Bill Clinton was for NAFTA. I heard him over in Tokyo he came out all said it was a great bill. Secretary Clinton was for it. She called it the gold standard when she was secretary of state.
Only Barack Obama consistently opposed NAFTA.
All the U.S. is asking for is free, fair trade.
I do have a concern that if we just say no Trans-Pacific Partnership, we're done, we're ignoring the region, and then, yes, I think we're creating a void for China, but that is not what the president [Donald Trump] is saying.
America's trade policy has an enormous impact on the economic well-being of the American people and the strategic interests of the United States.
We want to make America great again. We want to bring back our industry, we want to bring back our jobs from China and Japan, and by the way Mexico, which has taken so many of our jobs. And that's what it's about. I have not heard about these incidences.
This softwood lumber dispute is a very old dispute that almost follows a dynamic entirely of its own that is actually somewhat independent of the issues of the issues that are bothering the president Donald Trump on NAFTA.
Our country was built, to a large extent, on protecting our manufacturers. If you go back to Jefferson, you go back to all of these great, great people that ran the United States properly, it was really based on a certain form of tariff and a certain form of protection. We're just the opposite now.
I fought NAFTA when it passed; it has been a big disaster for us, in my opinion. If we can renegotiate that, it would be wonderful.
I am a firm believer in free but fair trade. However the United States should not be on the losing end of trade agreements that are not enforced. It is time that we make China play fairly.
I was a big supporter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I worked very closely with President Obama on that.
Congress has the responsibility to ensure that any international trade agreement entered into by the United States must serve the national interest, not merely the interests of those crafting the proposal in secret.
Failure to pass TPP sends a big signal. The United States is backing off, backing away. That will create a huge void here.
I will announce my intention to totally renegotiate NAFTA, one of the worst deals America has ever made.
I see something different in Hillary Clinton. She wants a trade prosecutor. She's going after currency. She's going stand up strong on keeping China designated as a non-market economy.
If trade agreements were subject to amendment [by Congress] then no country would ever want to negotiate with us.
We're in a trade war. We've been in a trade war for decades. That's why we have the deficit.
The Barack Obama administration had been negotiating with the Canadians to come up with a permanent solution on lumber tariff. And they failed. And so even though this is being portrayed as the first salvo by Donald Trump's tough trade regime, in fact, it's quite possible that, if Hillary Clinton were president, we would be in the same place.
Now is not the time to open the border to receive Canadian beef down to the United States.
If we don't get the deal we want, we leave NAFTA and start over to get a much better, a much more fair deal because right now, we're a one-way highway into Mexico, a one-way highway .
The USMCA is certainly a historic bipartisan achievement by Trump, whose determination produced a trade deal supported by both labor unions and business along with Democrats and Republicans.
The United States is a low-trade - low-tariff country.
I think NAFTA has been extremely beneficial to the United States, in many ways, but there's no question after 23 years it needs to be updated, to say the least.
The US does not observe the free-trade principles. Those are for the weak. So agribusiness is highly subsidized and pours product into Mexico and drives out Mexican farmers. Maybe they have to go into the cities, and they don't have jobs to support them, so they flee across the border.
Part of what you need to understand is that we're forced to look back. You had the importation of third world or developing world conditions into the United States because of a bipartisan elite consensus for neo-liberalism. In other words, you had both political parties, the smarty-pants in both political parties said, hey, let's do these crazy trade deals.
