FLASHBACK: Bill Clinton’s False Promise on Trade with China

In his final year in the White House, then-President Bill Clinton successfully lobbied Congress to grant Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR, now known as Most Favored Nation) status to China. Congress obliged, and PNTR for China became law with the president’s signature in October 2000. Clinton, along with then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, among others, argued that PNTR with China would carry with it a panacea of economic and national security benefits.  For America, these have proven to be nothing more than empty promises.

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Alongside Clinton at a press conference in 2000, Greenspan assured skeptical Americans that PNTR with China would “result in a more efficient allocation of resources and raise the standard of living in China and its trading partners.”  The ‘Maestro’ continued, “extending PNTR to China, and full participation by China in the WTO [World Trade Organization] is in the interests of the United States.” (To provide some perspective on Greenspan’s predictive powers, he also testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget in 2001 about how to deal with the decades of federal budget surpluses awaiting America’s near future.)

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President Clinton, for his part, in turn stated, “I believe that Chairman Greenspan has established a pretty good record for knowing what is in America’s economic interests.”  He added, “Economically, the case is clear and compelling.”

Clear and compelling? Let’s look at the facts. In 2000, the annual trade in goods deficit with China was already an alarming $84 billion. Yet by the end of 2015, this deficit had more than quadrupled to $367 billion. An Economic Policy Institute analysis found that trade with China between 2001 and 2013 had cost, on net, at least 3.2 million American jobs, including jobs in all 50 states.

Earlier this year, Washington Post economics reporter Jim Tankersley wrote,”The 2000 vote effectively unleashed a flood of outsourcing to China, which in turn exported trillions of dollars of cheap goods back to the United States … It was the strongest force in an overall manufacturing decline that cost 5 million jobs. Those workers were typically men whose education stopped after high school, a group that has seen its wages fall by 15 percent after adjusting for inflation.”

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Tankersley also noted, “Business leaders stood nearly united in their support of the bill, arguing that the vote would serve only to open China’s markets to U.S. exports … In many ways, the vote worked out much better for the GOP’s donor class than for the working-class voters now flocking to Trump.”

In 2012, The Huffington Post ran a piece titled, “Bill Clinton’s True Legacy: Outsourcer-in-Chief.” In it, author Jane White pointed out, “Clinton had the gall to accuse those who opposed China’s entry into the WTO of ‘aligning themselves with the Chinese army and hard-liners in Beijing who do not want accession for China.'”

Making spurious accusations of political opponents teaming up with oppressive regimes appears to be a “most favored” Clinton tactic, a way to avoid the substantive and meaningful policy debates they might lose. The latest example of this has been the Clinton campaign and its media allies trying to get Americans to believe the preposterous notion that Donald Trump is somehow in bed with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, the media has largely abandoned investigating the Clintons’ role in a suspicious deal that gave Russia control over 20 percent of America’s strategic uranium.

One thing pundits across the political spectrum surely agree upon, at least privately, is that Hillary wants — like with the Russian uranium deal — as few voting Americans as possible to find out that as secretary of state, she relentlessly promoted the 5,544-page Trans-Pacific Partnership (which a Tufts University study found would cost 450,000 American jobs), going as far as calling it “the gold standard in trade agreements.”

The question Hillary hasn’t been asked yet is — “The gold standard for who, exactly?”

Spencer Hill contributed to this report.