Jan Schakowsky Quotes

Governments have been ceding power to big multinational corporations in the market. We see the manifest in a variety of ways. Where governments are giving up power to big international institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, which are disabling governments' ability to protect the rights of their own people.

The developing countries are scared out of their wits now, because they don’t understand what they’re being forced to sign. The agreements are going way outside the trade issues and involve a helluva lot of things like your access to oil, your access to intellectual property and capital controls…. When I looked through the investment agreements, it was worse than reading my insurance policy for the fine print. I couldn’t make anything out of it, and I’m a reasonably informed person, a pretty smart economist as they go.

I'm not opposed to free trade if it's fair trade. But I am opposed to bad trade deals.

But, we have had the debate in our country now for a number of years as to whether or not free trade agreements are good for economic growth and economic opportunity in creating jobs and lifting people out of poverty.

Before we move forward with new efforts to lower the barriers to international free trade, we must review the consequences of the policies of the past and address the problems of the present.

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.

We could not get NAFTA passed today with the current Congress…. We’ve got to combine trade liberalization with a broad-based sharing of the fruits of our productivity.

Under the guise of trade deals and trade agreements, its [free trade] really been used to keep workers in the world suppressed in terms of their wages or qualities of life.

If we're going to do trade agreements, as we should, we need trade agreements with rules that will lift up all boats, rather than continuing to pull down U.S. food safety standards, U.S. worker wages, environment, all that these job losses and all that this has done to pull down our standards.

Stop exporting American jobs. Stop exporting American factories, and stop exporting American sovereignty and independence to global institutions like the World Trade Organization.

I don't know that free trade... is good for our country and good for Iowa and Iowa workers.

I am a firm believer in free but fair trade. However the United States should not be on the losing end of trade agreements that are not enforced. It is time that we make China play fairly.

Not only must we fight to end disastrous unfettered free trade agreements with China, Mexico, and other low wage countries, we must fight to fundamentally rewrite our trade agreements so that American products, not jobs, are our number one export.

Unfortunately, the United States has entered into several free trade agreements that do not sufficiently protect and support our manufacturing industries and the millions of American workers they employ.

Likewise, free trade does not, as evidenced in CAFTA, mean fair trade.

I don't believe we're the party of big business.

Let me say at the outset that I do not reflexively oppose international trade.

I think bolstering free trade is a boon to the dollar.

If I were a congressman who had voted for the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, I'd claim it was forced on our country by a sinister international organization.

I believe in free trade. I don't support regulating trade prices between different regions. Our point of view is we don't want trade barriers between different countries.

Now, given the experience that we have had thus far, with our subsequent trade agreements with NAFTA and others, you would think that with our experience of job loss that we have had there that when you find yourself in a hole that you might stop digging.

The Bush Administration and the Congress have to stop ignoring this crisis in international trade. The longer we ignore it, the more American jobs will move overseas. It's just that simple.

We can no longer allow multinationals to parade as agents of progress and democracy in the newspapers, even as they subvert it at the workplace.

There's no conflict between the social-welfare state and open markets.

General Electric, NBC's parent, is one of the largest corporations in the world, with an anti-labor history of outsourcing jobs and with financial links to military and nuclear power industries.