WELCOME MAT FOR TERRORISTS (FTAA)

With Marxist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil and Haiti, and Communist movements in other Latin American countries, the FTAA poses an enormous security nightmare.

Could the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, now galloping toward completion, actually spur the spread of Marxist revolution throughout Latin America? Would a completed FTAA result in the political and economic merger of the United States with Marxist-run countries in the region, including, ultimately, Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba? Will the FTAA make it easier for terrorists from Latin America and throughout the world, including the Middle East, to enter the United States? The answer to each of these questions is a resounding — and alarming — yes.

Previous articles in THE NEW AMERICAN have reported on the destructive impact that this proposed "common market" for the Western Hemisphere would have on U.S. jobs and industry. The FTAA would vastly multiply the devastation already wrought by NAFTA, the WTO and other so-called free-trade agreements negotiated by the Clinton and Bush administrations. Millions of jobs and virtually every U.S. industry sector — from agriculture and basic manufacturing to information technology and financial services — are on the line. We have also exposed the blueprint behind the FTAA to use the trade issue as simply the opening step in an ongoing process that will lead to a hemispheric supranational government, just as the Common Market in Europe led to a merger of nations in the European Union.* This puts our Constitution and our very existence as a sovereign nation at stake.

The FTAA, however, poses an additional enormous danger that should be of paramount concern to every U.S. citizen, especially in light of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the ongoing terror war. For the past 40 years, Fidel Castro has maintained Havana as the center for international terrorism in the Western Hemisphere. He maintains close ties with every recognized terror regime — Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya, Algeria and Lebanon as well as with Russia and China. He was one of Saddam Hussein’s most loyal allies and defenders.

Following the 9-11 attacks, Castro hosted a global terror summit in Havana that included representatives from the "axis of evil" regimes and top terrorist groups. And, unbeknownst to most U.S. citizens, Comrade Fidel is bosom buddy to the Marxist presidents of our new FTAA partners Brazil and Venezuela. These two regimes, along with several others in the area, have become terrorist havens for Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the PLO, PFLP and other Middle Eastern and Islamic terrorist organizations.

If the U.S. Congress approves the FTAA, these terrorists, along with others in Latin America, will eventually have free access to the U.S. What’s more, the FTAA planners intend to bring Communist Cuba itself into the hemispheric union as well.

The plan for the FTAA would not even have gotten off the ground in 1994 if there had been any hint that Fidel Castro’s regime might some day be included in what then was being sold merely as a trade pact. President Bill Clinton knew that when he presided over the 1994 Summit of the Americas in Miami that launched the FTAA process. Florida’s influential Cuban-American community and their traditional anti-Communist allies would have forced Congress to torpedo any effort to lift the U.S. embargo of Castro, let alone give him the preferential trade status to be conferred on FTAA countries.

So Cuba, alone among the 35 countries of the Western Hemisphere, was pointedly excluded from the 1994 Miami summit and all succeeding FTAA gatherings, including the most recent Ministerial summit held in Miami during November 16-20, 2003. Castro’s exclusion, together with rosy assessments that envision a hemisphere growing ever more prosperous, stable and democratic, have won over many FTAA skeptics and opponents. A free-trade agreement promoting the free movement of capital, people, goods and services across borders (goes the argument) will create a rising tide of prosperity that will lift all boats — big and small businesses, the poor as well as the rich — in Latin America and the Caribbean. This, in turn, say the FTAA advocates, will undercut any residual attraction to the bankrupt policies of Marxism. The rhetoric has worked well. Cuban-American business leaders are among the most enthusiastic supporters of the trade pact. Republicans who claim conservative, anti-Castro credentials form the hard core of FTAA support in Congress.

However, many of the FTAA’s most fervent supporters are being taken for a ride. Besides the immense problems that the trade pact will cause the U.S. in terms of dislocation, job loss, market loss and trade deficits, there is also an enormous security issue that has been totally papered over. The FTAA’s architects know that Communist movements and terrorist organizations that were relatively quiet throughout the 1990s have roared back into action throughout the Americas. Openly Marxist, pro-Castro governments have taken over two of our most critical trading partners in the region: Brazil and Venezuela. Communist China is investing heavily throughout the region and controls key shipping ports, including the ports of Balboa and Cristobal strategically located at each end of the Panama Canal, and the huge new port in the Bahamas built by Beijing’s global acquisition agent, Hutchison Whampoa, Inc. A Communist madman runs Haiti. Colombia is tottering between narco-terrorists and "soft" Marxists. Peru faces a possible slide back into anarchy and terrorism. In Nicaragua, the Communist Sandinistas may well come back openly to power.

In addition, virtually every country in the proposed FTAA is awash in debt and beyond bankrupt. And we’ve barely scratched the surface. In short, Latin America is already an enormous security problem for the United States. Protecting our borders and getting some handle on the millions of illegal aliens now in our country are already daunting challenges. The FTAA architects would make the problem infinitely worse by accelerating the abolition of our borders. The hemispheric merger they are pushing would completely enmesh the political and economic systems of the region to allow free migration between countries, as now allowed in the European Union. To top it off, they intend to include Cuba in this new common market after all. Yes, all of the key players in the FTAA game plan have long supported normalizing relations with Fidel Castro, welcoming him into all international organizations, and showering his Communist regime with loans, credits and foreign aid. If the United States joins the FTAA, you can be sure that it won’t be long until all of those outrages become official U.S. policy.

And why shouldn’t Communist Cuba be a full-fledged FTAA member? After all, Comrade Fidel can legitimately lay claim to being one of the earliest proponents of this Marxist-Leninist concept, decades before the rest of us even heard of such a thing. Less than five months after taking control of Cuba, the bearded dictator advocated the creation of a common market for the Western Hemisphere. In a speech delivered on May 2, 1959 to an inter-American economic conference in Buenos Aires, Castro urged the United States to join in the creation of a so-called Latin American common market. He proposed that the U.S. provide $30 billion in credit over 10 years for the economic development of Latin America.

Incredibly, Castro’s proposal became U.S. policy. Herbert Matthews, Fidel’s leading champion at the New York Times, later wrote of Castro’s Buenos Aires speech: "The American delegation dismissed the idea with amused contempt. But less than two years later President Kennedy put forward the proposal for his Alliance for Progress, pledging $10 billion for the first ten years. Later President Johnson promised another $10 billion for the first ten years."

What we are now witnessing as the unfolding FTAA began as a revolutionary program of the Kennedy administration under the lofty sounding title of Alliance for Progress. The Alliance for Progress, designed on the pattern of the Marshall Plan, was established to funnel billions of foreign aid dollars to socialist parties and Communist movements in Latin America, with the aim of melding all of the region’s countries into a common market, just as the Marshall Planners had done after World War II in Europe.

Stripped of its phony rhetoric about "free markets," Castro’s support of a regional common market makes perfect sense; it is in complete accord with Communist strategy. "Divide the world into regional groups as a transitional stage to world government," Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wrote in his book Marxism and the National Question. "Populations will more readily abandon their national loyalties to a vague regional loyalty than they will for a world authority. Later, the regionals can be brought all the way into a single world dictatorship...."

So Fidel was merely following his ideological masters. What most Americans will find astounding is that top U.S. government officials not only adopted the same program, but did so with the aim of establishing the same regional approach to global socialism. However, this scheme had to be sold to the American public as a cure to stop the spread of Communism in Latin America.

The Kennedy administration was loaded with many of the same one-world ideologues and pro-Communists who had dominated the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations. This continuing claque of policymakers invariably saw allies in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Gamal Nasser and other Communists.

The Kennedy brain trust drew from the usual stable: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, Harvard University, the Ford Foundation, and, most importantly, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Adolph Berle, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Goodwin, Lincoln Gordon and Walt Rostow — all CFR apparatchiks — together with other Establishment leftists, launched the regionalization effort for the Americas advocated by Stalin and Castro.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger described in his book A Thousand Days some of what he witnessed as a participant in that process. Schlesinger, a radical Fabian Socialist and New Dealer, recalled a Washington, D.C., meeting President John F. Kennedy and some of his advisers had with Dr. Cheddi Jagan, the Communist leader of Guyana. Kennedy and Jagan found much common ground, especially in their mutual admiration of one of Britain’s leading Fabian Socialist icons, Professor Harold Laski. Schlesinger writes:

Recalling Jagan’s words of admiration for Harold Laski on Meet the Press, Kennedy observed that he himself had studied for a term under Laski at the London School of Economics and that his older brother had visited the Soviet Union with him. Jagan replied that the first book of Laski’s he had read was The American Presidency; he considered himself, he added, a Bevanite. We all responded agreeably to this, citing Bevan’s … belief that the struggle of the future would be between democratic socialism and Communism....

Kennedy’s Latin American policy, crafted by his CFR brain trust, was based on this premise that the Western Hemisphere — and mankind in general — had only two viable options: socialism or Communism. It was a continuation of the CFR-hatched policies that had steered post-war Europe along the socialist track. To give this revolutionary plan a respectable face, the Kennedy administration resorted to a common ploy of governments, as well as institutions that aspire to govern: It set up a "task force" on Latin American policy. The man chosen to head the task force was Adolph Berle (CFR), a New Deal lawyer who implemented President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s "good neighbor" policy and later served as U.S. ambassador to Brazil.

Berle’s task force issued a report in 1961 that laid out what became, essentially, the FTAA program. It recommended that the United States support "a long-range economic plan for the whole hemisphere." This plan should provide "integrated development programs covering several years in advance, prepared first on a national basis … and then combined into a region-wide effort." The Berle report urged the U.S. to end its "doctrinaire opposition" to socialism and revolutionary movements and to encourage "diverse social systems in different countries." U.S. military force should not be used, it said, to "stabilize the dying reactionary situations." By which the authors clearly meant that anti-Communist allies in Latin America should not be assisted when under attack by Soviet-sponsored "progressive" forces. These "reactionary" regimes were presumed to be corrupt by virtue of the simple fact that they did not embrace socialism. However, according to the task force, the U.S. military may be justifiably deployed to aid a Leftist regime pursuing the socialist holy grail.

The Kennedy-Berle plan was officially launched as the Alliance for Progress at the Inter-American Economic and Social Council conference in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in August 1961. The U.S. representative at the summit, C. Douglas Dillon (a longtime CFR director and vice chairman of the board), found himself facing opposition to the scheme from virtually every country — except Castro’s Cuba. Schlesinger noted this was because "Cuba was in sympathy with many of the Alliance’s objectives...." Castro recognized the pro-Communist reality beneath the Kennedy administration’s anti-Communist rhetoric. Thus, says Schlesinger, "Word soon went round the conference that there were only ‘two left-wing governments present — Cuba and the United States.’..."

With billions of Alliance for Progress dollars voted by Congress, the administration began the process of luring, bribing and bludgeoning reluctant Latin American countries into the hemispheric merger. Additional U.S. taxpayer funds provided through the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund further greased the skids.

However, perhaps just as important to the success of the Alliance for Progress’ plan for hemispheric integration as official U.S. policy was (and is) the support provided by powerful private organizations. Foremost among these, in addition to the Council on Foreign Relations, is the Council of the Americas (COA). Officially established in 1965, just after the Alliance for Progress got up and running, the COA moved in to make sure the policies and aid dollars were advancing the objectives outlined by the Berle task force.

The COA was founded by (and for many years chaired by) mega-banker David Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller remains today as honorary chairman of the organization, while William R. Rhodes (CFR) serves as the COA’s current chairman. David Rockefeller was uniquely qualified to head this venture, having a few years before been a central player in the plan to regionalize and socialize Europe. In 1947 he had served as secretary of the CFR study group on "Reconstruction in Western Europe," what later became known as the Marshall Plan. That scheme to build the Common Market (now the European Union) was officially administered in Europe by Rockefeller’s longtime CFR colleague John J. McCloy.

The COA’s membership has included some of the top members of the CFR’s circles of power in government, business, the media and academe. The COA’s corporate members comprise a Who’s Who of business and finance: Bank of America, Citibank, AOL Time Warner, Ford, GM, Lucent Technologies, Coca Cola, Pepsico, McDonald’s, Microsoft, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, etc. With this kind of political and economic clout, the COA leadership has been well positioned to reward or punish Latin American business and political leaders. "The Council regularly hosts Presidents, cabinet ministers, central bankers, government officials, and leading experts in economics, politics, business, and finance," the COA’s website boasts. "This programming," it notes, "gives our members unique access to information and insights into the evolution of the region...." Indeed it does. And the COA and CFR have worked hand in hand to use this "unique access" to direct the "evolution of the region" in a corporate-socialist direction — while claiming to advance free markets.

Operating through the COA and other fronts such as the Inter-American Dialogue, the CFR has drawn most of Latin America’s movers and shakers into its sway. It even has national CFR affiliates throughout the hemisphere to push the process more directly. Page 12 of the CFR’s 2003 Annual Report features a photo of "The first Hemispheric meeting of the Councils on Foreign Relations … held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 30-31, 2003." Pictured are representatives from mini-CFRs in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico and Paraguay.

The presence of well-known corporate giants and business moguls in the CFR-COA membership rolls leads many observers to conclude that these men are conservative businessmen who would have no truck with socialism and revolution. But in reality, these people are, by and large, not free market entrepreneurs but transnational corporatists. They know that the international regulations and agreements they promote favor huge economies of scale that will wipe out their smaller competitors and challengers. They bear no national allegiance; in fact, they support world government. They prattle endlessly about the virtues of globalization, global governance and international law — and support policies to implement the same.

The CFR establishment’s perspective on the Communist background and government of Brazil’s president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, more commonly known as Lula, is typical of the continuing socialist program directed by these elites. On December 5, 2002, the CFR’s Kenneth R. Maxwell penned a blistering diatribe for the New York Review of Books taking on Lula’s U.S. critics. Mr. Maxwell is the "Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Inter-American Studies" at the CFR and the council’s director of Latin America Studies — ergo, the "expert’s expert."

Mr. Maxwell explained that he had returned from Brazil, where Mr. Lula had just been elected president in a tremendous upset. And Maxwell was upset that the "United States was not celebrating this remarkable demonstration of democratic civility."

"Lula’s triumph seemed like the realization of an American dream," wrote the CFR’s expert, and he couldn’t understand why U.S. conservatives were painting the new president as a dangerous, pro-Castro radical. He was irate that critics had linked Lula to the Sao Paulo Forum and had described the SPF as a center of international terrorism.

"No one I met in Brazil thinks that Lula would see Cuba, let alone Venezuela, as a model," said Maxwell. "Even the best-informed experts I talked to in Brazil had never heard of the Sao Paulo Forum," he insisted. And "the charge that it is a secret ‘Castroist’ cabal, aimed at promoting international terrorism, is exaggerated to say the least," he averred.

For the record, the Sao Paulo Forum is indeed a Castroist cabal that may justly be called a continuation of the terrorist Tricontinental network Fidel launched in the 1960s. Its membership includes such notorious terrorist groups as the FARC and ELN of Colombia, the MIR of Chile, the FMLN of El Salvador and the FSLN of Nicaragua, as well as the Communist Parties of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela. The first SPF gathering was held in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and was hosted by Lula and his (Communist) Workers Party. Lula has since then publicly attended many of the SPF’s annual confabs, including the one hosted by Fidel Castro in Havana in December 2001. His economic and political policies indicate he does indeed see Cuba and Venezuela as models for his socialist state.

All of this information on Lula and the SPF — and much more besides — is publicly available on Communist and pro-Castro websites on the Internet. How did all of this escape the notice of the CFR’s top Latin American expert? Interestingly, it didn’t; Maxwell simply chooses to dismiss it as irrelevant. He acknowledges:

No one doubts that the stakes involved in the election of a candidate of the left in Brazil are high and the risks great, or that Lula and the Workers Party have longstanding socialist credentials, or that he has met with Castro, or received a victory "Bolivarian saber" from Venezuelan president Chavez, or that his closest adviser, Jose Dirceu, was trained as a guerrilla in Cuba and returned to Brazil decades ago with a face altered by plastic surgery to disguise him.

Maxwell and his fellow CFR revolutionists would have you believe all that is superfluous. Likewise, the fact that Lula’s first official guests as president of Brazil were Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Marxist President Hugo Chavez. But Maxwell wouldn’t see that as a problem, since the CFR favors normalizing relations with Castro, just as it led the charge to aid, and trade with, Communist China, Saddam’s Iraq, and Communist Vietnam.

Mr. Chavez has also been given remarkably friendly treatment by the CFR experts, though he makes no attempt to conceal his Communist colors. Since taking power in 1999, Hugo Chavez has marched Venezuela steadily leftward toward a Castro-type dictatorship. With him go Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest proven deposits.

Chavez has publicly aligned himself with the terrorist-sponsoring regimes of Cuba, China, Iraq (under Saddam Hussein), Iran and North Korea. He has repeatedly unleashed his "Bolivarian Circles," armed thugs and neighborhood spies, patterned after Castro’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, to beat, intimidate and murder his opposition.

Lula and Chavez appear to be throwing left-handed wrenches into the FTAA works with their revolutionary rhetoric, their demands for trade exemptions and concessions, and their pursuit of their own South American common market known as Mercosur. But that is a feint supported by the COA-CFR elitists. Contrary to the claims of some observers, the regional Mercosur is not incompatible with FTAA.

Indeed, one of the top FTAA architects, C. Fred Bergsten (CFR), has repeatedly soothed his fellow globalists who have become concerned that sub-regional trade areas would undermine the larger hemispheric plan. To the contrary, says Bergsten in Open Regionalism, a 1997 working paper from the Institute for International Economics, these smaller trade zones actually create "incentives for other regions and individual countries to follow suit and thus to ‘ratchet up’ the global process."

Thus the CFR elites are not unduly bothered by heated bombast from the likes of Lula, Chavez or Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In fact they are happy to shovel billions more taxpayer dollars into these Marxist hellholes, as these regimes push their own regional trade pacts. According to Bergsten, it is only necessary to assure that these "regional agreements will in practice be building blocks for further global liberalization rather than stumbling blocks that deter such progress."

FTAA Falters on Road to 2005 by William F. Jasper

The recent negotiation impasse at the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Miami shows that the globalist plan to merge the hemisphere can still be stopped.

Plans to merge 34 countries of North and South America and the Caribbean into a supra-national government modeled after the European Union hit some snags at the recent hemispheric summit in Miami. However, the Bush administration is continuing the Clinton administration’s commitment to complete a formal agreement on the merger by 2005. To this end, it has announced a stepped-up schedule to negotiate a series of bilateral, multilateral and regional trade agreements aimed at achieving the hemispheric merger piecemeal and applying pressure to countries that are resisting economic and political convergence.

The weeklong Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) summit in Miami ended abruptly on Thursday, November 20, a day earlier than scheduled. Though U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and many of his foreign counterparts attending the conference termed the gathering a success, it was clear that they were putting a happy face on a negotiated framework agreement that had become mired in trade disputes and had fallen far short of expectations.

At a surprise press conference hurriedly called Thursday night, Mr. Zoellick announced that the trade and finance ministers had completed their work earlier than expected. "We got our work done a few hours early," he announced. "We are moving the FTAA … into a new phase. We are negotiating it, not just seeking it." Brazil’s Celso Amorim, who co-chaired the summit with Zoellick, contrasted the event’s conclusion with the collapse of the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Cancun, Mexico, in September. The Cancun summit ended in deadlock, as several countries walked out over disputes concerning agricultural tariffs and subsidies, intellectual property rights and other hotly contested issues. "The great difference [at Cancun] is that everyone was dancing to the beat of their own drum," said Amorim. "Today we have reached a result that was all common."

But the image of sweet unity and harmony projected by Zoellick and Amorim was an attempt to cover over contentious issues that had threatened to turn Miami into another Cancun donnybrook. The Miami declaration provides the framework for the next round of FTAA negotiations, which will begin early next year. The document reaffirms the commitment signed by President George W. Bush and other hemispheric leaders at the Quebec Summit of the Americas in 2001 to achieve a final agreement by January 2005, with the FTAA going into effect by the end of that year. The declaration gives a deadline of September 30, 2004 for final tariff negotiations but sets no dates for other matters, such as environmental regulation, labor codes, immigration and health care — all of which have been proposed for FTAA jurisdiction.

To avoid an impasse, the U.S. agreed to a weaker treaty draft that would allow countries to opt out of FTAA regulations they don’t like. The agreement, for example, allows Brazil to opt out of the FTAA on intellectual property rights, opening services markets, and new laws protecting foreign investors. Zoellick pointedly contested critics’ characterizations of the Miami agreement as "FTAA Lite" or "ALCA Lite" — ALCA being the Spanish acronym for FTAA. "I don’t accept your presumption that what we negotiated was an ALCA Lite," Zoellick told Latin American critics during a Thursday afternoon session.

However, the U.S. trade representative’s actions belied his words. On November 19, after negotiations had reached a deadlock, Zoellick announced that he would launch a new flurry of negotiations for bilateral trade pacts with at least six countries. Those named were the Dominican Republic, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Although Zoellick has been pursuing bilateral trade pacts with these and many other countries over the past two years, the announcement signaled a new high-pressure effort by the administration to draft reluctant countries into the FTAA with the threat of being isolated from access to the coveted U.S. market.

David Lewis, a Washington-based trade adviser attending the Miami FTAA business forums, explained the U.S. bilateral strategy to the Miami Herald this way: "Basically what it says is, ‘OK, if we can’t close a good FTAA, we’ll close some good bilateral [treaties].’ Before you know it, you may not have an FTAA. But what you have in the bilaterals may be equal to an FTAA."

Amalgamating the Americas

That, of course, is the plan. The FTAA architects have designed the envisioned organization as the hemispheric equivalent of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Area), which now encompasses the United States, Canada and Mexico. It is also planned as a regional adjunct of the WTO. The FTAA proponents intend that their new creation will expand rapidly beyond trade issues and, following the model of the European Union, absorb the sovereign nations of the Western Hemisphere into a supranational government.

The crucial sovereignty issue was a major bone of contention at the 2001 Quebec summit. In an April 23, 2001 Associated Press story entitled "Biggest Obstacle to Selling Trade Pact Is Sovereignty," writer David E. Sanger highlighted the central issue at stake in the so-called free-trade pact. "The biggest problem," Sanger noted, "comes down to one word: sovereignty."

As with NAFTA, the FTAA would turn over control of trade issues, as well as a growing list of add-on issues, to an international bureaucracy that can override national and local laws and constitutions. But there was virtually no mention of sovereignty at the Miami summit, at least none that made it out to the press.

The conference was one of the most hermetically sealed trade summits ever convened, with almost all of the sessions taking place behind closed doors at the Intercontinental and Hyatt Regency hotels in Miami’s downtown oceanfront. Due to the violent riots that had plagued the Seattle WTO summit, the Quebec FTAA summit and other international gatherings, the Miami conference took place within a police cordon that sealed off several city blocks behind barricades and an overwhelming police presence on land and sea and in the air. No one was allowed into the area unless registered with the event and in possession of an official photo I.D. issued by FTAA organizers. Even registered members of the media were severely restricted and forced to go through repeated searches, metal detectors, and "wandings" for the few press conferences and photo ops that were made available.

The FTAA media center in the Hyatt was provided video feeds of some of the speeches, but most of the sessions took place two blocks away at the Intercontinental and were off-limits to the press. When we were allowed to attend events, we were escorted by guards and not permitted to mingle with any of the conference delegates. When the official sessions ended, delegates were usually spirited off to dinners and evening events that also were closed to the press. As a result, even those of us who were staying in the Hyatt, where most of the delegates also were staying, found little opportunity to interview the main FTAA participants. This was according to plan; the summit organizers wanted to be sure that exposure of delegates to the media was kept to an absolute minimum and that news coverage would be largely reduced to regurgitation of official FTAA press releases. With this tightly controlled media setup, FTAA organizers could greatly curtail expressions of dissent, present a general image of agreement, and make it appear that the radical street protesters were the only opposition to the "trade liberalization" proposed under the FTAA.

Controlled "Opposition"

The only other voices of opposition heard in Miami came from supposed conservative quarters in the business and political communities, where the criticism was that the declaration did not go far enough! The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, dominated by large corporate influences that stand to gain by moving even more of their production to cheaper Latin American venues, warned that Zoellick’s new bilateral strategy "must not distract from the effort to complete the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which remains our top hemispheric priority."

Likewise, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) expressed concern that the watered-down agreement might not be acceptable to them. "This is not the way we want to go," said NAM international vice president Frank Vargo. "If it is not a high-quality agreement, we are not going to support it." By high quality, Vargo means an FTAA with broad powers and real regulatory teeth. It is unlikely that the hundreds of thousands of small- and medium-sized businesses that make up the U.S. Chamber and the NAM fully realize that their leaders are lobbying to saddle them with an unaccountable international regulatory bureaucracy. Those American businesses are already staggering under regulatory overload. If the FTAA goes through, they will not only find themselves hit with an ever-increasing welter of FTAA regulations, mandates and lawsuits, but they will see what remaining market share they now have eroded by a flood of less expensive foreign products. Of course, many of those products will come from the foreign plants of big corporate NAM and Chamber members that are not subject to the same socialist burdens forced on the smaller members who produce domestically.

Many of these same corporate business leaders also expressed dismay that the Miami summit failed to decide on a location for the FTAA Secretariat, the new bureaucracy that would administer the planned explosion of "international law" spawned by the new organization. The location of the Secretariat was one of the highly anticipated outcomes of the summit that failed to materialize. Miami appears to be the leading candidate for the permanent headquarters, and officials for Florida and the City of Miami have been campaigning for this political plum for the past several years.

In view of the "FTAA Lite" accord, many delegates openly expressed doubt that the FTAA would have sufficient regulatory duties to justify a large and impressive staff. Not to worry, said Carl Cira, the FTAA would still be a force to reckon with. Mr. Cira, the director of the Summit of the Americas Center at Florida International University, insisted: "It would be the World Trade Organization of this hemisphere. It’s still worth fighting for that."

The NAM’s director of international trade policy Scott Otteman was less enthusiastic than Cira. "I would have more respect for it if it was a secretariat administering a broad, comprehensive agreement,’’ Otteman stated. Chuck Cobb, the leading cheerleader of the Sunshine State’s business community, has urged his fellow Floridians to see a silver lining in the weaker FTAA declaration. According to Mr. Cobb, the "bright side" is the possibility that the profusion of loopholes and exceptions in the agreement will make it more complex and therefore require a larger staff than otherwise would be necessary.

The Miami Herald reported:

Florida FTAA Chairman Chuck Cobb and others counter that the looser treaty proposed Wednesday — which would let countries opt out of FTAA rules they don’t like — could spawn an even larger bureaucracy for the headquarters, since it would have a more sprawling matrix of regulations to administer.

So why are these business leaders so anxious to subject themselves to the ministrations of a new level of international bureaucrats? Many in the business community have undoubtedly succumbed to the fabulous promises of immense wealth to be made from exporting U.S.-made products to these new markets. The same promises were made concerning NAFTA and the WTO. Instead, we have seen an accelerated hemorrhage of jobs, manufacturing and technology to Asia, Mexico and Latin America. How could any businessman consider erecting a new WTO for this hemisphere to be a good thing? Why would a representative for the manufacturing industry want a new regulatory monstrosity to be given "broad, comprehensive" administrative authority? Why would a business leader hope for "an even larger bureaucracy" with "a more sprawling mix of regulations"?

The answer is that, like Mr. Zoellick, most of these business leaders pushing the FTAA free-trade scam are corporate, one-world socialists who know that the trade policies and regulatory regimes they are supporting will wipe out most of their smaller competitors. They also know that each of these so-called free-trade agreements includes billions of dollars for the taking, ladled out by USAID, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other entities to those corporations with the right political connections.

Like Mr. Zoellick, most of the leading lights of the FTAA crusade are members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which has been in the forefront of virtually every effort to promote regional governance schemes as a stepping stone to world government.

Global Governance

The FTAA is a prime example of the favored model of "transgovernmentalism," described by Harvard Law School Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter (CFR) in the September-October 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs, the CFR journal. In her essay entitled "The Real New World Order," Professor Slaughter declared that "Transgovernmentalism is emerging as the real new world order, rapidly becoming the most widespread and effective mode of international governance."

Transgovernmentalism is the developing wave of supra-national government networks that incorporate big business and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) into the governing mix. According to Slaughter, these "government networks are government for the information age. They offer the world a blueprint for the international architecture of the 21st century." "The result," she says "is not world government, but global governance."

According to Slaughter, this transgovernmentalist strategy of networking has the advantage of not providing a centralized target like the UN for conservatives to demonize. However, Slaughter goes on to contradict her nonsensical governance-government distinction by admitting that the transgovernmental model she champions is indeed a form of world government. The new networks, she says, "can work with their subnational and supranational counterparts, creating a genuinely new world order in which networked institutions perform the functions of a world government — legislation, administration, and adjudication — without the form."

Of course, once the "functions of a world government" are established in a network of institutions, it is a rather elementary matter to formalize an actual world government in a concrete, centralized structure. While many of the business leaders chasing the elusive trade dollar may not see this design behind the FTAA, you can be sure that Robert Zoellick, Anne-Marie Slaughter and their fellow one-worlders at the CFR most certainly do.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The FTAA’s Controlled Opposition - "...the repulsive appearance of many of the FTAA protesters and their lawless actions make the FTAA proponents appear conservative and eminently respectable by comparison. The same repellent image of the demonstrators also serves to taint and discourage all others who might otherwise oppose the FTAA on completely legitimate, principled grounds. No patriot wants to be associated with such revolting rabble."

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.