Why the race to the bottom? Why does America's elite support policies that export jobs and technology, import foreign workers, erode national sovereignty, and destroy our standard of living? (Cover Story: Business).

" Will America be a Third World country in 20 years?" That provocative question concluded a recent column by Paul Craig Roberts. It is a question that demands serious and immediate pondering by every American. One may quibble with the time line or the definition of "Third World' but the answer to Dr. Roberts' question is: "Yes. If we do not reverse our present course, that is precisely where we are headed."

The evidence to support that shocking assessment is all around us. The two related articles on pages 10 and 17 present a relatively small sampling of the mountains of evidence pointing toward America's precipitous slide from world power to Third World has-been. Our once unmatched manufacturing production capabilities have been strip-mined and exported to Asia and Latin America, along with millions of blue collar jobs that provided a livelihood for middle-class families. At the same time, millions of foreign workers, legal and illegal, have been imported to the U.S., thanks to policies of successive Democrat and Republican administrations. Day after day they flood across our rapidly disappearing borders, taking more jobs and driving down wages.

America-hating Elites

Paul Craig Roberts' column quoted above, entitled "U.S. Leaving First World," is a sobering look at this destructive export/import dynamic. "America has turned its back on Americans," he charges. "Even illegal aliens count higher with the American government than native-born, taxpaying, loyal U.S. citizens, who are regarded by their government as nothing but resources to be exploited."

This anti-citizen, pro-illegal alien attitude, so blatantly evident during the reign of Bill Clinton, has intensified under George W. Bush. "Politicians," says Roberts, "including President Bush, pander to illegals even more shamelessly than they pander to monied special interest groups." Roberts notes:

American taxpayers now are expected to shoulder the burden of paying for university educations for illegal aliens. When U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo (R, Cob.) said recently that illegal aliens should be deported, not given in-state tuition, Karl Rove, the Power Behind the Bush, told Mr. Tancredo never again to darken the steps of the White House.

"The U.S. government is replete with hatred of everyone who sticks up for the rights of citizenship' says Roberts, and it "steadfastly refuses to defend our borders." The ongoing policies prove his point--policies destroying America's jobs, businesses, living standards, communities, economic independence, and scientific and technological leadership. Having already "clear cut" much of our nation's industrial base, our policy-making elite has started to do the same with our hi-tech businesses and jobs. And why not? As Roberts points out: "If it is permissible for illegal aliens to take fast-food jobs away from U.S. teenagers and construction jobs away from U.S. construction workers, it is all right for H-1B visas to be issued to foreigners to take jobs away from American professionals."

Foreign nurses and other health care professionals are being imported in large numbers, along with many other professionals. Paul Craig Roberts asks: "Will your occupation be destroyed next? If software engineers can be imported, so can electrical, chemical, mechanical, and civil engineers. If nurses can be imported, so can doctors. The list of occupations that can be destroyed by 'internationalizing' the U.S. job market is long."

FTAA Stealth Weapon

That destructive process will accelerate exponentially if we allow the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) program to be implemented. President Bush's trade representative, Robert B. Zoellick, announced on February 11th that the administration is pushing vigorously ahead on the FTAA. This means expanding the existing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)--which now includes the U.S., Canada, and Mexico--to include all countries in the hemisphere, with the exception of Cuba, by January 2005. That is less than 24 months away. Not content with that fast-looming date, the Bush administration is advocating an earlier across-the-board dropping of tariffs on consumer, agricultural, and industrial products that will deliver a serious blow to businesses in every sector and send millions more jobs overseas.

"That really is a dramatic gesture," said Eric P. Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas (COA), referring to the Bush tariff proposal. "It will have a serious impact on the domestic market and be controversial," he told the New York Times. Serious impact? Controversial? Those are COA euphemisms meant to soft pedal the fact that the FTAA will devastate our domestic market and stir a major backlash, as the American public comes to grasp its full implications.

The COA was founded in 1965 by David Rockefeller, who serves today as the group's honorary chairman. Mr. Rockefeller and the COA have played central roles in planning and promoting the FTAA over the past couple decades. In this venture, they have worked hand-in-hand with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), that subversive organization of elite one-worlders that the Washington Post's Richard Harwood once aptly described as "a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that guides our destiny as a nation." (Recall that the Presidium was the top executive committee of Communist oligarchs who ran the Soviet Union.) Mr. Rockefeller chaired the CFR for many years and is today the "Presidium's" recognized elder "statesman."

Merger Megalomania 

The COA/CFR's FTAA game plan calls for transforming the Western Hemisphere along the same lines as the European Union, ultimately merging the U.S. and the other hemispheric nations under an EU-style supra-national government, with a single currency, a central bank--and no internal borders. In other words, an end to our national sovereignty; an end to our national independence; an end to our Constitution, our form of government, our way of life.

As in the EU, FTAA "citizens" will be able to migrate between member states without restriction; efforts to stem the illegal alien flood will be rendered not only impossible, but illegal.

Do the vast majority of Americans have even the slightest inking of the vast, radical, destructive changes that the FTAA will foist on them? Of course not. Like Europe's unsuspecting peoples entering the EU 45 years ago (it was then known as the Common Market), they are walking blindly into a trap. The peoples of Europe were told repeatedly that the Common Market treaty was merely an agreement to establish an area in which the free movement of goods, services, persons, and capital would be greatly facilitated, bringing increased prosperity and freedom for all. They were repeatedly assured that it would not impair national sovereignty or lead to a centralized, supra-national government. That was a lie, of course. The EU architects knew precisely that the "free trade" organization they were setting up would indeed end up as the centralized, supra-national, increasingly tyrannical government it is today.

One of the EU's original architects is David Rockefeller, who in 194647 served as secretary of the CFR's Study Group on Reconstruction in Western Europe. A CFR coterie within the U.S. government then adopted the Study Group's plan for "unifying" Europe and rechristened it the Marshall Plan. With billions of U.S. taxpayers' dollars and the U.S. government's prestige and power behind it, the Marshall Plan successfully fastened the Common Market/EU on Europe.

As we have explained in these pages many times over the past decade, the FTAA is following the same deceptive path as the EU. Those who understand one-world jargon, and closely observe the activities of the CFR internationalist elite, saw this clearly at the 1995 Summit of the Americas in Miami, where the FTAA was formally launched. The December 9th-11th summit was hosted by then-President Bill Clinton (CFR). The true meaning of the Miami summit was revealed in a little-reported comment by Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty, President Clinton's chief of staff, who stated: "[T]his summit is much broader than [lowering tariffs], and that's how it should be looked at. This is not a trade summit, it is an overall summit. It will focus on economic integration and convergence." (Emphasis added.)

"Integration and convergence" are the code words used by the CFR internationalists to describe the processes by which they have eroded and destroyed the EU nations' sovereignty and independence. They are the same code words used to describe what the same one-worlders have been doing worldwide through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which became, in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Vicious Road to "World Order"

The essential game plan for world government through world "integration and convergence" was publicly enunciated in April 1974 through the pages of Foreign Affairs, the CFR's house journal. In an essay entitled "The Hard Road to World Order," Columbia University Professor Richard N. Gardner, a leading CFR planner (and later a key adviser to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton), explained to fellow globalists that the UN could not impose world government in one fell swoop. Instead, he said, "the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down." It would have to be done piecemeal, through "an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece." Gardner happily noted that the march toward "world order" was progressing "even as nations resist appeals for 'world government' and 'the surrender of sovereignty,'" thanks to the leadership provided by the CFR elite. Gardner also listed 10 important programs key to advancing the world government agenda. Numb er two on that list, following the International Monetary Fund, is the GATT (WTO), through which trade policies will "subject countries to an unprecedented degree of international surveillance over up to now sacrosanct 'domestic' policies."

Simply put, as Gardner and his fellow CFR one-worlders in government and business see it, international trade is one of the key weapons in their globalist arsenal for eroding national sovereignty piece by piece. It is an essential weapon being used to strip away America's economic, scientific, and technological leadership; render us dependent on foreign sources of energy and basic resources; and drastically reduce our productivity and standard of living to a "world" level that will enable our "integration and convergence" into a world government. That is what Professor Gardner's CFR counterparts in the Republican Party and the Bush administration are continuing to push with their destructive trade and immigration policies. If they are not stopped, America will be turned into a Third World country, but it may not take 20 years. It falls to us to make sure that this never happens.