NEW YORK — President Obama highlighted new efforts by his administration on Tuesday to fight human trafficking, which he called “modern slavery.”
Obama told a crowd at the annual Clinton Global Initiative that he does not use that word "slavery" lightly because it conjures “one of the most painful chapters of our nation’s history.”
But he called the practice of human trafficking “barbaric” and “evil,” and he said it has “no place in a civilized world.”
As a result, Obama said his administration would be implementing new executive orders to bolster prohibitions against human trafficking and that the government would be working closely with Amtrak and other transportation services in an effort to “do more to spot it and stop it.”
He said trafficking should be of concern to everyone “because it’s a debasement of our common humanity” and “tears at our social fabric.”
Obama made the remarks after delivering a foreign policy address before the United Nations General Assembly that followed Mitt Romney’s speech before the same conference. Romney did not mention Obama in his speech but he did briefly attribute Obama’s recent post-convention bounce in the polls to Bill Clinton.
“If there’s one thing we’ve learned this election season, it’s that a few words from Bill Clinton can do any man a lot of good,” Romney said. “After that introduction, I guess all I have to do is wait a day or two for the bounce.”
Before Obama took to the podium, Clinton cracked his own joke about his much heralded convention speech.
"I wanna finish that speech I started in Charlotte,” the former president said to applause from the crowd, which included singer Barbra Streisand, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and his Clinton's daughter, Chelsea.
When Obama began his speech, he thanked Clinton for his introduction but added, with a smile, “I really did like the speech a few weeks back a little better.”
He thanked Clinton for his “friendship and your extraordinary leadership,” calling him “a great treasure for all of us.”
And, before he moved on, he praised Clinton’s wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for being “a leader of grace and grit.”
