Hillary Rodham Clinton’s grounds for flip-flopping for supporting a controversial Columbian free-trade agreement in 2009 had been casted off by a majority of the Democrats who has voted against it in Congress.
Clinton is trying to prevent a confrontation with critics who is charging that she had changed her mind following the millions which poured into the Clinton Foundation. The former Secretary of the State has insisted that she changed her mind just because Columbia agreed to substantive changes in its handling of trade unionists.
Back in 2008, Clinton had quoted an appalling level of violence which includes murder as well, against union activists in opposing the deal. She said in 2008, “It doesn’t matter who talks to me. It doesn’t matter any circumstances. I have been against it. I am against it. I will be against it absent the kind of changes in behavior that I have been calling for from the Colombian government.”
She had been on board just a year after that, although trade experts say that the changes that had been crafted by Columbia had been small.
Brian Finnegan of the AFL-CIO (The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) said, “There’s no other country that had for many decades so many labor leaders being killed, shot at. People were very sensitive about it. Why are we signing a trade agreement with a country that has such a horrible human-rights record? ”
The issue now comes back to the same point as the critics pointed out, that this turnaround by Clintons has been triggered by the millions of dollars in contribution to her family’s foundation and speaking fees to her husband, the former president Bill Clinton.
The deal had eventually gone through Congress in 2011, after the Obama administration made negotiations on changes which most of the elected Democrats didn’t think went far enough. The trade deal has been voted by only 31 House Democrats passing 262-167.
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