Political Quotes

“I have worked in all my years here to expand trade in ways that spread its benefits to the many, not just to the few. Charlie Rangel and I led the fight to include strong and enforceable labor and environmental positions and to strike the right balance between innovation and access to medicines in the historic May 10 agreement of 2007. The trouble with this TPA is that it means no meaningful provisions whatsoever in TPP on currency manipulation, which has destroyed millions of middle class American jobs and allows investors to challenge American health and environmental regulations and others, not through the American legal system but through unregulated arbitration panels. {time} 0930 It is about a TPP going in the wrong direction in access to medicines and, in some important ways, on environmental protections; and it is about countries like Mexico that deny their workers basic labor rights to gain an uncompetitive advantage over our companies and workers. It is about Vietnam and Malaysia, which stand in clear violation of the May 10 provisions on international workers' rights, with no plan we know of. In that sense, it is secret of a TPP to change that, far from a progressive trade agreement. On this and every other area of the TPP, there are only vague negotiating objectives left to be determined whether they were met by those who did the negotiating.…”