10 fallacies and rebuttals: mistaken ideas about the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas abound. The faulty reasoning behind 10 very common misconceptions is exposed herein.

1 NAFTA was a raging success; the FTAA will simply be more of a good thing. The facts tell a different story. "NAFTA has displaced American workers and devastated entire towns," noted the Christian Science Monitor in a 10th anniversary assessment of the trade pact's impact. "[Its effects are] evident from the job-training centers in southern Texas to the 'NAFTA ghost towns' of North Carolina, with their shuttered textile plants."

Defenders of NAFTA point out that U.S. exports to Mexico and Canada have increased since enactment of the agreement. But our trade deficit with them has grown even more--from $16.6 billion in 1993 to $62.8 billion in 2000, and it keeps climbing. Imports from Mexico have dramatically increased in large part because the U.S. has been exporting manufacturing jobs there--while absorbing millions of Mexico's unskilled workers as well. Clearly, we can't survive another "success" like NAFTA.

But even if NAFTA had provided a boost to our economy, it would still represent the first installment of a long-term plan to destroy our national independence by creating a regional government. No short-term economic gain is worth the price our nation will pay in lost independence--which will lead to economic ruin in the long run.

2 FTAA will improve our standard of living, as well as that of the rest of the hemisphere. According to Congressman Todd Akin (R-Mo.), the FTAA is "an essential element of an export-led development strategy"--"development" in this case being a synonym for "foreign aid." The operative assumption here is that the trade pact will help impoverished nations to the south. But this in turn assumes that those nations will be exporting goods, not importing them, since prosperity is a result of production, not consumption. Besides, this contradicts another favorite refrain of FTAA proponents, namely that the pact would increase our prosperity by expanding exports to the south.

Through the FTAA, our government would be entering into a hemispheric economic and political cartel with the corrupt rulers of an increasingly Marxist Latin America. This would obviously be to the benefit of that oppressive ruling elite, but it would do nothing to improve the lives of the peoples of the hemisphere.

Additionally, even some supporters of the FTAA apparently expect that the agreement's economic impact on the U.S. would be negative. FTAA proponent Senator George Allen (R-Va.) strongly supports "programs to help train workers for new jobs, look for new employment, and provide extended unemployment for those who are in training" as a result of being displaced through "international competition." He also proudly touts his "Homestead Protection Act," which would offer subsidized "low-interest loans for home mortgage assistance to workers who lose their jobs because of trade."

3 FTAA opponents reject free trade. It's certainly true that protectionists--those who favor central government intervention to shield domestic industries against foreign competition--oppose the FTAA. But it must not be forgotten that the FTAA is artfully misnamed: it wouldn't facilitate free trade (mutually beneficial exchanges between buyers and sellers), but rather regulate trade under the jurisdiction of a large, unaccountable regional bureaucracy. In short, it would be a socialist's dream. For this reason, the pact is opposed by Americans--including supporters of genuine free trade--who are concerned about protecting our national sovereignty.

4 If the FTAA threatens our national sovereignty, we can withdraw. "I would not support any agreement that I felt undermined the sovereignty of the United States," Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah) assured a constituent in a September 9, 2004 letter. The senator promptly contradicted himself by admitting, "the FTAA will contain provisions that participating countries are required to observe." However, he insisted, "in my view they do not challenge the overall sovereignty of the United States as the final draft of the FTAA should also include a clause that would allow the U.S. to unilaterally withdraw if U.S. interests are not being met."

Sovereignty, like marital fidelity, does not admit degrees. Bill Clinton could have maintained that his extra-marital sexual dalliances did not challenge his "overall" fidelity to his marriage vows, but a husband who cheats on his wife only to return to her later is still an adulterer.

By signing on to the FTAA, the U.S. government would be submerging our interests by pledging to act in the best interests of the hemisphere. A government willing to do such a perfidious thing cannot be trusted to act in our national interests once the threat becomes tangible and acute. To date, our government has never permanently withdrawn from an international body --the UN, World Bank, IMF, NATO, etc.--no matter how corrupt or injurious to our interests it has become.

Furthermore, European governments which entered into the European Union when it was called the "Common Market" only learned after the fact that the so-called "free trade" area was intended all along to become a continent-spanning superstate. And once they were caught in the EU web, it was too late to withdraw.

5 FTAA negotiations missed the January 2005 deadline--so the agreement is a dead issue. "The world's largest free trade area was meant to open across 34 nations of the Americas on Jan. 1, 2005," noted a December 28 Reuters news analysis. "The only visible sign of it in Latin America in the final days of 2004 is anti-U.S, graffiti sprayed on city walls."

It would be welcome news indeed were the FTAA dead. But the Power Elite behind the FTAA has a long track record of reviving "dead" agreements of this sort, even after lengthy periods of dormancy. Consider, for example, the proposed Global Trade Organization (GTO), which was intended to be the enforcement body of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The GTO agreement was unveiled at a high-profile summit in Havana in 1946. Two efforts to secure congressional approval of the GTO failed without the agreement being brought to a vote. In 1994--nearly 50 years after the GTO was proposed--a lame-duck session of Congress approved creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a body nearly identical to the GTO.

This isn't to say that FTAA proponents would wait a half-century to finish the agreement. Rather, it's to illustrate the persistence of the Power Elite in following its long-term strategy to erect a world government composed of regional trade blocs--and the danger of assuming that a temporary setback for the Power Elite is a lasting victory for freedom and national independence.

6 The radical left opposes the FTAA, so it must be a good idea. Curious as it might seem to many conservatives, a proposed measure can provoke militant opposition from the radical left and still be a bad idea. The radical "anti-globalist" left doesn't oppose regional or even global government; what they oppose is the spread of free-market capitalism. And this isn't to say that the FTAA and similar "free trade" measures are actually designed to expand free markets. It's to say that, by branding the FTAA a "free trade" accord, those orchestrating the debate are provoking knee-jerk reactions from both the left and the right.

By beguiling conservatives into supporting the accord on the pretext of "free trade," they have a much better chance of getting it through Congress. And by getting liberals to complain loudly that the FTAA does not do enough to protect workers' rights, the environment, etc., they can make the administration-supported accord appear moderate by comparison.

7 Latin American Marxist leaders oppose hemispheric integration. In a December 14 speech entitled "The Road to Hemispheric Security," Stephen Johnson of the Heritage Foundation described the role played by Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez in organizing radical networks--the Sao Paulo Forum and the Bolivarian Congress--to advance Marxist revolutionary goals in Latin America. Those goals, Johnson stated, "include reducing North American influence in the region and halting the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas."

Actually, the revolutionary left favors FTAA-style integration of the hemisphere; it simply prefers a more overtly socialist version. In a December 14 summit in Havana, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro signed two notable documents. The first condemned the FTAA as an "imperialist" proposal; the second outlined a proposed "Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas" (ALBA, in its Spanish acronym) that would supposedly realize "the dream of Bolivar and Marti of a single Latin America, united in justice." ALBA would be a dialectical foil for the FTAA, serving to advance hemispheric union while driving deliberations farther to the left.

8 Passage of the FTAA will open new markets for American exporters. The problem with this prediction is this: the U.S. accounts for nearly 70 percent of the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the entire Western Hemisphere. If the "NAFTA nations" and Brazil are removed from that picture, we find that the other 30 Western Hemisphere countries combined contribute less than 10 percent of the aggregate GDR Given this reality, we may well ask: What "key markets" exist in such impoverished nations? If we were to succeed in lowering barriers to U.S. exports, what would they buy from us?

There is every reason to believe, however, that the FTAA, like NAFTA before it, would greatly accelerate the export of our manufacturing capacity.

9 We can't be competitive internationally without the FTAA. Advocates of the FTAA, citing the growing economic clout of the European Union, maintain that the U.S. will be overmatched in the international economic arena unless we join a trade bloc of our own. Implicit in that argument, however, is the admission that the EU is not a "free trade" zone, but rather a political-commercial cartel--and that the FTAA would become one, as well. If the EU's rulers were really engaged in genuine free trade, the region would be open to our exports whether or not we belonged to a trade bloc.

The unspoken, but unavoidable, subtext to the argument cited above is that citizens of the U.S. should stop thinking in terms of national economic competitiveness, and think instead in terms of competitiveness as a regional bloc. An assessment offered on NAFTA's tenth anniversary by economist Jorge Gonzalez of Trinity University, a supporter of NAFTA (the first installment of the FTAA), made this clear. "We've basically taken two economies with vastly different resources [e.g. the U.S. and Mexico] and integrated them. That helps the whole region become more competitive."

Clearly, the "competitiveness" argument is nothing more than a stalking horse for an attack on U.S. sovereignty.

10 The FTAA would create jobs. There is actually some merit to this argument, once it is understood that the FTAA, like NAFTA, would create a huge and growing international bureaucracy--to regulate trade, once again, not to free it from regulatory interference.

The NAFTA agreement--which consumes thousands of pages spread over two weighty volumes--created scores of committees, councils, tribunals, panels, and other regulatory bodies. This huge bureaucratic infrastructure was created to supervise the merger of three nations and their economies; the FTAA would encompass 34 nations.

Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) obliquely acknowledged the bureaucracy-driven windfall FTAA would create in an October 19, 2004 letter to a constituent: "I have been working along with the Georgia Congressional delegation and the governor to bring the FTAA Headquarters to Atlanta because it is expected to create 27,000 new jobs and $500 million in extra income for the State of Georgia." Of course, those new jobs would be servicing a huge and growing international regulatory body devoted to pursuing the extinction of our national independence and prosperity.