The MEC Endorses Medea Benjamin: Green Party Candidate for U.S. Senate

Medea Benjamin is Founding Director of the San Francisco-based human rights organization Global Exchange. She worked for ten years as an economist and nutritionist in Latin America and Africa for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization to devise more sustainable models of development. She was also a senior analyst with the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) in California. Medea's most recent work has focused on changing the labor and environmental practices of U.S. multinational corporations, and the policies of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Her organization, Global Exchange, was instrumental in organizing the peaceful protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November 1999.

Medea received a Masters degree in Public Health from Columbia University and a Masters degree in Economics from the New School for Social Research. She lives in San Francisco with her husband Kevin Danaher and their two daughters.

Medea says "As a human rights advocate, economist, nutritionist, and mother, I have struggled for the past 25 years to help build a world where no child goes hungry and where our air, water and land are protected for future generations. For the past 10 years I've pressured U.S. corporations to stop abusive policies - from sweatshop labor to clearcutting our forests to tampering with our food supply through genetic engineering.

"Our political system is in desperate need of campaign finance reform and must be opened to a broader array of voices through proportional representation if we are to legitimately call ourselves a democratic nation."

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