By Steven Yates
May 6, 2005
www.newswithviews.com/Yates/steven7.htm
It was back in 1993 that the federal government signed
off on the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA). The Clinton crowd was all for it.
Interestingly, mainstream Republicans were also
talking it up (not that there is any difference
between the two that makes a difference). Rush
Limbaugh touted it on his talk radio show. Among those
visible, only Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan had opposed
it; the former's reference to that "giant sucking
sound" of jobs going south of America's border and
into Mexico is now legendary.
I didn't know much about trade agreements back in the
early 1990s. My research interests were elsewhere. But
as the decade progressed and began to show that Perot
and Buchanan had been right while the "establishment"
had been wrong-the country did hemorrhage
manufacturing jobs, after all, replacing them with
low-paying "service sector" jobs-I decided to learn.
Were the effects of NAFTA on our job market a natural
consequence of globalization? If so, then worrying
about lost jobs was an exercise in futility. Or was
there more to the story?
What, precisely, is free trade? In economics, it is an
arrangement in which buyers and sellers can approach
one another, producers with goods or services to sell
and consumers wanting to buy; they conduct their
transaction by choice, without forcible interference
from others. Both producers and consumers obtain
something they want; both believe they come out ahead,
so both go away satisfied. In a natural order where
there is specialization and divisions of labor, where
some recognize that needs exist and can satisfy them,
free trade will develop naturally and doesn't need
approval or regulation by outsiders. The only reasons
for government oversight are to watch for fraud, or to
make sure that it isn't human beings that are being
bought and sold (for example). There is no reason why
trade should be confined within a single nation's
borders. It never has been possible to do so. In this
sense, globalization is a process that has been going
on for centuries, since before there was an America.
The question, in this case, is: why should the process
require leviathan-sized 'agreements' like NAFTA?
NAFTA's final version ran to approximately 1,700
pages. When the World Trade Organization (WTO) was
created the following year, its founding document ran
to 23,000 pages! Both have since grown by thousands of
pages. What is in all this fine print? Regulations.
Thousands of them. NAFTA created dozens of new
regulatory bodies-international bureaucracies, in
other words, leading to the creation of the WTO. I
don't see how one can peruse the official documents of
NAFTA and the WTO without realizing that the former
was not really a free trade agreement and the latter
is not really about free trade. Both are about trade
micromanaged and controlled by contingents of
bureaucrats, politicians, and politically
well-connected corporations and business groups. In
other words, what NAFTA created was the opposite of
free trade. It, along with myriad other workaday
activities of our government, set up a state of
affairs that made it harder for those without the
right political connections to do business profitably
in America, while making it easier to outsource jobs
to Mexico to save labor costs.
In other words, many of those who cried foul over lost
jobs and a diminished standard of living in areas
especially hard hit by the effects of NAFTA were
justified. They just had the wrong target. Free trade
wasn't the culprit. For all practical purposes, there
is no such thing today, not on a large enough scale to
make a difference. Micromanaged trade, driven by
"incentives," designed as if to hurt the interests of
ordinary working Americas, has been to blame.
Murray N. Rothbard once wrote (Ron Paul [R-Tx] is
quoting him here): "[G]enuine free trade doesn't
require a treaty (or its deformed cousin, a 'trade
agreement'; NAFTA is called an agreement so it can
avoid the constitutional requirement of approval by
two-thirds of the Senate). If the establishment truly
wants free trade, all it has to do is to repeal our
numerous tariffs, import quotas, anti-dumping laws,
and other American-imposed restrictions on free trade.
No foreign policy or foreign maneuvering is
necessary."
The folks who gave us NAFTA have served up two new
trade abominations. The first is called the Central
American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) which could be
voted on before the end of this month. CAFTA extends
NAFTA to six more nations: the Dominican Republic,
Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa
Rica. It is a stepping stone to the second, the
granddaddy of all the pseudo free trade agreements:
the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The FTAA
has been called "NAFTA on steroids." It would
integrate all 34 nations of the Western Hemisphere
into a single "trade bloc" extending from the Arctic
Circle to Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of
South America.
This move toward regional integration also began in
the early 1990s, with a confab called the Summit of
the Americas which met in Miami in early December,
1994. This meeting resulted in a Declaration of
Principles drawing on the UN Charter and the Charter
of the Organization of American States (OAS) that
integrated commitment to "democracy, free trade and
sustainable development." The Summit of the Americas
launched a ten-year campaign the goal of which was the
FTAA. The target year for completion of negotiations
leading to the FTAA: 2005. Here are the Declaration's
own words: "We ... resolve to begin immediately to
construct the 'Free Trade Area of the Americas'
(FTAA), in which barriers to trade and investment will
be progressively eliminated. We further resolve to
conclude the negotiation of the 'Free Trade Area of
the Americas' no later than 2005 ..."
On April 21 I attended a talk by William F. Jasper,
senior editor of the magazine The New American.
Jasper, who has authored two books on the United
Nations, spoke of all this and more. The real issue,
he emphasized, is not just American jobs but the
survival of the United States of America as a
sovereign nation. A sovereign nation is able to
control its legal and political destiny. It need not
fear absorption into a megastate. That is the future
of the U.S.A. if CAFTA and the FTAA go through. We
will be absorbed into an entity akin to the socialist
European Union (EU). CAFTA speaks openly of regional
integration. From its own Preamble, the following
(emboldenments in original; italics mine):
"[The six CAFTA governments] are resolved to:
strengthen the special bonds of friendship and
cooperation among their nations and promote regional
economic integration.... Implement this agreement in a
manner consistent with environmental protection and
conservation, promote sustainable development, and
strengthen their cooperation on environmental
matters.... Recognize the interest of the Central
American Parties in strengthening and deepening their
regional economic integration and contribute to
hemispheric integration and provide an impetus toward
establishing the Free Trade Area of the Americas."
There it is, folks, in black and white. Hemispheric
integration is about more than trade. It is a
political construct, and from the standpoint of our
future, a very dangerous one.
Jasper made four points with regard to CAFTA and the
FTAA.
First, and for reasons we noted above, as free trade
agreements these documents are frauds. The many
references to the environment, ensuring opportunities
for women, other forms of diversity, etc., etc., ought
to be sufficient to indicate why, and how. They are
about hyper-regulation, not free trade. Their actual
aim is to mandate collectivism and inculcate
supersized socialism through massive redistribution of
wealth.
The adoption of the FTAA will mean the transfer, over
a number of years, of hundreds of billions of American
taxpayer dollars. Though a document still in progress,
it already contains thousands of pages of regulations
which will be interpreted at an international level.
Moreover, it will continue expanding in unpredictable
ways, as NAFTA and the WTO have continued expanding,
and to arenas going well outside trade. The 1998
Summit of the Americas contains sections on education
(which the power elite has essentially already
controlled for years), municipal and regional
administrations, transportation, health care, drugs,
terrorism, and more besides. We are looking at reams
of regulations that would effectively end property
rights by individuals and businesses, as these all
must yield to the "hemispheric integration" process.
Second, these agreements are traps capable of bringing
more and more aspects of the American legal system
under the control of globalist bureaucrats. Supreme
Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen Breyer
have both pondered whether the U.S. Constitution can
survive in an increasingly "globalized" era. The
reality is that international tribunals created by
NAFTA are already arrogating for themselves the
authority to overrule U.S. courts in trade spats
between American and foreign firms. William Jasper had
in his possession copies of an article entitled "NAFTA
court is law of the 3 lands" which appeared in the
Sunday, April 14, 2004 Sacramento Bee. This article
reported how, in 2002, a tribunal created by Chapter
11 of NAFTA passed judgment on the ruling of a
Massachusetts court over a Canadian real estate
company (the U.S. Supreme Court had declined to hear
the case). The tribunal had found in favor of the
Massachusetts court, but that isn't the point. This is
just one of several cases that have arisen. The WTO
has been considerably more aggressive in handing down
judgments against state laws in ways that indicate
growing attacks on U.S. sovereignty. Professor John D.
Echeverria of Georgetown University's law school
observed (in the above-mentioned article), "This is
the biggest threat to United States judicial
independence that no one has heard of and even fewer
people understand." Professor Peter Spiro of Hofstra
University's law school also noted, "It's basically
been under the radar screen.... But it points to a
fundamental reorientation of our constitutional
system. You have an international tribunal essentially
reviewing American court judgments." Professor Spiro,
by the way, approves. A recent article of his in the
Council on Foreign Relations flagship journal Foreign
Affairs (2000) attacked "new sovereigntists," his term
for those wishing to maintain U.S. sovereignty under
the Constitution. "Indeed," he writes somewhat
euphemistically, "the Constitution will have to adapt
to global requirements sooner or later ..."
It is happening. None of this was planned when NAFTA
was originally debated. Sen. John Kerry, Bush's
erstwhile opponent last year, observed, "When we
debated NAFTA, not a single word was uttered in
discussing Chapter 11 [of NAFTA]. Why? Because we
didn't know how this provision would play out. No one
really knew just how high the stakes would get."
We know now! Those currently debating CAFTA and the
FTAA will not be able to say they weren't warned!
For third, continued Jasper, CAFTA and the FTAA aren't
single agreements but processes. The FTAA will include
material from all previous Summits, and there will be
much of the open-endedness that has allowed
international tribunals to begin reviewing American
court decisions. The model for Western hemispheric
integration has been the EU, which was sold to
Europeans as a "free trade zone" consisting of six
nations, and has since expanded to 25. The nations of
Europe have lost control of their economic destinies,
lost their currencies, and are losing their political
sovereignty. While I do not foresee Americans ever
giving up the dollar, Canada has at least toyed with
the idea of accepting it. The term here is
dollarization. Several Central American nations
already use dollars. If more followed suit, this could
lead to our fiat money becoming the official currency
of a pan-American megastate, as the euro has become
for the EU.
There are two buzzwords to watch out for, given the
European experience: broadening and deepening.
Broadening involves geographical expansion or what can
be called horizontal integration, eroding geographical
borders. In this sense, CAFTA is a broadening of
NAFTA, and the FTAA is the proposed broadening of
CAFTA. Broadening, that is, means horizontal regional
integration. Then there is deepening. Deepening
includes gradual vertical integration beginning with
economies and rapidly moving to other arenas such as
education, transportation, cultural issues, security
issues, and so on. In fact, advocates for deepening
NAFTA are hard at work.
Both George W. Bush and Mexican president Vicente Fox
have come out in favor of making the FTAA akin to the
EU. (One may see here just how ambitious Bush's agenda
really is!) It goes without saying that the FTAA
includes components regarding immigration. Is there
really any wonder why Bush not only has done nothing
about flagrant lawbreaking by illegal immigrants but
actually undermined the rule of American law with
irrational-seeming policies such as
amnesty-for-illegals? If the U.S. Congress commits
this country to the FTAA, the problem of illegal
immigrants will be "solved": by a policy of entirely
open borders. And in a cultural context where we are
all expected, in true political-correctese, to
"celebrate our diversity." Result: there will be no
exclusive property rights for anyone!
This monstrosity has actually received support from
those influential in American business! The late
Robert Bartley, Wall Street Journal editor, proposed a
Constitutional Amendment in a revealing article:
"There shall be open borders." He once told
immigration critic Peter Brimelow, "I think the
nation-state is finished."
The fifty dollar question is: has all this been a
natural process, an outgrowth of the globalization we
mentioned at the outset? Or has globalization been
hijacked by globalism, an aggressive, very well
financed ideology with a long-term elite-driven
strategy to go along with it? The New York-based
Council on Foreign Relations was created in 1921. It
was created in response to the defeat of proposed U.S.
membership in the first attempt at creating an
incipient world government in Europe, the League of
Nations. One can go back further, of course, to the
Round Table groups that began in 1891 following Cecil
Rhodes' having set aside part of his fortune for the
creation of a "secret society." The goal of this
society was world government-conceived as a revival of
a British Empire that had reincorporated America.
Or one can go back still further, to the British
Fabian Society, the socialist group founded in 1883.
The Fabians repudiated classical Marxian revolutionism
in favor of gradualism, advocating the slow
infiltration of institutions and communities until
they were transformed from within and turned to
socialist purposes. Fabians assisted Rhodes in making
the contacts in England necessary to build up his
secret society; then Fabianism migrated to America.
Edward Mandel House, close associate of Woodrow
Wilson, was surrounded by Fabians, and when he was
instrumental in founding the Council on Foreign
Relations it was all Fabian-approved. Arnold Toynbee,
well-known British historian, Fabian, and member of
the Royal Institute of International Affairs (the
British equivalent of the Council on Foreign
Relations), stated ten years later: "We are at present
working ... with all our might to wrest this
mysterious political force called sovereignty out of
the clutches of the local states of the world. And all
the time we are denying with our lips what we are
doing with our hands."
The elites have thus had no moral scruples about lying
to the public when confronted-although they are quite
open about their intentions in their own writings,
which they have long assumed the masses would never
read. Indeed, the CFR's Foreign Affairs has the look
of just one more dry, academic-type periodical,
assuring that it will never have the audience of, say,
People-or even National Review. Which is perhaps why
we can find in it statements such as that of Richard
N. Gartner, a former UN ambassador, who wrote candidly
in 1974 (in an article entitled "The Hard Road to
World Order") of "an end run around national
sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece ..."
Fabian-style gradualism all the way.
In other words, this scheme aimed at undermining U.S.
sovereignty did not happen overnight. Unfortunately,
this means it cannot be stopped overnight. We are
looking at a broad-based convergence of institutions
and an accumulation of resources that has a lot of
forward momentum. Authors are appearing who maintain
that world government of some sort is now inevitable,
if only because of globalized forms of technology such
as the Internet. An example is Robert Wright, writing
in the (Fabian founded) The New Republic (January 17,
2000) that "In recent years, more and more people have
raised the specter of world government.... Much power
now vested in the nation-state is indeed starting to
migrate to international institutions, and one of
these is the WTO...." The process of creating world
government will massively accelerate after an FTAA is
in place.
Fourth and finally, CAFTA and the FTAA are treasonous.
It should be clear by now that they involve the
gradual dismantling of our Constitutional system of
government involving checks and balances by those who
swore an oath upon taking office to uphold and protect
the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution was written by
men who did not trust power--including their own. This
loss of mistrust of power has been eroded over the
past two and a quarter centuries of time, until our
globalist elites see central planning as the solution
to everything. The idea of an economic system absent
stifling governmental controls is simply beyond them.
This is an important reason natural processes such as
globalization are vulnerable to being hijacked, so
they begin automatically to work against the natural
liberties of the individual.
I have often been asked by readers, "What can we do?"
Here is something specific we can all do. We can all
fire up our word processors and begin turning out
letters to our Senators and Representatives in
Congress. The backers of CAFTA, the most immediate
concern of the globalists, need 218 votes to get it
passed. What we as U.S. citizens can do is urge them
to vote against CAFTA, using arguments such as those
developed in this article and elsewhere. There are
models letters available (although I do not recommend
people sending letters and emails which look pretty
much alike!). There is no guarantee, of course, that
the specifics of such letters will be read. But the
next election is a perennial concern up in Rome on the
Potomac. Each of our fearless leaders doubtless has a
staff person who keeps track of what comes in the mail
(regular and electronic), and what positions are taken
on which issues. And it is easy for letter-writers to
find out how any particular Senator or Representative
voted on any issue.
This is important, because the adoption of CAFTA and
the FTAA will impact seriously on Americans'
pocketbooks in ways going well beyond NAFTA. More
importantly, these trade agreements are more than
trade agreements. They are direct, long-term threats
to the sovereignty of this country. They would
effectively end whatever tenuous hold the Constitution
still has on our government-and they would not replace
it with a libertarian natural order, either! They
would replace it with the incipient New World Order!
(c) 2005 Steven Yates - All Rights Reserved
Dr. Steven Yates has a Ph.D. in philosophy and
currently teaches the subject in an adjunct capacity
at the University of South Carolina Upstate and the
University of South Carolina at Union. He is the
author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With
Affirmative Action (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994),
and his new book Worldviews: Christian Theism versus
Modern Materialism (Columbia, S.C.: The Worldviews
Project) should be out this summer. He is a board
member of the South Carolina Chapter of Citizens
Committee to Stop the FTAA. He lives near Greenville,
South Carolina.
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