Looking at the end game: the proposed North American Union is a major building bloc in a plan to merge the entire world into a UN-supervised, centrally planned economy.

With Wyoming's mighty Teton Mountain Range providing a suitably Olympian background, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke eagerly preached the gospel of global economic integration.

"One of the defining characteristics of the world in which we now live is that, by most economically relevant measures, distances are shrinking rapidly," Bernanke informed his fellow titans--central bankers from around the globe, gathered at the annual Jackson Hole Economic Forum. "The shrinking globe has been a major source of the powerful wave of worldwide economic integration and increased economic interdependence that we are currently experiencing."

Bernanke praised the "critical role of government policy in supporting, or at least permitting, global economic integration" by creating "the institutional framework supporting global trade, most importantly the World Trade Organization," but also "regional frameworks and agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the European Union's 'single market.'"

A few days after communing with the global banking elite on Mount Olympus, Bernanke paid a visit to his old hometown--Dillon, South Carolina, a community of about 6,800. The 1971 Dillon High School Valedictorian, Bernanke was on hand to celebrate "Ben Bernanke Day" and receive the Order of Palmetto, the highest civilian honor the state can bestow.

For most locals, Bernanke was a case of "local boy makes good." Those attuned to the ways of the power elite, however, treated him like a divine emissary. The "local power structure turned out in reverent multitudes" to pay tribute to Bernanke, reported columnist James Pinkerton from the scene. Chosen to offer a benediction at the event, state Senator Kent Williams asked God to confer his blessing on Bernanke, "your chosen vessel." At least some members of Bernanke's audience hoped that he would be able to work a miracle to resurrect the community's moribund economy.

Globalization's Impact

As a bright and energetic teenager growing up in Dillon, Bernanke worked in construction, waited tables, and worked other summer jobs in the small community's vibrant economy. Once largely dependent on tobacco farming, Dillon had branched out decades before into textile production. But largely because of the globalist economic policies Bernanke extolled at Jackson Hole, his old hometown has all but disappeared.

Over the past two decades, tobacco price supports, an unconstitutional subsidy that had attracted many farmers into that industry, were phased out--not because the federal government has become more scrupulous about its constitutional duties, but because of trade agreements requiring that such subsidies be discontinued. More recently, the town's troubles have been thanks to decisions by the World Trade Organization (WTO) opening up huge markets for textiles produced in China for what amounts to slave-labor wages.

According to Labor Department figures, unemployment in Dillon is nearly 10 percent, and many families in a community that once boasted a thriving middle class now live on an annual household income of less than $20,000. "We've got a lot of poor people in this area," Mayor Todd Davis reports. "Some families are on their second and third generation of welfare. They don't know anything else."

"The only major new facility to locate [to Dillon] in recent years is a distribution center for Harbor Freight Tools, a catalog retailer of tools--many of which are imported--employing about 250 people," notes a Reuters report. The only other significant local business is South of the Border, "a tourist-trap collection of souvenir shops, fireworks stands, carnival rides and restaurants at the North Carolina border along a major interstate highway."

It's doubtful that so many as a handful of Dillon's residents were aware that decisions made by a group of unelected foreign bureaucrats in Geneva could have such devastating effects on their community--or that the man they honored on September 1 is among the elite that is busy building a global system that would wreak similar devastation on the rest of our country.

At the apex of that system is the WTO, a kind of economic United Nations that claims the authority to set trade and economic policy for its 149 member nations. The WTO enforces its rulings through the use of fines and targeted retaliatory tariffs; it was through the threatened use of such measures that the WTO induced the Bush administration to remove protective tariffs on American steel.

On November 26, 2004, the WTO issued a ruling authorizing the European Union--a multinational trade bloc designed to be a regional enforcement arm of the globalized trade system--to impose "punitive taxes" against the United States unless the steel tariffs were lifted. "While quite small initially," noted Newsday, "the level of punitive duties will be reviewed each year and could rise sharply. The value of the sanctions, on everything from sweet corn to metals and textiles, hasn't been determined, but trade officials estimated them at more than $150 million a year."

Consider what this means, in practical terms.

A body in Geneva took issue with a tariff law that--whatever its merits--was passed by our elected representatives and signed by the president. Without constitutional authority, accountability to the American people, or any interest in our national prosperity, that body gave permission to kindred bureaucrats presiding over the European Union to impose punitive taxes on U.S. imports, thereby inflicting severe and escalating economic damage on millions of Americans who work in agriculture, textiles, steel production, and other fields.

An Economic UN

Like the European Union and other proposed regional trade blocs, the so-called North American Union, officially known as the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), is intended to be an enforcement and implementation arm of the WTO-headed global economic system. It would build on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), "broadening" its regulatory and enforcement powers while "deepening" the economic and political relationships among the three signatory nations. And it would join the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) as another steppingstone toward amalgamating the entire Western Hemisphere into one political and economic entity called the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)--which, once again, would be supervised by the WTO.

Multinational bodies like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the proposed FTAA "have far less to do with the free movement of goods and services than they do with government coordination and management of international trade," points out Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), who enthusiastically supports genuine free trade (that is, mutually beneficial transactions between producers and consumers without government intervention). Noting that an announced objective of those working to create the SPP/North American Union is "to strengthen regulatory cooperation" and to "have our central regulatory agencies complete a trilateral regulatory framework by 2007," Rep. Paul points out that this "adds up to not only more and bigger government, but to the establishment of an unelected mega-government."

And that "unelected mega-government" would be just the regional arm of an even greater version with global jurisdiction.

As originally proposed after World War II, the WTO was to be called the International Trade Organization, or ITO. The trade body was intended to join the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as another multilateral economic appendage of the UN system. As with the United Nations itself, the ITO's chief architect was Alger Hiss, a key State Department adviser to FDR who was later exposed as a Soviet spy. Hiss had co-written the UN Charter alongside Soviet official V.M. Molotov, and been the secretary-general of the UN's founding conference in San Francisco. He played a very similar role in the effort to create the ITO.

With Hiss acting as chairman for the U.S. delegation, a conference was convened in Havana in 1947 for the purpose of creating a framework agreement for the ITO. Although only two years had passed since the Senate's near-unanimous approval of U.S. membership in the UN, public opinion regarding the wisdom of continued entanglement in the world body and its affiliates had changed dramatically; it was clear to Congress that the American public had no interest in turning over its economic future to a global bureaucracy.

Congressman Bertrand Gearhart (R-Calif.) captured that mood when he described the Hiss-led delegation at Havana as "boatloads of smug diplomats, all-wise economists ... experts, theorists, specialists and whatnots, sailing gaily from our shores to barter away ... the little factory in Wichita, the little shop in Keokuk."

In that era before business associations had been broken to the saddle of the central government, business groups freely denounced the ITO. "The entire document reflects an excessive acceptance of economic planning," protested the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when the final draft of the ITO agreement was made public in March 1948. The National Foreign Trade Council warned that "if the United States subscribes to the charter it will be abandoning traditional American principles and espousing, instead, planned economy and full-scale political control of production, trade, and monetary exchange. The charter does not reflect faith in the principles of free, private, competitive enterprise." Similar reactions were heard from both sides of the aisle in Congress.

Although described as "a charter to 'free world trade,'" the ITO agreement was actually "a charter for trade control," noted Senator George W. Malone (R-Nev.). "The result of its adoption would have been socialism, on a global plane." Congressman Samuel B. Pettingill (Ind.), a Democrat who had spoken out critically against FDR's economic policies, agreed with Malone's assessment of the pact, denouncing it as "part and parcel of international socialism, one-worldism, and the slow surrender of American sovereignty."

Writing in 1958, ten years after Congress rejected the ITO, Senator Malone pointed out that the global trade body and the United Nations were designed as two arms of "a pincers movement ... both on the domestic and on the international scene." The political arm consisted of incremental entanglement of the United States in UN-centered international alliances and multilateral bodies. The economic arm was created by the Trade Agreements Act of 1934, in which Congress ceded to the Executive Branch the power to control our nation's trade policy.

Because of the 1934 act, wrote Malone in his remarkably prescient book Mainline, "the business and the enterprise of individuals now were considered in close connection to the policies of the State. The State would assist them in the expansion of their markets. Government would negotiate the channels of trade." Put succinctly, "the State would determine trade," rather than the free market, and that power was to be exercised by the president, not the Congress.

In December 1994, decades after Congress initially rejected the ITO and just weeks after the Republicans took control of the Congress for the first time in decades, a special "lame-duck" session was called to ratify U.S. membership in the body, now renamed the World Trade Organization. This was done with the active involvement of incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Majority Leader Bob Dole, who understood that the newly elected Republican legislators would almost certainly have opposed the WTO.

To his credit, Gingrich admitted in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee that approval of the WTO would amount to nothing less than a fundamental change in our system of government, by "transferring from the United States at a practical level significant authority to a new organization."

"This is not just another trade agreement," Gingrich continued. "This is adopting something which twice, once in the 1940s and once in the 1950s, the U.S. Congress rejected. I am not even saying that we should reject it; I, in fact, lean toward it. But I think we have to be very careful, because it is a very big transfer of power."

Creation of the SPP/North American Union would likewise be what Gingrich calls a "transformational movement," the creation of a powerful regional mechanism for the WTO to implement its designs and impose its will directly on the citizens of the United States, as well as Canadians and Mexicans--all of whom, incidentally, would be expected to repudiate their present national identities.

"Fast Track" and FTAs

All of these sovereignty-sapping trade agreements have been negotiated under "fast track" or "trade promotion authority" (TPA), under which a president is permitted to negotiate not just a particular trade agreement, but also to craft the implementing legislation needed to "harmonize" U.S. law to conform with the agreement.

An obvious violation of the constitutional separation of powers, TPA completely eliminates the congressional power to "regulate commerce with foreign nations," replacing that constitutional duty with a simple "take it or leave it" proposition permitting only an up or down vote on presidentially crafted agreements. The first president Bush was granted "fast track" authority to conclude NAFTA; Bill Clinton used the same power to finalize negotiations on the WTO; George W. Bush followed their lead in finishing CAFTA.

In addition to major multilateral initiatives like CAFTA and the SPP/North American Union, the current Bush administration has completed numerous bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with countries ranging from Chile to Singapore. Each of these agreements opens our vast consumer market to small, low-wage nations that can't afford to buy what we produce. In effect, FTAs are agreements to export part of our manufacturing base abroad, in addition to helping lay the groundwork for larger multilateral agreements. The most recently enacted FTA with Oman--a Middle Eastern emirate--passed the House by a 221-205 vote on July 20.

FTAs with Latin American nations such as Chile and Colombia are seen as precursors for the FTAA. The U.S.-Oman FTA is one of several bilateral agreements with Middle Eastern nations--Israel, Jordan, Morocco, and Bahrain--that are either active or scheduled to go into force soon. And all of these FTAs anticipate creation of yet another WTO-supervised regional bloc--the Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA), scheduled for completion in 2013.

Reclaim Our Sovereignty

While politicians and other policymakers knit together their grand design for an integrated globalized economy, their schemes inflict real suffering on people in communities like Dillon, South Carolina.

The costs of surrendering our independence, and turning our economic destiny over to globalist bodies, are genuine and tangible. A small part of that price can be found amid the shuttered looms and padlocked factories of economically blighted towns like Dillon, South Carolina--the first American communities to partake of the blessings of global economic integration.