Barbara Mikulski Quotes

NAFTA and GATT have about as much to do with free trade as the Patriot Act has to do with liberty.

It certainly was difficult to sell NAFTA because it's always difficult to sell open markets.

It's not just free trade verses protectionism any longer, you've got the concepts of managed trade and reciprocity, and environmental issues.

We want free trade but we want free trade that is good. We want free trade that levels the playing field.

These agreements should be free trade. They aren’t free trade.

A lot of people believe, and I do at times, that some of our trade agreements are lopsided, and we've got to look at them. But that doesn't mean that we're going to put a tariff on everything.

I know something about trade agreements. I was proud to help President Clinton pass the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and create what is still the world's largest free-trade area, linking 426 million people and more than $12 trillion of goods and services.

In Illinois, we've seen job losses from agreements like CAFTA and NAFTA. Those agreements didn't help American workers - and they haven't brought improvements to the lives of workers in other countries, either.

Like so many free trade deals before and since, Nafta was sold as a massive opportunity for working people and their prospects. Forecasts spoke of hundreds of thousands of new jobs in all three countries. The reality could not have been more different.

NAFTA has been a great success for the three countries involved.

More than any other issue, economists have kind of been boosters for trade.

We had much freer trade in the 19th century. We have much less globalization now than we did then.

One can see the results of those policies in hundreds of communities around my State. As one might expect, our largest communities - places like Milwaukee, Madison, and Green Bay - lost thousands of jobs as a result of those trade policies, most notably NAFTA and permanent most-favored-nation status for China.

We have to resist, protectionism, other kinds of barriers to market access and to trade.

I love free trade, but we need great leadership to have real free trade. And we don't have good leadership. We have leadership that doesn't know what it's doing.

America has lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs since NAFTA, a deal signed by Bill Clinton and supported strongly by Hillary Clinton. And by the way, the single worst trade deal ever made in history anywhere.

The regime of globalization promotes an unfettered marketplace as the dynamic instrument organizing international relations.

Trade liberalization can be contagious, and the opening of markets regionally can spark progress multilaterally as well.

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.

During the boom years of the 1990s, globalization emerged as the most significant development in our national life. With NAFTA and the Internet and big-box stores selling cheap goods from China, the line between national and international began to blur.

The North American Free Trade Agreement marked a fundamental change in the global trade scheme.

I want completing the single market to be our driving mission. I want us to be at the forefront of transformative trade deals with the US, Japan and India as part of the drive towards global free trade. And I want us to be pushing to exempt Europe's smallest entrepreneurial companies from more EU directives.

I fully support global commerce.

There's a lot of exaggerated talk about CAFTA, but it's actually a fairly routine trade agreement. Although it involves fairly small nations, they're still more important trade partners than places like Australia or many other larger nations.