Changing Her Mind.
Hillary recently wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal about the perils of outsourcing jobs, noting that "You can't turn on the news without hearing about offshore outsourcing." She goes on to describe how the benefits of outsourcing are exaggerated and that "America is more competitive than most realize." Hillary says that America has "the potential to be competitive," but "to realize that potential we need a strategy that focuses on critical areas-innovation, new job creation, workforce development, connectivity expansion, and collaboration between industry, academia, labor and government. We have to equip businesses and workers to become even more competitive, further develop the digital economy, and work to end trade and tax practices which undermine competitiveness."
That's right, she admits that there are "tax practices" that burden business. Not necessarily high taxes, but "tax practices." It's a start. Her other proposed solutions, such as "connectivity expansion" and collaboration with academia, sound like they came from the Sixties.
She concludes by claiming that "with a smarter national strategy and better information on real costs, many companies would rethink offshore sourcing. The choice they would make might be described as 'bestshoring.' It would keep more good paying jobs in America and replace the ones we have lost with even better ones." What is interesting is that while she criticizes outsourcing this week, only a few months ago she was defending the practice against CNN's Lou Dobbs. When the host of "Moneyline" attacked Tata Consultancy, a company from India that Hillary helped lure to New York, as "a well-known outsourcer," Hillary didn't back down: "I know they outsource jobs," she replied calmly, "but they've brought jobs to Buffalo. You know, outsourcing does work both ways."
She Told Us So.
Hillary took advantage of the release of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations to score political points against President Bush. She wrote a letter to the White House, calling on the President to embrace the commission's recommendation to allocate homeland security funds based on threat and risk, which is what she has been espousing all along. Such a system of disbursement would provide an increase in terror funding for New York City.
Said Hill: "I am pleased that the President is moving to create a National Intelligence Director and take the other steps he announced today, but I think he should act just as quickly to increase homeland security funding for New York and Washington, as the 9/11 Commission recommended."
She went on to reiterate that we must allocate terrorist funds based on a variety of threat and vulnerability factors, because "I am certain that as terrorists are plotting where to attack in our country next they are looking at many of these same factors."
She concluded by getting in a dig at the administration, writing that "Although I believe your administration has not allocated homeland security funding in the most appropriate way in the past, there is a still a tremendous opportunity. . . to allocate funding in a way that is in the best interest of our nation's homeland defense."
Good Intentions, Bad Results.
What Hillary didn't mention in her letter to President Bush is that the 9/11 Commission report also revealed that U.S. officials scrapped a 1999 plan to offer the Taliban a $250-million bribe to hand over Osama bin Laden. Why? Because they were afraid that then-First Lady Hillary and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright would object to paying off the infamous women's rights abusers.
The commission noted that the May 1999 memo said that "Two senior State Department officials suggested asking the Saudis to offer the Taliban $250 million for Bin Laden," but White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke "opposed. . . a 'huge grant to a regime as heinous as the Taliban' and suggested that the idea might not seem attractive to either Secretary Albright or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton-both critics of the Taliban's record on women's rights." In response, her office said, "Sen. Clinton was a vocal critic of the heinous Taliban regime well before 9/11."
