Political Quotes

“Yes. The agreements are written so that corporations have protections and their patents have protections and people who need drugs in certain countries for their own health often cannot afford them because the patent protections are supplied to corporations under these trade agreements but countries cannot go ahead and make generic equivalents because it would challenge the way the trade laws are structured. So these trade agreements are never written to benefit people. They are written to benefit corporations. We have to remember that even in our own country, corporations often have greater powers than individuals. There was an 1895, I believe it was, Santa Clara County decision by the Supreme Court which basically ceded to corporations a whole range of rights that put them on equal status with people. Yet corporations do not want to recognize the fundamental human rights that workers have, the fundamental responsibility that we all have to protecting the environment, and so they are given privileges in this country to avoid responsibility for protecting our air and water, to avoid responsibility for protecting workers' pensions, to avoid responsibility for providing for a safe workplace. They often can get off on some of their violations. Yet these trade agreements basically create a race to the bottom on standards, on rights, on principles, on the environment.…”