotes,
with references, are as follows:
“My dream is a
hemispheric common market, with open
trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as
green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for
every person in the hemisphere.” [05162013 Remarks to Banco Itau.doc, p. 28]”
“Secondly, I
think we have to have a concerted plan to increase trade already under the
current circumstances, you know, that Inter-American Development Bank figure is
pretty surprising. There is so much more we can do, there is a lot of low
hanging fruit but businesses on both sides have to make it a priority and it’s
not for governments to do but governments can either make it easy or make it
hard and we have to resist protectionism, other kinds of barriers to market
access and to trade and I would like to see this get much more attention and be
not just a policy for a year under president X or president Y but a consistent one.”
[05162013 Remarks to Banco Itau.doc, p. 32]”
These remarks
were made in May, 2013, after she had left the Obama Administration, where she
had been Secretary of State, and when she was widely expected to run for
president as Obama’s successor. The speech
was made to a Brazilian bank, for
money.
The call for open borders is pretty undeniable. The call for a sort-of hemispheric NAFTA
agreement is pretty unmistakable. There
can be no walking this back, and the only explanations are bad ones.
What could those explanations be?
Notice that these remarks were made to an audience virtually
guaranteed to like them. Of course
Brazil would like to have open trade with the United States because its exports
would be so much cheaper than domestically-made American goods. And Brazil was then and is now so poor, that
it couldn’t afford to import American made products, and the net balance in
trade would greatly favor Brazil. It doesn’t
have the labor costs and protections, the environmental laws, and the health
care expenses of the American labor market.
One explanation the Hillary campaign could offer is that she was simply
telling the Brazilians what they wanted to hear, for the speaking fees.
While that sounds exactly like something Hillary or Bill
would do, using that as an excuse won’t come across well to the American
electorate. They don’t want to hear that
Hillary tells lies for personal gain, that she says one thing to one audience,
and another to another. There is no good
explanation for the open-borders, open-trade remark, except that that is what
she truly believes. (We will get into
the private/public position remarks in another posting. In this case, you can’t tell because these
were supposed to be private remarks – which makes them her real ones. But she was saying what the audience wanted
to hear, so that could be the public ones – the ones said for personal gain.)
The second quote from the same speech goes to what I was
saying yesterday about Hillary’s blather method of speaking. The second quote is practically
incoherent. It is a run-on
sentence. It is full of the speaking
tics Hillary uses in speeches to American audiences. For example, “we have to have a concerted
plan…” “, you know,…” “there is so much more we can do…” “a lot of low-hanging
fruit…” “[somebody other than her] has to make it a priority…” “…hard…” “I
would like to see this get much more attention…” If you force enough empty clichés together in
a run-on sentence you get something that sounds reasonable but you don’t really
grasp what was being said. This is a typical
Clintonian technique to avoid being controversial and to have some form of
deniability.
Despite that, the second quote is consistent with the first.
Hillary wants some form of hemispheric
NAFTA agreement, an informal one if necessary, and she wants an arrangement
that is not subject to the whims of some successor to her. This position is quite intellectually
defensible on economic grounds, but the experience of the actual practice of
free trade compared to theory between countries of remarkably different levels
of development has not been a happy one for many of America’s blue-collar
workers.
Trump has made a lot of political hay by decrying NAFTA, and
the visceral reaction against the TPP caused Hillary to make an embarrassing volte-face on the matter. She denied during a debate calling the TPP
the “gold standard” of trade deals, even as tape exists having her say those
very things. A politician’s being caught
in a brazen lie has not the same catastrophic effect on her candidacy as it
once did. The people have been Clintoned
out, or Clinton-conditioned. And so she
continues to get support. A second
occasion, however, of having to deny favoring a TPP deal, in this case a NAFTA-like hemispheric deal, cause some of her support to weary.
The facts are that Hillary Clinton, in May 2013, called for
open borders and open trade, by which she meant a NAFTA-like trade arrangement
for the western hemisphere, to Brazilian bankers. Perhaps she never expected something she said
in Brazil to come and bite her in America.
We have yet to determine whether the opinions she expressed were her
public ones or her private ones.
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