Why the Race to the Bottom?
By William F. Jasper
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Source: The New American, March 10, 2003
Why
does America’s elite support policies that export jobs and technology,
import foreign workers, erode national sovereignty, and destroy our
standard of living? |
“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, Colo.) 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 inkling 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 1946-47 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 1994 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. Number two on that list,
following the International Monetary Fund, is the GATT (WTO), through
which trade policies will “subject countries to an un-precedented
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.
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