Political Quotes

“10 years ago this week China's Communist dictatorship sent its tanks and armored carriers crashing through the prodemocracy protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Hundreds of innocent protesters were crushed to death, hundreds more were mowed down by machine guns, hundreds more were arrested and executed. The men and women who lost their lives in Beijing and the ones who remain jailed are the heirs to the legacy of our Founding Fathers. They quoted Thomas Jefferson, they built a monument fashioned after our Statue of Liberty, they look to the United States as a beacon of hope and of freedom. In the United States, the nation which the thousands of dead at Tiananmen hoped to emulate, is once again coddling the same dictators who had them murdered by renewing China's annual trade privileges. After all, the lure of one billion Chinese low-wage workers is the catalyst of our China policy. Think about it: no pesky unions, no minimum wage laws, no labor standards, no effective court system to scare away investors. The potential for profit, regardless of human rights for American corporations, is enormous. After all, Wall Street bankers could not care less if the shelves at the Lorain, Ohio, K-Mart are lined with goods manufactured by Chinese slave labor. The lawyers in Washington could not care less if Chinese workers are imprisoned for trying to form unions.”