Political Quotes

“the gentleman talks about stability of those governments. I have heard the whole series of arguments. It was not much different with NAFTA. The President started off telling us NAFTA would be great for businesses, workers, and small manufacturing. People just were not buying it. Then he shifted it into a national security argument and an immigration argument, and then whether it was NAFTA or CAFTA, the President, whoever the President was in each one of those, would shift into the old issue of stability of those governments. President Clinton said it with NAFTA and Mexico. Now they are talking about political stability in the Dominican Republic and in the five Central American nations, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and in Honduras. But when we talk about stability, the opposition to these agreements in these countries is widespread and strong. There were all kind of demonstrations. There have been at least 45 demonstrations in the five Central American countries with 150,000 people at least participating in those demonstrations, and these are farmers and small business owners and workers and ranchers and people who came from the countryside, hiked into the cities and protested at their legislatures. In one of the five Central American countries when the agreement passed, they did it in the middle of the night. The legislature met, they had to surround the building and nobody knew about it. All of those kinds of things have happened.…”