Keep US independent! Most Americans would oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas if they understood the threat, which is why the FTAA's promoters must rely on deception.

Imagine a not-too-distant future in which America's borders have become obsolete. Customs and border controls no longer exist. The former boundaries of the United States are merely registration stations for throngs of migrant workers, criminal fugitives, narcotics traffickers and even terrorists entering the country from Latin America and beyond, via Canada and Mexico.

In this gloomy future, most American factories are shuttered and the American manufacturing sector has relocated to Central and South America, where wages are far cheaper and workers are willing to work for much longer hours. The American economy, meanwhile, consists largely of service-sector jobs. Unemployment in excess of 20 percent is a permanent feature of the economic landscape. College enrollment has declined sharply as young adults lose interest in formerly popular subjects like engineering and computer science that no longer offer employment prospects.

Crime rates have skyrocketed as gang warfare among burgeoning rival immigrant communities has crippled America's inner cities, while terrorist attacks, both by Islamic extremist infiltrators and ethnic minority malcontents, have become commonplace.

To facilitate trade across open borders, America's old currency, the dollar, has been abolished and replaced by the Amero, which is used throughout the Western Hemisphere. American financial policy is no longer determined by the Federal Reserve or the U.S. Treasury Department, but by the Central Bank of the Americas.

A new hemispheric government is now in force in this hypothetical future, complete with a hemispheric parliament, military and police force. Americans now pay income and property taxes to the new supranational Government of the Americas, in addition to their domestic tax obligations. A new hemispheric constitution has been drawn up and ratified, which supersedes or nullifies many of the provisions of our U.S. Constitution.

Moreover, our elected leaders in Washington have had their powers sharply curtailed, and now have little say-so in foreign policy, trade, immigration or military spending. Even in many areas of domestic policy, they must receive approval from the Executive Committee of the Government of the Americas to ensure that any legislation passed is in harmony with the regulatory standards of the rest of the hemisphere. As a result, the lives of ordinary Americans are regulated and controlled as never before by myriads of domestic and international agencies for whom labor laws, environmental standards, and occupational health and safety regulations can never be strict enough.

Reality Check

Such a future, in which America--her laws, her culture, her borders and her economic base--has ceased to exist, is closer to reality than most Americans would dare to imagine. Although many of us live our lives assuming that the America we sometimes take for granted--our vibrant economy, our seemingly limitless capacity for growth and innovation, and our unmatched standard of living--will always be around, powerful forces now in motion are working to bring about a world without the United States of America.

International organizations designed to destroy the independence of all nations, including the U.S.--like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization--have been chipping away at our liberties and our independence for many years. Right now, however, the most urgent danger to the long-term survival of the United States is the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a planned organization billed as a free trade agreement but designed to curtail American independence, and eventually to destroy our nationhood altogether.

The preparation for the Free Trade Area of the Americas began in December 1994 at a conference in Miami, Florida. There, at the behest of the Clinton administration, representatives from every New World country except Cuba met to agree on a schedule for creating a "free trade zone" that would embrace the entire Western Hemisphere, building on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U.S., Canada and Mexico launched in January 1994. The Free Trade Area of the Americas would eventually open borders to the unrestricted flow of goods, services and people among the nations of North, Central and South America. It would also change or "harmonize" U.S. laws to match those of other New World countries, not only on imports and exports but on environmental standards and a host of other regulatory domains.

The FTAA planners allowed a decade to complete their project, and have held annual meetings at prominent New World cities for planning and negotiations. The FTAA agreement has taken shape rapidly and, with the cooperation of major economic powers like Brazil, Chile, and especially the United States, is on track for completion in early 2005. Should the lengthy document spelling out the powers and bylaws of the FTAA be completed, it would need to be submitted to Congress for approval.

The FTAA is not merely an agreement, however; it would set up a literal international organization consisting of a governing Council, an Executive Committee, a series of other committees, a Secretariat, and a Dispute Settlement Body. This hemispheric organization would have certain powers to enforce the terms of the FTAA agreement, to adjudicate disputes between members with binding rulings, and even to modify the terms of the agreement and the powers of the FTAA whenever deemed necessary.

Social Catastrophe

The FTAA agreement would create essentially free traffic in goods and services--which would mean severely relaxing if not outright abolishing border controls over time. In consequence, the current stream of illegal immigrants from south of the border into the United States would swell into a deluge of legal migrants, as citizens of poor Latin American countries trample a path to the land of plenty.

In addition, open borders would attract undesirables from overseas, including terrorists, who would take advantage of easy entry into the United States from Canada and Mexico. Unregulated immigration would bring in its train--as to a considerable extent it has done already--a sharp rise in crime and cross-border drug trafficking that would devastate American society, and would make the war on terrorism unwinnable.

Faulty Economics

Most of the FTAA's supporters rely on economic arguments to defend the organization. The major talking point, that the FTAA would promote "free trade," is trotted out with assurances that, whatever the destabilizing effects of open borders, the benefits of free trade will compensate for them. That might be a point worth considering--if the FTAA had anything to do with genuine free trade.

In fact time FTAA is not about free trade but managed trade, which is to say, the FTAA will take the comparatively free and unregulated international trade arena and turn it into a hyper-regulated, big-government bureaucrat's fondest desire. The FTAA agreement trader preparation has lavish, vaguely worded sections requiring parties to maintain, for example, high levels of environmental (Chapter VI) and labor-related (Chapter VII) regulations, in the case of FTAA-mandated labor laws, these include compliance with "internationally-recognized labor rights" such as "acceptable conditions of work with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health."

The FTAA, in other words, is poised to become an international EPA and OSHA rolled into one. Its role, like those domes tic agencies, would be to micro-manage and hinder economic activity, not liberate it. Far from leading to freer trade, the FTAA would add extra layers of burdensome regulation on American business.

Moreover, America already has had a foretaste of the effects of so-called "free trade" in the form of globalization. The reduction of trade barriers and the off shoring of capital and jobs in the name of globalization has already wrought great harm on the American economy.

It is globalization that primarily has been responsible for the "jobless recovery" that has produced modest increases in service-sector jobs, but seen a stunning contraction of manufacturing and high-tech employment. According to author and economist Paul Craig Roberts, most of the jobs created in the new millennium "are concentrated in low paying domestic services that cannot be outsourced.... Our economy is not creating jobs that are part of the high-tech global economy or that re quire university education. The jobs that made America a land of opportunity where people could rise are missing."

Outsourcing has transferred much of America's manufacturing and high-tech productive base to India, China and elsewhere in Asia. Some of it has been made possible by the Internet and other technology allowing freer international travel and communication.

A very large part of globalization, though, is being engineered by elites who insist both on handcuffing American industries that operate on American soil with debilitating regulations and taxes, and on abolishing international obstacles--like tariffs--to trade and outsourcing. Such policies create the greatest possible incentive for critical industries--engines of progress like high-tech and the manufacturing sector--to move resources offshore.

The effect of the FTAA would be to amplify the economic consequences of globalization still further, adding new layers of regulation on already overburdened domestic businesses while offering tempting new incentives to move operations out of the United States. This would mean further catastrophic erosion of America's manufacturing and technology sectors, as high-tech companies discover the short-term economic advantages of tapping into vast reservoirs of underpaid, overqualified engineering and tech talent like Brazil and Argentina, and America's manufacturers take advantage of workforces--like Bolivia and Peru--even cheaper than Mexico. Under such conditions, of course, the economies of Latin America would likely flourish--at least for politically favored elites--as American industry builds for them a capital base they have never managed to build themselves. In the meantime, the U.S. economy would develop an increasingly Third World profile, a service-based marketplace bereft of its productive manufacturing sinews.

End of Independence?

But none of these concerns, vital as they are, really cut to the heart of the FTAA. Beyond the cultural and even economic ramifications of a hemisphere-wide trade zone, the FTAA would lead in the long run to the end of American independence and would be a death knell for our Republic and the Constitution on which it was founded. For the FTAA is about much more than just trade, the claims of its promoters notwithstanding. In reality, the most influential promoters of the FTAA plan to use this hemispheric trade regime as a foundation on which to erect a hemispheric government, complete with a hemispheric constitution, parliament, central bank, and, in the longer run, a regional military and the power to levy taxes.

Nor is this idle, baseless speculation: it is the history of Western Europe over the last several decades, a past that will be prelude for our country unless America can be roused from her slumber. Nearly 50 years ago, many of the nations of Western Europe founded the European Economic Community (or Common Market), an international organization billed as a free-trade zone that would eliminate trade barriers and bolster European economies still crippled by the lingering trauma of the Second World War. The early Common Market, regarded as the brainchild of French political insider Jean Monnet, was intended by its founders to be the economic precursor of a continent-wide European government. As early as 1943, Monnet told members of the French government in exile: "There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted [after the war] on the basis of national sovereignty.... The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their peoples the necessary prosperity and social development. The European states must constitute themselves into a federation." Winston Churchill himself called for a "United States of Europe" in 1946 in a speech at the University of Zurich. In 1957 the Common Market was formally established under the Treaty of Rome. Over the next three decades, the organization grew to encompass most of the countries of Western Europe. Its name was shortened to the European Community as the facade of free trade fell away. The European Community began more aggressively to promote not only outright economic convergence but political union as well.

With the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the project to create a European suprastate gained new momentum. The EC was renamed the European Union in 1993, and the final push was underway to realize Monnet's dream of abolishing the independent nations of Europe.

On January 1, 2002, a new currency, the euro, swept away centuries-old national currencies like the franc, the lira and the mark. A whole host of new supranational European government agencies and lawmaking bodies, including a European parliament, have been created, bodies that are already wreaking havoc on national and local laws from London to Tallinn. A European military is under preparation, and various schemes for continent-wide taxation are being developed.

Most ominous of all is the new European Constitution drawn up between late 2001 and mid-2003, and now under consideration for ratification by the governments of the 25 EU member states. The European Constitution will be signed in Rome on November 20, 2004, and the ratification process is expected to take another two years.

When the Constitution is signed and ratified, the architects of the New European Order will have achieved their objective: the destruction of the sovereign nations of Old Europe and their replacement with a single continent-wide government. All national laws and constitutions will become obsolete, and the former citizens of France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain, Italy and the rest of Europe will find their independence, and, in the longer run, their distinct cultures and customs, erased by a continental superstate to which they will pay taxes and owe their final allegiance.

This is also the real goal behind the NAFTA-FTAA process now underway in our own hemisphere. The original North American--Free Trade Agreement set up supposedly to open up more markets for our goods--would be expanded to include the rest of the Western Hemisphere through the FTAA. Once established, the FTAA would gradually be strengthened into an all-purpose instrument for hemispheric governance. In fact, just as the Common Market and the EC were the forerunners to the European Union, NAFTA and the FTAA would be forerunners to full-fledged regional government in the Americas. Like Jean Monnet, proponents of NAFTA and the FTAA have, in candid moments, admitted what the real objectives of "free trade zones" are. NAFTA supporter William Orme Jr., author of Continental Shift: Free Trade and the New North America, noted in the Washington Post in 1993 that "critics in [the U.S., Mexico and Canada] claimed that [NAFTA's] hidden agenda was the development of a European-style Common Market." Admitted Orme:

   [NAFTA's] critics were essentially
   right. NAFTA lays the foundation for
   a continental common market, as
   many of its architects privately acknowledge.
   Part of this foundation,
   inevitably, is bureaucratic: The agreement
   creates a variety of continental
   institutions--ranging from trade dispute
   panels to environmental and
   labor commissions--that are, in aggregate,
   an embryonic NAFTA
   government.

Mexican President Vicente Fox commented in Madrid in May 2002 that "our long-range objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada, our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union."

Most damning of all are comments made by National Security Council Adviser Anthony Lake in a late November 1993 memo to then-President Clinton proposing a hemisphere-wide trade organization:

   The NAFTA is the foundation for the
   gradual expansion of hemispheric
   trade.... Hemispheric institutions, including
   ... the NAFTA institutions,
   can be forged into the vital mechanisms
   of hemispheric governance.
   The organizing concept could be a
   hemispheric "Community of Democracies"
   increasingly integrated by
   economic exchange and shared political
   values.

On to World Government

Comments like this, coupled with the experience of the formerly independent nations of Europe, leave absolutely no doubt where the FTAA's creators want to take us. Yet even "hemispheric governance" is not the ultimate goal. The final objective is world government, an outcome that can be stitched together very conveniently out of several regional governments like the European Union and the planned FTAA.

For decades now, globalist insiders at elite organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York City and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London have been working to craft a world government out of nearly 200 sovereign nations, with only limited success. With the ploy of "regionalization," however, the drive for world government has accelerated sharply.

As Zbigniew Brzezinski (CFR), former President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, put it in 1995, "we cannot leap into world government in one quick step.... In brief, the precondition for eventual globalization--genuine globalization--is progressive regionalization, because thereby we move toward larger, more stable, more cooperative units."

The FTAA, like the EU, is to become one of several regional building blocks for socialist world government, an outcome that would void our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. It would finally and completely guarantee the global triumph of socialism and slavery over liberty and limited government, and silence the last echoes of the "shot heard round the world" fired at Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775.

Even prior to the arrival of total world government, the creation of hemispheric government in the New World modeled after the European Union would spell the end of American independence, just as the European Union has snuffed out the independence of the European nations more surely than any conquering army has ever managed to do.

The FTAA poses such a threat because few Americans have heard of it and still fewer understand the danger that it poses. Like the European Union, the FTAA is a calculated attempt to seize power not by military force but by patient gradualism and deception. This tried and true recipe for tyranny is hard to detect and harder to defeat, because it operates too slowly and quietly to attract mass attention.

Fortunately for the United States, if not for the Europeans, the history of the real effects of regional trade blocs and open borders has already largely been written, and should serve as a cautionary tale to Americans. We know what the economic and social consequences of the FTAA would be, regardless of the glib assurances of economists, because we have already experienced firsthand--thanks to the ravages of NAFTA and the effects of globalization in general--the true fruits of so-called free trade agreements. And we know from Europe's experience the real agenda behind the FTAA, and the catastrophic political revolution that its promoters have in store for us--unless the FTAA is exposed and defeated.