Free trade is a true misnomer, a ruse. Free trade is not fair trade. It always has lots of controlling tentacles. NAFTA is the example for why we should get out of all Free Trade Agreements (FTA’s).
NAFTA proponent Gary Hufbauer member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) predicted in his 1993 paper ‘NAFTA An Assessment,’ “with NAFTA, U.S. exports to Mexico will continue to outstrip Mexican exports to the United States, leading to a U.S. trade surplus with Mexico of about $7 billion to $9 billion annually between 2000 and 2010.” Really?
NAFTA’S REALITIES
Our current trade deficits in NAFTA are: Canada – $582 billion traded with an $18 billion deficit and Mexico – $557 billion traded with a $71 billion deficit.
The year before NAFTA we enjoyed a trade surplus of $1.66 billion. The first year after NAFTA we had a $15.8 billion deficit. Increasing greatly every year since, since 2010 we have been running a deficit with Mexico not to mention that before NAFTA we exported around 225,000 cars annually to Mexico and in 2016 Mexico’s exports to the U.S. has surpassed 3.1 million cars. Chrysler, Ford and GM transferred major production facilities to Mexico in the last several years.
Haufbauer also predicted that 170,000 new net jobs will be created by NAFTA. In a 1995 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he admitted, “The best figure for the jobs effect of NAFTA is approximately zero… The lesson for me is to stay away from job forecasting.”
An August 2017 article in the Washington Post (no friend of President Trump’s) reported “The numbers are clear. The U.S. government has certified that at least 700,000 Americans have lost their jobs due to changing trade flows resulting from NAFTA. Many people believe that the number is much, much bigger than that.” — United States Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer, remarks on NAFTA renegotiation, Aug. 16
The late, Professor Robert A Pastor, one of the leading architects of the European Union wrote in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations: “NAFTA was merely the first draft of an economic constitution for North America.”
NAFTA supporter Andrew Reding of the World Policy Institute has written: “With economic integration will come political integration…. One of the purposes of NAFTA and other international trade agreements is to set the principles by which such decisions are to be made, including the critical question of how to “harmonize” differing labor, consumer, environmental, and other standards. By whatever name, this is an incipient form of international government.”
During the Obama years, the endeavor toward ‘our partnering’ was being broadened and expedited through implementation of new foreboding ‘free trade agreements.’
Real free trade is as it should be, FREE. These masked agreements are chock full of restricting and illegal regulations that, like our experience with NAFTA, are ruinous to our interests, freedom, and sovereignty.
What does climate change, sustainable development, internet regulation, homeland security, the military and international courts have to do with trade? Nothing, but it’s all part of the pending free trade agreements.
Critical for our attention recently has been the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the looming Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Fortunately, President Trump has for now put a stop to these deceitful and very dangerous programs that want only one thing out of us. Control. If you study them they include long lists of all kinds of controls and worse even are the courts that circumvent our own courts.
During the Obama administration’s dealing with TPP, members of congress were shut out of negotiations, no press or public participation was allowed, yet corporate lobbyists, other nations and their corporate lobbyists were having full access. The only information available was that that was leaked.
TRUST CAN BE FATAL
William F Jasper, Senior Editor of The New American magazine states, “The fact is that the European Union (EU) began as an economic and trade pact that, over the course of six decades, morphed into a full-blown supranational government that is now in the process of wiping out the few remaining vestiges of national sovereignty of its member states. And what is important to note is the blatant lying and deception that has been essential to each advance of the EU project along these lines. At each crucial step, when critics objected that a new set of EU powers would lead to destruction of national sovereignty and independence, the EU propagandists would assure the contrary and insist that “economic integration,” “harmonization,” and “convergence” posed no threat to national sovereignty, tradition, and local rule. Those assurances have now been proven completely false. “Vladimir Bukovsky, the famous Russian dissident, author, neurophysiologist, and survivor of Soviet prisons, psychiatric prisons, and labor camps states: “It is no accident that the European Parliament, for example, reminds me of the Supreme Soviet.”
Mr. Jasper also reports: “The TPP and TTIP should be of special concern to Americans, since…. the authors and promoters of these agreements admit that they deal with far more than trade and have been designed to drag the United States into “regional governance” on a host of issues. The architects of the TPP and TTIP are virtually unanimous in their head-over-heels praise of, and support for, the political and economic merger taking place in the European Union. The once-sovereign nations of Europe have been tricked, bribed, and browbeaten into yielding control over almost every aspect of their lives to globalist banking and corporate elites and their bureaucratic servitors in Brussels. The national governments, legislatures, and courts in the European Union are becoming mere administrative units of the unaccountable rulers of the increasingly tyrannical EU central government.
UTTER SECRECY WITH THE WRONG BEDFELLOWS
This should tick you off! In 2013, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) issued a statement criticizing the Obama administration for the lack of oversight into an agreement with devastating potential: “After more than a decade of broken promises from NAFTA, CAFTA, and normalized trade relations with China, we can now add a credibility deficit to the trade deficits we’ve seen. The leaked documents surfacing today only underscore the secrecy surrounding TPP negotiations and confirm worst suspicions about the direction trade negotiations are heading. It’s telling that it is easier for the CEO of a major corporation to access information about the negotiations than the American people’s elected representatives.
AND THERE ARE STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
There’s nothing partisan about this fight. This is an American fight. In 2015, out of curiosity, I googled ‘democrats opposing FTA’s’ and quite surprisingly, I found many democrats were alarmed at the blatant undertakings of the FTA’s as well as the secrecy. Prominent democrats included Senator Ron Wyden (OR). And Representatives Rosa DeLauro (CT) and George Miller (CA) as well as 149 others in the House told Obama they would not support Fast Track for the TPP.
Quoting from the U.S. House Democrats’ letter to Obama in November 2013 on the subject: “For some time, members of Congress have urged your administration to engage in broader and deeper consultations with members of the full range of committees of Congress whose jurisdiction touches on the numerous issues being negotiated. Many have raised concerns relating to reports about the agreement’s proposed content… Such opportunity for input from Congress is critical as the TPP FTA will include binding obligations that touch upon a wide swath of policy matters under the authority of Congress.
“Beyond traditional tariff issues, these include policies related to labour, patent and copyright, land use, food, agriculture and product standards, natural resources, the environment, professional licensing, competition, state-owned enterprises and government procurement policies, as well as financial, healthcare, energy, e-commerce, telecommunications and other service sector regulations.
“Twentieth Century ‘Fast Track’ is simply not appropriate for 21st Century agreements and must be replaced. THE UNITED STATES CANNOT AFFORD ANOTHER TRADE AGREEMENT THAT REPLICATES THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST. WE CAN AND MUST DO BETTER.” Fast Track today is called ‘Trade-Promotion Authority’ (TPA).
MY POSITION ON A TPA EXTENSION THAT MAKES SENSE
In 2015, Congress shamefully voted to relinquish their Constitutional responsibility for negotiating trade to the sorriest elected American, (if he truly is bonafide) to ever hold office, in my opinion, who again, in my opinion, wasn’t capable of negotiating himself out of a wet paper bag. In that relinquishing of their responsibility to deceitful Obama, many members took a lot of money for passing that legislation.
Back in May, 2015 when Congress passed TPA The Guardian identified the source of the money and the senators who participated in the bipartisan betrayal:
“Using data from the Federal Election Commission, this chart shows all donations that corporate members of the U.S. Business Coalition for TPP made to U.S. Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate:
“Out of the total $1,148,971 given, an average of $17,676.48 was donated to each of the 65 “yea” votes.
“The average Republican member received $19,673.28 from corporate TPP supporters.
“The average Democrat received $9,689.23 from those same donors.”
That same very shameful ‘tainted’ Congress today is as inept for such a task of negotiating as the infamous ‘Mr. Hope and Change,’ deceitful Obama was. Under normal circumstances Constitutionally, Congress should not extend the TPA.
However, today, wide awake Americans who recognize that our non-perfect President Trump, who may not have all the answers ‘yet,’ or the best staff he needs ‘yet,’ is aces, and by far, the best breath of fresh air Washington, DC has experienced in decades. The Donald has the instinct for true American values and our best interests at heart and certainly has the negotiating prowess to deal with these complex trade issues on our behalf much more safely than would the corrupt, deep state orchestrated, special interest Congress with a most disgusting track record that’s virtually performance free but for the tax reduction bill. I feel it would be wisest for us to most safely extend TPA before July 1, 2018, for President Trump to deal with than for this establishment Congress. Be damned with this dangerous Congress!
McCONNELL AND THE RHINOCRATS
We need to replace all the RINO’s & Democrats in Congress with rock-solid platform following patriotic Republicans. Liberty Caucus Republicans if you will. The Republican Party Platform like The Constitution Party have fine platforms that very closely mirror our Constitution. If only 90% of Republicans were following their platform and the contemptible Mitch McConnell would invoke the Nuclear Option, which is as the Constitution specifies: ‘majority vote in the Senate,’ we would be in great shape to go forward accomplishing much, instead of all the shameful and intentional stagnation designed to continue taking our great Republic into the world of the establishment’s drive to make us a member state of a global government. McConnell has got to go and we must watch voting on The Freedom Index!
THE DUMBING DOWN MEDIA
Of course, the ‘dumbing down’ media moguls are directing their newsrooms away from exposing these Trojan Horse endeavors cloaked in such an innocently beneficial sounding name as ‘free’ trade. When really what’s clandestinely being crafted by poker-faced ‘newsmen’ and their orchestrators who continually act with virtual impunity, is extremely harmful to our continued future as a capitalist society and contributing to our demise as a free sovereign nation.
DECEITFUL FTA’S IMMEDIATELY THREATEN OUR SOVEREIGNTY
This real story needs to get out! FTA’s need understanding, exposing, and acted upon with serious blocking action legislation, if necessary, before it’s too late. FTA’s and subsequent ‘national unions’ might be accomplished in an on-going gradual secretive process. Most people probably don’t believe this really can happen. Really!!! They’re either too trusting or asleep at the switch.
American sovereignty will be dissolved if these giant FTA’s are reawakened to transition us to fruition as intended. Then freedom loving Americans will be told by a world government run by unaccountable, unelected global power elitist what’s best for us and how we must conduct all aspects of our lives with unfathomable rules about everything that makes our current big government maladies appear like we’re just in training for the ‘big hurt’ (my expression) and all the while subordinating our new member state status during our transition to the UN, WHICH WE SHOULD BE OUT OF!
President Trump might need to use the carrot of negotiating if he wishes to use some of these free trade issues like tools to barter into accomplishing other ends, perhaps such as border walls, etc. but he must become aware of our greatest danger lurking in these purported ‘programs:’ the regulations and courts that pose our nation’s greatest threat, our loss of control. FTA’S demand control. The best Trump could do is to get us totally out of all free trade programs!
‘Free trade’ has always been a giant misnomer of those that would have their way with our weak, naïve and even complicit negotiators from the likes of the National Chamber of Commerce who are all in with these globalist machinators.
Thank God we have President Trump dealing with this topic. We need to pray that he will continue to stay focused on how bad the mechanics of these programs are in their controls even more than the predatory price agreements. It would be most desirous to hear President Trump say, “We are not doing any ‘free trade’ agreements! We are only going to work on ‘fair trade’ agreements with individual countries, one on one. That makes good sense and truly is the fairest and safest way to trade”
See: ‘Globalists and Nationalists: Who Owns the Future?’
