Submitted by Eric Zuesse,

The record shows that she actually supports international trade treaties that allow the participating countries to allow international corporations to murder labor union organizers to keep wages down. Her financial backers include many of the controlling stockholders in corporations that shift jobs overseas to lower-wage nations so as to boost their stock-profits and executive compensation (those executives are paid largely by stock options in the companies they run — the more the stock rises, the bigger their pay); and portions of those takes by the top executives and other top owners of international corporations end up in the political campaign chests of conservative U.S. politicians such as of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and virtually all Republicans — i.e., of corrupt or otherwise conservative politicians. But this article will deal only with Hillary Clinton.

She also supports international trade treaties — such as Obama’s proposed TPP with Pacific countries and TTIP with Atlantic countries — that will cripple participating countries’ ability to regulate the safety of products, such as drugs, food-contamination, water-contamination, auto-safety, the environment, etc. However, her campaign rhetoric lies disfavoring such treaties, even more blatantly than Barack Obama’s rhetoric against NAFTA did, when he was running against her, in 2008.

On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, on Thursday October 22nd, David Axelrod, who is one of President Obama’s chief advisors inside the White House, explained Hillary's switch, from verbally supporting, to verbally opposing, President Obama’s proposed trade deals. The interviewer noted that, "Hillary Clinton had previously spoken in favor of the Pacific trade deal [TPP], then once the details were out she said she was against it.” Axelrod asserted, to explain what happened: "I actually think her switch of positions on trade was as much a response to Biden as it was to Sanders. She knew that the Vice President was very much tied to the President’s policy and would have to be, and she wanted to head him off at the pass particularly with organized labor.” That separation of herself from Obama’s proposed trade deals effectively killed Biden’s opportunity to win the support of labor union leaders who don’t believe that a self-declared “socialist” such as Bernie Sanders is even electable in the United States. Biden had been hoping to wedge into the Democratic primaries as being the “centrist” Democrat who could pull lots of supporters away from both Clinton and Sanders.

The reason why organized labor is opposed to Obama’s trade deals is that (as will be shown) the deals would allow all participating countries to allow international corporations to hire hitmen to murder labor union organizers so as to keep wages down. U.S. workers would then be competing internationally against workers whose rights to participate in labor unions are merely nominal, not authentic. That, in turn, would accelerate the shrinkage of labor unions in the United States; and this would even further benefit the big campaign-contributors. (Obama and Clinton actually support this, though it reduces the labor-union base of the Democratic Party. The electorate are split between a ‘liberal’ party that wants unions to be weak, versus a conservative party that wants them to be dead.)

President Obama’s Trade Representative, his longtime personal friend Michael Froman, organized and largely wrote Obama's proposed trade treaties: TPP, TTIP, and TISA. Froman told the AFL-CIO and U.S. Senators that when countries such as Colombia systematically murder labor-union organizers, it’s no violation of workers’ rights — nothing that’s of any concern to the U.S. regarding this country's international trade policies or the enforcement of them. On April 22nd, Huffington Post, one of the few U.S. news media to report honestly on these treaties, bannered "AFL-CIO's Trumka: USTR Told Us Murder Isn't A Violation,” and reported that, "Defenders of the White House push for sweeping trade deals argue they include tough enforcement of labor standards. But a top union leader scoffed at such claims Tuesday, revealing that [Obama] administration officials have said privately that they don’t consider even the killings of labor organizers to be violations of those pacts.”

In other words: This is and will be the low level of the playing-field that U.S. workers will be competing against in TPP etc., just as it is already, in the far-smaller existing NAFTA (which Hillary had helped to pass in Congress). "Trumka said that even after the Obama administration crafted an agreement to tighten labor protections four years ago, some 105 labor organizers have been killed, and more than 1,300 have been threatened with death.” The Obama Administration is ignoring the tightened regulations that it itself managed to get nominally implemented on paper. "Pressed for details about Trumka’s assertion that murder doesn’t count as a violation of labor rules, Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO deputy chief of staff, told HuffPost that USTR officials said in at least two meetings where she was present that killing and brutalizing organizers would not be considered interfering with labor rights under the terms of the trade measures.” Furthermore: “'We documented five or six murders of Guatemalan trade unionists that the government had failed to effectively investigate or prosecute,' Lee said. 'The USTR told us that the murders of trade unionists or violence against trade unionists was not a violation of the labor chapter.’” That U.S. Trade Representative, Michael Froman, is the same person Obama has negotiating with foreign governments, and with international corporations, both Obama's TPP, and his TTIP.

Any country in TPP, TTIP, or TISA, that introduces worker-protection regulations which are beyond this abysmally low level, will then be fined by corporate panels, and those fines will become income to the companies whose ‘rights’ (such as to murder labor-organizers) have been violated, under the terms of the given treaty: TPP, TTIP, and TISA.

And that’s just one example of the type of sovereignty (in this instance over workers’ rights) that is being, essentially, ceded to panels controlled by international corporations, under these 'trade’ deals. They’re actually about a lot more than just tariffs etc.; they’re about sovereignty — switching sovereignty to international corporations.

As the UN’s top official on such matters has said, TTP & TTIP will produce "a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots."

Here was Hillary Clinton’s past record on NAFTA, her own husband’s trade deal, which was almost as bad as are the ones that Obama is now trying to pass — and Obama’s will cover vastly more nations: