Posted on 07/18/2005 12:40:00 PM PDT by datura
Since democracy is the worldwide goal of the Bush Administration, we must face the stunning fact that the integration of different nationalities under a common European Union (EU) Constitution was rejected by decisive democratic votes. President Bush can thank conservative leaders for saving him from the embarrassment of endorsing the EU Constitution, shortly before it was so soundly defeated in France and the Netherlands.
The EU Constitution was defeated, because Western Europeans don't want to be politically, economically, or socially integrated with the culture, economy, lifestyle, or history of Eastern Europe and Muslim countries. Western Europeans recognized in the proposed EU Constitution a loss of national identity and freedom, to a foreign bureaucracy, plus a redistribution of wealth from richer countries to poorer countries.
Will the political and business elites in America hear this message, and stop trying to force CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) on America?
The Senate Republican Policy Committee appears to be tone deaf. Its just-released policy paper argues that CAFTA should be approved, because its purpose is "integrating more closely with 34 hemispheric neighbors - thus furthering the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA)," which the 2001 Quebec Declaration declared would bring about "hemispheric integration."
Americans don't want to be "integrated" with the poverty, corruption, socialism, and communism of our hemispheric neighbors, any more than the French want to be integrated with the Turks and Bulgarians.
Just as the French and Dutch were suspicious of the dangers lurking in the 485-page EU Constitution, Americans are wary of the dangers hiding in the 92-page CAFTA legislation, plus the 31 pages that purport to spell out the administrative actions the U.S. must take in compliance. No wonder CAFTA's supporters are bypassing our Constitution's requirement that treaties can be valid only if passed by two-thirds of our Senators.
The Senate Republican policy paper argues that CAFTA "will promote democratic governance." But, there is nothing democratic about CAFTA's many pages of grants of vague authority to foreign tribunals, on which foreign judges could force us to change our domestic laws to be "no more burdensome than necessary" on foreign trade.
We have had enough impertinent interference with our lives and economy from the international tribunals Congress has already locked us into, such as the WTO (World Trade Organization) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Americans don't want decisions from another anti-American tribunal any more than the French and Dutch wanted their lives micro-managed by Belgian bureaucrats.
The EU political elite ridiculed the French and the Dutch for not realizing that globalism is on the march, and we should all get on the train before it leaves the station. The French and Dutch woke up to the fact that the engineers of the EU train are bureaucrats in Brussels and judges in Luxembourg, who invent regulations and judge-made laws, without so much as tip of their hats to democracy.
The pro-EU political bosses blamed the "non" vote by the French on worry about losing their jobs to the cheap labor of Eastern Europe and Turkey. But the worry was grounded in reality, and Americans are likewise correct, to worry about how CAFTA will put U.S. jobs in competition with low-wage Central America, where the average factory worker is paid about one dollar an hour.
CAFTA would even prohibit U.S. states from giving preference to American workers when taxpayer-funded contracts are granted.
CAFTA is not about free trade; it's about round-trip trade. That means multi-national corporations sending their raw materials to poor countries, where they can hire very cheap labor and avoid U.S. employment, safety and environmental regulations, and then bringing the finished goods back into the United States duty-free, to undersell U.S. companies that pay decent wages and comply with our laws.
The promise that CAFTA will give us 44 million new customers for U.S. goods is pie in the sky, like the false promise that letting Communist China into the WTO would give us a billion-person market for American agriculture. Or, the false promise that NAFTA would increase our trade surplus with Mexico to $10 billion when, in fact, it nosedived, to a $62 billion deficit.
Knowing that Americans are upset about Central America's chief export to the U.S., which is the incredibly vicious MS-13 Salvadoran gangs, the Senate Republican policy paper assures us that CAFTA will diminish "the incentives for illegal immigration to the United States." That's another fairy tale, like the unfulfilled promise that NAFTA would reduce illegal aliens and illegal drugs entering the U.S. from Mexico.
By stating that CAFTA means the implementation of a "rules-based framework" for trade, investment, and technology, the Senate Republican policy paper confirms that free trade requires world, or at least hemispheric, government. You can't have a single economy, without a single government.
CAFTA may serve the economic interests of the globalists and the multinational corporations, but it makes no sense historically, Constitutionally, or democratically. Americans will never sing "God Bless the Western Hemisphere" instead of "God Bless America."
What a laugh. The Europeans, namely the French, rejected the EU constitution because they thought it supported evil anglo-American style capitalism.
To repeat what I said in rely # 86:
Along the line of our earlier exchange, we hear a constant litany of complaints about lost jobs, outsourcing, trade deficits, increasing national debt, cheap goods from sweat shops and slave labor, jobs being lost to illegal immigrants, and on and on. There seems to be no recognition that the facts bely that. Our economy is booming, unemployment is at a near record low, the national debt is going down, the dollar is climbing, and the "cheap goods" are rapidly out selling and out lasting our own homemade products.
The people who complain the most are the ones, or are effected by the propaganda of the ones, who put us at a competitive disadvantage to start with - the leftists unions and economic policies put in place by the same Congress they now want to save us. Add to that the trial lawyers who are the enforcers for said group.
Without the competition from outside we will drown in the same anti-business and anti-freedom policies that have been growing for seventy years.
Right! They didn't want to give up their 35 hour work week and 7 weeks of vacation plus the multitude of other socialist programs. To spin it as anti-capitalism is typical left wing media hype.
All these trade agreements do is expand free enterprise to those who haven't experienced the benefits of it as well as lower prices and increase trade for everyone, benefitting all economies. Those against it have a vested interest in the status quo, though they bemoan that, too.
If that doesn't remind everyone of the Democrats in Congress I don't know why not.
This is true. Most are tenant farmers for the huge corporate farming co-ops. This is why 80% of all subsidies are paid to the co-ops. That welfare is then used to drive smaller farmers out of business or it is used to buyout the small farmer and turn him into an employee.
You guys cry rivers for the small family farmer but fail to recognize that it's your beloved corporate welfare that is driving them out of business.
Actually, if you want to "eliminate" "many" of the "liberal-imposed laws & rgulations" then do so directly. You have my blessing for having our Congress eliminating many of them. However, keep in mind that you are acknowledging a fundamental contradiction in that the WTO is doing this by their edicts, behind closed doors, by those who owe no representational allegiance to our People, our Republic, or its Constitution, and the laws of our government. And you are using this extra-constitutional body to coerce this result. You are explicitly abidicating and attacking our nation's sovereignty, which you denied was happening, by so doing.
As for the links, those were just some that popped to the top of Google. Take up your attack on their pedigree with the individual sources, and with Google. The substance is the important thing.
Don't you know that many many farmers lease their land?
You are not very aware of how food gets to your table, I take it.
I guess this explains a lot about your position, lack of economic understanding. Are you not aware that the leasee pays for the landowner's taxes in the price he pays for the lease? Remember, stones - glass houses.
Absolutely worth repeating again....and is why we only get emotions and anecdotes from the protectionists. The facts, on the other hand, tell a completely different story from their endless doom and gloom.
Absolutely wrong! How much evidence will it take to convince you? Congress has the last say on all this, not some foreign committee meeting in secret. Congress can agree or disagree, obey or disobey. We maintain complete soverneignty, at least to the extent of the representatives we elect. That is why you don't want to put the Democrats back in power. They want exactly what you fear.
As for the links, those were just some that popped to the top of Google. Take up your attack on their pedigree with the individual sources, and with Google. The substance is the important thing.
OK, but I assume you read them and were aware from whence they eminated.
I don't know. I suppose I misunderstood your point. Sorry.
You mean they aren't your friends, too? I hate to admit it but they can be wrong sometimes. :-)
Damn straight! Notice the crickets chirping on their end. What DO they recommend?
Debauch the currency overnight? (Nope, that would contradict that this purported "free trade" is win-win and enriching our country's workers).
Bankruptcy? (Nope they took that away with the Reform Act)
Move to a cheaper country? (Question, how many of these free trader propagandists on FR are even U.S. citizens???)
hedgetrimmer replied:
Because domestic standards that do not conform to international standards must satisfy a battery of NAFTA or WTO tests in order to avoid being considered barriers to trade...
This is utter nonsense. You're fabricating reasons again. This provision enforces fair trade. Isn't that what you want? Here are some examples of unfair trade and why point #6 is in the agreement:
"A European Union (EU) ban, in place since 1989, on imports of meat products from animals treated with growth-promoting hormones, which has effectively blocked U.S. meat (mainly beef) exports valued at about $100 million annually. A WTO panel recently ruled in favor of the United States, but the EU is appealing"
"An EU prohibition this year against poultry meat imports from the United States (valued at $50 million annually), because the EU will not recognize as safe the U.S. processors' system for washing carcasses in chlorinated water. In retaliation, the United States banned some $1 million in EU poultry product imports"
"Korean border clearance procedures that can delay imported perishable products for several weeks, compared with several days elsewhere in Asia. These include a rule that 100% of imported agricultural products be inspected and tested rather than sampled randomly, and a requirement that every shipment of imported fresh produce be unpacked, sorted, and repacked to remove any spoiled product; An EU decision, effective November 1, 1997, that human foods must be labeled to indicate whether they were produced from genetically modified corn and soybeans."
The provision cited at the top is simply in response to other nations putting up additional barriers to protect domestic industries. Nothing more. You're creating issues that just aren't there.
The same guys who have a vested interest in the sell-out, having passed (without reading) the NAFTA, and WTO agreements? The same guys who likely take Chinese and other foreign money for their re-elections? In principal, the appearance of U.S. autonomy is being reserved. But not in practice. Every time things come to a shove, the prospect of Or Else All-Out "Trade War" is invoked. As if what is happening isn't full-blown trade war now against our country.
We maintain complete soverneignty, at least to the extent of the representatives we elect.
Apparently so. Hence my point is proved.
That is why you don't want to put the Democrats back in power. They want exactly what you fear.
I agree. But they differ on these soveriegnty issues in precisely how much degree from what's currently there pretending to be Republican? My take is that the GOP guys either shut their eyes and ears to the betrayals of sovereignty, and/or don't want to think about it because the money dangled in front of them. They have become corrupted. So the corrupted GOPers are just ignoring it and pretending "this is NOT happening". Thank God for honest remaining republicans such as Tancredo, and Duncan Hunter. While the democrats will openly cheer the abdications...and brazenly lie to their constituency as they always have.
But as the RINOs have proved, you can't accept these kind of Fifth Columnists in your ranks.
We need to take the GOP back, and clean house of everyone who does not repudiate these actions that have been implemented.
I believe we need a constitutional amendment to term-limit the Senators to two terms. Let's see if that improves things. My guess is that it would.
And an honest Supreme Court would have made all this unnecessary, if they had simply ruled from the get-go that these "agreements" were an unconstitutional Excess Delegation by Congress, and further, to the extent permissable, that any such Agreement needed to be implemented as a Treaty, by two-thirds vote in the Senate. But as you know, we have 5 or more Justices who believe not in our Constitution, and the Power being from THE PEOPLE, but their own internationalist creeds.
No, they have imposed a new government. They just haven't formalized it yet with an actual written constitution. That's all. The EU hasn't lost any authority that it's gained so far, it's just failed for the moment to gain new authority.
I just don't think it is the only inevitable pattern we have to follow in America.
The fact remains, the EU was a plan for a supranational government that masqueraded as a trade agreement. The fact that one group of nations got hoodwinked by that scam shows that it can happen again. Therefore, the burden of proof isn't on those who warn that history will repeat itself with CAFTA and the FTAA (especially with President Fox, among others, openly citing the EU as a model to follow). The burden's on those who try to assure everyone that it won't.
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