PHILADELPHIA — New York Mayor Bill De Blasio and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sounded like GOP nominee Donald Trump Wednesday as they railed against the Trans-Pacific Partnership at a labor council event held in Philadelphia.
“We need to send TPP to its grave where it belongs!” de Blasio said told a crowd of enthusiastic Democratic National Convention attendees.
“After we win that election, we have a chance to show the power of labor and the progressive movement,” the mayor said, explaining that such trade agreements only hurt American workers by robbing them of job opportunities.
Part of demonstrating labor’s power, he said, will involve crushing the Obama-backed trade agreement once and for all.
The mayor also encouraged attendees to stay focused an engaged, and to continue to “fight” for Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton, who once claimed the TPP set “the gold standard in trade agreements.” Clinton has since come out against the deal.
Mayor de Blasio’s sentiments, which received a warm reception at the labor event, were echoed in a separate address by Cuomo.
“When they tell you we’re going to pass TPP,” the former governor said, “they’re saying they don’t understand the damage they’ve done in the first place and now they want to extend it with TPP.”
He argued that the deal would “extend” the damage of other trade agreements, which he said have already hurt American manufacturing workers.
Cuomo’s remarks on the trade agreement come one day after anti-TPP protesters heckled him an LGBT caucus event elsewhere in Philadelphia.
The New York politicians are joined in their distaste for the TPP by fellow New Yorker Donald Trump, who has made railing against the trade agreement a staple of his campaign stump speeches.
“The TPP would be the death blow for American manufacturing. The agreement would also force American workers to compete directly against workers from Vietnam, one of the lowest wage countries on Earth. Not only will the TPP undermine our economy, but it will undermine our independence,” he said in a speech in June. “There is no way to ‘fix’ the TPP. We need bilateral trade deals. We do not need to enter into another massive international agreement that ties us up and binds us down.”
He said in a separate address that same month that the TPP is, “a rape of our country. It’s a harsh word, but that’s what it is – rape of our country.”
