Economic Woes, a Consequence of Free Trade

Posted on October 7, 2010

 By one of my favorite writers and a very nice lady …..

Deanna Spingola

The abolition of nationalism and borders under the guise of the free trade has been the ultimate Illuminati objective since the late 1700s, notably illustrated by Aaron H. Palmer who had a law office on Wall Street in the first half of the 19th century. He catered to individuals interested in transnational business and managed their commerce and paperwork with the European bankers who advocated trade. By February 1837 when the bankers and politicians shrunk the U.S. credit market, Palmer already had a working relationship with N M Rothschild & Sons, located in the City of London. Palmer supplied the Rothschilds with an account of all the financial failures, as many as 280, in the months just before the final crash. {1}

The products of the labor of its citizens determine a nation’s prosperity. A brisk manufacturing base is essential, augmented by the service industry. Nationalists believe in reasonable tariffs that protect the nation’s industry. Free trade is detrimental to a nation’s wealth. So-called “conservatives,” those Republican “nationalists” who claim to put the U.S. first have promoted and participated, along with the Democrats, in the legislation of all of the nation’s free trade agreements. One cannot claim to cherish both sovereignty and accept free trade, through “multinational trade organizations and global financial conglomerates.” Marx, a mouthpiece minion for the elite, advocated both the income tax and free trade. He said of free trade, “it breaks up old nationalities” and eliminates the “bourgeoisie” (small businessmen). {2} Free trade functions to equalize the masses while elevating the elite and their acquiescent political devotees.

President Woodrow Wilson, advocating the elite’s agenda, promoted the League of Nations as a global forum for the settlement of territorial disputes by arbitration, along with the power of aggressive military enforcement or through less aggressive sanctions and free global trade, as elucidated in his Fourteen Points, “equality of trade” and “removal … of all economic barriers.” {3} On December 23, 1913, certain members of Congress instituted the Federal Reserve, a vital step to the ultimate globalization of currency. The elite established tax-free foundations to escape the income tax trap they set for the rest of American society. In October 1913, B’nai B’rith established the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) possibly to counter criticism of many of the individuals responsible for the Federal Reserve.

Proponents of the New World Order, the banker’s ultimate political monopoly, want the world’s citizens to abandon political and cultural nationalism in favor of internationalism. U.S. politicians, through their machinations, have rejected (in our behalf) the nationalism once espoused by Thomas Jefferson and others. Nations lose their self-sufficiency and independence through external military action and/or through the actions of corrupt political leaders. In the U.S. these are often the prominent leaders of each political party who dictate partisan policy which includes the decision to wage war. Banker-funded warfare opens a nation to free trade. After warfare, war-torn, devastated nations, no longer able to meet their own needs, must depend on other nations to supply essential needs – food, clothing and supplies to reconstruct the bombed-out infrastructure.

Swiss business journalist and author Gian Trepp said “War, a place where moneymen can gather, because money is stronger than nationalism. Even during the war the moneymen of different nations needed to keep in touch because when the war stops, you have to rebuild and you need free trade.” {4} Globalists have vilified the word “nationalist” in their battle to subtly convince us to accept world governance, a goal they hope to impose by 2025, according to their most recent 2010 publication, Global Governance 2025: At a Critical Juncture.

Our current economic woes began long before the elites installed Obama, their current presidential puppet to further implement global governance. By 1980, Dr. Mordechai E. Kreinin, Professor of Economics, along with Michael G. Plummer, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University, evaluated the idea of North American economic integration. Kreinin, still pushing internationalism through free trade, compiled Building a Partnership, the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement, a series of papers presented by like-minded academics during the September 1998 conference at Michigan State University. He is the past president of the International Trade and Finance Association and has advised the UN, the State Department and the Commerce Department regarding trade relations.

In accordance with the exponents of internationalism, officials began negotiating the NAFTA in 1986 when Reagan was president. NAFTA was formally signed on December 17, 1992 under President George H.W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas. Bush had lost the November 1992 election and left the job of getting congressional approval of the agreement to his successor, Bill Clinton and his vice president, longtime elite internationalist, Albert Gore.

On July 18, 1993 Henry Kissinger (CFR, TC) allegedly wrote in The Los Angeles Times about NAFTA, “What Congress will have before it is not a conventional trade agreement but the architecture of a new international system…a first step toward a new world order.”

Gore approached Republican House Minority Whip (1989–1995), Newt Gingrich, just another internationalist still masquerading as a constitutionalist. He promised he could extract 132 votes for NAFTA, a treaty that author Ian Fletcher refers to as “a veritable case study in failure.” {5} Congressional bribery just for NAFTA, known as “pork barrel promises” totaled $50 billion, paid by the U.S. taxpayers. NAFTA cost the Democrats control of the House and Senate in 1994. Gingrich then became Speaker of the House in 1995. Voters automatically punish the party in power for the treasonous acts committed under their jurisdiction when in fact, congressional members of both parties act in concert. By 1997, due to NAFTA, U.S. job losses amounted to about 394,835, mostly women, Blacks and Hispanics. The figure increased to 600,000 by January 1, 1999. Wages in Mexico sank by 29%. Clinton and Gore, like typical politicians, engaged in orchestrated opposition. At the 1997 AFL-CIO Pittsburgh Convention, Clinton was pro-NAFTA, while Gore feigned an anti-NAFTA stance. This charade won the AFL-CIO’s endorsement of Gore in the 2000 elections. {6}

Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gotari had endorsed the NAFTA concept in 1990, making it a political possibility. The Mexican public was the treaty’s most formidable obstacle as it had a history of distancing itself from its northern neighbor. U.S. labor unions were very vocal about their opposition and their intent to retaliate against all legislators who voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The House of Representatives approved NAFTA on November 17, 1993, by a vote of 234 to 200. Those who supported the treaty included 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats. It passed the Senate by a vote of 61-38. Clinton signed it into law on December 8, 1993; it went into effect on January 1, 1994. {7} NAFTA added Mexico to the prior treaty, the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1988. NAFTA eliminated tariffs and the majority of non-tariff prohibitions between the three countries. Additionally, investors in the three countries were to enjoy the same treatment as domestic investors. {8}

NAFTA, promoted as a strategy to reduce US trade deficits, actually increased those deficits. In 1993, we had a $1.6 billion surplus in our trade with Mexico but by 2007, we had a $74.8 billion deficit. In 1994 we had an $8.1 billion yearly deficit with Canada, probably due to our oil importation despite our own adequate oil supply. NAFTA cost 525,000 US jobs between 1994 and 2002. Some figures state the total of jobs lost at 766,000, primarily among the non-college-educated population – the producers in the manufacturing segment. Mexico, as a US trading partner, is too poor, to be an export market for American goods. {9}

Pat Buchanan, referring to NAFTA, wrote, “Two years after NAFTA, the predictions of its opponents had all come true. The U.S. trade surplus with Mexico had vanished; a trade deficit of $15 billion had opened up. Trucks heading north out of Mexico were hauling more and more manufactured goods, while those going south carried machinery and equipment for the new factories going up, pointing to endless and deepening U.S. trade deficits. By 1997, 3,300 maquiladora factories were operating, employing 800,000 Mexican workers in jobs that not long ago would have gone to Americans.” {10}

Over 80% of the American population opposed NAFTA. Despite massive objections against Trade Agreements, both Democrats and Republicans habitually cater to the banks and corporations. George H. W. Bush (CFR, TC) and George W. Bush personally promoted NAFTA. It weakened U.S. and Canadian environmental laws and increased the misery in Mexico and ultimately, in addition to faulty currency policies and manipulations, contributed to the crash of the peso, further impoverishing the regular citizens. {11}

Promoters sold NAFTA, trade with Mexico, by promising new job creation in the U.S. Yet, research studies and historical examples in other countries provided adequate information and experience to discourage any kind of free trade with two inequitable countries. Labor-intensive manufacturers, encouraged by NAFTA, relocated to Mexico where Mexican nationals were willing to work for less. To get it passed, the Mexican government spent millions on lobbyists and public relations. U.S. capital, about $70 billion, went south with American jobs. New companies emerged in Mexico, along with debt in the form of interest for loans. There are about 90,000,000 people in Mexico, out of which 200,000 people control the entire wealth of the nation – thirty-two families.

Unfortunately, Mexico, along with many other third world countries, became victims of the economic hit men. John Perkins recently revealed their tactics in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Mexico was generating about $30 billion a year towards paying the debt service or interest on its international banking cabal loans. Yet the actual cost amounted to $40-45 billion per year. Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the privately owned Federal Reserve increased the interest rates in late 1994 which deliberately “devastated the Mexican Economy.” {12} In December 1994, Mexico devalued the peso by about 40%. {13} Congress immediately approved a $40 taxpayer funded billion-dollar loan despite debt-burdened Mexico’s inability to repay it. That loan was merely a transfer from our pockets into the international bankers’ coffers. The recent bailouts and Obama’s stimulus package, disguised as assistance to the populace, is a huge transference of wealth – again from the taxpayer’s pockets into the banker’s pockets.

After NAFTA, the Clinton administration hammered through 200 additional trade agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO) replaced the GATT. {14} The WTO opened the world to corporate predators and further diluted environmental, labor and human rights. The Bretton Woods Agreement (1945), an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, ultimately led to the establishment of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the GATT, a global economic system that managed free trade with the dollar as the world’s basic currency. The elite designed the system to ensure British and U.S. hegemony over monetary and trade issues. The Federal Reserve, a private enterprise, became master of the economic system.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is located in Geneva, Switzerland. Congress created the WTO as “a policeman, a global free trade enforcer, and a battering ram for the trillion dollar annual world agribusiness trade.” The WTO was devised “to advance the interests of private agribusiness companies.” It is not accountable to any nation’s laws. The WTO may impose disciplinary penalties or other measure on member countries that violate their regulations. The WTO may also force countries to accept genetically modified crops. The WTO is a product of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Seventy-five GATT members and the European Communities founded the WTO on January 1, 1995 as a result of Uruguay Round of trade liberalization talks, held in del Este, Uruguay, in September 1986, and concluded in Marrakech, Morocco, in April 1994. {15}

According to Ian Fletcher, “The U.S. should seek strategic, not unconditional integration with the rest of the world economy. Economic openness, like most things in life, is valuable up to a point – but not beyond it. Fairly open trade, most of the time, is justified. Absolutely free trade, 100 percent of the time, is an extremist position and is not.” Free trade is certainly not inevitable. A former British colony, the U.S., for decades, protected their manufacturing base through protectionist tariffs. The regulation of commerce was included in the Constitution, Article I, Section 8 authorizes Congress “to regulate commerce with foreign nations,” a mandate that is in the best interests of the nation and its people. {16} Nation states are economically essential and relevant as most people, according to Fletcher, live in the country in which they were born. Consequently, their “economic fortunes depend upon the wage and consumption levels within that one society.” When trade laws, to benefit large firms, alter the economic nationalism of a nation, it impacts every resident. {17}

Free trade, as currently practiced with chronic US deficits and a plethora of cheap imports, can actually “seduce” a population into “decadent consumption.” People have abandoned the tradition of saving and frugal living. Business owners often fail to reinvest profits and instead depend on bank loans. Seemingly, individuals in their personal or business circumstances prefer to mortgage their futures in order to obtain immediate gratification. Fletcher claims that Americans are addicted to debt as evidenced by the incidence of consumer credit. America’s combined household and government debt totals 243% of GDP as opposed to China where the government discourages personal debt. At least 500 million Chinese people have a cell phone but only one million Chinese residents have a credit card. {18} China is the world’s largest mobile telephone market. {19} I visited China in 2007 and was amazed at its thriving economy, the huge building projects throughout the country, and the presence of large US-based corporations, like Motorola, in Beijing.

Robert B. Zoellick (CFR, TC, Bilderberg, PNAC), current President of the World Bank, as Under Secretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs (1991-1992) helped seal the NAFTA accord with Mexico. He was also instrumental in launching the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He was a U.S. Trade Representative (2001-2005) who attempted to fast track the Free Trade of Americas Agreement (FTAA) and negotiated the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in May 2004. He advised George W. Bush on foreign policy during the 2000 campaign as part of a group led by Condoleezza Rice called The Vulcans. Bush nominated Zoellick to replace Paul Wolfowitz (PNAC) as the new World Bank president. {20}

Residents flee when their nation’s economy fails, or when it is devastated by war. Illegals in the U.S. increased from three million in the 1990s to eleven million with about 55% or six million individuals from Mexico. This resulted from Mexico’s economic crisis in conjunction with George W. Bush’s so-called “guest-worker” program, possibly associated with his secretive meeting in Waco, Texas on March 23, 2005 with then Mexican President Vicente Fox and then Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. They met to discuss the formation of the North American Community which is, by default, a done deal. The U.S. government has been deliberately ineffective in protecting the southern border in order to create a destabilizing cultural and economic crisis in the U.S.

NAFTA Vote by Party and City, Suburb and Rural Location:
Anti NAFTA Pro NAFTA {21}

Democrats
City 67.4% 32.6%
Suburb 59.6% 40.4%
Rural 52.2% 47.8%

Republicans
City 22.2% 77.8%
Suburb 26.4% 73.6%
Rural 21.4% 78.6% 

Some of the same treasonous scoundrels that voted for NAFTA are currently appearing on the privately owned media busily blaming the current administration for not fixing the economy, a direct result of NAFTA. Some of those neo-cons include Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Tom DeLay, Dick Durbin, Jeffrey Flake, Thomas Foley, John Kasich, Dick Armey, Dennis Hastert, and on the left, Nancy Pelosi. She, as Speaker of the House, pushed through the disastrous healthcare bill in the same manner. These politicians count on the fact that the US public has forgotten who voted on NAFTA and what it did. They are now blaming the bulk of the country’s economic woes on others, such as people who shouldn’t have borrowed money to buy homes (now in foreclosure) and a number of other issues – never on the fact that they imposed a treaty on the US that was deliberately designed to de-industrialize the country and cause an economic catastrophe. Neo-con Republicans continue to maintain that NAFTA was a good policy, but for who? Mexico, now a slave-wage corporate slum-burb from which desperate citizens attempt to escape is a direct result of NAFTA. Meanwhile, jobless, middle-class Americans struggle to stave-off foreclosure.   

In March 2010 Rep. Gene Taylor, a Mississippi Democrat, lead a small group of twenty-eight lawmakers who introduced legislation that would require President Obama to relinquish our participation in NAFTA, the 16-year trade agreement that began the de-industrialization of America, a process that has created the current joblessness (10 to 12%) and the economic fallout. The National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, organizations that represent the elite, have always supported NAFTA. If Taylor’s legislation passes, Obama would have to give Canada and Mexico six months’ notice of the U.S. intentions to vacate the pact. {22}

In his campaign speeches Obama opposed NAFTA but now is in the process of negotiating with officials in South Korea, Panama and Colombia to implement trade pacts with those countries. In March 2010, U.S. officials also began trade negotiations with Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, Peru, Vietnam and Brunei in what would be the Asia-Pacific regional free-trade agreement. Members of the House of Representatives are supposed to vote before the end of the year whether the U.S. is to retain their membership in the World Trade Organization. {23}

Ian Fletcher says, “Free trade is inexorably bleeding our economy and preventing it from returning to true health. Nobody in the Obama administration wants to talk about the economics of free trade, because as soon as one seriously scrutinizes this doctrine, one begins to discover that free trade may be the biggest myth in American economics.” {24}

1 There is no Need for Anyone to go to America: Commercial Correspondence and Nineteenth Century Globalization from Papers found by Jessica Lepler, Assistant Professor of American History at the University of New Hampshire, during research into the 1837 financial crisis in the US.
2 The Judas Goats, the Enemy Within by Michael Collins Piper, American Free Press, Washington, DC, 2006, p. 30
3 Rockefeller Internationalism by Will Banyan, Part 1, Nexus Magazine Volume 10 – Number 3, (April-May 2003)
4 Hitler’s Secret Bankers, the Myth of Swiss Neutrality During the Holocaust by Adam LeBor, Birch Lane Press, New York, 1997, p. 73
5 Free Trade Doesn’t Work, What Should Replace It and Why by Ian Fletcher, U.S. Business & Industry Council, Washington, DC, 2010, pp. 158-159
6 Al Gore: A User’s Manual by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Verso 2000, pp. 160-171
7 Organized Labor’s Campaign Contributions after the NAFTA Vote: Rhetoric or Retribution? by Gretchen Anne Phillips and Edward Tower, p. 3
8 NAFTA, GATT Uruguay Round, and Fast Track 1998: a Brief Legislative History, Institute for International Economics, www.iie.com, p. 1
9 Free Trade Doesn’t Work, What Should Replace It and Why by Ian Fletcher, U.S. Business & Industry Council, Washington, DC, 2010, pp. 158-159
10 The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy by Patrick J. Buchanan, Little, Brown, New York, p. 269
11 Al Gore: A User’s Manual by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Verso 2000, pp. 160-171
12 Texas and Mexico, Immediate Impact of the Mexican Crisis
13 NAFTA and the Peso Collapse, Not Just a Coincidence by Robert A. Blecker, Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper, http://www.epinet.org/briefingpapers/1997_bp_nafta.pdf
14 Seeds of Destruction, the Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation by F. William Engdahl, Global Research, Center for Research on Globalization, Montreal, Quebec, 2007, pp. 216-247
15 Ibid, p. 217
16 Free Trade Doesn’t Work, What Should Replace It and Why by Ian Fletcher, U.S. Business & Industry Council, Washington, DC, 2010, pp. 20-21. This is a book that everyone interested in so-called free trade should read.
17 Ibid, pp. 23-24, 25
18 Ibid, pp. 48-49
19 Motorola’s Cell-Phone Stumble in China, Telecom August 28, 2008, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_36/b4098056926227.htm
20 Robert Zoellick, http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1397
21 Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper, Washington, DC, Political Arithmetic of the NAFTA Vote by Lawrence Mishel and Ruy A. Teixeira, p. 12, http://epi.3cdn.net/3d995382f3252362c7_ydm6bxl4u.pdf
22 Reuters, A small group of U.S. lawmakers unveiled legislation on Thursday to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement in the latest sign of congressional disillusionment with free-trade deals, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6233MS20100304
23 Ibid
24 Free Trade Doesn’t Work, What Should Replace It and Why by Ian Fletcher, http://www.freetradedoesntwork.com/

Archive of Deanna Spingola’s articles 

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