Quote:
Originally Posted by jms62
I would say someone whose party is supposed to be for the people whose family has made hundreds of millions since leaving office from the fat cats that party should be protecting these same people from is a worse candidate. A candidate whose husbands DISASTOROUS trade deals have all but destroyed the middle class as a worse candidate. Voters thinking that this candidate will change things that have made her family obscenely wealthy are the worst voters in any election.
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You mean NAFTA? NAFTA that George Bush Sr. created with Canada and Mexico? That NAFTA? The one that Republican Congresscritters overwhelmingly voted for NAFTA? That NAFTA?
The NAFTA that Clinton openly says hasn't delivered what it promised?
It's easy to look back on NAFTA with 20 years of hindsight and say, "This was terrible" but are we sure we'd be in a better place without it? Our employment issues run much deeper than a trade agreement. We depended for decades on being the only developed nation that didn't get bombed to smithereens in WW2. We got to dominate trade because we were the only country that still had infrastructure. It was naive to think other nations wouldn't catch back up.
Which is to say, I don't know what the solution is. Our culture believes that a company's first obligation is to return money to shareholders, and however that happens is just fine. If we lived in a nation that believed a company's first obligation was to sustain a local community, maybe things would be different, but that's not our culture and it's unlikely to change anytime soon.
I do find it interesting that Dems regularly get blamed for policies that end up hurting American workers, while Republican elected officials get a free pass, despite the fact that the Republicans are the ones overwhelmingly voting in favor of these policies. It's a fascinating disconnect.
Also, it's interesting that it's totally fine with Americans that someone be born extremely wealthy and spend their career indulging in deals that harm the average American (see Trump hiring illegal immigrants to construct his buildings and Trump Sr. taking gov't handouts and then using them to block black folk from getting housing - Woody Guthrie actually wrote songs about how much he hated "Old Man Trump"), but when a Democrat rises from middle-class to very rich (or, in the case of Bill, from dirt poor to very rich), somehow it's an affront to American principles.
Maybe, deep down, America really wants to be an aristocracy.