Jorge Casteneda Quotes

Unfettered free trade has been a disaster not only for Americans but for the working people of Mexico and Canada as well.

Since NAFTA was put in place, Mexico has lost 1.9 million jobs and most Mexicans' real wages have fallen.

All over the globe the U.S. is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who consume what the U.S. majority can afford.

I don't think we should sell out the American worker. That's why I am opposed to NAFTA.

Almost one-fourth of our children are living in poverty. No other western industrialized nation has anything close to that figure. This is not an act of God. There is no divine intervention that says children in America have to live in poverty more than children in Italy, or Denmark, or Great Britain, or Canada, or other western industrialized nations. It a result of flawed policy. It is a result of policy that panders to those who make campaign contributions rather than to needs

Free trade: certainly the interest of nations, but by no means the interest of certain towns and districts, which tariff feeds fat; and the eager interest of the few overpowers the apathetic general conviction of the many.

The data on worker displacement after NAFTA reads like a funeral program for the middle class.

The Alliance for Progress is an alliance between one millionaire and many beggars.

Wild globalization has helped some people much, but has hurt most.

NAFTA will continue to regulate the relationship between Mexico and Canada.

Most of the time in America, we're surrounded by oppressive inequality such that the wealthiest 1 percent collectively own substantially more than the bottom 90 percent. One escape from that is America's wild places.

The Occupy Wall Street protests at last suggest that America's wealth gap is once again becoming an organizing political principle in the country.

I think the collision between the First and Third world is going to become more and more conspicuous. It's the big cliff that we've all got to climb.

If you consider that a typical Central American consumer earns only a small fraction of an average American worker's wages, it becomes clear that CAFTA's true goal is not to the increase U.S. exports.

America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It's grotesquely mentally ill.

The pact creating a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns.

Unfair trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement eviscerated good-paying manufacturing jobs, putting more than 3 million U.S. workers out of work.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

Globalization has benefited middle-income less than either richer or poorer countries.

It’s no surprise that a global economy creates a global class conflict…. All markets create classes and class conflicts.

One by one, trade and investment barriers will continue to be swept away by globalization, like leaves on an autumn day…The new challenge will be less to regulate relations among national economies, than to establish the rules and structures of a transnational economy.

Globalization causes job and income losses in certain sectors which exact significant psychological tolls. The government, therefore, has a responsibility to channel help from the winners to the losers.

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.

Global poverty is a powder keg ignitable by our own indifference.

Many will see [globalization] as little more than a mask used by certain economic elites for taking away the voice of the individual citizen.