Leadership Quote by John Conyers

Conyers is doing the politician’s most effective trick: making the controversial sound like consensus. “We all agree” isn’t a throwaway preface; it’s a pressure tactic. It frames dissent as irrational, even unserious, before the argument has begun. In a policy fight where enforcement can bleed into surveillance and overreach, he starts by planting everyone on the same moral high ground: of course fakes are bad, of course consumers should be protected, of course brands deserve basic control over their names.

The careful symmetry of the sentence does quiet work. “Fake goods… marketed in their names” pairs with “own goods… marketed under fake names,” covering both counterfeiters and gray-market mislabeling. It’s designed to sweep up a range of practices under one clean category: deception. That broadness matters, because once you’ve defined the problem as fraud, nearly any remedy can be pitched as common sense rather than expanded power. Notice how “ensure” softens what could mean raids, seizures, or platform takedowns. It suggests a modest housekeeping function, not a coercive apparatus.

The context is a long-running American tug-of-war: intellectual property as consumer protection versus intellectual property as corporate leverage. Conyers, a lawmaker steeped in committee-room pragmatism, speaks in the language of rights and market integrity, not artistry or innovation. The subtext is coalition-building: reassuring manufacturers and constituents alike while preemptively narrowing the debate to implementation details, not first principles. Once everyone “agrees” on the right, the argument shifts from whether enforcement should expand to how quickly it can be made to work.