FTAA progress report. (Insider Report).

Just before its August recess, Congress voted to give President Bush Trade Promotion Authority (TPA). Formerly known as "fast-track" authority, TPA was included in H.R. 3009, the Trade Act of 2002. The House passed H.R. 3009 by a 215-212 vote at 3:30 a.m. on July 27th; the Senate vote was 64-34 on August 1st. President Bush signed the bill on August 6th. As we reported in our May 6th issue ("Erasing Our Borders"), President Bush intends to use TPA to complete negotiations for the sovereignty-destroying Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by 2005. The press is already referring to the FTAA as an existing organization. Under the headline "FTAA Delegates to Meet in Bahamas," an AP article for July 30th stated: "Delegates from 34 member nations of the Free Trade Area of the Americas are planning to meet for an international labor conference in October, a trade union official said Tuesday....Delegates will have a chance to discuss their countries' concerns and to plan for setting up the free trade arrangemen t by 2005 throughout the Western Hemisphere."

For further evidence of just how advanced FTAA plans are, there is an elaborate official website of the "FTAA process" maintained by "the Tripartite Committee, consisting of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC)." Under the conditions of TPA as given to President Bush by Congress, it is likely that an FTAA agreement will be presented to Congress sometime in 2004 or 2005 for a simple up or down vote with no amendments possible. Since the FTAA is being modeled after the EU, and since the EU has already morphed from a free trade area into a supranational government, an extraordinary educational campaign to inform voters of the FTAA threat will be required in the next couple of years to preserve U.S. national sovereignty.