CAFTA Small economies shafted by Big Business US style

Caving in to White House threats and bribes, the Senate approved the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on June 30, by a vote of 54 to 45 after squeaking through the House 217-215. The argument that these "fledgling" democracies would devolve once again into civil war was hammered home by Republicans who said, "We can send free trade to Central America today, or we will be sending troops tomorrow." It was probably more by reaching into the pork barrel - $286 billion highway spending bill pledges were made to Southern textile and agricultural states - that finally turned the screw. Plus a little “vote jiggling” - Rep. Jo Ann Davis also would have voted against CAFTA, but claimed that a storm prevented her from returning from a cancelled Boy Scout Jamboree.

Deaf and indifferent to farmers, manufacturers, and workers devastated by previous trade agreements, unconcerned about the growing danger these pacts pose to U.S. sovereignty, President Bush pulled out all stops in a major effort to ram CAFTA through the Senate before the July 4 recess. Sometimes to promote the shadowy interests of global business he uses men in uniform, CAFTA uses the men in business suits.

The Central American Free Trade Agreement’s 2000 pages expands NAFTA (the decade-old North American Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada) to include Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The Bush administration has been clear that it sees CAFTA approval as essential to building momentum for approval of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would include all the nations of our Western Hemisphere.)Or what we patronisingly call the "New World" even thought the original settlers from the Asian motherland we now know probably populated the the Americas, North and South 30,000 years ago.

Signing the treaty President Bush said;

"...the Bill I'm about to sign is good for America. I'm pleased that Congress has taken a step to eliminate the barriers to America's goods and crops to 44 million customers.

I welcome the opportunity to make our nation more secure by strengthening our ties with democracies that share our belief in free markets and free government.

All of us in this room understand that to keep our economy growing and creating jobs, we need to open markets for American products overseas.

All of us understand that strengthening our economic ties with our democratic neighbours is vital to America's economic and national security interests.

All of us understand that by strengthening ties with democracies in our hemisphere, we are advancing the stability that comes from freedom.

Pete du Pont ex Delaware Governer cheered for the CAFTA cause when he wrote about “Sugar Socialism” in the Wall Street Journal on May 25th , "a spoonful of sugar may be the poison that kills the economic opportunity of free trade between the United States and six nations in Central America and undermines the fundamental concept of international trade." du Pont pointed out that the American sugar industry is so strongly advantaged by quotas, tariffs and subsidies that total sugar imports have declined by about a third since the 1990s. CAFTA would allow additional sugar imports from the Central American nations of 107,000 metric tons in the first year. Annual U.S. sugar production is about 7.8 million metric tons, so the effect of CAFTA is to raise sugar imports into America by about one day's sugar production.

In 1993, as NAFTA was about to be officially launched, Henry Kissinger said of the trade agreement: "It will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War, and the first step toward an even larger vision of a free-trade zone for the entire Western Hemisphere." NAFTA "is not a conventional trade agreement," he noted, "but the architecture of a new international system." Dr. Kissinger, a high-level Insider and member of the CFR and Trilateral Commission, knew that the trade agreement label was merely a deceptive cover story to mask the truly treasonous intent of the document’s authors: to destroy the national sovereignty of the United States and all other countries of the Western Hemisphere.

NAFTA was launched amid great hoopla and promises that it would bring a continuous wave of progress and prosperity to all three nations involved: Mexico, Canada and the United States

Although Presidents George Bush (the elder) and Bill Clinton were the most visible figures associated with the campaign for NAFTA, they were merely fronting for much more powerful forces operating behind the scenes.

Leaders and members of these two pillars of the Establishment have provided the critical economic and political impetus for NAFTA and the FTAA.

Including the 89 year old David Rockefeller , who combines his fabulous family wealth with business contacts and an array of organizational power bases at the global and hemispheric levels. Founder and chairman of the Council of the Americas, the Americas Society, and Forum of the Americas, influencing US policies and thinking – he founded the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University and has funded the Latin American studies programs at many other institutions. His chairmanship of the Chase Manhattan Bank, provides access to the operations of the IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and US AID. His voice is always at the front when Wall Street calls for increasing U.S. taxpayer funding for these globalist institutions.

David Rockefeller is the founder and honorary chairman of the Trilateral Commission, as well as a continuing power within the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR chairman for 15 years) and a major financial angel of the Institute for International Economics, all of which have been at the forefront of the push to establish sovereignty-eroding regional trade pacts.
Thomas “Mack” McLarty — is remembered as President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff and counsel (1992-1994). He was a key mover and shaker in the creation of NAFTA. At the 1994 Miami Summit of the Americas, he gave the game away "This summit is much broader than lowering tariffs, ….. This is not a trade summit, it is an overall summit. It will focus on economic integration and convergence."
Kissinger soon took him on board (where he joined Paul Bremer of Baghdad fame) and was beatified as president of Kissinger McLarty Associates . He is also a board member of Rockefeller’s Council of the Americas and Inter-American Dialogue. In 2001 he also co-chaired the Carnegie Endowment panel that recommended adoption of Mexican President Vicente Fox’s so-called migration policies to do away with the U.S.-Mexico border.

Robert Zoellick — U.S. Trade Representative for President George W. Bush, Mr. Zoellick has presided over the most active and aggressive push for multilateral and bilateral trade agreements in U.S. history. He served as a top lieutenant to influence peddlar James Baker III (CFR) in the Reagan and Bush administrations, where he helped negotiate the NAFTA agreements, create the WTO and has since worked assiduously to lay the groundwork for the FTAA. Zoellick was a paid consultant and substantial shareholder on the Enron advisory board before joining the US administration. Currently in China Zoellick and Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo participated in Sino-US strategic dialogue on Monday 1/8/2005 the first of its kind since the two countries forged diplomatic ties 26 years ago. This formal dialogue resulted from the agreement reached by Chinese President Hu Jintao and US President George W. Bush during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Chile last year. (The one where they all wore old bleankets for the Group photoshoot).

Preaching free trade, he trails a long history of private business interests in predatory multinational corporations like Vivendi, Enron, Goldman Sachs, and Alliance Capital. The unvarying tenet in Zoellick's perverse creed is the “manifest US destiny ”to dominate world trade.

Some try military dominance, he is a crusader for monetary hegemony.

Sometimes he supports combining both – In speech in May this year to the Institute for International Economics, he said, "The U.S. seeks cooperation--or better--on foreign policy and security...Given that the U.S. has international interests beyond trade, why not try to urge people to support our overall policies? Negotiating a free-trade agreement with the U.S. is not something one has a right to -it's a privilege." This suggestion is not new, or even untried. Reagan used PL480 agricultural aid and other “trade concessions” to bribe and cajole Honduras into serving as a military base for illegal terrorist aggression against Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. Which enabled Mr Negroponte and friends to use other and more dramatic forms of persuasion.

Robert Bartley — Although he died in 2003 ,as editor of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bartley has provided one of the most powerful and strategic voices for the globalism for three decades. Claiming to be a conservative free-market Republican, Bartley used the news and editorial pages of the Journal to promote neoconservative internationalists and to propagandize for NAFTA, FTAA, WTO, IMF, World Bank and other globalist institutions and programs. He was a member of the CFR and Trilateral Commission, as well as a speaker at the annual World Economic Forum and an attendee of the super-secretive Bilderberg meetings. He once said "I think the nation-state is finished" stating simply "There shall be open borders."

Bartley, who died in December 2003, was a member of the CFR and Trilateral Commission, as well as a speaker at the annual World Economic Forum and an attendee of the super-secretive Bilderberg meetings. For more on Robert Bartley’s reign at the Wall Street Journal, see "The Nation-State Is Finished," in the February 23, 2004 issue of TNA. As quoted previously the WSJ maintains the struggle for globalism for it’s readers.

Kenichi Ohmae — Promoted by The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Ohmae received his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from MIT, he is most famous for his best-selling books on business and economics and his articles in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy and The Economist. Among the more than sixty books the The Borderless World and The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies stand out. In his 1993 essay "The Rise of the Region State" for Foreign Affairs, the house journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, He declared the full neo-con one global world "The nation state has become an unnatural, even dysfunctional, unit for organizing human activity and managing economic endeavor in a borderless world." The CFR has effectively promoted his views that nationhood is indeed headed inevitably for extinction, to be replaced by a new order of global governance.

Peter Hakim — As president of Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), Mr. Hakim frequently promotes the agenda of the Left for the U.S. foreign policy Establishment, defending Fidel Castro’s Communist regime and advocating U.S. normalization of relations with Cuba. He currently serves on boards and advisory committees for the Foundation of the Americas, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Human Rights Watch. He is however a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and frequently appears as a panellist or speaker on CFR programs.

George Soros — One of the world’s wealthiest men, multi-billionaire currency trader, his secretive Soros Foundation and Open Society Institute operate in more than 50 countries in Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America, friend of Mikhail Gorbachev, member of the Trilateral Commission also a CFR director, his Soros Fund Management is a CFR corporate member, providing generous funding for the globalist agenda.

C. Fred Bergsten —Leaving the Carter administration in 1981, he took over as director of the newly founded David Rockefeller’s Institute for International Economics (IIE), "the most influential think-tank on the planet,", the chairman of the IIE is Peter G. Peterson, who also chairs the CFR. Bergsten is a director of the CFR as well as a member of the Trilateral Commission.

Alan Greenspan — Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, Mr. Greenspan one of the most powerful men on Earth who can move world financial markets with a casual and often enigmatic aside. He has been one of the most influential advocates of NAFTA and the FTAA.

Longserving CFR member a former director (and currently an honorary director) of the IIE. Other current and former Federal Reserve officers who are in lock-step.. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker (CFR, TC, IIE), New York Federal Reserve President William McDonough (CFR director), New York Federal Reserve Chairman Peter G. Peterson (CFR chairman), Chicago Federal Reserve Chairman Michael Moskow (CFR director), are all active in lobbying for the NAFTA-FTAA agenda among U.S. leaders as well as their central bank counterparts in Latin America. …Arminio Fraga, former president of Brazil’s Central Bank is now MD of Soros Fund Management.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger —Brazilian and radical Marxist who has spent the last 30 years teaching and writing at Harvard University’s Law School and at the David Rockefeller Center for the Study of Latin America. Unger became the mentor and ideological guru of President Vicente Fox, and was for a period, Fox’s foreign minister.

Zbigniew Brzezinski — The eminence grise of globalism. As early as 1970 in his book Between Two Ages, Zbigniew Brzezinski (CFR) was identifying the Government of the US as obsolete, that "national sovereignty is no longer a viable concept," and that world leaders must work toward gradual economic and political "convergence" of nations, with the final aim being "the goal of world government." In 1972, while at a Bilderberg conference, David Rockefeller and Mr. Brzezinski formed the Trilateral Commission as an elite new body of globalists from three continents (Europe, Asia and North America — hence the "Trilateral" designation). Brzezinski was appointed as the commission’s first director.

In 1995 he lamented that with only five years to the start of the new millennium, "We do not have a new world order." "We cannot leap into world government in one quick step” …." This requires a process of gradually expanding the range of democratic cooperation as well as the range of personal and national security, a widening, step by step, stone by stone, [of] existing relatively narrow zones of stability in the world of security and cooperation. In brief, the precondition for eventual globalization — genuine globalization — is progressive regionalization, because thereby we move toward larger, more stable, more cooperative units." This describes precisely the gradualist regional approach to global government proposed through the FTAA.

In the real world, The US is a mercantilist nation, just as the one that emerged from the contretemps about tea taxes with the hated British colonialists and relies heavily on protective tariffs and internal subsidies.

For sheer hyposcrisy and double standards consider cotton. In 2001, the US Commodity Credit Corporation spent $4bn subsidising the income of cotton producers, a total of some 25,000 corporate farms in California, Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi.

The world market value of the cotton crop for that year about $3bn. It is a problem to decide whether the Bush pork barrel farm policies owe more to the command principles of Bolshevik state planning or the market principles espoused by Zoellick. As the world’s largest cotton exporter, US domestic trade policy has global consequences. The International Cotton Advisory Committee, said they lowered world prices by around one-quarter, plunging world cotton markets into the deepest and most protracted depression in since the Great Depression.

Jump from subsidy heaven in Texas, to West Africa and examine the result. 1 region has 11 million households depending on cotton cultivation for their livelihoods, and their nations where cotton is a crucial source of foreign exchange.. At a conservative estimate, it lost some $200m in 2001 as a direct consequence of American corporate farm subsidies.

To put this figure in context, it dwarfs the amount that governments in the region receive in the form of US aid or debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. The sheer numbers hide the people, ‘agricultural labourers who get lower wages, small farmers who have less to spend on food and health, and children being taken out of school because their parents can no longer afford the fees.’

Robert Zoellick likes to wax lyrical about the merits of a ‘level playing field’ in agriculture. President Bush wasted no opportunity to press on African producers the benefits of open markets when he visited Africa last January. No doubt he rehearsed his speeches again at G8. What sort of level playing field is it when cotton farms in America receive more subsidy than the entire national income of cotton-producing countries such as Burkina Faso and Mali?