thetyrannyofthefederalreserve@yahoo.com
10/28/2015
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is barreling down the tracks toward what seems like inevitable passage into law.
On Oct. 5, after five years of intensive negotiations, trade ministers from 12 countries concluded TPP negotiations in Atlanta. The agreement now goes to Congress for debate and a vote for passage. Details of the TPP have been a tightly guarded secret and have yet to be made public, except for some aspects that have been leaked here and there.
Despite widespread opposition in our country and across much of the world, the mainstream media has been working full steam to get us regular folks to believe that the TPP is a good deal for us and for the future of our country.
It is being billed as a trade agreement. But it is more than just that. So what is the TPP really about, anyway?
What is becoming clear is that this treaty will have profound effects on most of our lives, even more so than its predecessor, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was steamrolled through Congress in 1993.
If passed, the TPP will further integrate the American economy with 11 countries on the Pacific Rim—Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam, Chile, Brunei, Singapore and New Zealand—creating a market of 800 million people. The treaty binds these countries together under a series of trade rules and regulations in much the same manner that the American, Canadian and Mexican economies were unified under NAFTA.
However, the TPP is a much bigger deal than NAFTA ever was. According to an article in the New York Times, the TPP is the largest regional trade accord in history, setting new terms for trade and business investment among the 12 participating Pacific Rim nations, which together have an annual gross domestic product of nearly $28 trillion, representing roughly 40 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and one-third of world trade. According to the Times, the TPP accord could be a legacy-making achievement for President Obama and the capstone of both his economic agenda and his foreign policy goal of closer relations with eastern Asia.
President Bill Clinton gave us NAFTA, which was arguably the most profound and lasting achievement of his presidency. Obama is working to one-up Clinton by giving us the TPP.
If you liked NAFTA, you’re gonna love the TPP.
If the TPP website is to be believed, the treaty will help increase Made-in-America exports, grow the American economy, support well-paying American jobs and strengthen the American middle class.
Where have we heard these arguments for a free-trade pact before? Didn’t they tell us NAFTA would bring us more jobs, higher pay and a stronger middle class?
How did that work out?
In hindsight, we can look back and see that NAFTA did not help the American middle class but instead resulted in a “great sucking sound” as American jobs drained away to our so-called trade partners.
When we look back, we can see that an American trade surplus with Mexico before NAFTA immediately became a growing trade deficit that grew to $60 billion per year. By 2013, the trade deficit with Canada and Mexico reached $181 billion. Cheap American corn poured into Mexico bankrupting Mexican small farmers who then crossed the border illegally in the millions in search of work in the United States, turning an illegal immigration crisis into a full-blown national catastrophe that is changing the character of our nation into something nearly unrecognizable from pre-NAFTA America. Wages did not rise and the good paying jobs that were promised never arrived. Income inequality worsened as the middle and working classes saw their wages stagnate and their jobs disappear. Meanwhile, the stock market soared and passive-income seekers raked in profits from corporations that were able to take advantage of lax Mexican environmental regulations and cut labor costs by replacing high-wage American workers with pauperized Mexican labor.
Since NAFTA was enacted, upwards of 50,000 factories in America were shuttered and moved across the border and no new jobs replaced the jobs that were lost. In fact, in 2014 the American labor force participation rate fell to 63 percent, lower than the 67 percent when NAFTA was signed, even as tens of millions more people were added to our country through immigration. According to a Jan. 25, 2014 article in the New York Times, the United States lost nearly six million manufacturing jobs from 2000 to 2009.
Now here we are two decades after NAFTA with an even bigger trade treaty in the works.
It wouldn’t be accurate to say that the TPP is going to flood us with more low-cost imports or accelerate the offshoring of American factories and jobs. That ship has already sailed. Our economy was thrown open to foreign imports decades ago, and the offshoring of American economic production was underway long before TPP negotiations began. This treaty is about other things.
So what is it all about?
The lead U.S. negotiator for the TPP is U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman. On Oct. 15, Froman spoke to a collection of luminaries during a conference call hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. According to Froman, the U.S. is already an open market, with our tariffs already low at 1.4 percent on average. Eighty percent of the goods coming in from TPP countries come into our market duty-free, and we don’t use regulations as a non-tariff barrier to trade.
Froman tells us that the TPP is less a trade agreement than the centerpiece of the American rebalancing strategy towards Asia. The treaty “underscores that the U.S. is a Pacific power—we always have been, we always will be—and that our partners in the region want us to be deeply embedded with them, both on economic issues and on broader issues.”
Froman tells us that the TPP is “the most concrete manifestation of our rebalancing strategy towards Asia. But even more than that, it is a manifestation of U.S. leadership in the world. And it’s got broad strategic implications for the U.S. role in the world.”
The treaty is not about increasing Made-in-America exports, growing the American economy, supporting well-paying American jobs and strengthening the American middle class, but about the projection of American power into Asia to counterbalance China’s growing influence in the region. The treaty is a move being made in an international chess game for control of the world, with the American economy and the American middle class sacrificed as pawns to further the global ambitions of a transnational elite that has seized control of our government, media and economy.
If we look back at the effects of NAFTA, we can rest assured that the TPP will not help the American middle class one bit, but instead will make life even more difficult for those of us who work for a living. This trade agreement, if passed, would put American workers under further wage competition with workers in Malaysia, Peru and Vietnam, while empowering corporations to more easily move operations to where wages and environmental regulations are lowest.
Ominously, the TPP creates independent corporate tribunals that allow investors to sue governments that are accused of breaching the treaty's rules. The TPP creates a new global authority, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission, which has enforcement powers above the authority of national governments. This commission will have the authority to admit new members, even China, if it wishes to enter.
The international institutions created by the TPP are being designed to be supranational and will override our Constitution and the ability of our elected representatives to enact laws that effect our economy. Instead, our economy will be regulated by a world system of financial control in private hands. The treaty is less about trade and more about creating the international institutions that will regulate our integrated economies and 40 percent of the world’s gross domestic product.
The TPP is nothing less than a direct attack on the American wage earner, small business owner and on the sovereignty of our nation. It is a treaty designed to set up a supranational regulatory system above the power of elected governments—a system of international corporate feudalism.
To make matters worse, U.S. Trade Representative Froman is also secretly negotiating and planning the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) that will put in place international commissions that will regulate and merge the United States economy with the EU. Also being secretly negotiated is the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), a 51-nation agreement to regulate and liberalize global trade in services, everything from e-commerce to health care to education and much more.
Who is Michael Froman, anyway?
Well, we know he was appointed U.S. Trade Representative by President Obama in 2013. Before that, Froman was a member of an elitist international body of globalists known as the Trilateral Commission. The Trilateral Commission traces its origins back to 1972 when the international banker David Rockefeller and Columbia University Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski floated the idea for the commission at a Bilderberg Conference that year in Belgium. The purpose of the proposed commission was to foster a new international economic order, promote global economic interdependence and promote free trade by dismantling tariffs. The commission was to be made up of 289 hand-picked members from banks, corporations, universities, governments, media, law firms and NGOs located in North America, Europe and Japan. Ninety-seven of the members were to be from the U.S. from both the Democratic and Republican parties. The Bilderberg Conference attendees liked the idea and thus the Trilateral Commission was born in 1973.
Since 1977, Trilateral Commission members have dominated the executive branch in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Nine out of 12 of the last U.S. Trade Representatives have been Trilateral Commission members, including Charlene Barshefsky, from 1997 to 2001; and Robert Zoellick, from 2001 to 2005; and, of course, our current U.S. Trade Representative, Michael Froman.
Under the banner of free trade, Trilateral Commission members have been working relentlessly over the past four decades to create a supranational system of corporate feudalism. Trilateralists gave us NAFTA. Today, they are working hard on their current project, the TPP, which will create an international regulatory structure encompassing the Pacific Rim that will supersede the power of nation-states.
Froman has been an effective and tireless negotiator for the TPP, which is set to bring about a new international economic order in a profound and transformational way.
Piece by piece, treaty by treaty, the sovereignty and prosperity of the American people are being stolen by the hand-selected agents of international bankers.
In his epic work, Tragedy and Hope, Georgetown historian Carroll Quigley, who famously was Bill Clinton’s history professor, told us that a handful of international bankers used the power to create money to amass great fortunes in the 19th century. Quigley told us their names—Raring, Lazard, Erlanger, Warburg, Schroder, Seligman, the Speyers, Mirabaud, Mallet, Fould, Rothschild and Morgan. According to Quigley, these bankers wanted to create a new international order above the power of nation-states.
Quigley wrote, “The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank ... sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”
The dream of fulfilling this far-reaching aim has continued through the institutions these bankers created and through the generations as the heirs of the great 19th century banking dynasties continue their project in our modern era.
The agents of the international bankers, serving in organizations such as the Trilateral Commission, are working toward a far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole, controlled in feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.
Don’t for a second believe the rhetoric you will hear in the media about the TPP growing the American economy and creating more jobs and higher wages for the middle class. We’ve heard all that before.
The people pushing the TPP have larger aims in mind.
Call your congressman, call your senator. Email them. Tell them we do not want the TPP. We have had enough.
Brian O’Brien is the author of “The Tyranny of the Federal Reserve.”
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