The Constitution under attack. What is the FTAA?

When it comes to treaties, Representatives don't count.

That wasn't my point and nobody has made my day.

The Summit of Americas is completely separate and has nothing to do with the FTAA.

http://www.oas.org/main/main.asp?sLang=E&sLink=http://www.oas.org/OASpage/eng/latestnews/latestnews.asp

Key OAS Issues

Free Trade in the Hemisphere

...Free trade has been an integral part of the Summit of the Americas process since the leaders of the 34 democratic countries of the Western Hemisphere launched the process of creating the FTAA in 1994, at the First Summit of the Americas. The Second Summit of the Americas, in 1998, marked the beginning of formal FTAA negotiations. At the Third Summit of the Americas, held in April 2001 in Quebec City, Canada, the presidents and prime ministers agreed to conclude negotiations by January 2005 so the trade pact can enter into force no later than December of that same year. ...

In other words we haven't agreed to anything yet, we are still NEGOTIATING.

In other words they want to conclude negotiations AFTER the elections. Do you wonder why?

Immigration will cease and be replaced by migration at will.

Making it possible, of course, for a terrorist to enter a banana republic and just drift north. (As though they can't now.)

"Making it possible, of course, for a terrorist to enter a banana republic and just drift north. (As though they can't now.)"

They can now, and do. Presently they come across the border with Mexico via smugglers to avoid checkpoints. On the Canadian border it's much easier. Our immigration personnel have had their funding cut by Congress and they only hold them for 72 hours or so before releasing them after giving them a hearing date. Surprisingly to the government, they don't show up for their hearings. They just disappeared from sight.

The government has reported some 4,000 such detention cases involving "visitors" from suspected Middle East terrorist nations. The government suggests the numbers may be closer to 12,000. Often it helps to just step back, look at government, and wonder what they're thinking.

More on the FTAA
Proponents argue that the FTAA would increase prosperity by eliminating trade and investment barriers between the nations of the Western Hemisphere. The FTAA would expand NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, to include all of the Latin American countries with the exception of Cuba. NAFTA currently applies only to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Privately, proponents are also saying that the FTAA would deepen NAFTA by claiming jurisdiction over an ever-increasing number of functions that have previously been under the control of national, state, and local governments.

Proponents are employing numerous deceptions to keep the American public asleep while this revolutionary scheme is implemented. First is the name itself – the use of the term Free Trade in the name is a violation of truth in labeling. The objective of this charade is to enlist support among those who understand the economic benefits of true free trade.

The Free Trade Charade
Commenting about NAFTA, the FTAA’s predecessor, James Bovard of the CATO Institute warned, "With each passing month, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is acquiring more protectionist overtones." Bovard notes that the pact contains Byzantine "rules of origin" for products to qualify as North American products. He also points out the unlikelihood that this treaty, which is over 1,000 pages long, could represent anything resembling bona fide free trade: "Free trade is not complex -- it is protectionism that requires endless administrative gimmicks to camouflage its true nature. NAFTA amounts to a proliferation of new definitions of fair trade."

The plan for NAFTA mandated the creation of more than 30 international government committees, subcommittees, councils, working groups, and subgroups. For example, NAFTA established the Free Trade Council with at least eight permanent committees, six "working groups," and five subcommittees and subgroups. And NAFTA’s side agreement on import surges called for the creation of a permanent "Working Group on Emergency Actions." Other side agreements on labor and the environment called for still more "law-making" bodies and advisory committees.

NAFTA supporter Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) bragged about the "iron fist" of that pact. No, NAFTA was not about free trade. Nor is the FTAA, which is based on an expansion of NAFTA. In case there is any doubt about the teeth in the NAFTA agreement, consider the candid statements of U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, the negotiator of the "side agreement" on the environment. Kantor said officially that "no nation can lower labor or environmental standards, only raise them .... " In the Wall Street Journal on August 17, 1993, Kantor explicitly stated that "no country in the agreement can lower its environmental standards -- ever."

Then What?
An even bigger deception than the name itself is the true objective of the FTAA step. The major advocates of NAFTA/FTAA generally try to deceive the public as to the magnitude and real objective of their revolutionary proposals. Nevertheless, there have been some startling and candid admissions in the general press:

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a member of the executive committee of the Trilateral Commission and a longtime power in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), called the vote on NAFTA the single most important decision that Congress would make during Mr. Clinton's first term. Indeed, Kissinger acknowledged in the Los Angeles Times that passage of NAFTA "will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War...." NAFTA "is not a conventional trade agreement," he noted, "but the architecture of a new international system."

David Rockefeller, Kissinger's superior among the Trilateralists and members of the Council on Foreign Relations, exhorted in the Wall Street Journal: "Everything is in place -- after 500 years -- to build a true 'new world' in the Western Hemisphere."

Another proponent, Andrew Reding of the New School for Social Research, admitted in a Canadian publication that the passage of NAFTA, which he called "an incipient form of international government," would "signal the formation, however tentatively, of a new political unit -- North America." This is not idle speculation, for as Reding suggested, "with economic integration will come political integration."

Still another supporter, Representative Robert Matsui (D-CA), candidly admitted that the NAFTA agreement brings with it a surrender of American "independence."

The FTAA is a key milestone in a major grab for political power over the nations of this hemisphere. Proponents intend for the FTAA to follow the same route that globalists used to deceive the nations of Europe into giving up their sovereignty step-by-step to the government of the EU in Brussels. The first step in those plans was a so-called "free trade zone" -- the Common Market. As nations were being enticed to join the European common market, proponents lied as to their ultimate intentions by denying that any political sovereignty was at stake.

In less public forums, FTAA proponents admit the parallel to the European Union.

Open Borders
Proponents also conceal the effect of the FTAA on U.S. borders, realizing that the American public would not support their revolutionary goals. Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO) has clearly and correctly warned:

"There are people in the [Bush] administration, and in Mexico, and in Congress, who believe that we should do away with borders entirely. Their ultimate goal is to create this hemispheric ‘free trade’ area consolidating all of North and South America into some kind of ‘United States of the Americas.’"

Mexico’s Vicente Fox, in a 2002 address to European elites, was unexpectedly candid about these aims:

"Eventually our long-range objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada, our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union, with the goal of attending to future themes [such as] the future prosperity of North America, and the movement of capital, goods, services, and persons." [Emphasis ours]

This same vision has been endorsed by powerful people in our nation -- including some regarded to be conservative. Among those who applauded Fox's vision was Robert L. Bartley, editor of the influential Wall Street Journal:

"Reformist Mexican President Vicente Fox raises eyebrows with his suggestion that over a decade or two Nafta should evolve into something like the European Union, with open borders for not only goods and investment but also people. He can rest assured that there is one voice north of the Rio Grande that supports his vision. To wit, this newspaper."

"Indeed, during the immigration debate of 1984 we suggested an ultimate goal to guide passing policies — a constitutional amendment: "There shall be -- open borders."

—July 2, 2002 editorial entitled "Open NAFTA Borders? Why Not?"

Harmonization
When globalists seek to rally support for their schemes, they often use code terms such as "convergence," "integration,’ and [upward or downward) "harmonization." These deliberately vague and ambiguous buzz words are calculated to seem unthreatening to the general public.

But what the globalists mean by these terms reveals a great deal about how their plans will actually affect Americans. In the globalist lexicon, liberalization, harmonization, integration, and cooperation mean socialization, internationalization, expansion, centralization, and concentration of the powers of government.

When negotiators for the European Community or the North American Free Trade Agreement use the term "harmonization," they are referring to the effort to impose uniform wages and regulations across national borders. With respect to human rights, "harmonization" refers to the subordination of national constitutions to UN human rights conventions and covenants.

Naturally, in the United Nations, where the vast majority of member states are authoritarian regimes, "harmonization" means that American citizens must yield their rights for the common "global good." The UN Charter, of course, like most of the national constitutions of UN member states, recognizes no God-given individual rights and certainly no individual right to keep and bear arms. So, for example, "harmonization" would inevitably mean tightening controls on the loosely regulated U.S. gun business .

Upward harmonization means taking the socialist regulations and standards that are stifling business and ensuring that these standards are harmonized upward through the hemisphere. On the other hand, downward harmonization refers to the fact that for the nations of our hemisphere to "converge," the standard of living of most Americans will have to plummet.

Other Deceptions
This web site also presents evidence of other deceptions, such as:

1. The real forces driving the FTAA proposal that are kept from public scrutiny.

What are the origins of the FTAA?

Internationalists/Globalists

2. The orchestration of a phony hemispheric consensus so that it appears that leaders from Canada, Mexico, and Latin America all independently favor an FTAA.

3. The globalist funding of phony opposition to the FTAA. This phony opposition includes not only the rabble demonstrating in the streets but also Establishment-anointed "respectable" opposition. Both forms serve to confuse the American public and help build support for an even more aggressive FTAA agenda by demanding upward harmonization of the radical regulation that is already undermining our economic vitality.

4. Offers of loans through the World Bank to develop the infrastructure of the poorer countries of Latin America. These "bribes" are designed to lure those nations into the FTAA trap, from which there will be no escape.

And the last deception:

5. The claim that the FTAA will promote prosperity throughout the region and in America. This claim is merely bait and dishonest bait at that. Prosperity comes from a culture and a political system that protects freedom. Men must be free to innovate and to keep the fruits of their labor. That opportunity explains the incredible rise of the American middle class during the 19th and 20th centuries and why so many people came to this nation in search of a better life.

The Internationalists promoting the FTAA have rejected those lessons of history – they seek to regulate the world, not to advance freedom either at home or abroad. And they have little compunction in providing foreign aid to corrupt regimes that keep their people in poverty. [See "Welcome Mat to Terrorists" under "Recommended reading," below.]

Recommended reading:
Welcome Mat for Terrorists - The New American - December 29, 2003

With Marxist Regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil and Haiti, and Communist movements in other Latin American countries, the FTAA poses an enormous security nightmare.

Erasing Our Borders - The New American - May 6, 2002

Globalists are maneuvering America into a merger with the rest of the Western Hemisphere via "free trade" agreements. Their goal, as with the EU, is regional government.

Pincer Strategy Behind the FTAA - The New American - May 21, 2001

Street-level radicals are making it easier for pinstripe revolutionaries to transform their "free trade" rhetoric into regional governance — all according to plan.

Birchite or not some powerful arguement as to what the FTAA will help happen.

Erasing Our Borders
By William F. Jasper
The New American, May 6, 2002

Globalists are maneuvering America into a merger with the rest of the Western Hemisphere via “free trade” agreements. Their goal, as with the EU, is regional government.

America is being hijacked, but the hijackers don’t go by names like Mohamed, Omar, and Osama. The hijackers to whom we refer bear prominent names, such as Bush, Clinton, Kissinger, McLarty, Greenspan, Rubin, and Rockefeller. They don’t use box cutters and bombs or commandeer airliners to create towering infernos; their weapons of choice are instruments such as the WTO, NAFTA, the IMF, and the FTAA. They hijack entire nations, stealing sovereignty and destroying constitutions — usually under the banners of "free trade," "debt relief," and "globalization" — proclaiming all the while that their lawless actions will advance global prosperity, democratization, and "the rule of law."

A colossal hijacking operation is in full swing even now. Its primary target is the United States of America, but it is aimed at all the other nations of North and South America as well. It is the FTAA, the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas, which proposes nothing less than the economic and political merger of the 34 nations of the Western Hemisphere.

EU Blueprint
Following the same plan of attack that was used to hijack the nations of Europe into the sovereignty-destroying European Union (EU), the internationalist architects of the FTAA intend to transform the nation-states of the Western Hemisphere — including the United States — into mere administrative units of the supranational FTAA. (The article beginning on page 23 examines the European model for this attack, where the hijacking is so far advanced that the EU is now widely recognized as a developing regional government sapping the sovereignty of France, Germany, Great Britain, and the other member states. As it is in Europe, so it will be in the Americas — if the architects of world order are successful.)

The FTAA represents a vast "broadening and deepening" of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which set the hijack operation in motion by tying Canada, the United States, and Mexico together in a system of ever-expanding and tightening political, economic, social, and military entanglements. Following the EU model, the trinational NAFTA is adding new members (what the internationalists call "broadening") and claiming jurisdiction over an ever-increasing swath of functions ("deepening") that have previously been solely the purview of national governments and their state and local governments.

The NAFTA/FTAA plan calls for an entire hemispheric regime of regulations to "harmonize" business, industry, labor, agriculture, transportation, immigration, education, taxation, environment, health, trade, defense, criminal justice, and other matters of policy and law "from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego." NAFTA is not, and never was, about "free trade." Free trade — real free trade — is a voluntary exchange between two parties, unhampered by government intervention and subsidies.

But NAFTA, like the European Union, seeks to regulate and control virtually every industrial, agricultural, commercial, social, environmental, and labor matter. Rather than creating or permitting economic freedom by eliminating government intervention, NAFTA seeks to homogenize the multitude of socialist programs that now hamstring the U.S., Mexican, and Canadian economies — and add a new host of controls besides. Also, in keeping with the EU pattern, the NAFTA/FTAA globalists have already launched their campaign for a single hemispheric currency as a counterpart to the euro, which replaced the currencies of the EU member states in January of this year. For now, the dollar is being touted as the hemispheric legal tender, but plans have already been floated to replace the dollar with a new currency called the "amero."

Strikingly obvious is that the NAFTA/ FTAA "broadening and deepening" and "harmonization and integration" represent a radical, revolutionary assault on national sovereignty and constitutional government. Piece by piece, governmental functions are being ripped from protective firewalls so carefully constructed by our own country’s Founding Fathers. These powers are being transferred to unaccountable, unelected international bureaucracies that are not bound by the checks and balances that have prevented the accumulation of absolute, tyrannical power in our constitutional system of government.

The people of the EU have only recently begun realizing that the process started five decades ago under the banner of "free trade" was really a stealth attack aimed at nothing less than destroying their national sovereignties and imposing a tyrannical oligarchy ruling over them from Brussels. The EU has become a supranational regional bloc in the new world order, and its ruling elite now pushes to further concentrate and centralize power at the global level — under an all-powerful United Nations. That same EU process is now being imposed on the Western Hemisphere, but on an accelerated schedule. What took decades to accomplish in Europe, the FTAA schemers intend to achieve in the next few years. They have, in fact, set the fast-approaching 2005 as the target year for locking the FTAA into place.

"We’re working to build a Free Trade Area of the Americas, and we’re determined to complete those negotiations by January of 2005," President George W. Bush declared in his January 16, 2002 speech to the Organization for American States (OAS) and the World Affairs Council in Washington, D.C. "We plan to complete a free trade agreement with Chile early this year. And once we conclude the agreement, I urge Congress to take it up quickly. And I ask the Senate to schedule a vote, as soon as it returns, on renewing and expanding the Andean Trade Preference Act. Today, I announce that the United States will explore a free trade agreement with the countries of Central America.... Our purpose is to strengthen the economic ties we already have with these nations … and to take another step toward completing the Free Trade Area of the Americas."

The 2005 timetable did not originate with President Bush; he was merely renewing a pledge that his predecessor, Bill Clinton, had also made when endorsing the FTAA agenda in 1994. In December of that year, President Clinton hosted the Summit of the Americas in Miami, which served as the FTAA launch pad. He endorsed both the "Declaration of Principles" and the "Plan of Action" promulgated at the conference.

The Declaration’s preamble declares, "We are determined to consolidate and advance closer bonds of cooperation.... We reiterate our firm adherence to the principles of international law and the purposes and principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter and in the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS)...." Moreover, the Declaration pledges "to begin immediately to construct the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)," to be concluded no later than 2005. The signatories also swore to "advance and implement the commitments made at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development" (the enviro-Marxist Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro) by creating "cooperative partnerships to strengthen our capacity to prevent and control pollution" and promote "sustainable development" (globalese for UN control over economic, industrial, and population matters).

The FTAA Plan of Action states that governments will "cooperate fully with all United Nations and inter-American human rights bodies," "undertake all measures necessary to guarantee the rights of children, and, where they have not already done so, give serious consideration to ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child." The governments will also seek to strengthen "the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights," both of which can be expected to interfere with increasing frequency in U.S. civil and criminal cases.

That barely scratches the surface of the kinds of transnational meddling in U.S. affairs that the FTAA will bring. At that 1994 summit, the presidents of El Salvador and Guatemala condemned California’s Proposition 187. This measure to deny various welfare benefits to illegal aliens was passed by an overwhelming majority of California voters. Proposition 187, said the presidents, grossly violated "children’s rights." In similar fashion, the Mexican consul demanded that the U.S. "consult" with its hemispheric neighbors before passing certain laws. However, news coverage of these and other manifestations of the new world disorder bearing down on us received short shrift. As with coverage of NAFTA, the internationalist media giants focused public attention on the glorious economic benefits that allegedly would accrue with the new wave of hemispheric trade that the FTAA would bring.

A few candid admissions did surface. Mack McLarty, President Clinton’s chief of staff, offered this comment: "[T]his summit is much broader than [lowering tariffs], and that’s how it should be looked at. This is not a trade summit, it is an overall summit. It will focus on economic integration and convergence." The terms integration and convergence pass over the heads of average Americans. But they are pregnant with meaning for committed globalists, of which Mr. McLarty is a hearty specimen. Subsequently moving on to a heady (and highly profitable) partnership with Henry Kissinger, McLarty now prominently advocates hemispheric integration and convergence in the business and financial communities.

Henry Kissinger, a member of the executive committee of the Trilateral Commission and a longtime power in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), called the NAFTA vote the single most important decision that Congress would make during Mr. Clinton’s first term. Indeed, Kissinger admitted in the Los Angeles Times in 1993 that passing NAFTA "will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War...." NAFTA "is not a conventional trade agreement," he said, "but the architecture of a new international system."

Self-appointed Wisemen
Over the past decade, many of Kissinger’s Trilateralist and CFR brethren have expounded on how important this "new international system" is in constructing their subversive "new world order." Some of them openly admit that NAFTA and the FTAA can, and will, follow the sovereignty-destroying path blazed by the EU. Many of the most important revelations in this regard can be found in the pages of the CFR’s journal, Foreign Affairs. In the Fall 1991 issue, for example, CFR member M. Delal Baer penned an article entitled "North American Free Trade," hinting at the hemispheric leviathan emerging from the murky depths.

"The creation of trinational dispute-resolution mechanisms and rule-making bodies on border and environmental issues may also be embryonic forms of more comprehensive structures," said Baer. "After all, international organizations and agreements like GATT and NAFTA by definition minimize assertions of sovereignty in favor of a joint rule-making authority." (Emphasis added.) Dr. Baer went on to draw a direct analogy to the EU, suggesting:

It may be useful to revisit the spirit of the Monnet Commission, which provided a blueprint for Europe at a moment of extraordinary opportunity. The three nations of North America, in more modest fashion, have also arrived at a defining moment. They may want to create a wiseman’s North American commission to operate in the post-ratification period.... The commission might also adopt a forward-looking agenda on themes such as North American competitiveness, links between scientific institutions, borderland integration, the continental ecological system and educational and cultural exchanges.

The Monnet Commission Baer refers to was named for Jean Monnet, the socialist one-worlder who served as the principal architect of the Common Market. He and his self-appointed, self-anointed "wisemen" — together with their American counterparts — gradually foisted the EU on the people of Europe, using deception, outright lies, bribery, extortion, and corruption to achieve their objective.

Jacques Delors, the socialist president of the European Community Commission in 1992, when the NAFTA debate was raging, clearly saw the parallels between the two regional organizations. Delors gloated that "NAFTA is a form of flattery for us Europeans. In many ways, we have shown what positive, liberating effect these regional arrangements can have." Liberating for whom? Why, for one-world "wisemen" like Delors, naturally, who detest constitutional limitations on their powers.

In 1994, an important study by Gary Clyde Hufbauer (CFR) and Jeffrey J. Schott provided a fairly detailed guide to the globalist game plan for the hemisphere. Entitled Western Hemisphere Economic Integration, the Hufbauer-Schott study was published by the Institute for International Economics (IIE), a close sister of the CFR. The IIE, says The London Observer, "may be the most influential think-tank on the planet," with "an extraordinary record in turning ideas into effective policy."

"After four decades of dedicated effort," said the IIE report, "Western Europe has just arrived at the threshold of … monetary union, and fiscal coordination. It seems likely that trade and investment integration will proceed at a faster pace within the Western Hemisphere." Yes, the IIE-CFR internationalists have learned from the EU experience and expect to use those lessons to speed the process along in the Americas.

According to Hufbauer and Schott, "the more countries that participate in integration and the wider its scope, the greater the need for some institutional mechanism to administer the arrangements and to resolve the inevitable disputes, and the stronger the case for a common legal framework." This means supranational legislative, executive, and judicial institutions, of course. "The European Commission, Council, Parliament, and Court of Justice have many of the powers of comparable institutions in federal states," they noted approvingly before commenting, "On this subject, we score Europe with a 5 [on a scale of 0 to 5]."

But Hufbauer and Schott propose going even beyond the EU’s rapacious appetite. They assert that "integration between NAFTA and Latin America should be legally open-ended; potentially the WHFTA [an earlier name for the FTAA] should include countries outside the hemisphere." They assert: "Economic logic suggests that the expansion of NAFTA in an Asian direction is just as desirable as its expansion in a Latin American direction."

A more recent brief for this hijacking of the Americas is provided by Felipe A.M. de la Balze, director of the Argentine Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of international economics. In an article entitled "Finding Allies in the Back Yard: NAFTA and the Southern Cone," in the July/August 2001 Foreign Affairs, de la Balze points his fellow Insiders toward the EU experience. "Witness the successive expansions of the European integration project (now the European Union)," he says, "which incorporated Italy in the 1950s, Spain in the 1970s, and then Greece, Ireland, and Portugal in the 1980s."

He continues:

Now a similar opportunity for integration exists in the Southern Cone of South America. A core group of countries — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay — have made great strides in recent years and are poised, despite their short-term economic problems, to make steady political and economic gains over the next decade....

To this end, the best incentive the United States can provide is an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the Southern Cone, making these South American nations members of the pact alongside the United States, Canada, and Mexico. But economic integration will not succeed without a compelling political rationale as well: namely, the promotion of democracy and regional security that could follow the creation of a "super NAFTA."

Integration Express
Having helped design the economic program in Argentina that has brought about that country’s bankruptcy and present crisis, de la Balze believes it is time to crank up the "integration express": "A seven-state NAFTA, incorporating democratic and security accords as well as economic agreements, would offer a wide array of benefits to the entire hemisphere and could eventually integrate other Latin American countries." De la Balze acknowledges that the countries he proposes to integrate into the NAFTA/FTAA "need help in addressing endemic problems such as economic instability, low per-capita income, illiberal democratic practices, and narcoterrorism." And that "bringing economic growth and social stability to South America will require not only a vibrant private sector and functioning markets but also public education for the young, job training for the unemployed, public health care for the poor, and courts and police that treat all citizens alike." In other words, it will take huge transfers of wealth from U.S. taxpayers, as well as transfers of U.S. sovereignty to the new FTAA institutions. The program he outlines is a hemispheric socialist manifesto, disguised with rhetoric about free trade. "Again, Europe provides a good precedent," de la Balze claims.

President George W. Bush, like Bill Clinton before him, is following the destructive and subversive FTAA road plan laid out by de la Balze, Hufbauer, Schott, Baer, Kissinger, et al. Why? Senator Barry Goldwater explained in his 1979 memoir, With No Apologies, that despite the heated rhetoric and change in party label from one administration to the next, the same internationalist policies continue unabated:

When a new President comes on board, there is a great turnover in personnel but no change in policy. Example: During the Nixon years Henry Kissinger, CFR member and Nelson Rockefeller’s protégé, was in charge of foreign policy. When Jimmy Carter was elected, Kissinger was replaced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, CFR member and David Rockefeller’s protégé.

That same musical chairs rotation of CFR-Trilateral one-worlders has continued through the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II administrations. This was plainly evident at a February 15, 2002 CFR program televised on C-SPAN. Vice President Dick Cheney, the featured speaker, drew a round of laughter by noting that he had been a longtime member of the Council but that he couldn’t let his constituents back in Wyoming know that when he was serving as a member of Congress. The first person to speak following Mr. Cheney’s speech was David Rockefeller, former chairman of both the CFR and Trilateral Commission (TC). "Mr. Vice President," said Rockefeller, "I just enjoyed so much your whole speech, but I was particularly pleased that you gave such a strong endorsement for the free-trade agreement for all the Americas — a subject that has been of great concern to me for many years and particularly recently."

Indeed, David Rockefeller and the Rockefeller family have spearheaded the entire FTAA process for several decades through organizations such as the CFR, TC, IIE, the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Council of the Americas, The Americas Society, the Center for Inter-American Relations, and other institutions.

Both the FTAA and Trilateral processes entail building regional relationships that will eventually coalesce in world government. In With No Apologies, Goldwater noted that "the Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power — political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical.... What the Trilaterals truly intend is the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nation-states involved.... As managers and creators of the system they will rule the future."

Clearly, the EU-NAFTA-FTAA schemes are intended to accomplish precisely that criminal and treasonous objective. As such, they are far more dangerous than any of the terrorist attacks that Osama bin Laden or others of his ilk can throw at us.

Since under FTAA border control will be an impossibility the logical bureaucratic approach is to consider everybody a potential terrorist and this leads logically to expanding police powers of the state. Now as with 'gun control' and much of the current farce of 'airline security' the brunt of these regulations will fall on normal law abiding Americans and the terrorists and transnational criminals will continue to use the cosmopolitan FTAA border and immigration regime to float freely from one jurisdiction to another. Can you say 'police state for the law abiding' and you say 'anarcho-tyranny'.

Welcome Mat for Terrorists
By William F. Jasper
The New American, December 29, 2003

With Marxist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil and Haiti, and Communist movements in other Latin American countries, the FTAA poses an enormous security nightmare.

Could the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, now galloping toward completion, actually spur the spread of Marxist revolution throughout Latin America? Would a completed FTAA result in the political and economic merger of the United States with Marxist-run countries in the region, including, ultimately, Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba? Will the FTAA make it easier for terrorists from Latin America and throughout the world, including the Middle East, to enter the United States? The answer to each of these questions is a resounding — and alarming — yes.

Previous articles in THE NEW AMERICAN have reported on the destructive impact that this proposed "common market" for the Western Hemisphere would have on U.S. jobs and industry. The FTAA would vastly multiply the devastation already wrought by NAFTA, the WTO and other so-called free-trade agreements negotiated by the Clinton and Bush administrations. Millions of jobs and virtually every U.S. industry sector — from agriculture and basic manufacturing to information technology and financial services — are on the line. We have also exposed the blueprint behind the FTAA to use the trade issue as simply the opening step in an ongoing process that will lead to a hemispheric supranational government, just as the Common Market in Europe led to a merger of nations in the European Union.* This puts our Constitution and our very existence as a sovereign nation at stake.

Opening the Door for Terrorism

The FTAA, however, poses an additional enormous danger that should be of paramount concern to every U.S. citizen, especially in light of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the ongoing terror war. For the past 40 years, Fidel Castro has maintained Havana as the center for international terrorism in the Western Hemisphere. He maintains close ties with every recognized terror regime — Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya, Algeria and Lebanon as well as with Russia and China. He was one of Saddam Hussein’s most loyal allies and defenders.

Following the 9-11 attacks, Castro hosted a global terror summit in Havana that included representatives from the "axis of evil" regimes and top terrorist groups. And, unbeknownst to most U.S. citizens, Comrade Fidel is bosom buddy to the Marxist presidents of our new FTAA partners Brazil and Venezuela. These two regimes, along with several others in the area, have become terrorist havens for Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the PLO, PFLP and other Middle Eastern and Islamic terrorist organizations.

If the U.S. Congress approves the FTAA, these terrorists, along with others in Latin America, will eventually have free access to the U.S. What’s more, the FTAA planners intend to bring Communist Cuba itself into the hemispheric union as well.

The plan for the FTAA would not even have gotten off the ground in 1994 if there had been any hint that Fidel Castro’s regime might some day be included in what then was being sold merely as a trade pact. President Bill Clinton knew that when he presided over the 1994 Summit of the Americas in Miami that launched the FTAA process. Florida’s influential Cuban-American community and their traditional anti-Communist allies would have forced Congress to torpedo any effort to lift the U.S. embargo of Castro, let alone give him the preferential trade status to be conferred on FTAA countries.

So Cuba, alone among the 35 countries of the Western Hemisphere, was pointedly excluded from the 1994 Miami summit and all succeeding FTAA gatherings, including the most recent Ministerial summit held in Miami during November 16-20, 2003. Castro’s exclusion, together with rosy assessments that envision a hemisphere growing ever more prosperous, stable and democratic, have won over many FTAA skeptics and opponents. A free-trade agreement promoting the free movement of capital, people, goods and services across borders (goes the argument) will create a rising tide of prosperity that will lift all boats — big and small businesses, the poor as well as the rich — in Latin America and the Caribbean. This, in turn, say the FTAA advocates, will undercut any residual attraction to the bankrupt policies of Marxism. The rhetoric has worked well. Cuban-American business leaders are among the most enthusiastic supporters of the trade pact. Republicans who claim conservative, anti-Castro credentials form the hard core of FTAA support in Congress.

However, many of the FTAA’s most fervent supporters are being taken for a ride. Besides the immense problems that the trade pact will cause the U.S. in terms of dislocation, job loss, market loss and trade deficits, there is also an enormous security issue that has been totally papered over. The FTAA’s architects know that Communist movements and terrorist organizations that were relatively quiet throughout the 1990s have roared back into action throughout the Americas. Openly Marxist, pro-Castro governments have taken over two of our most critical trading partners in the region: Brazil and Venezuela. Communist China is investing heavily throughout the region and controls key shipping ports, including the ports of Balboa and Cristobal strategically located at each end of the Panama Canal, and the huge new port in the Bahamas built by Beijing’s global acquisition agent, Hutchison Whampoa, Inc. A Communist madman runs Haiti. Colombia is tottering between narco-terrorists and "soft" Marxists. Peru faces a possible slide back into anarchy and terrorism. In Nicaragua, the Communist Sandinistas may well come back openly to power.

In addition, virtually every country in the proposed FTAA is awash in debt and beyond bankrupt. And we’ve barely scratched the surface. In short, Latin America is already an enormous security problem for the United States. Protecting our borders and getting some handle on the millions of illegal aliens now in our country are already daunting challenges. The FTAA architects would make the problem infinitely worse by accelerating the abolition of our borders. The hemispheric merger they are pushing would completely enmesh the political and economic systems of the region to allow free migration between countries, as now allowed in the European Union. To top it off, they intend to include Cuba in this new common market after all. Yes, all of the key players in the FTAA game plan have long supported normalizing relations with Fidel Castro, welcoming him into all international organizations, and showering his Communist regime with loans, credits and foreign aid. If the United States joins the FTAA, you can be sure that it won’t be long until all of those outrages become official U.S. policy.

FTAA — Castro’s Brainchild

And why shouldn’t Communist Cuba be a full-fledged FTAA member? After all, Comrade Fidel can legitimately lay claim to being one of the earliest proponents of this Marxist-Leninist concept, decades before the rest of us even heard of such a thing. Less than five months after taking control of Cuba, the bearded dictator advocated the creation of a common market for the Western Hemisphere. In a speech delivered on May 2, 1959 to an inter-American economic conference in Buenos Aires, Castro urged the United States to join in the creation of a so-called Latin American common market. He proposed that the U.S. provide $30 billion in credit over 10 years for the economic development of Latin America.

Incredibly, Castro’s proposal became U.S. policy. Herbert Matthews, Fidel’s leading champion at the New York Times, later wrote of Castro’s Buenos Aires speech: "The American delegation dismissed the idea with amused contempt. But less than two years later President Kennedy put forward the proposal for his Alliance for Progress, pledging $10 billion for the first ten years. Later President Johnson promised another $10 billion for the first ten years."

What we are now witnessing as the unfolding FTAA began as a revolutionary program of the Kennedy administration under the lofty sounding title of Alliance for Progress. The Alliance for Progress, designed on the pattern of the Marshall Plan, was established to funnel billions of foreign aid dollars to socialist parties and Communist movements in Latin America, with the aim of melding all of the region’s countries into a common market, just as the Marshall Planners had done after World War II in Europe.

Stripped of its phony rhetoric about "free markets," Castro’s support of a regional common market makes perfect sense; it is in complete accord with Communist strategy. "Divide the world into regional groups as a transitional stage to world government," Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wrote in his book Marxism and the National Question. "Populations will more readily abandon their national loyalties to a vague regional loyalty than they will for a world authority. Later, the regionals can be brought all the way into a single world dictatorship...."

So Fidel was merely following his ideological masters. What most Americans will find astounding is that top U.S. government officials not only adopted the same program, but did so with the aim of establishing the same regional approach to global socialism. However, this scheme had to be sold to the American public as a cure to stop the spread of Communism in Latin America.

Unholy Alliance

The Kennedy administration was loaded with many of the same one-world ideologues and pro-Communists who had dominated the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations. This continuing claque of policymakers invariably saw allies in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Gamal Nasser and other Communists.

The Kennedy brain trust drew from the usual stable: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, Harvard University, the Ford Foundation, and, most importantly, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Adolph Berle, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Goodwin, Lincoln Gordon and Walt Rostow — all CFR apparatchiks — together with other Establishment leftists, launched the regionalization effort for the Americas advocated by Stalin and Castro.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger described in his book A Thousand Days some of what he witnessed as a participant in that process. Schlesinger, a radical Fabian Socialist and New Dealer, recalled a Washington, D.C., meeting President John F. Kennedy and some of his advisers had with Dr. Cheddi Jagan, the Communist leader of Guyana. Kennedy and Jagan found much common ground, especially in their mutual admiration of one of Britain’s leading Fabian Socialist icons, Professor Harold Laski. Schlesinger writes:

Recalling Jagan’s words of admiration for Harold Laski on Meet the Press, Kennedy observed that he himself had studied for a term under Laski at the London School of Economics and that his older brother had visited the Soviet Union with him. Jagan replied that the first book of Laski’s he had read was The American Presidency; he considered himself, he added, a Bevanite. We all responded agreeably to this, citing Bevan’s … belief that the struggle of the future would be between democratic socialism and Communism....

Kennedy’s Latin American policy, crafted by his CFR brain trust, was based on this premise that the Western Hemisphere — and mankind in general — had only two viable options: socialism or Communism. It was a continuation of the CFR-hatched policies that had steered post-war Europe along the socialist track. To give this revolutionary plan a respectable face, the Kennedy administration resorted to a common ploy of governments, as well as institutions that aspire to govern: It set up a "task force" on Latin American policy. The man chosen to head the task force was Adolph Berle (CFR), a New Deal lawyer who implemented President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s "good neighbor" policy and later served as U.S. ambassador to Brazil.

Berle’s task force issued a report in 1961 that laid out what became, essentially, the FTAA program. It recommended that the United States support "a long-range economic plan for the whole hemisphere." This plan should provide "integrated development programs covering several years in advance, prepared first on a national basis … and then combined into a region-wide effort." The Berle report urged the U.S. to end its "doctrinaire opposition" to socialism and revolutionary movements and to encourage "diverse social systems in different countries." U.S. military force should not be used, it said, to "stabilize the dying reactionary situations." By which the authors clearly meant that anti-Communist allies in Latin America should not be assisted when under attack by Soviet-sponsored "progressive" forces. These "reactionary" regimes were presumed to be corrupt by virtue of the simple fact that they did not embrace socialism. However, according to the task force, the U.S. military may be justifiably deployed to aid a Leftist regime pursuing the socialist holy grail.

The Kennedy-Berle plan was officially launched as the Alliance for Progress at the Inter-American Economic and Social Council conference in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in August 1961. The U.S. representative at the summit, C. Douglas Dillon (a longtime CFR director and vice chairman of the board), found himself facing opposition to the scheme from virtually every country — except Castro’s Cuba. Schlesinger noted this was because "Cuba was in sympathy with many of the Alliance’s objectives...." Castro recognized the pro-Communist reality beneath the Kennedy administration’s anti-Communist rhetoric. Thus, says Schlesinger, "Word soon went round the conference that there were only ‘two left-wing governments present — Cuba and the United States.’..."

The Elite Castro Lobby

With billions of Alliance for Progress dollars voted by Congress, the administration began the process of luring, bribing and bludgeoning reluctant Latin American countries into the hemispheric merger. Additional U.S. taxpayer funds provided through the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund further greased the skids.

However, perhaps just as important to the success of the Alliance for Progress’ plan for hemispheric integration as official U.S. policy was (and is) the support provided by powerful private organizations. Foremost among these, in addition to the Council on Foreign Relations, is the Council of the Americas (COA). Officially established in 1965, just after the Alliance for Progress got up and running, the COA moved in to make sure the policies and aid dollars were advancing the objectives outlined by the Berle task force.

The COA was founded by (and for many years chaired by) mega-banker David Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller remains today as honorary chairman of the organization, while William R. Rhodes (CFR) serves as the COA’s current chairman. David Rockefeller was uniquely qualified to head this venture, having a few years before been a central player in the plan to regionalize and socialize Europe. In 1947 he had served as secretary of the CFR study group on "Reconstruction in Western Europe," what later became known as the Marshall Plan. That scheme to build the Common Market (now the European Union) was officially administered in Europe by Rockefeller’s longtime CFR colleague John J. McCloy.

The COA’s membership has included some of the top members of the CFR’s circles of power in government, business, the media and academe. The COA’s corporate members comprise a Who’s Who of business and finance: Bank of America, Citibank, AOL Time Warner, Ford, GM, Lucent Technologies, Coca Cola, Pepsico, McDonald’s, Microsoft, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, etc. With this kind of political and economic clout, the COA leadership has been well positioned to reward or punish Latin American business and political leaders. "The Council regularly hosts Presidents, cabinet ministers, central bankers, government officials, and leading experts in economics, politics, business, and finance," the COA’s website boasts. "This programming," it notes, "gives our members unique access to information and insights into the evolution of the region...." Indeed it does. And the COA and CFR have worked hand in hand to use this "unique access" to direct the "evolution of the region" in a corporate-socialist direction — while claiming to advance free markets.

Operating through the COA and other fronts such as the Inter-American Dialogue, the CFR has drawn most of Latin America’s movers and shakers into its sway. It even has national CFR affiliates throughout the hemisphere to push the process more directly. Page 12 of the CFR’s 2003 Annual Report features a photo of "The first Hemispheric meeting of the Councils on Foreign Relations … held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 30-31, 2003." Pictured are representatives from mini-CFRs in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico and Paraguay.

CFR Tells Lulu on Lula

The presence of well-known corporate giants and business moguls in the CFR-COA membership rolls leads many observers to conclude that these men are conservative businessmen who would have no truck with socialism and revolution. But in reality, these people are, by and large, not free market entrepreneurs but transnational corporatists. They know that the international regulations and agreements they promote favor huge economies of scale that will wipe out their smaller competitors and challengers. They bear no national allegiance; in fact, they support world government. They prattle endlessly about the virtues of globalization, global governance and international law — and support policies to implement the same.

The CFR establishment’s perspective on the Communist background and government of Brazil’s president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, more commonly known as Lula, is typical of the continuing socialist program directed by these elites. On December 5, 2002, the CFR’s Kenneth R. Maxwell penned a blistering diatribe for the New York Review of Books taking on Lula’s U.S. critics. Mr. Maxwell is the "Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Inter-American Studies" at the CFR and the council’s director of Latin America Studies — ergo, the "expert’s expert."

Mr. Maxwell explained that he had returned from Brazil, where Mr. Lula had just been elected president in a tremendous upset. And Maxwell was upset that the "United States was not celebrating this remarkable demonstration of democratic civility."

"Lula’s triumph seemed like the realization of an American dream," wrote the CFR’s expert, and he couldn’t understand why U.S. conservatives were painting the new president as a dangerous, pro-Castro radical. He was irate that critics had linked Lula to the Sao Paulo Forum and had described the SPF as a center of international terrorism.

"No one I met in Brazil thinks that Lula would see Cuba, let alone Venezuela, as a model," said Maxwell. "Even the best-informed experts I talked to in Brazil had never heard of the Sao Paulo Forum," he insisted. And "the charge that it is a secret ‘Castroist’ cabal, aimed at promoting international terrorism, is exaggerated to say the least," he averred.

For the record, the Sao Paulo Forum is indeed a Castroist cabal that may justly be called a continuation of the terrorist Tricontinental network Fidel launched in the 1960s. Its membership includes such notorious terrorist groups as the FARC and ELN of Colombia, the MIR of Chile, the FMLN of El Salvador and the FSLN of Nicaragua, as well as the Communist Parties of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela. The first SPF gathering was held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and was hosted by Lula and his (Communist) Workers Party. Lula has since then publicly attended many of the SPF’s annual confabs, including the one hosted by Fidel Castro in Havana in December 2001. His economic and political policies indicate he does indeed see Cuba and Venezuela as models for his socialist state.

All of this information on Lula and the SPF — and much more besides — is publicly available on Communist and pro-Castro websites on the Internet. How did all of this escape the notice of the CFR’s top Latin American expert? Interestingly, it didn’t; Maxwell simply chooses to dismiss it as irrelevant. He acknowledges:

No one doubts that the stakes involved in the election of a candidate of the left in Brazil are high and the risks great, or that Lula and the Workers Party have longstanding socialist credentials, or that he has met with Castro, or received a victory "Bolivarian saber" from Venezuelan president Chavez, or that his closest adviser, Jose Dirceu, was trained as a guerrilla in Cuba and returned to Brazil decades ago with a face altered by plastic surgery to disguise him.

Maxwell and his fellow CFR revolutionists would have you believe all that is superfluous. Likewise, the fact that Lula’s first official guests as president of Brazil were Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Marxist President Hugo Chavez. But Maxwell wouldn’t see that as a problem, since the CFR favors normalizing relations with Castro, just as it led the charge to aid, and trade with, Communist China, Saddam’s Iraq, and Communist Vietnam.

Mr. Chavez has also been given remarkably friendly treatment by the CFR experts, though he makes no attempt to conceal his Communist colors. Since taking power in 1999, Hugo Chavez has marched Venezuela steadily leftward toward a Castro-type dictatorship. With him go Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest proven deposits.

Chavez has publicly aligned himself with the terrorist-sponsoring regimes of Cuba, China, Iraq (under Saddam Hussein), Iran and North Korea. He has repeatedly unleashed his "Bolivarian Circles," armed thugs and neighborhood spies, patterned after Castro’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, to beat, intimidate and murder his opposition.

Lula and Chavez appear to be throwing left-handed wrenches into the FTAA works with their revolutionary rhetoric, their demands for trade exemptions and concessions, and their pursuit of their own South American common market known as Mercosur. But that is a feint supported by the COA-CFR elitists. Contrary to the claims of some observers, the regional Mercosur is not incompatible with FTAA.

Indeed, one of the top FTAA architects, C. Fred Bergsten (CFR), has repeatedly soothed his fellow globalists who have become concerned that sub-regional trade areas would undermine the larger hemispheric plan. To the contrary, says Bergsten in Open Regionalism, a 1997 working paper from the Institute for International Economics, these smaller trade zones actually create "incentives for other regions and individual countries to follow suit and thus to ‘ratchet up’ the global process."

Thus the CFR elites are not unduly bothered by heated bombast from the likes of Lula, Chavez or Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In fact they are happy to shovel billions more taxpayer dollars into these Marxist hellholes, as these regimes push their own regional trade pacts. According to Bergsten, it is only necessary to assure that these "regional agreements will in practice be building blocks for further global liberalization rather than stumbling blocks that deter such progress."

So, ah, who ya voting for?

I think your last post illustrates exactly what I'm talking about when I say that people don't understand the NAFTA or its requirements.

For instance, you say: "Mexican food production industries don't have to match U.S. regulations when it comes to producing food."

However, this statement is, at best, misleading. Chapter 7, Section B of the NAFTA requires that each member maintain at least international standards on agricultural and food products. So, to use your example, if Mexico tried to import strawberries contaminated with human waste, the United States could block it under the NAFTA, and it would be perfectly legal under the agreement.

So anyway, the NAFTA DOES, in fact, level the playing field. If the United States chooses, for instance, to have higher food standards than the international requirement, that is, in your words, a sovereign decision. You should be all about that--it is the United States exercising its sovereignty.

As for the NAFTA being a failure for Mexico, I've read some articles that say that, but I think those articles are tremendously short-sighted and have a memory about as long as last week. Harken back to the state of the Mexican economy when the NAFTA was being negotiated and signed--Mexico was in the middle of its Peso Crisis--and facing a bailout from the IMF (funded largely, incidentally, by the United States). Remember too, at the time of the signing, the NAFTA represented a guarantee to Mexico that the US would not close its markets to Mexican imports (which, thanks to maquiladoras, were already largely tariff free), which would essentially bankrupt the Mexican government. Add all of this to the context of the PRI government beginning to collapse, and the NAFTA lent an extraordinary amount of stability to a country that was on the verge of economic collapse.

Additionally, the treaty bound future Mexican governments to continue market-friendly reform. This was doubly important because many of the PRI "elite" were adamantly against such open-market reform that Salinas was pushing.

We fast-forward ten years later, and the story of Mexican economic development, is largely a happy one, although, of course, anything can still happen. Inflation is down from around 150% in 1987, and Mexico essentially has a balanced budget. While the NAFTA certainly can't take credit for all of this, it has basically ensured that future Mexican governments will continue to dismantle government control of the economy and government regulations of the private sector, which over the past several decades, have kept the Mexican economy far below what it otherwise would have been. The NAFTA hasn't been good for Mexico? Please.

You make a job loss argument, and I thought that had been debunked like 5 years ago. There was no "giant sucking sound." It just didn't happen--and as far as I'm concerned, if Mexican truck drivers can do the same job as US truck drivers, and cheaper, then Mexican truck drivers can do the job. Great--capitalism in action, and it'll save me some money, to boot.

the WTO, not our government exercised policy making decisions.

Uh, no it didn't. At Cancun, the G-20 walked out of the Doha round over farm subsidies. The G-20 said it would not participate in any future negotiations unless the EU and the US largely ended its farm subsidies. The EU and the US both then made its own decisions to end its farm subsidies, although, of course, we haven't done anything but lip service yet. We'll see what happens over the next year or so and if the round is completed.

The WTO didn't exercise policy decisions--the US government did. The US government decided (wisely, I might add) that it was important to complete the Doha round. So they eliminated the farm subsidies. No one but the US government decided.

I note, too, that we've had the GATT since 1947, and, amazingly, we still have sovereignty and a congress and a president and everything! It's amazing!

Does it? Here are some quotes. Vicente Fox: "Mexico, the Untied States, and Canada will unite under one "Trade Umbrella", with U.S. wages falling to meet Mexico's rising wages. The rest of the Western Hemisphere will join later".

George Bush: "I would like to see a Free Trade Zone from the North of Canada to the tip of Cape Horn".

BTW, Bush does have the Fast Track ability now. Now why don't you go to the FTAA site and really read it. Read the side issues like the discussion of how to allow judges to have greater power from the bench to hand down harsher sentences for "hate speech". The E.U. also has laws dealing with jail sentences for anyone who diss'es the E.U.
They don't really enforce them much, yet. But the law is on the books.

Free movement across borders is also discussed. The ability of a lady from Chili being able to come to the USofA to sell her tribal rugs with no border hassles.

The FTAA is a nation killer that dissolves borders, cultures, and patriotism, yet leaves government in place. A real oddity. Corporations love it of course, the drone market being so cheap and all.

You cannot really debate it until you have read it, and connected the dots with the Supremes Court's recent statements about their study and planned use of Euro law. I believe it was Euro Law used to set aside the Texas Sodomy Laws.

Already the talk is about how the new jobs created doesn't pay squat. So the decline in US wages seems to be in play right now. And what happens to a widget maker and his employees in the USofA when he comes up against unfair competition with a favored widget maker whose cousin is the President of Brazil?

Who settles this dispute? An appointed, not elected board, with a whole lot of power. It's like adding an extra layer of government over the entire western hemisphere, more powerful than any national Constitution.

This recovery has been called a jobless recovery. The corporations are making money, the stock market is okay, but the wealth that ordinary American's would make from a living wage job has and is going over seas at a greater clip.

Bush has made the comment that he has faith that no one can compete with the American worker if he is given a level playing field. Just what does he really mean by that?

Free Trade is not Fair Trade and the US worker gets the dirty end of the stick already. For the US worker to compete in today's market his wages and standard of living must go into the toilette. But of course this is covered under our "duty" to raise the boats of the rest of the world, by giving it all away.

No one wants to see Kerry elected, the truth is it makes no difference regarding the FTAA who is in office, Bush will ram it through congress also. My best advise is to hit the ground running after the election to defeat the FTAA. Things will be happening fast, as it did with the 245i amnesty. November will be the election, January the attempt will be made to pass the FTAA. I hope people are as prepared to call their congressmen and senators to defeat it, as they did over the 245i amnesty in the two times the attempt was made to sneak it past voters.

When U.S. companies were being taxed on profits in Europe, the United States forgave their U.S. tax obligation. It considered a U.S. tax obligation to amount to double taxation. Well Europe disagreed. They appealed to the WTO and the WTO agreed. Europe didn't want to compete with the U.S. on a fair footing, so they manipulated the system.

U.S. companies would have to submit to double taxation before they could compete in Europe. Is that right? Should we be happy about relinquishing our sovereign decision making on this topic. Hell no.

You have this almost perfectly backwards. A U.S. company operating overseas may receive a tax credit from the I.R.S. for that portion of its U.S. tax liability that corresponds to its foreign tax liability. In essence, if the I.R.S. shows that the company owes $100, and it already has paid $30 to the foreign taxing authority, then it owes the I.R.S. $70. This is the way it has always worked. The only authority engaging in double-taxation of U.S. companies is the I.R.S. Foreign companies operating in the U.S. do not receive credits from their respective foreign taxing authorities because they are not taxed by their home country. This gives them a competitive advantage, and is one primary example of how our tax code is more eff-ed up than the Europeans'.

As for NAFTA allowing Mexican farmers to import contaminated produce, that's simply John Birch Society BS.

And what happens to a widget maker and his employees in the USofA when he comes up against unfair competition with a favored widget maker whose cousin is the President of Brazil?

Isn't that why we have trade agreements in the first place? Talk about walking a tightrope: trade is inherently unfair, and trade agreements to make trade fair must be opposed.

This is different, with the FTAA you are dealing with an entity that makes very powerful decisions that will effect the nation big time. In effect another layer of government that is not elected. They told Bush to shove his Steel Tariff and he did, they settled the fule additive law suit in Canadas favor, and are demanding that our nation be open to Mexican truckers.

I do not understand what has happened to the fighters on F.R. Is everyone on drugs or just asleep? We fought the 245I amnesty to a stand still, not once but twice. No one called Bush's attempt to sneak this amnesty past voters tin foil hat stuff. It was real, and so is the FTAA agreement.

If Freepers hated and fought 245I they are really going to be put off by the FTAA treaty which is only about a million times worse than 245I.

I believe it was Euro Law used to set aside the Texas Sodomy Laws

It was mentioned in like one paragraph. It was hardly "used to set aside Texas sodomy laws."

I do not understand what has happened to the fighters on F.R.

There are those who think the steel tariffs were a bad idea, and the "controversy" over Mexican trucks is simply Naderite-Teamster posturing.

Which points to one of the major flaws in protectionist reasoning: protectionism is not about making things more "fair," it is merely about re-distributing economic rewards to different constituencies. In the case of steel, it was the steel-consuming industries that got hosed. In the case of trucking, it's about Big Labor acting to keep its slice of the pie.

They told Bush to shove his Steel Tariff and he did

Bush made his own decision. He levied illegal tariffs on steel, and the EU was going to retaliate with tariffs on orange juice and pajama bottoms if he didn't remove the illegal tariffs. So Bush made a decision to back off. His decision--not anyone else.

"Which points to one of the major flaws in protectionist reasoning: protectionism is not about making things more "fair," it is merely about re-distributing economic rewards to different constituencies".

Different constituencies in India, China, etc? I believe that is called strip mining the wealth of Americans in favor of Corporations. But that is a side issue to the big issue. Nationhood. Evidently there is nothing we will not be asked to give up that we will not give up.