Leading Democrat presidential primary candidate Joe Biden said in a 2013 speech that China’s economic dominance is “overwhelmingly” in the United States’ interests.
In a 2013 speech at the Export-Import Bank’s 2013 Annual Conference, Biden touted the need for the multilateral free trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as a necessity to creating a “new world order.”
Biden said he proudly supported TPP, which he acknowledged would have opened global markets and forced American workers and U.S. industry to compete against low-wage foreign workers in countries like Malaysia and Vietnam.
“These institutions that the affirmative task we have now is to actually create a new world order because the global order is changing again,” Biden told Export-Import bankers.
Central to this multilateral, open markets agenda, Biden said, is ensuring that foreign countries are prosperous — including China. Biden said at the time that China having a prosperous economy is “overwhelmingly” in the interests of American businesses and U.S. workers:
We have to update the global rules of the road, we have to do it in a way that maximize benefits for everyone because obviously its overwhelmingly in our interests. This is not a zero-sum game. It’s overwhelmingly in our interests that China prosper, that Mongolia prosper, that nations big and large, east and west, in Latin America and in Africa prosper … we want everyone to have a little money to make sure they can buy American products. [Emphasis added]
Similarly, Biden conceded to China’s economic rise over the last three decades. Rather than shifting economic power back to the West, Biden said the U.S. must “assert” itself as a “resonate economic power” in the Eastern region of the world through TPP, which he promised would help merge economies “across the Pacific.”
“The world’s economic engine has shifted eastward and we know that it is in Asia where much of the opportunity in the 21st Century will be found,” Biden said. “Economically, Asia already accounts for more than one-quarter of global GDP. Over the next five years, the Asian Pacific may account for as much as 60 percent of global growth.”
Biden continued:
That’s why, through the efforts like the Trans-Pacific Partnership … we’re continuing to assert ourselves as a resonate economic power in the region. Think about the opportunity that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, alone, represents. Eleven members comprising 658 million people with a combined economic output of $20.5 trillion per year. We’ve been working to forge an agreement that will bring together economies from across the Pacific, developed and developing alike. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is perhaps the most ambitious trade negotiation underway in the world. [Emphasis added]
TPP, before being ultimately killed by President Trump, was expected to eliminate millions of American jobs from the U.S. economy, as well as driving down working and middle-class wages.
Though Biden has declared himself, in recent years, a “fair trader,” his goals in the 2013 speech made clear that he supports the elimination of all tariffs and the free flow of products.
“That’s why we have an ambitious agenda, not only to eliminate tariffs but also to tackle costly so-called ‘behind-the-border barriers’ to the flow of goods and services,” Biden said.
For years, Biden has downplayed the economic dominance of China. This month, Biden scoffed at the notion that China was an economic threat to the U.S. and American workers:
China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man. They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west, They can’t figure out how they are going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us. [Emphasis added]
This week, Biden blasted Trump’s recent hiking of tariffs on China to 25 percent on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of foreign goods to protect American workers and U.S. industry.
“The only people paying the price are farmers and working people right now,” Biden said. “He’s going about it all the wrong way, a lot of bravado, no action.”
Biden has continuously claimed that free trade deals like NAFTA have created more American jobs than those lost. Data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) finds otherwise.
The U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated at least 3.5 million American jobs from the country’s economy, the latest data from EPI has found. Millions of Americans in all 50 states have been displaced from their jobs, which have been lost due to U.S.-China trade relations.
States that saw the largest amount of job loss from free trade with China include California, where more than 560,000 U.S. jobs have been lost; Texas, where 314,000 U.S. jobs were eliminated; and New York, which saw 183,500 U.S. jobs lost in the state.
States like Oregon, New Hampshire, Minnesota, North Carolina, Vermont, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were among the ten “hardest-hit states, when looking at job loss as a share of total state employment,” the EPI researchers note.
When pushing NAFTA in the early 1990s, Biden said a Chrysler plant in his home state of Delaware would benefit greatly from subjecting the company to more foreign competition. In 2007, the Chrysler plant in Delaware was idled and between 700 to 1,100 American workers were laid off.
Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer’s book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, details in depth the financial dealings of the Biden family in China, especially those of Biden’s son, Hunter.
Specifically, Schweizer’s book exposed a $1.5 billion deal in 2013 between Hunter Biden’s firm and the Bank of China signed after Biden had flown to China with his son aboard Air Force Two. A recent revelation from The Intercept revealed that Hunter Biden’s Chinese investment firm invested in one of the Chinese corporations that helped create the surveillance system designed to electronically spy on Muslim residents.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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