Lori Wallach Quotes (16 Quotes)

None of Congressman Fitzpatrick's statements about why he voted to support CAFTA make sense. His constituents deserve a straight answer even if it is an admission that he does not have the backbone to stand up to what everyone knows was extreme pressure by the Republican leadership to do as they ordered rather than what Fitzpatrick believed or promised.

By acquiring Costa Rican gaming operations, giant European firms now have a platform from which to launch attacks on federal, state and local gambling restrictions in an effort to secure an even greater share of the diverse and lucrative U. S. gambling market. This is a threat that was brought to the attention of all three Utah congressmen.

It's a model that's very useful for a very narrow set of U.S. interests.

They need to go back into the existing agreement and repair the rules that limit a country's ability to have environmental safety and human rights laws.

This does not bode well -- ha, ha, ha -- for Bush's trade agenda. What a tragedy. You don't take out a very effective player like Portman, who has good relations in Congress and on the international scene, when this whole agenda stands on the precipice, without knowing what that means.

It is very clear that if this document is going to determine the future course of the WTO, the majority of people in the world would be worse off.

What people in Washington are saying is that Fitzpatrick simply could not stand up to the pressure of the Republican leadership when they demanded that he vote with them, meaning that on such a vital vote for his district, he prioritized the Republican Party marching orders over the interests of his own constituents and his own principles. People in Pennsylvania's 8thdistrict have to worry that if Fitzpatrick caved in to GOP leadership pressure on CAFTA, what might he do on a whole host of other issues on which he has committed to his voters but which are not in line with the Republican leaders' positions.

If your growth rate is achieved by the privatization of a huge national asset, it looks good on paper, but if people lose out who depend on that employment, the quality of life declines.

Forget the Valentine's Day chocolates and roses, the handful of congressional lawmakers whose startling votes for CAFTA pushed this slimy deal through Congress appear to have received campaign cash as a reward for the corporate dangerous liaisons, and many of the voters whose hearts they broke are considering permanent separations from these congressional betrayers of their interests.

Rep. Towns' alarming flip-flop on CAFTA was a shock. The Rep. Towns of November 2004 who made a congressional floor speech passionately criticizing CAFTA sounded like a leader of the global justice movement, so clear was his analysis of the problems with the NAFTA model of trade agreements. This leaves his constituents to angrily ask how he could have provided one of the deciding votes that passed CAFTA.

By casting the deciding votes on CAFTA,Utah's congressmen have made themselves responsible for any future attacks on U.S. gambling regulations that CAFTA makes possible.

History has been made in Seattle, as the allegedly irresistible forces of corporate economic globalization were stopped in their tracks.

We look at these agreements as Trojan horses, where whole other agendas are slipped in under the cover of free trade. It's a real threat to democratic, accountable governance.

It didn't have any of the actively anti-environmental provisions of this CAFTA agreement.

There's nothing to it, ... The actual text of the CAFTA agreement is what's binding and the text of the agreement is a catastrophe.

That a member of Congress who is supposed to represent one of the U.S. states hardest hit by NAFTA job loss, and whose constituents care deeply about poverty in Central America, would become a deciding vote to expand NAFTA to six more nations is unimaginable, given the damage the NAFTA model has proven to cause to U.S. working people and Mexico's poor.