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."
Congress passes the statute that provides for fast track negotiations through a trade representative. If Congress doesn't pass the statute, it can't happen. I support the fast track approach, because it is the only efficient way these important agreements can be carefully evaluated and negotiated. I do not believe originalist interpretation of the Constitution requires otherwise.
Thanks for the factual information.
There is also one other hidden beneficiary behind the high tariffs on sugar besides the sugar beet and sugar cane farmers. That is Archer Daniels Midland who benefit by many government protections and subsidies. Specifically relating to sugar, tariffs keep the price of sugar so high that most volume users like the soft drink and candy makers use corn syrup instead. Who is the largest producer of corn? Not the dear old family farmer. Who is behind the uneconomical insistence on ethanol in gasoline? Not your friendly gas station operator. Why does milk cost twice as much as gasoline? Not because of the small dairyman.
These trade agreements eliminate the influence of many special interest groups.
See #85
I, in turn, agree with all you say. We are a majority of two. :-)
I am not sure about the steel tariffs either nor did I like the idea.
A problem we have is that we must maintain enough heavy industry for national defense. As I have often said, we would be competitive and would not be losing these industries but for our own self-inflicted wounds. We must harness the labor unions and anti-business, anti-American leftist in our midst in order to do that. Otherwise all is lost anyway as the perps are more friends with the enemy than with us.
Thanks to the links but I have gone to that site before and I simply have no confidence in what they say and, shades of Karl Rove, I would advise you not to drink the Kool Aid either.
I think our FDA standards and many others should be loosened and can be done so without any danger to our health. The same with environmental and safty standards. Many are not only unnecessary but they do more harm than good. If you would like a little education along that line, as well as a good read on free enterprise, get John Stossel's new book, "Give Me a Break". He sites many examples he has run across in his years of reporting on such things.
That is another benefit of these agreements, the break the bonds with which our own leftists have shackled us.
So you believe that our politicians (unless they're Democrats) are always looking out for our best interests. Do you think that the EU has infringed on the sovereignty of its member states? Are you aware that the "Conservative" party in Britain has also been part of the push for European integration, along with Labor? I don't understand what makes you guys think the letter R somehow makes politicians more noble and more willing to scrupulously serve the public interest.
I don't believe all this Tri-Lateral Commission, Committee of Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, Jewish bankers, etc.
Only the fourth item on your list has no basis in anything. Obviously you just threw it in there as a way of tarnishing the believability of the other three (a very common Leninist tactic, by the way). The other three exist as a matter of public record, and they do have members high up in both parties (as well as in the media and corporate worlds), and they do conduct meetings in secret. This isn't just a "theory"; it's plainly acknowledged fact.
Whether or not they actually do engage in any sort of conspiring is of course anybody's guess, but the opportunity certainly is there.
So your answer would be that there is no settled or pending legal challenges to fast track. Should tell you everything you need to know.
I'm just not sure which path the EU is on these days. I don't like the EU constitution, that's for sure. But at least the various governments have permitted people to vote on the issue, rather than just impose the new government. All of that shows again the great good fortune we have inherited from the contributions by Hamilton and others in the form of our Constitution. Yet our Constitution survives only to the extent the S.Ct. permits it. We have to fight hard to keep it. But EU is not the worst situation in the world, and it has actually improved the monetary situation in Europe with a more stable euro. I just don't think it is the only inevitable pattern we have to follow in America.
How about the Law of the Sea Treaty? And when was the last time any politicians took credit for implementing NAFTA? What about the factual examples of the WTO running roughshod over explicit U.S. internal policies? WTO Overrules U.S. Environmental Law
If I wanted to take the time and look I could find numerous threads where you have strongly defended price supports (welfare) for sugar beet and cane farmers.
But since you brought it up, why did you use the adjective "rich" to describe sugar beet farmers?
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the price-support system will pay $2.1 billion during the next 10 years, or an average of $351,170 for each of the 5,980 sugar-beet and sugar- cane farms listed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's more than $35,000 a year of your tax dollars for every farmer producing sugar from sugar beets which is by far the most inefficient method of producing sucrose in the world.
Every year each farmer receives an average of $35,000 in payments. You're going to have a hard time pleading a case that sugar beet and sugar cane farmers are not rich when they sell their product at two or three times the world price and are protected from all competition..
Why do you call a price support program 'corporate welfare', but you don't call "spending to increase trade" corporate welfare,
For the record, I am opposed to any use of taxpayer money to support businesses. I will however, make the distinction between what is welfare and what I consider investment spending. By spending to increase trade, there will be a return on that spending in the form of increased business, jobs and tax revenue. There is no such return with price supports. With price supports the taxpayer gets screwed twice.
If what you're concerned about is government waste, you should be campaigning against the vast entitlement programs that take a larger share of the pie every year.
That is called extending the premise, a logical fallacy and "common Leninist tactic". Just because I don't think the Republicans will give up our sovereignty doesn't mean I believe all that other stuff.
I don't understand what makes you guys think the letter R somehow makes politicians more noble and more willing to scrupulously serve the public interest.
That's an easy one. In this present crop they simply are. Conservatives by nature are honest and liberals by nature are liars. Period.
Only the fourth item on your list has no basis in anything.
If you aren't aware that the idea of a cabal of Jewish bankers secretly running the world has been around almost as long as banks and Jews then you are either very young or are very sheltered from conspiracy theories.
Obviously you just threw it in there as a way of tarnishing the believability of the other three (a very common Leninist tactic, by the way).
Obviously you just threw that in to try to discredit me personally, a common Leninist tactic.
The other three exist as a matter of public record, and they do have members high up in both parties (as well as in the media and corporate worlds), and they do conduct meetings in secret. This isn't just a "theory"; it's plainly acknowledged fact.
Yeah, well I happen to know that the Masons run everything and plan it all in their secret meetings. Those other three are just misdirection.
Whether or not they actually do engage in any sort of conspiring is of course anybody's guess, but the opportunity certainly is there.
Look how adamant you were at first, even accusing me of Communists affiliations, only to wimp out at the end and admit you really don't know what the heck you are talking about. You could have saved us all a lot of time by lurking.
Excellent points! ADM, price fixers to the world, and Cargill have a heavily vested interest in keeping the price of sugar high and driving sales of their corn syrup products. Dumbing down the quality of so many food products was another unintended consequence of these absurd supports.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.