Earl Blumenauer: “I have dedicated over 30 years to environmental efforts. As a Member of this Congress, I successfully fought to enhance…”

“I have dedicated over 30 years to environmental efforts. As a Member of this Congress, I successfully fought to enhance environmental provisions in the Singapore Free Trade Agreement. I have carried these arguments and opportunities in China, Indonesia and Vietnam. I didn't support CAFTA because President Bush and the partisan Republican leadership abandoned efforts to work in a bipartisan fashion and rebuffed our efforts at environmental protection. I can't express my appreciation to our chairman, Mr. Rangel, and to the chairman of the subcommittee, Mr. Levin, for empowering members to work with the environmental community to make sure that their voices were heard. And we have been able to enshrine in this agreement enforceable, multilateral environmental agreements in the FTA for the first time in history. Absolutely unprecedented. We have already been able to use the force of these agreements to clarify the protections of threatened Peruvian forest wilderness using the leverage we have already got even before it was enacted. This is not remotely NAFTA. We have all learned from that experience. It is not CAFTA, which I didn't support. We have given the critics what they said they wanted within labor protection and within the environment. I urge in the strongest possible terms that we vote a new beginning in trade.”