IT'S HAPPENING HERE!

I'm a bit behind here due to other obligations, but hope I can get things caught up over the next two or three days. In the meantime, this comes courtesy of Cal S. and points up the extremely dangerous nature of something that for some reason strikes some people as very attractive: a Constitutional Convention.

People should beware: were a Constitutional Convention actually called, everything would be up for grabs. The major players--who would doubtless include the investment-banker power elites that are the real rulers of America now--could very easily abolish Constitutional government altogether and establish a dictatorship. At the very least, they could abolish the existing Constitution and replace it with a document modeled on the UN Charter. The document would grant "rights except where proscribed by law" or some such. Given today's political ambience, it would clearly be an internationalist document, not something our Founding Fathers would have approved of.

Let's be very clear: under no circumstances should we permit a Constitutional Convention to be called. We could lose what little is left of Constitutional government altogether, without a Free Trade Area of the Americas. I would go so far as to say, as with the FTAA, if anyone attempts to force this kind of agenda down our throats, civil disobedience will be called for. I don't have a date for this article. That makes me all the more nervous.

The Effort to Dismantle Our Constitution

http://www.sweetliberty.org/concon.htm

States With a Standing Call for a Constitutional Convention

Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
Delaware
Colorado
Georgia
Idaho
Iowa
Kansas
Maryland
Mississippi
Missouri
Nebraska
New Hampshire
New Mexico
North Carolina
North Dakota
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Wyoming

The remaining 18 states have not called for a convention. Citizens must keep a vigilant watch to block legislation in any of these states that calls for a Con-Con.

Although 32 states had initially passed resolutions calling for a Con-Con (for the alleged purpose of adding a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution), 3 states ­ Alabama, Florida and Louisiana ­ rescinded their calls.

The Nevada House of Representatives "purged" its resolution. However, since both chambers passed the resolution, it is questionable whether the one-chamber purge would be accepted as a rescission. Conversely, it has been argued that because the resolution was actually purged from the records it would negate the initial resolution, since it must pass in both chambers.

We should not consider Nevada's purge, nor the rescissions of Alabama, Florida and Louisiana as a safety margin.

According to Article V of the Constitution, Congress must call a convention when 2/3rds of the states apply. That magic number is 34 states. Since three states have formally withdrawn (rescinded) their calls, that would seemingly leave us 5 states away from having a Con-Con. However, we have been informed that the advocates of the convention are waiting to capture not five, but only two more. It is said that if they get two more states to pass resolutions for a Con-Con, they plan to challenge the rescissions of the three states and throw them into the courts while going ahead with a convention.

Considering the blatant corruption in courts at all levels today, it would be folly to rest on our laurels and feel safe that the courts would uphold those rescissions. For that reason, it should be considered at this time that only two states are needed to require the Congress to call a Constitutional Convention.

After experiencing the onslaught of lawyers (scribes, as in "scribes and Pharisees") in Florida's presidential election fiasco, can you imagine the hay-day they would have with a court battle of this magnitude and importance?

This (courtesy of Joan Masters) from the woman who led the fight against predatory developers in New London, CT, the case known as Kelo v. New London. Suzette Kelo understands eminent domain, and so understands abuses of eminent domain. She also understands the Orwellian abuse of language that has become epidemic in this society, although she doesn't identify Orwell by name. This entire case--and its predecessors (it has been drawn to my attention that there are several, including a case in Hawaii that was never reported in the mainstream media)--demonstrate the consequences of living in a society whose government sees everyone else as existing only to pay taxes, and which sees private property rights as an expendable abstraction, a pawn to be captured in the quest of a predatory few for money and power. As for eminent domain itself, a genuinely free society would be better off getting rid of it altogether.

Eminent domain up close
By Susette Kelo
September 20, 2005
The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

I am the Kelo in Kelo v. City of New London -- the now-infamous U.S. Supreme Court case in which the court ruled private property, including my home, could be taken by another private party promising to create more jobs and taxes with the land. Just last week, three of my neighbors got eviction notices, giving them 30 to 90 days to leave their homes.

I received just such a notice five years ago, the day before Thanksgiving, which marked the beginning of my fight to defend what is rightfully mine. It took a gutsy demand from my state's governor to finally make the private condemning agency back down for now on its demand that I and my neighbors give up our homes so they could be bulldozed.

Today, I am scheduled to testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on eminent domain abuse. I sincerely hope Congress will do what judges and local legislators so far have failed to do for me and for thousands of others across the nation: protect our homes under a plain reading of the U.S. Constitution, which says government may only take private property for a "public use."

Federal lawmakers should pass legislation that will withhold federal funding for eminent domain projects that are for private development -- such as the one that could take my home, and which received $2 million in federal funds.

While this legislation is very important, it is not a magic solution to the many problems surrounding government use of eminent domain. If homeowners, small business owners, churches and others are to be safe, state and local lawmakers across the nation should follow the congressional lead and do what they should have been doing all along: respect our right to own property rather than cut sweetheart deals with developers who tempt lawmakers with the promise of more taxes and jobs. What we have now at the local, state and federal level amounts to "government by the highest bidder."

Think I'm overstating the problem? Consider my story, variations of which are playing out with literally thousand of homeowners nationwide who now live under the threat of eminent domain for some other private party's profit.

I grew up in southeastern Connecticut and bought my house at 8 East St. in New London in 1997. It was just what I wanted: great view of the water, affordable price, nice neighbors. I enjoyed fixing it up and making my family's home. I invested a lot of time and energy in this house and my neighborhood.

In 1998, a real estate agent came by and made me an offer on the house on behalf of an unnamed buyer. I explained to her I was not interested in selling, but she said my home would be taken by eminent domain if I refused to sell. She told me stories of her relatives who had lost their homes to eminent domain. Her advice? Give up. The government always wins.

Why did the City and the New London Development Corp. (NLDC) want to kick us out? To make way for up-scale condos and other private developments that could bring in more taxes to the city and possibly more jobs. The poor and middle class had to make way for the rich and politically connected.

If the government was taking our property for a road or firehouse, I would be prepared to sell without a fight. But the government should not be able to force me to sell my home so someone else can enjoy my view. NLDC wants my land to market to a developer for projects to "complement" our area's new Pfizer facility. This is for private profit, not public use.

Nearly all my neighbors' homes have been bulldozed -- all but those seven families who stayed and fought not only for our rights, but for the rights of homeowners nationwide.

Like my neighbors up the street, I worked hard (in my case, at up to three jobs at a time) to pay for my home. And we should not be forced out by our own government simply because someone else who carries more political clout wants the land for a nonpublic use. Isn't that what the courts, Congress and the Constitution are supposed to protect us from?

As I sat there in the U.S. Supreme Court back in February and listened to the justices hear my case, I was so disappointed their very first question and first concern was for the power of government rather than the rights of citizens.

In many ways, my neighbors and I are the victims of legislators, lawyers and judges who believe it is somehow a sign of intelligence to make language that clearly means one thing mean something exactly the opposite: "Public use" now means private use; judges don't judge but instead let legislators decide whether they're violating the Constitution. There is nothing intelligent about misusing language in this way to take away people's homes and their rights.

What is happening to me should not happen to anyone else. Congress and state legislatures need to send a message to local governments that this kind of abuse of power not only won't be funded, it won't be tolerated.

Special interests -- developers and governments that benefit from this use of power --are working to convince the public there is no problem, but I am living proof there is.

This battle against eminent domain abuse may have started as a way for me to save my little salmon-pink cottage, but it has rightfully grown in something much larger -- the fight to restore the American Dream and the sacredness and security of each of our homes.

Susette Kelo is a homeowner from New London, Conn. She was lead plaintiff in the landmark eminent domain case Kelo v. City of New London.

Missed this one yesterday from Charley Reese. It is another winner!

We Are Revolutionaries

by Charley Reese
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese223.html
September 19, 2005

It would be a hopeful sign if the Senate could get away from its obsession with abortion on demand and consider, during its Supreme Court confirmation hearings, what the Constitution is and what it isn't.

Some people seem to be under the erroneous belief that the Constitution grants us our rights. It does no such thing. To understand the Constitution, you have to remember the Declaration of Independence, which preceded it by several years. It is the Declaration that contains the philosophy of the American Revolution. The Constitution merely implements that philosophy.

The philosophy of the American Revolution contains three basic premises. One is that rights come from God and are unalienable. Two is that men create governments to protect those rights. Three is that when government fails to protect those rights and becomes abusive of those rights, men have a right and even a duty to overthrow that government and create a new one.

Some Americans have so neglected their study of American history that the idea of violently overthrowing a government strikes them as, well, communist or some such. Of course, if the Founding Fathers had not violently overthrown the colonial government of Great Britain in North America, we would not be an independent nation.

If you read the Constitution with those three premises in mind (and both documents were written to be read by ordinary folks, not legal scholars), it makes perfect sense. The main part of the Constitution simply establishes the framework for the federal government and its three parts, defines their respective duties and establishes what the federal government can do and what the states can do. None of that has anything at all to do with individual rights or with social issues.

The Bill of Rights, which is a set of amendments added after ratification to reassure opponents of the Constitution that the new government would not usurp their rights, simply forbids the new federal government from abusing or abridging already-existing rights. The right to free speech and all the others existed prior to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The language of the First Amendment tells what the intent was: "Congress shall pass no law." Only the new federal government had a Congress.

The Second Amendment does not grant people the right to keep and bear arms. They already had and continue to have that right. It simply says the already-existing right cannot be abridged. You can't abridge something that doesn't exist. Remember, too, that the same people involved in the Constitution were involved in the Revolution. Obviously, if you believe people have a right to overthrow a government, then no government must be allowed to disarm them.

It is also good to keep in mind that the Constitution is a textual document, not a "living document." That was a false metaphor intended to provide cover for judges to legislate and amend by interpretation so that the Constitution would mean whatever they said it meant. Not so. It means what it says. It cannot be amended by interpretation or by Congress ignoring it, though modern politicians have committed both sins.

The Constitution is a written contract between the sovereign people and their government. It was ratified by the people, and only the people can change it through the amendment process. Every single American, liberal or conservative, should be fiercely adamant on that point. Otherwise, we have a nation of men, not of laws.

Finally, keep in mind that the Constitution was never intended to deal with moral and philosophical issues, such as abortion. The Founding Fathers properly left those to elected legislatures. That's why Roe v. Wade is a profoundly flawed decision. The court usurped the powers of the 50 state legislatures and, by interpretation, created a right to privacy that the words of the Constitution do not support.

It is said that when the Constitutional Convention ended, a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government they had given the people. "Madam, we have given you a republic – if you can keep it," was the reply. That is still an open question. If Americans continue to allow lawyers and academics to tell them what is so and not so, instead of thinking for themselves, then most surely we won't keep it.

September 19, 2005

Charley Reese [send him mail] has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2005 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

Charley Reese Archives

Two first-rate keepers from the weekend edition of LewRockwell.com. Ron Paul (R-Tx) sees a bleak future if we remain on our present course, and Charley Reese shows how neither the media elites nor the political elites understand the plight of those of us--and I would have to include myself in this category--who are just a couple of paychecks away from being evicted from our too-small apartments, or one serious illness away from complete financial ruin because our McJobs (in my case, two academic McJobs) do not come with health or medical benefits. The root-cause of this plight: the debauching of the currency by the power elites (bankers).

The Coming Category 5 Financial Hurricane
by Ron Paul
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul276.html

Before the US House of Representatives, September 15, 2005

The tragic scenes of abject poverty in New Orleans revealed on national TV by Katrina’s destruction were real eye-openers for many. These scenes prompted two emotional reactions. One side claims Katrina proved there was not enough government welfare, and its distribution was based on race. The other side claims we need to pump billions of new dollars into the very federal agency that failed (FEMA), while giving it extraordinary new police powers. Both sides support more authoritarianism, more centralization, and even the imposition of martial law in times of natural disasters.

There is no hint that we will resort to reason now that the failed welfare policies of the past 60 years have been laid bare. Certainly no one has connected the tragedy of poverty in New Orleans to the flawed monetary system that has significantly contributed to the impoverishment of a huge segment of American society.

Congress reacted to Katrina in the expected irresponsible manner. It immediately appropriated over $60 billion with little planning or debate. Taxes won’t be raised to pay the bill – fortunately. There will be no offsets or spending reductions to pay the bill. Welfare and entitlement spending is sacrosanct. Spending for the war in Iraq and the military-industrial complex is sacrosanct. There is no guarantee that gracious foreign lenders will step forward, especially without raising interest rates. This means the Federal Reserve and Treasury will print the money needed to pay the bills. The sad truth is that monetary debasement hurts poor people the most – the very people we saw on TV after Katrina. Inflating our currency hurts the poor and destroys the middle class, while transferring wealth to the ruling class. This occurs in spite of good intentions and misplaced compassion.

We face a coming financial crisis. Our current account deficit is more than $600 billion annually. Our foreign debt is more than $3 trillion. Foreigners now own over $1.4 trillion of our Treasury and mortgage debt. We must borrow $3 billion from foreigners every business day to maintain our extravagant spending. Our national debt now is increasing $600 billion per year, and guess what, we print over $600 billion per year to keep the charade going. But there is a limit and I’m fearful we’re fast approaching it.

Runaway inflation is a well-known phenomenon. It leads to political and economic chaos of the kind we witnessed in New Orleans. Hopefully we’ll come to our senses and not allow that to happen. But we’re vulnerable and we have only ourselves to blame. The flawed paper money system in existence since 1971 has allowed for the irresponsible spending of the past 30 years. Without a linkage to gold, Washington politicians and the Federal Reserve have no restraints placed on their power to devalue our money by merely printing more to pay the bills run up by the welfare-warfare state.

This system of money is a big contributing factor in the exporting of American jobs, especially in the manufacturing industries.

Since the last link to gold was severed in 1971, the dollar has lost 92% of its value relative to gold, with gold going from $35 to $450 per ounce.

Major adjustment of the dollar and the current account deficit can come any time, and the longer the delay the greater the distortions will be in terms of a correction.

In the meantime we give leverage to our economic competitors and our political adversaries, especially China.

The current system is held together by a false confidence in the U.S. dollar that is vulnerable to sudden changes in the economy and political events.

My suggestion to my colleagues: Any new expenditures must have offsets greater in amount than the new programs. Foreign military and foreign aid expenditures must be the first target. The Federal Reserve must stop inflating the currency merely for the purpose of artificially lowering interest rates to perpetuate a financial bubble. This policy allows government and consumer debt to grow beyond sustainable levels, while undermining incentives to save. This in turn undermines capital investment while exaggerating consumption. If this policy doesn’t change, the dollar must fall and the current account deficit will play havoc until the house of cards collapses.

Our spending habits, in combination with our flawed monetary system, if not changed will bring us a financial whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a minor storm. Loss of confidence in the dollar and the international financial system is a frightening possibility – but it need not happen if Congress can curb its appetite for buying the people’s support through unrestrained spending.

If Congress does not show some sense of financial restraint soon, we can expect the poor to become poorer; the middle class to become smaller; and the government to get bigger and more authoritarian – while the liberty of the people is diminished. The illusion that deficits, printing money, and expanding the welfare and warfare states serves the people must come to an end.

September 17, 2005

Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.

Grand Prize
by Charley Reese
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese224.html

Grand prize for the most absurd statements about the hurricane goes to those liberal columnists who have self-righteously proclaimed that the New Orleans disaster has "forced" the American people to confront poverty.

This is an example of projection. It's the media that ignore poverty. The American people, except for that 1 percent who own practically everything, confront poverty every day. You can't drive around any American city or rural area and not see it.

To the members of the lower middle class, poverty is a pack of wolves loping behind them. One accident, one bout of sickness, one layoff, and the wolves of poverty will devour them. Ignore poverty? How ridiculous. These people know it because they lived it and worked hard to escape it and are afraid every day of their lives they will slip back into it.

No, the media are out of touch, not only with poor people but with middle-class people. Look at the entertainment on television. Practically all of the characters in the shows are portrayed as being more affluent than the people who watch the shows. It doesn't take long for six-figure commentators to start associating exclusively with people in their income bracket or higher. Pretty soon they think everybody is worried about his or her 401(k) and investment strategy.

Not so. The majority of Americans are worried about keeping their jobs and paying their bills. They are worried about health care. They are worried about their children's future. This isn't liberal dogma. It's fact. We have allowed a system to develop that makes it easier for the rich to get richer and harder for the poor to escape to the middle class.

The underlying cause – and the most difficult to address – is a policy of gradual depreciation of the currency. It's usually referred to as inflation, but whatever jargon you wish to apply, the end result is that year after year, the dollar a man or woman earns buys less. To hide this from the public, the government periodically changes the base year by which it computes inflation. To further confuse the public, the government harps on the monthly rate of inflation.

Measured in purchasing power, it takes $4 today to buy what $1 would buy in 1967. Now, if wages and prices rose in a uniform rate, as some imagine, everything would be equal. Trouble is, they don't. Prices, for both goods and services, far outstrip wage increases. Ever-increasing taxes chip away at living standards. Look at your telephone bill, your utility bill and your cable-TV bill. Every conceivable thing that can be taxed is taxed.

The basic unfairness of our system lies in a difference in power. The business owner, the manufacturer, the professional can raises prices and fees restrained only by the competitive factor. This problem is often solved with some unofficial price fixing. Look at the near uniformity of prices among competing brands. Call five orthodontists and get a price for braces on your child's teeth. Competition, which is supposed to keep prices down, is often nothing more than a cover to keep prices high and uniform. For all the lip service paid to free enterprise, most American businesses and professionals hate price competition with a passion.

So while the businesses and professionals are free to increase their income as the market or their agreements allow, the working man and woman cannot. They are totally dependent on their employer. If the employer gives them a cost-of-living raise once a year, he is, in effect, not giving them a raise at all. If they try to save money, they will lose money, as the gradual inflation will eat away their capital. If you had put $10,000 in the mattress in 1967, it would be worth $2,500 today. The $7,500 was stolen by a combination of Congress and the central bank, for they are monetizing the deficits that have depreciated the currency.

America is being converted into a Third World country before our very eyes. Don't give me that malarkey about being blind to poverty. We'll all see more of poverty than we want to if we don't change the system.

September 17, 2005

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.

© 2005 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

Courtesy of Joan Masters.

06 September 2005
Argentina Meeting To Focus on Policies for Summit of the Americas

Buenos Aires hosting preparatory meeting for November summit

By Eric Green
Washington File Staff Writer


Washington -- Representatives of the Western Hemisphere's 34 democracies will meet September 7-9 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to continue work on adopting policies for job creation to fight poverty and strengthen democratic governance in the region, which is the theme of the November Summit of the Americas.

The meeting of the Summit Implementation Review Group (SIRG) will set forth the strategies to promote job creation in the Americas. Those strategies are to be included in the summit's final declaration and in a "plan of action."

The Fourth Summit of the Americas will be held November 4-5 in Mar del Plata, Argentina. One final SIRG meeting is scheduled for November 1-2 in Argentina, before the summit opens. The SIRG, which holds about four regular meetings each year, was created following the first Summit of the Americas, which took place in Miami in 1994, to monitor implementation of summit mandates and to prepare reports for the region's foreign ministers.

The Organization of American States (OAS), the home of the summit's secretariat, says representatives of civil society will attend the SIRG meeting. Civil society representatives will offer recommendations on the Mar del Plata summit's theme, and on problems confronting indigenous peoples and people of African descent in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking nations of Latin America and the Caribbean. Members of civil society also will raise issues relating to human rights and employment.

The OAS is responsible for acting as the "institutional memory" for the Summit of the Americas process and for performing preparatory work for future summits. The OAS also chairs the so-called "Joint Summit Working Group," which brings together international and inter-American agencies in support of summit mandates.

U.S. National Summit Coordinator John Maisto has said the summit declaration in Mar del Plata should be "action-oriented and forward-looking," focusing on measures that leaders can take within the context of issues such as debt, deficits and global forces beyond their control. (See related article.)

"It serves no purpose to focus on problems. We need to focus on solutions," said Maisto, who is also the U.S. permanent representative to the OAS.

In March 25 remarks at a Civil Society Task Force "Summit in Focus" program in Washington, Maisto said the summit declaration needs to stress the central role of the private sector in job creation. The appropriate role of government is not to create jobs but to create the conditions that promote job creation by the private sector and to ensure that citizens are given equal opportunities, he said.

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

This afternoon I discovered an intriguing website: Push Hamburger. Its theme: think about what's been done to this country by the power elites--in light of the beaucoups of information generally not reported by the controlled corporate media, but conveyed here in a graphically rich format and delivered with plenty of sardonic wit. From the standpoint of the ordinary person, without political connections, what's been done is to put us at the head of the "race to the bottom," with burger-flipper McJobs or other low paying borderline slave-labor forms of work having replaced the manufacturing and other varieties of work that actually made use of people's brains and college educations. I do not know for sure when the article posted below was written, but obviously it was during the noxious 1990s--probably right around the time the establishment corporate media was parroting establishment Federal Government and central banking crowing that "the economy is booming." Which it was doing if you were part of the elite or politically connected to it!

Occasionally I get called a "conspiracy nut." I used to try to be polite!

I'll probably be posting more from this site.

NAFTA'S SMOKING GUN
WHO DUNNIT AND WHY ?

by Chuck Harder

http://www.pushhamburger.com/nafta1.htm

Can you think of any nation on Earth that would sit idly by and watch its factories and jobs move offshore, and put its own taxpayers out of work? Name one nation on the planet that uses its taxpayer's funds to assist factories to move or expand offshore, and then close operations back in the homeland, and then fire its own workers? There is only one. The United States of America.

Turn the clock back to the early 1970s. Henry Kissinger was flitting around the globe and spending time in the Middle-East. U.S. policy was providing aid and comfort to the various warring enemy factions in the explosive region. OPEC was raising oil prices, and putting a stranglehold on the USA at the gas pump. David Rockefeller at the Chase Manhattan Bank, and the others on Wall Street, lusted to get their hands on the vast sums of surplus petro-dollars held by the oil sheiks. They soon did. That's when the problem began.

Soon the New York bankers were taking in mountains of dollars from the Middle East, and loaning them back out to "Third-world" countries in Latin America. While the international rich elite understood the "art of the deal," the peasant classes in Mexico and Latin America were only one step above the stone age. Ambitious industrial projects failed and the massive debt could not be repaid. Mexico alone defaulted on over $100 billion owed to New York Banks, and the banks were under pressure by the Middle East sheiks who wanted their money back. What to do ?

According to the July 25, 1989 edition of "FINANCIAL WORLD" magazine, meetings to rescue Mexico and get the banks paid, had been held off-and-on in New York since 1987. The investigative article titled, "Sweat Equity" indicates that the most favored scheme was to industrialize Mexico into a low-cost, export-producing giant. The banks would then get a piece of the overall export profits to be paid toward their principal and interest. The unpaid principal balance would be rolled-over each year and whatever could be paid against it credited. Such a system would let Mexico pay the debt painlessly from new income streams. Even better, the banks would be paid! No consideration was given to the devastation this policy would cause to the American worker and middle-class. They were the source to provide the needed wealth from their everyday consumer spending and thus an expendable factor.

This concept was further promoted in the book, "LATIN AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS," which was written and published in August of 1990, by David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission think-tank based in New York and Washington. It was easy to get the book accepted as USA policy because Jimmy Carter, George Bush and Bill Clinton were all members of the elite club. In fact, the Trilateral Commission member list reads like a WHO'S WHO of government and politics. White House insiders are also often members of the Council On Foreign Relations, which is also nurtured by, and serves the same international and New York financial interests.

Shortly after the Trilateral book was published, a momentum developed to implement the scheme in a legalized method. While congress could not sit still for such a transfer of wealth and jobs by official treaty, another idea was developed. To give the scheme a slim chance at all, the power elite called it an "Agreement" which needed only a simple majority of Congress to pass, and could be "Fast Tracked" to avoid the normal scrutiny. To that end, the thousands of pages of the North American Free Trade Agreement were kept secret from the citizens and press until long after it was signed. Lawmakers and the press were instead given a 45 page "Summary" that was upbeat and filled with happy-talk. Most of the lawmakers on Capitol Hill, financial columnists, and economists who support NAFTA have a curious common denominator. They haven't read it!

Once "released" by the Government, the massive two-volume work was priced at $41.00 and only available through the handful of U.S. Government Printing Office outlets. These stores are not a favorite of "Window Shoppers," and only a few hundred beltway insiders even wanted the document. They naturally wouldn't say much against the policy that had been established earlier. A few voices such as Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Chuck Harder, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Brown, and Rev. Jesse Jackson soon spoke out with concern, but the media was able to filter them out and keep most of them from reaching large audiences.

Ross Perot also soon found it difficult to buy good TV time and he became a target of ridicule for his actions against NAFTA. While the "curtain of silence" fell upon anti-NAFTA voices, a strange round of "Shotgun weddings" took place as big media suddenly got merger-mania. Radio crackled with activity, and Westwood One, the owner of NBC,

Mutual, The Source and Talknet, married New York's Unistar. TV soon pictured romance, and a mega-deal cooking with Bell Atlantic, TCI and Liberty Media was the big story. Word was quietly out in the boardrooms that the USA consumers would soon take a monster hit-in-the-pocket-book over NAFTA, and only the strong media would survive. Providing a futuristic metaphor, "USA TODAY" newspaper even revamped its colorful back weather page this summer to include all of Canada and Mexico, while the outline of the continental USA shrunk.

The biggest USA national media corporations also fell in love with the deal after being promised expansion into Mexico to reach new audiences. New American technology to offer 500 channel cable-TV loomed as another threat to take more domestic audience with shrinking bank accounts away from the big network media players. Soon deals were

cooking in the boardrooms to have more USA media merge, and also take positions in the Mexican press and broadcast industry. The big banks, Wall Street, and the stockmarket loved it!

Remember that NAFTA is not a new invention. The banker/politician combine had quietly created policy years ago to allow the set up of the "Maquilladora Region" as a pilot-program along the US-Mexican border. Soon over 2,200 USA factories moved into that 12 mile strip of Mexico during the period from the late 1980's onward. Much had been learned from the early years of operations, and new procedures using low-skill Mexican peasants had been perfected. Industrial engineers learned new designs for assembly operations, and USA trade magazines now report these techniques ready for the expected thousands of new plants and expanded facilities in Mexico as soon as NAFTA becomes law and expands deep into the Mexican continent. Recent financial and real estate conventions held in Washington with capacity-crowds, have also focused on the massive "get rich" Mexican opportunities to soon be created under NAFTA.

To seal the deal, the Mexican billionaire families put up millions of dollars to assist the Salinas government to buy the best lobbyists in Washington. The list of highly paid Mexican agents reads like an "Alumni Roster" of Capitol Hill. The Clinton administration has also announced that, "The store is open." The White House will hand out necessary goodies to sway the undecided members of Congress. The "Fix" is in!

Left out of the deal are the American people. Nobody can explain to them how it's good for America to have millions of jobs move to Mexico? How can USA workers compete with frightened Mexican peasants making 58 cents or a dollar an hour? Government retraining programs have been exposed as multi-billion-dollar-hoaxes because new high-tech jobs don't exist! Unemployed USA workers with families to feed, and mortgages to pay, can't find replacement jobs at the same pay scale, if at all! A permanent underclass is developing and crime is on the increase. In 1994, government regulations will require heads of welfare families to go back to work. Where will those millions of jobs be found ? The NAFTA scheme to pay back the New York banks makes Charles Keating, (the convicted S & L crook), look like Peter Pan. Willing co-conspirators on Capitol Hill don't personally fear the anticipated financial ruin, as they all are vested with government pensions and "Golden Parachutes." The Middle-Class will be affected. They could be retrained to become docile peasants. The "American Dream" and "Rule of Law" is at risk.

The latest United Nations confab is underway in New York City at the UN's own headquarters. Here is the latest. Annan may well be on his way out, tainted by scandal, but guess who is elbowing his way toward the center (corrupt or not). And note the cost of admission, which is inevitably going to be limited to members of the super-elite in good standing.

It's also worth paying attention to the list of corporate and other big-money sponsors.

Clinton-Soros Initiative
at U.N. Summit
'Vacuum' caused by United Nations corruption creating new power center
Posted: September 15, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Mary Jo Anderson
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

Expect world leaders to dodge some scheduled United Nations sessions today in a rush to attend the opening round of the Clinton Global Initiative, where 750 global glitterati and their aides have converged on the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers – at $15,000 per head – to forge a "new level" of global cooperation.

The former U.S. president has openly sought a post-presidential position commensurate with his vision, hoping to use his "clout, connections and charisma" on behalf of the global community.

A South China Morning Post headline captures the mood: "His plans are grand, but can he save the world?" Maybe so, according to heavy-hitter sponsors, including Microsoft, Starbucks, Hewlett Packard, Google, Yahoo, Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation and Citigroup.

As Americans remain focused on Katrina recovery and the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, an international drama is unfolding in New York where the U.N. is hosting a World Summit in celebration of its 60th anniversary. The Summit is the largest ever gathering for world leaders. Topping the list for diplomats is the urgent and embarrassing call for U.N. reform.

Last month, newly arrived U.S. Ambassador John Bolton flipped aside the proposed document that called for developed nations to dedicate 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product to eradicate global poverty. That document also endorsed the U.N.'s ambitious "Millennium Development Goals," among them universal education, "gender equality" and measures to halt AIDS. Delegates spent weeks in a slug-fest to rewrite a face-saving document for heads-of-state to sign in front of cameras, a bid to salvage some semblance of U.N. leadership for global efforts.

The revised document created a Peace Commission, but omitted contested sections on disarmament and failed to define terrorism. The revision did not increase Secretary General Kofi Annan's power to make management changes, a disappointment that Annan did not obscure.

"There were governments that were not willing to make the concessions necessary," he said. "There were spoilers also in the group; let’s be quite honest about that."

On the opening day of the Summit, Annan pleaded with 153 monarchs, prime ministers and presidents to sign the document as their pledge to the Millennium Development Goals adopted in 2000.

Yet, brittle-eyed realists have moved on, say some U.N. watchers. They've begun to look beyond the United Nations flags flapping above the line of diplomatic limousines. Some think Annan, tainted by the oil-for-food scandal, is incapable of guiding the international agenda.

President Bush thumped Annan at yesterday's High Level Plenary session. The U.S. president addressed the Millennium Development Goal of poverty where he noted that leaders have a "moral duty to make sure our actions are effective," a clear reference to the corrupt and inefficient oil-for-food program. Bush drove home his point, reminding world leaders that "We agreed to a new vision for the way we fight poverty, and curb corruption" in Monterrey in 2002.

The president caused squirms among a few nations when he outlined the terms of America's commitment to MDGs via the U.S. government's new Millennium Challenge Account: "This account is increasing U.S. aid for countries that govern justly, invest in their people, and promote economic freedom."

Annan and his management team seem to be dismissed in all but the formality. Blocks away, a new paradigm of global leadership is under construction. Former president Clinton and fellow internationalists – those who profess a vision of planetary interdependence and "global governance" – have convened the CGI conference.

A veteran U.N. observer quipped, "These people all have 'Multilateral' for their middle name. They are self-appointed patrolmen of the global commons."

Like the U.N., the Clinton Global Initiative has set for itself some of the same lofty goals: Poverty; Enhancing Governance; Climate Change; and Religion, Conflict, and Reconciliation. Attendees include Condoleezza Rice, perhaps to keep an eye on heads-of-state including Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair. Unlike the U.N., global elites of the billionaire variety, captains of industry, doyennes of charity, think tankers and masters of the media (Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, Fox's Rupert Murdoch) are among the invited. Selected political operatives like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Vice President Al Gore and Gen. Wesley Clark will also attend. To maintain international fraternity, Kofi Annan is also included.

In a strange twist of events, Hurricane Katrina has highlighted the globalists' call for an interdependent planet. Plans for the Clinton Global Initiative were drawn long before Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast. But the aftershocks of Katrina provided fodder for the anti-unilateralist ideologues that claim that U.S. failures in the wake of the storm demonstrate an inherent U.S. weakness. Others find the storm the perfect platform for chastising the U.S. position on global warming. Their reasoning is that the United States bungled Iraq and has now bungled Katrina.

"The reason that Hugo Chávez can organize across Latin America in ways contrary to U.S. interests is that the sheen has come off American exceptionalism. We are no longer seen as being able to order our own universe," said former Clinton aide David Dreyer.

The premise for global governance adherents is that a new, multilateral, mutually secured world is the answer to global calamities, whether natural or man-made such as genocide.

Top supporters for the "interactive" (if exclusive) Clinton Initiative donate a minimum of $250,000 in exchange for their name or logo on event gift bags. And if this fund-raising tactic would appear to reduce the CGI to one more tiresome tony forum, some are less sanguine. Of particular concern is the Religion Conflict and Resolution component. According to CGI, "For many hundreds of millions, the most important community ties are born of faith – not nation; the most authoritative pronouncements are those of religious leaders – not statesmen …"

The Clinton Global Initiative finds religion to be "a chief engine of deadly conflict, providing immediate pretext and overall context …" Yet, people of faith are wary of those who preach peace by fingering religion as the source of "deadly conflict." In light of the CGI's goal of an "integrated global community of shared benefits, responsibilities, and values," a looming question is, whose religious "values" will this "integrated global community" demand?

The advisory board for the Religion Forum is packed with those who are noted for their liberal views toward religion – those for whom dogma is "problematical." Board members include the cardinal archbishop of Washington, D.C., Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, Edgar Bronfman, Sr., president of the World Jewish Congress and William F. Vendley, secretary general of the World Conference of Religions for Peace / International (Religions for Peace).

The advisory board for the Enhancing Governance track includes a man prominent in most conspiracy theories – George Soros of the Open Society Foundation. Soros' presence is considered ominous among defenders of American sovereignty.

One blog site summed up the Clinton-Soros axis this way: "If the United Nations is shifting away from the Annan legacy, but Clinton-Soros move into the vacuum, we are left with the same globalist mentality. That is not government 'enhancement,' but entrapment."

Outspoken anti-globalists ask if the world is witnessing the first stage of a Clinton-and-Clinton world hegemony – Hilary as president of the United States and Bill as secretary general of the United Nations.

"Between them they will control the world's money and arms," lamented one blogger.

"No," responded a Hilary fan. "That idea is just part of the vast right-wing conspiracy."



Mary Jo Anderson is a contributing reporter to WorldNetDaily.

Last night at the Hilton Hotel in Greenville, John F. McManus (John Birch Society, Citizens Committee to Stop the FTAA) presented the speech of the year and possibly of the decade on why it is absolutely imperative that the Free Trade Area of the Americas be stopped. We have the historical background and insight into the goals of those who are building the New World Order--along with more than a few hints of a definite Satanic influence in all of this.

This speech is long, but every word is worthwhile! It comes courtesy of John F. McManus himself, with thanks and appreciation.

The FTAA Must Be Defeated

By John F. McManus
Senior Executive Advisor, The John Birch Society

September- October, 2005


Let me begin with the story about a duck hunter. On a typical duck hunting morning, a veteran of the sport took a friend along who had never participated. There they were in the little boat when some ducks flew by. The hunter fired his gun, and a duck fell into the water only a few yards away. He said to his duck-hunting dog, "Fetch." And the dog walked out on the water, grabbed the duck, and walked back to the boat. The friend was stunned but before he could say anything, more ducks, another shot, and another falling duck. Once again, the dog walked out on the water and retrieved the duck. Finally, with a break in the action, the duck hunter asked his friend, "Say, did you notice anything different about my dog?" And the friend said, "Yeah, he can't swim."

If ever there was a classic case of missing the point, there you have it.

Sad to say, there are plenty of Americans who are missing the point about the plunge into so-called free trade agreements - NAFTA, World Trade Organization, CAFTA, and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, FTAA. The NAFTA agreement filled 900 pages and its authors had the audacity to attach the word "free" to it. Free and 900 pages of regulations don't mix. NAFTA was supposed to spur trade among Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. During most of my lifetime, our nation's greatest trading partner has been Canada. There was no need for NAFTA to improve that. As for Mexico, they have always had little to trade.

NAFTA entangled only three nations. The FTAA envisions entangling 34 nations in the Western Hemisphere. Obviously, the FTAA is NAFTA on steroids. As this John Birch Society-generated cartoon states, "If NAFTA hasn't crushed you … the FTAA will."

FTAA's promoters have been at work since 1994 when President Bill Clinton endorsed the pact at its unveiling during Summit of the Americas meeting in Miami. No sooner did George Bush enter the White House than he announced his plan to deliver the FTAA proposal to Congress for its approval in January 2005. All during 2004, members of The John Birch Society alerted fellow Americans - and many in Congress - about this dangerous pact. Our pamphlets, billboards, videos, books and speakers were put to work exposing the FTAA. Evidently, all this effort had some impact because Mr. Bush didn't present the FTAA to Congress in January 2005 as he repeatedly said he would. Instead, the administration offered the six-nation Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) as an interim measure - and it was approved in the House of Representatives in July by the slimmest of margins after maximum pressure emerged from the White House and Republican Party leaders.

The CAFTA document itself acknowledges that it's only a steppingstone to the FTAA. Its Preamble states that its purpose is to "Contribute to hemispheric integration and provide an impetus toward establishing the Free Trade Area of the Americas." That's pretty conclusive. And even though CAFTA was approved, the administration may have used up all of its arm-twisting and vote-buying power to get it passed by the House of Representatives. Getting FTAA approved will not be easy for them. We must make it impossible.

In order to explain the threat posed by FTAA, there's a need to take a hard look at several "free trade" agreements, even at the overall policies of those who have been leading - I should say misleading - our nation for a long time. Lurking behind all of these trade agreements, as I shall explain, is the United Nations, the seat of the world government long desired by deceitful leaders of many nations. So, fasten your seat belts as we review some important history.

Anyone who studies the matter knows that NAFTA isn't really about free trade. Its 900 pages are about managed trade and the creation of the New World Order. Henry Kissinger, a major player in all the key world-government-promoting organizations, told us so in a July 1993 newspaper column published nationwide prior to the congressional vote approving the pact. Kissinger stated that NAFTA represented a move toward the "new world order." That in itself is highly significant because "New World Order" has been the slogan of would-be world government leaders for several centuries. But, also very significant, he added that NAFTA would be "the first step toward an even larger vision of a free trade zone for the entire Western Hemisphere." In other words, he actually foresaw the FTAA 12 years ago! He said NAFTA was its precursor and that both would bring about the New World Order.

A few months later on October 1, 1993, David Rockefeller enthused about NAFTA in the Wall Street Journal where he stated: "Everything is in place - after 500 years - to build a true new world in the Western Hemisphere." Obviously, he also foresaw NAFTA as a precursor to the FTAA. There can be no doubt that NAFTA was only a "piece" of the New World Order puzzle. And the FTAA is designed to be a much larger piece of the world government being put together by Rockefeller and others who want to rule mankind.

Anyone who overlooks the possibility that some individuals seek world government today, or that others throughout history have plotted to achieve that same goal, has to rewrite history. We in The John Birch Society don't rewrite history; we report it in hopes that its lessons will keep our country free and independent

Some Important History
A few weeks before the signing of our nation's Declaration of Independence, a conspiratorial organization known as the Order of the Illuminati was hatched in Bavaria. Its rapid growth and influence was soon discovered and authorities in Bavaria outlawed membership in the Illuminati under pain of death. Targeting thrones and altars in France on the way to world rule, the Illuminati succeeded in bringing on the disastrous French Revolution from which France has never recovered.

Attempts to do to other countries what had been accomplished in France included penetration of some of our own nation's institutions. But in 1798, two important books exposing the Illuminati's plot were published, Proofs of a Conspiracy by English Professor John Robison and Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism by a French priest who had fled France for his life named Abbe’ Augustin Barruel. The two men didn't know each other, but their books presented almost identical condemnations of the conspiracy. Of particular interest to Americans is the fact that George Washington was given a copy of the Robison book, which he read, and then in his thank-you letter to the preacher who sent it to him stated his belief that there could be no doubt that the Illuminati had already made a target of our country. In that conclusion, the Father of our Country was joined by several other prominent Americans of his day.

Capably exposed, the Illuminati went more deeply underground and certainly did not disappear. It spawned the Carbonari in Italy and numerous other branches of the overall plot in Europe and in America. By the mid-19th Century in Germany, its adherents created the League of the Just, the very organization that sponsored Karl Marx to write The Communist Manifesto. No one doubts that Marx, the father of both communism and socialism, sought world government. He expected to accomplish the goal by having nations enact an income tax, a national bank a la the Federal Reserve, and control of children in government schools. His Manifesto also included attacks on private property, the family and marriage, eternal truths, and religion. If you sense that Marxism is taking hold here in America, you're correct.

The Communist Manifesto, of course, is something all Americans should study. But, for our purposes here, let it be known that Marx also stated in a speech given in Brussels on January 8, 1848 the following:

Free trade breaks up old nationalities … in a word, the free trade system hastens social revolution.

How revealing! Yes, he wanted social revolution. Yes, he wanted to break up nationalities. And he said that free trade would do the job on the way to his overall goal of world government.

After Marx went to his Maker, conspiratorial progress toward the ultimate goal of world government has been detailed in some very important works. Scotland's Msgr. George Dillon did so in a very important 1887 book; England's Nesta Webster authored several exposés in the early 20th Century; Bill Clinton's mentor Dr. Carroll Quigley produced his Tragedy and Hope in 1966; the current Librarian of Congress Dr. James H. Billington offered impressive research in his 1980 Fire in the Minds of Men; and John Birch Society Founder Robert Welch both wrote and spoke about the continuing plot against civilization generated by the Illuminati.

While most of those I have mentioned sought to block the drive toward tyrannical world government, other individuals promoted the diabolical goal. In 1912, the Rasputin-like Edward Mandell House - the man who had already captivated Woodrow Wilson and become his top advisor and confidant - issued his book entitled Philip Dru: Administrator. Admitting that his goal was "Socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx," House called for an income tax, a national bank, and a social security system, a restructuring of the U.S. Constitution, even a world government organization. His goals were those of Marx.

When World War I ended, President Wilson - following the lead suggested by House, his never-out-of-sight mentor - proposed the world government organization known as the League of Nations. But the U.S. Senate refused to have our nation become entangled and it eventually disappeared. Disappointed but far from defeated by the Senate's refusal, House and British counterparts created the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations and the London-based Royal Institute for International Affairs. These two organizations have labored continuously to create a vehicle for world government and to steer the world into it. They always intended that the entire world would be ruled by them, or by their traitorous successors. My own small book, The Insiders: Architects of the New World Order, shows the domination of the past five administrations by individuals from the world-government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations and related groups. The continuity of Insider control, one of the strongest indications of conspiracy, cannot be denied.

With financial backing from the Rockefellers, Carnegies and others, the CFR rose in power and influence. By 1939, its members had taken over an important segment of the U.S. State Department. All during World War II, these individuals spent much of their time planning for the creation of the United Nations. Very few Americans have ever read the United Nations Charter. Presented to the Senate in 1945, its main authors were Soviet Communist V.I. Molotov and Alger Hiss, a secret communist from our country who also held membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. And, as you all know, where the League of Nations had been rejected in 1919, U.S. entry into the United Nations won Senate approval in 1945. The world government organization now had the United States as a member, and the vehicle for consolidation of power over the planet had been created.

Always: The Goal was World Government
It's no overstatement to believe that the founders of the League of Nations, and then the United Nations, wanted to rule the world. In December 1922, the CFR's new magazine Foreign Affairs, lamented the division of the world into "fifty or sixty independent states" and concluded that "The real problem today is that of [the absence of] world government."

The U.S. delegation to the UN's founding conference in San Francisco included no less that 43 members of the Council on Foreign Relations. These individuals knew what they were doing. They soon had our nation fighting a war in Korea under the UN's auspices, and that war - never formally declared by Congress as required by the Constitution - began in 1950 and has never been settled. By 1953, the CFR leaders of the liberal Saturday Review editorialized: "If UNESCO is attacked on the grounds that it is helping to prepare the world's people for world government, then it is error to burst forth with apologetic statements and denials…. When faced with such a charge, let us by all means affirm it from the housetops."

Time permits only a glimpse into the huge body of evidence demonstrating the continuity of CFR-led efforts to build a world government. In 1962, for instance, U.S. taxpayers paid the bill for a State Department study entitled "A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations," a plan outlining steps needed to have the UN establish world rule. Not surprising, the author of this incredible document, Lincoln P. Bloomfield, held membership in the Council on Foreign Relations and so did Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State who commissioned the Bloomfield document.

Many who work diligently for world government keep their goal in the shadows. They know Americans don't want it and prefer to keep the U.S. independent. In 1976, California Senator Alan Cranston cautioned that "the more talk about world government, the less chance of achieving it, because it frightens people…." He had already sought a constitutional amendment to that would expedite the participation of the United States in a world federal government.

The parade of men who have served as UN Secretary-General includes one Marxist after another. They despise the notion of sovereignty or independence. In 1992, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated "the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty has passed." In 2000, his successor Kofi Annan added, "…state sovereignty … is being redefined by the forces of globalization and international cooperation." The goal of those who have led the UN is clear. That our leaders keep our nation in this trap, and continue to divert huge amounts of taxpayers’ money to keep it going, says plenty about U.S. leadership.

Tactics Leading to World Government
Having the UN control the planet necessarily entails dramatic leveling of the various nations - militarily, culturally, economically, etc. The sought-after control would mean forcing some nations downward, something already being accomplished in ours. But it would also mean using the wealth created by the American people and taken from them in taxation to gain control of other nations. So, in addition to the various moves being undertaken to subject our nation to world control, we see a two-pronged attack being waged on the American people by our own government: 1) destruction of the productive middle class, and 2) the use of taxpayers’ money to fund internationalist organizations and schemes that are forcing the rest of the world to knuckle under to control by those who aim for world government.

Let's mention a few of the organizations in just the economic arena that have both harmed America and used America's wealth to make a UN-dominated new world order more attainable. We'll be talking about the jobs of Americans going overseas via so-called "free trade" agreements but how many Americans have ever heard of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC)? Established in 1971, this federal government agency uses tax revenues taken from the American people to provide financing, investment insurance, and other services so that U.S. firms can set up risk-free facilities in foreign lands. The new enterprises then compete with America firms, take jobs away from our people, and impact the entire nation's prosperity.

OPIC's beneficiaries have included Exxon, General Electric, AT&T, DuPont, Coca Cola, Motorola, McDonald's, PepsiCo, Citicorp Bank, Levi Strauss, and many other well-known firms. Most of the companies I have just named are listed as corporate donors to the internationalist Council on Foreign Relations. These firms risk nothing as they establish themselves in other nations where they are able to take advantage of less expensive labor, lower taxation, and minimal regulatory control.

In addition to OPIC, there's the older Export-Import Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and numerous other foreign aid schemes. These agencies and their work constitute some more of the reasons why jobs have flown overseas.

Here in the U.S., excessive regulatory control is another reason why jobs have fled our shores. The National Association of Manufacturers produced a study in 2003 showing that regulatory costs imposed by our own government here in America add 22 percent more to the cost of doing business than what is faced by foreign competitors. This is the fruit of excessive mandates handed down by an assortment of regulatory agencies - OSHA, EPA, etc. To make a profit here in America, a business owner has to earn 22 percent more than a counterpart in another nation. Businesses are being forced out of our nation by unnecessary, even counterproductive regulatory agencies.

Shortly after that NAM study, a University of California Berkeley report entitled "The New Wave of Outsourcing" predicted a loss of 14 million jobs to outsourcing because of the enormous cost of doing business here at home. Jobs go to India, the Philippines, and other places where positions are eagerly sought by foreign-based workers at half or a third of the wages paid here in America.

Yet we hear U.S. officials claiming credit for creating new jobs as if there wasn't anything to worry about. But economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts addressed this claim when he wrote that almost all the new jobs eagerly pointed to by the Bush administration in July 2005 were "in the domestic service sector" or "tax-supported government jobs." He asked: "Where are the jobs for the 65,000 engineers the U.S. graduates every year? Where are the jobs for the physics, chemistry and math majors? Who needs a university degree to wait on tables and serve drinks, to build houses, to work as hospital orderlies, bus drivers, and sales clerks? What is the point of higher education when the job opportunities do not require it?" The kinds of jobs that are not being created are those held by America's middle class. What is happening is that the middle class, the backbone of our nation, is under heavy attack and is being programmed for extinction.

Two years ago, the Christian Science Monitor reported the staggering fact that free trade is the major reason why the number of manufacturing jobs nationwide has shrunk from 19.3 million to 14.6 million in just the past 25 years. That statistic may not impress some of you the way it should. So let me say that a strong and independent nation is one that manufactures what it needs. A weak nation gets its goods from elsewhere while becoming dependent on other nations. And the loss of manufacturing jobs has continued.

Who is responsible for this sharp decline? The answer is our own government's leaders and the corporate officials who cooperate with them. They care little or nothing about our nation and its people. They care everything about money and power - even power over the planet. They are delivering America to a United Nations-led New World Order that they expect to lead. And one of their first goals is to bring America down so it can be more comfortably merged with Third World nations.

One of my colleagues has assembled a startling amount of information about what is happening to our nation in his recently published book America's Engineered Decline. William Norman Grigg shows that our leaders have placed our nation in a "race to the bottom," a race that our internal enemies have America winning as jobs go overseas, borders are opened, and sovereignty is compromised. His book features discussion and condemnation of the plan to immerse our nation into the FTAA. But Will Grigg has also written a chapter about what every American can do to reverse the downward slide. If enough of us will understand what this small book contains, the engineered decline of America can be reversed. I highly recommend this book.

Piecemeal Delivery
FTAA, of course, fits in very well with some highly indicative statements issued by globalists three decades ago. Recall the incredibly subversive article penned by Richard N. Gardner in the Council on Foreign Relations Foreign Affairs in 1974. He boldly asserted that a single leap into world government was unrealistic. So he said "an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault." And he added that this approach "can produce some remarkable concessions of sovereignty that could not be achieved on an across-the-board basis." He wants our nation to end up as merely one area in a United Nations-run world.

Go back a few years earlier to Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1970 book Between Two Ages. In it, he praised Marxism for 60-odd pages, said America was becoming obsolete, and announced the goal of world government to be accomplished by entangling Western Europe, the U.S., and Japan. How did he expect to arrive at the world government? He said, “Movement toward a larger community of the developed nations will necessarily have to be piecemeal …through a variety of indirect ties and already developing limitations on national sovereignty." And his book led to the creation by David Rockefeller three years later of the Trilateral Commission, incorporating all of Brzezinski's plans.

Gardner said, "piece by piece." Brzezinski said "piecemeal." Both are disciples of David Rockefeller as CFR and Trilateral members. And for years until his elevation to emeritus status, David Rockefeller chaired both of these organizations. He now champions the FTAA.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
We're going to get to discussion of FTAA, but it's very helpful first to examine what NAFTA has meant for America. The Washington-based Economic Policy Institute stated that 879,280 American jobs were lost because of NAFTA during its first ten years. Washing machines, jeans, automobiles, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, and many more identifiably American products are now being made in Mexico. The toll in our nation's textile industry alone is hundreds of thousands of jobs lost since NAFTA began. And since NAFTA, many small farms and ranches have closed down, most of which closed because of the effects of NAFTA. And while NAFTA has had such a profound effect, so too have many other Americans have lost their jobs and their livelihoods to China and other countries.

Recently, one of the last large steel manufacturing plants in our nation closed its doors. Geneva Steel in Utah not only closed its doors, company executives sold the firm's equipment to communist China. The company once employed 8,000 workers.

In San Antonio, a factory that once made blue jeans for Levi Strauss is now closed. It's one of eight Levi Strauss plants in Texas to close down. There are no more Levis made anywhere in the United States. All production has been sent to Latin America and Asia.

Also in Texas, the Kimberley-Clark Corporation announced that it will close a medical products factory and ship the jobs off to Mexico.

In Chicago, the company that made millions of Radio Flyer wagons is moving operations to China. I had one of those when I was a boy; my children shared one as well.

The popular Etch-A-Sketch toy will now be made in China, devastating the small community of Bryan, Ohio, that has lost a major employer.

In Maine, loggers and the paper industry have been hard hit. The people and their Democrat congressman, Michael Michaud, blame NAFTA.

Rhode Island's AT Cross ballpoint pen company is moving overseas. In Tennessee, the Carrier air conditioning company is eliminating 1,800 jobs, most of which will go to Mexico. Maytag appliance company closed its plant in Illinois and 1,600 employees saw their jobs go off to Mexico. Texas Instruments closed a plant in Massachusetts at a cost of 800 jobs that moved to China, Korea and Mexico. Kodak laid off 500 in Rochester, New York, and sent the jobs to Mexico and China. The Pillowtex firm in North Carolina closed its doors and 6,500 employees lost their jobs. And in January of this year, the WestPoint Stevens textile company announced that it would lay off 2,465 employees and close factories in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Indiana. I could go on but I won't. But let me add that each manufacturing job lost affects 3 to 5 others, the restaurant owners, auto and real estate dealers, service providers, an so on.

Some say that NAFTA is good for Mexico and that, because it is, the flood of immigration into our southwest will soon cease. But it hasn't. The Los Angeles Times showed the folly of that argument by quoting a Mexican who entered the U.S. illegally and allowed himself to be interviewed. Insisting that the real beneficiaries of NAFTA were large Mexican and American companies, this man said, "If it were true that NAFTA was good for Mexico, we wouldn't be here. It just created more for those who already have more." He means government officials and corporate bigwigs are NAFTA's only real beneficiaries in Mexico. NAFTA isn't good for Mexicans and it isn't good for Americans either.

U.S. Borders
Most Americans know about the wave of illegal immigrants, and a few know about the potential for terrorists to cross into our country from Mexico. In January 2004, President Bush proposed a program to grant "legal status as temporary workers" for millions of illegals already here - and for millions more who will come here to take advantage of his offer. He didn't call this an amnesty program, but that's exactly what it is.

Mike Antonovich, a 21-year member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, says that illegal immigration "has imposed a catastrophic [financial] impact on taxpayers and seriously crippled our public school system." More than 80 hospitals in California have closed their doors due to insolvency brought on by having to care for illegal immigrants who have no funds.

Senator John McCain of Arizona, the darling of most of the mass media and a member of the CFR, wants to solve the problem by sending millions of federal dollars to ease the burden of the hospitals. This amounts to the offering of another costly government program to deal with the harm caused by an earlier costly government program. Men like McCain do this all the time as government power grows and grows.

The flood of illegals coming into our southwest isn't made up solely of poor Mexicans looking for work. Our undermanned and overworked Border Patrol has created a new category of illegals called OTMs. Other Than Mexicans! These individuals are Arab-speaking, Eastern Europeans, South Americans, and others. Among them are members of organized crime engaged in smuggling drugs and human beings. Our southern border has become so porous that the governors of Arizona and New Mexico have issued state of emergency declarations. Each faults U.S. and Mexican authorities for not doing the job entrusted to them.

NAFTA's effect on jobs and borders is bad enough. But like the duck hunter's friend who missed the point about the dog who walked on water, many Americans are missing the main effect of NAFTA: its attack on sovereignty.

In April 2004, a NAFTA tribunal overruled U.S. courts in a dispute involving a Canadian firm's claims against an American firm. NAFTA was supposed to be about free trade, but its Chapter 11 established a judicial tribunal whose rulings supersede the decisions of state and federal courts.

One of the NAFTA tribunal's judges happens to be former U.S. congressman Abner Mikva from Illinois. He commented after this ruling was handed down, "If Congress had known that there was anything like this in NAFTA, they never would have voted for it." Chief Justice Ronald M. George of the California Supreme Court stated, "There are grave implications here. It's rather shocking that the highest courts of the state and federal governments could have their judgments circumvented by these tribunals."

In California only a few months ago, the legislature overwhelmingly passed a measure calling for disposing of an annual glut of 32 million used tires by chopping them up and adding them to asphalt for road construction. But Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed the measure because of "free trade" agreements entered into by the federal government - such NAFTA. California's ability to take care of a real headache had been compromised by the federal government because NAFTA and the World Trade Organization now dictate that tires for road construction purposes had to be imported from Canada and Mexico. The once-sovereign state of California is no longer the master of its own fate.

If a NAFTA tribunal doesn't satisfy someone, its Chapter 11 states that recourse can be had via an agency of the World Bank, a creature of the United Nations, or the person can turn to the United Nations Commission for International Trade Law, another obvious link to the UN.

They told us NAFTA was just about trade. You know it isn't. Is it about loss of jobs? Yes! Is it about open borders? Yes! But its major effect is erosion of U.S. sovereignty, As Henry Kissinger stated, it is a "most creative step" toward the New World Order. New World Order has always meant economic control via socialism, and political control via world government. In other words, Marxism. And the world government these individuals want can be found at the United Nations.

World Trade Organization
Let's now look at the next bit of "piecemeal" loss of sovereignty. With NAFTA already functioning, Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich, another member of the Council on Foreign Relations, led the charge in Congress to insert our country into the 147-member World Trade Organization. He openly stated, "This is not just another trade agreement…. [We need] to be honest about the fact that we are transferring from the United States at a practical level significant authority to a new organization. This is a transformational moment."

Remember when he was considered the conservative savior in Congress? I assure you The John Birch Society knew better. In 1996, when Gingrich was riding high, we produced a video program entitled "Newt Gingrich Versus the Constitution."

Working with President Bill Clinton, another CFR member, Gingrich arranged for a lame-duck session of Congress in December 1994 that narrowly gained congressional approval of the measure inserting the U.S. into the WTO. An additional transfer of our nation's hard-won independence had been accomplished.

There's something else about the WTO that ought to be better known. It's another of many agencies of the United Nations compromising our nation's sovereignty and leading us into the New World order. Here is a chart published by the UN showing its entire system. Note that it lists the WTO within its rather tangled web. Careful study of this chart shows that just about every area of human endeavor is slated for total control by the UN.

The WTO has issued rulings against the U.S. in matters dealing with our tax laws, steel tariffs, oil importation, cotton subsidies, sale of wheat, and even the purchase of bananas. Is the WTO about trade? Yes, to some degree. But its major consequence is loss of national independence and the ability to establish our own laws. Only recently, the small nation of Antigua and Barbuda with a population of less than 100,000 appealed to the WTO because the state of Utah had a ban on gambling. The WTO ruled that Utah was violating Antigua and Barbuda’s rights to sponsor gambling via the internet. Outraged Utah state representative Sheryl Allen commented: "It's not just gambling. The states are losing their authority in a lot of areas."

A point that has to be stressed here is that it is the federal government that got us into NAFTA, the WTO and CAFTA. And federal officials want to create the next monster agreement, FTAA - on the way to a world government that many of them expect to lead.

Free Trade Area of the Americas
The FTAA was initially proposed in 1994 at a Miami, Florida, Summit of the Americas attended by President Bill Clinton who applauded the idea. The planned FTAA springs from the efforts of an array of organizations launched by David Rockefeller who created, financed, and/or godfathered of the Council of the Americas, the America's Society, the Forum for the Americas, the Institute for International Economics, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and more. All of these groups have labored for years to create the FTAA as one the major steps toward building world government.

When the drive to create the FTAA was launched in 1994, its proud sponsors published its Declaration of Principles stating unambiguously: "We reiterate our firm adherence to the purposes and principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter." How indicative! World government under the UN is the obvious ultimate goal.

President Bush has eagerly supported the FTAA. In 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney spoke at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting in Washington. He proudly pointed to his CFR membership and previous Board of Directors service with the organization, and his heavy enthusiasm for the FTAA during the speech won warm praise from David Rockefeller who just happened to be in the audience. Hardly surprising!

But, as already mentioned, the FTAA was scheduled to be brought before Congress in January 2005. A substantial effort by The John Birch Society all during 2004 alerted millions about the real purpose of FTAA. Hence the Bush administration postponed presenting it to Congress. Instead, the interim CAFTA pact was offered. And, as its own Preamble indicates, CAFTA is merely a steppingstone toward FTAA.

Just like NAFTA, CAFTA establishes its own tribunal whose rulings will take precedence over state and federal courts. Further, it directs aggrieved parties to seek additional recourse, if needed, through an agency of the World Bank, a creature of the United Nations, or through the United Nations Commission for International Trade Law, another obvious link to the UN. And it states that the CAFTA nations must respect the WTO agreement. More UN connections.

We have already mentioned the importance of the Council on Foreign Relations in these transfers of America's independence. And we pointed to the Institute for International Economics as one of the Rockefeller-funded organizations promoting the FTAA. Never leaving anything to chance, veteran CFR member Robert of the Institute for International Economics authored a 2001 book entitled Toward a North American Community: Lessons from the Old World for the New. In it, he called for the United States, Canada and Mexico to integrate far more fully in what has been termed "NAFTA-Plus." He followed that with an article in the January/February issue of the CFR journal Foreign Affairs entitled "North America's Second Decade."

Pastor urged the complete dismantling of borders and a huge transfer of U.S. taxpayers' money to improve impoverished Mexico's economic level. He said these and other steps would ease enactment of the FTAA. Pastor then led a new group named the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America (ITF) whose participants for our country were selected by the CFR. ITF meetings held in late 2004 and early 2005 produced a series of recommendations originally suggested by Pastor.

The next step taken by these internationalists resulted in the creation of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), the name given to an agreement signed by President Bush, Canadian leader Paul Martin and Mexico's Vicente Fox at Mr. Bush's Texas ranch in March 2005. These three national leaders have already agreed to 300 regulations that will not be subject to congressional and citizen review. Obviously, they intend to expand NAFTA, and to spring from its growth to the FTAA. We have a right to ask why a supine Congress allows all of this to happen.

Like the European Union
We know what NAFTA and WTO have done. Those who continue to applaud these pacts have stated that the proposed 34-nation FTAA will be an enlargement of NAFTA and a successor of CAFTA. But they have also stated that the FTAA will duplicate for the Western Hemisphere what the European Union has already done in Europe. We must take a good look at this European Union.

Mexico's President Fox, a close ally of President Bush stated in 2002 while in Spain, "Eventually, our long range objective [with NAFTA] is to establish … an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union." The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers have suggested that the FTAA duplicate what the EU has done in Europe.

So what has the EU accomplished? Like the selling of NAFTA and the WTO in our country, the EU was sold to the peoples of Europe as a beneficial trade agreement. The reality is that it isn't mainly about trade any more than NAFTA and WTO have proven to be. I'm pleased to report that some people in Europe are waking up to what is happening to their countries. In March 2004, the Deputy Leader of the new United Kingdom Independence Party, Mike Nattrass, sent a letter to The John Birch Society. In it, he said:

The EU was sold to the British people as "A trading agreement" and has turned into a "Political Union" which is changing our basic laws and traditions.

In 2003, President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic criticized the EU's proposed Constitution saying:

This is crossing the Rubicon, after which there will be no more sovereign states in Europe. … only one state will remain. We are against a European superstate.

In June 2004, leaders of the newly expanded roster of 25 EU nations hammered out a final EU Constitution. One of its articles revealingly states:

The Constitution, and law adopted by the Union's Institutions exercising competences conferred upon it, shall have primacy over the law of Member States.

That says it all. In Europe, national sovereignty has been cancelled. Subservience to the UN Charter in this final Constitution appears in such expressions as "strict observance for," "in accordance with," "respect for," "in conformity with," "without prejudice to," and "establishing all appropriate forms of cooperation with." Is the EU a major step on the way to delivering the nations of Europe to the UN? Absolutely. The new EU Constitution shows this to be the case.

After Spain ratified this new EU Constitution, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos exulted: "We are witnessing the last remnants of national politics. The member states have already relinquished control of justice, liberty and security. The concept of traditional citizenship has been bypassed in the 21st Century." This is what our nation faces.

And while it's true that voters in France and the Netherlands voted against ratification of the EU Constitution, it doesn't seem to matter. Britain's Daniel Hannan, an elected member of the European Parliament, recently told his constituents:

You may have got the impression that the European Constitution was dead - that the French felled it and the Dutch pounded a stake into its heart. If so, think again. The Constitution is being implemented, clause by clause, as if the votes had not happened. Most of the institutions that [the Constitution] would have authorized are either up and running already, or in the process of being established.

What the European Union has already accomplished, therefore, amounts to the greatest consolidation of political power in the history of mankind. More than the conquests of Alexander the Great, Ghengis Khan, Suliyman the Magnificent, Stalin, Hitler, or any of the would-be rulers of mankind.

There are now 25 nations in the European Union. The EU already has executive, legislative and judicial branches. Each of these branches of the EU government has already flexed its muscles on once-sovereign European nations. The EU has a central bank and the Euro currency. It also has a military arm and the beginnings of a police force called Europol. The EU also has a flag, motto, passport, anthem, auto license plates, Olympics, youth orchestra, and annual EU Day. In short, the EU means business. But it, too, is merely a step on the way to UN domination of the planet.

Today, there are 191 nations in the United Nations, many of them smaller than our smallest state. Achieving world government would be a rather difficult undertaking for the United Nations if dissolving national independence had to be accomplished 191 times. So, world government planners have been persuading nations to cede their sovereignty to regional groupings that can far more easily be brought to heel in a world government. This is what the EU, NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO, and the FTAA are designed to accomplish.

Nationhood was created by God at the Tower of Babel and is, therefore, eminently good and eminently worthy of preservation. And the world planners obviously know that God created nationhood. One of the agencies formed by the European Union is the Council of Europe. Approximately 20 years ago, this Council produced a poster depicting the rebuilding of the Tower of Babel. Here is a photo of the poster produced by the EU's Council of Europe. Note the crane indicating the desire to rebuild the Tower. Rebuilding the Tower of Babel means undoing what God did many centuries before the birth of Christ. It signifies a determination to abolish nationhood. It defiantly amounts to shaking one's fist at the sky while saying, "Not thy will but mine be done."

It is highly significant that the creators of the EU Constitution resisted pleas from several delegations that it acknowledge God and Europe's Christian heritage. But there is no mention of God or Europe’s Christian heritage at the European Union. It is also significant that there has never been a place for God at the United Nations.

The European Union acknowledges the fundamental importance of the United Nations. And so did the creators of the FTAA when they launched their proposal eleven years ago. The World Trade Organization is even listed on the UN's own organizational chart. Not so obvious are the UN's ties contained in the NAFTA and CAFTA pacts. All of these pacts are designed to cede power to the UN. But I contend that the United Nations isn't "taking over" our nation and others. The key here is to realize that we are being delivered to the UN. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan isn't our greatest enemy; the leaders of the U.S. government and similarly minded world government planners in other nations are! It is they who have been working for decades to deliver our nation - and all nations - to the god-less United Nations.

The European Union and the proposed FTAA - along with other trade blocs - are paving the way toward world government. Already in existence are the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation group, the Economic Community of West African States, South America's Southern Common Market called Mercosur, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the South African Development Community, and a recently concluded pact between China and India. It's certainly a lot easier to deliver a few large groups of nations to world government than it is to take control of all the nations of the world one by one. Hence, there is NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO, the European Union, all these other free trade groups, and the announced plan to create the FTAA.

If you get the impression that the world is getting very close to being completely controlled by a powerful few in a world government, you get my message. But my other message is that stopping the FTAA should be the beginning of the end for the conspirators.

Stop the FTAA
The stakes are extremely high in the fight to block U.S. entry into the FTAA. After many members of Congress allowed themselves to be browbeaten into passage of CAFTA, all who serve in Congress will soon face a choice regarding the FTAA. 1) They can reject the phony lure of free trade and have our country continue free and independent; or 2) They can have our nation commit suicide by transferring sovereignty to this extremely important plank in the building of the UN's new world order. How the members of Congress will make this critically important decision is up to you in this room, and up to our allies across the nation.

Defeating the plans of the conspirators who are behind this diabolically conceived scheme can be accomplished - but only if each of us reaches many more people about this issue than we have ever reached about any other issue. And when victory is ours, because members of Congress are now listening to us rather than to the President, party leaders, the media, and the corporate sellout artists, those same members of Congress will be approachable for other needed tasks. Like getting the U.S. out of the WTO, out of NAFTA, out of CAFTA, even out of the United Nations.

Our nation is being subverted from within. The middle class, the backbone of this nation, has been programmed for elimination by forces from within. Leaders who claim to be red, white, and blue Americans are delivering our nation to the United Nations. It's time to say "No more!" And it's time to realize that we're up against a conspiracy, not a series of mistakes.

The good news is that we don't have to get out of the FTAA. Congress hasn't already subjected our nation to it. Staying out is far easier than withdrawing at a later time. So Congress is the key. Find out how your representative and two senators stand on this measure. Contact them and ask them where they stand. And get others to do the same. Find out how they voted on CAFTA. If they voted YES, chide them and tell them to change. If they voted NO, congratulate them and tell them to remain strong when the FTAA is presented for approval.

The John Birch Society has produced all of the tools needed to alert fellow citizens. Pamphlets, books, billboards, signs, posters, pass-along cards mentioning our stoptheftaa.org web site and the books I have mentioned. Get yourself armed with these tools and get others involved in this incredibly important project.

The February 7, 2005 issue of The New American has been published to deal entirely with the threat posed by the FTAA. Note the headline, "Losing Our Independence," and the sub-head, "Trade Pacts Are Destroying America." I contend that anyone who reads our magazine will understand the threat and get involved in the fight to keep America free and independent. The way to do that is to join The John Birch Society.

Our nation has long been scheduled for inclusion in a tyrannical New World Order. Those who are working to bring this about have been laboring from within, eroding our sovereignty, diminishing our productive might, entangling us in the UN's web that they created in the first place. It's time to stand up for America for ourselves but, even more, for our children, grandchildren, and generations to come.

The battle over the FTAA can be the turning point we have long sought. And the American people will agree with us about this extremely important subject if we inform them. The bottom line is that the FTAA isn't about jobs or borders, it's about preserving this nation's independence. We have to tell many more Americans not to miss the point like the man who went duck hunting with his friend.

Let's win this battle and steer our nation back on to the path of freedom under the limitations on government contained in the Constitution of the United States, the document so many have either forgotten or never learned in the first place. And don't forget prayer, but like the farmer who prayed while he was hoeing, pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on yourself.

We must Stop the FTAA!

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THE INSIDERS: Architects of the New World Order by John F. McManus $5.95

AMERICA’S ENGINEERED DECLINE by William Norman Grigg $5.95

THE NEW AMERICAN: FTAA Issue (February 7, 2005) $2.95

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