"Free Trade" Impacts Sovereignty

by John F. McManus
February 20, 2006


America's ability to make its own laws and rules in every aspect of life is being transferred piecemeal to the UN's World Trade Organization.


The underlying goal of the drive for so-called free-trade agreements has always been control of national sovereignty. When the world-government advocates couldn't entice nations to give complete control of their governments to the United Nations via some single act, they aimed to achieve this goal through incremental power grabs by such UN subsidiary groups as the World Trade Organization (WTO).

U.S. participation in the UN began with Senate approval of the UN Charter in July 1945. By far the most important individual responsible for bringing the UN into existence -- even writing its charter -- was Alger Hiss. Later found to be a secret communist agent whose loyalty to the USSR superseded any devotion to his native America, Hiss would also play a pivotal role as the chairman of the U.S. delegation at the founding conference of the International Trade Organization (ITO) in Havana, Cuba, in 1947.

Various members of the U.S. Congress immediately concluded that the ITO was "a charter for trade control." Representative Samuel Pettingill (D-Ind.) said the ITO was "part and parcel of international socialism, one-worldism, and the slow surrender of national sovereignty." When several top-ranking business groups joined in with additional condemnations of the ITO, the issue never came up for a vote and Congress was spared the task of considering membership for our nation.

Faced with temporary defeat, the advocates of world government bided their time, changed the name of their proposal to the Geneva-based World Trade Organization (WTO), and finally gained U.S. admission to it in 1994. Its most important champion, Congressman Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), unabashedly labeled the vote on WTO membership "a transformational moment [through which] we are transferring from the United States at a practical level significant authority to a new organization." Over the past decade, the WTO -- prominently listed by the UN on its organizational chart -- has ruled against U.S. tax laws, cotton subsidies, steel tariffs, oil importation, and more. The U.S. Constitution grants power to Congress alone to "regulate commerce with foreign nations," but this doesn't seem to bother the globalists in and out of government.

Never shy about the UN's ultimate goal, the authors of a 1995 UN document entitled Our Global Neighborhood (OGN) described the WTO as "a crucial building block for global economic governance." The key word here, of course, is "governance." This means that the WTO intends to flex its muscles in far more than just trade. The UN boldly admitted its overall intention with WTO by stating in OGN that the falsely labeled trade pact was designed to create rules "that go way beyond what has been traditionally thought of as 'trade.'"

Ten years later, a 2005 WTO publication entitled Understanding the WTO proudly noted that "regional trading groups" are already speeding the organization toward its ultimate goal. Pointing to examples of the continuing drive to have trade groups bring about world rule, this document proudly lists the "European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA]" and several additional Asian and South American trading blocs as its regional trading groups. With 148 member nations already in the WTO and a growing number of trade groups currently in its grasp, the WTO is fast realizing the goals established by Alger Hiss and his world government-promoting allies six decades ago.

Those who seek to expand NAFTA have claimed that the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is a duplicate for the Western Hemisphere of what the EU has already done for its 25 European members. And they're correct. The EU Constitution is chock full of references to the United Nations. Now proceeding through a nation-by-nation ratifying process, approval of the EU Constitution in Spain prompted that country's foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, to exult, "We are witnessing the last remnants of national politics."

Even though French and Dutch voters emphatically turned thumbs down on ratification of the recently written EU Constitution, conservative EU Parliament member Daniel Hannan told his British constituents, "You may have got the impression that the European Constitution was dead -- that the French felled it and the Dutch had pounded a stake into its heart. If so, think again. The Constitution is being implemented, clause by clause, as if the No votes had never happened."

Here in America, the Bush administration seems unwilling to risk defeat of FTAA in Congress. So provisions of this sovereignty-targeting pact are being implemented piecemeal in the same way as additional provisions of the EU pact are being fastened around the necks of Europe's once-sovereign nations. Here, the step-by-step progression into world government is being called "NAFTA Plus" by some, or the "Security and Prosperity Partnership" (SPP). What all of this really boils down to is an attempt at piecemeal transfer of sovereignty -- essentially America's ability to make its own laws and rules in every aspect of life, not just business deals -- to the UN's WTO.

All portions of this sovereignty-destroying program -- call it "NAFTA Plus" or "SPP" or "FTAA" -- must be blocked.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/pu ... 3248.shtml