America is being hijacked, but the hijackers don’t go by names like Mohamed, Omar, and Osama. The hijackers to whom we refer bear prominent names, such as Bush, Clinton, Kissinger, McLarty, Greenspan, Rubin, and Rockefeller. They don’t use box cutters and bombs or commandeer airliners to create towering infernos; their weapons of choice are instruments such as the WTO, NAFTA, the IMF, and the FTAA. They hijack entire nations, stealing sovereignty and destroying constitutions — usually under the banners of "free trade," "debt relief," and "globalization" — proclaiming all the while that their lawless actions will advance global prosperity, democratization, and "the rule of law."

A colossal hijacking operation is in full swing even now. Its primary target is the United States of America, but it is aimed at all the other nations of North and South America as well. It is the FTAA, the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas, which proposes nothing less than the economic and political merger of the 34 nations of the Western Hemisphere.

EU Blueprint

Following the same plan of attack that was used to hijack the nations of Europe into the sovereignty-destroying European Union (EU), the internationalist architects of the FTAA intend to transform the nation-states of the Western Hemisphere — including the United States — into mere administrative units of the supranational FTAA. (The article beginning on page 23 examines the European model for this attack, where the hijacking is so far advanced that the EU is now widely recognized as a developing regional government sapping the sovereignty of France, Germany, Great Britain, and the other member states. As it is in Europe, so it will be in the Americas — if the architects of world order are successful.)

The FTAA represents a vast "broadening and deepening" of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which set the hijack operation in motion by tying Canada, the United States, and Mexico together in a system of ever-expanding and tightening political, economic, social, and military entanglements. Following the EU model, the trinational NAFTA is adding new members (what the internationalists call "broadening") and claiming jurisdiction over an ever-increasing swath of functions ("deepening") that have previously been solely the purview of national governments and their state and local governments.

The NAFTA/FTAA plan calls for an entire hemispheric regime of regulations to "harmonize" business, industry, labor, agriculture, transportation, immigration, education, taxation, environment, health, trade, defense, criminal justice, and other matters of policy and law "from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego." NAFTA is not, and never was, about "free trade." Free trade — real free trade — is a voluntary exchange between two parties, unhampered by government intervention and subsidies.

But NAFTA, like the European Union, seeks to regulate and control virtually every industrial, agricultural, commercial, social, environmental, and labor matter. Rather than creating or permitting economic freedom by eliminating government intervention, NAFTA seeks to homogenize the multitude of socialist programs that now hamstring the U.S., Mexican, and Canadian economies — and add a new host of controls besides. Also, in keeping with the EU pattern, the NAFTA/FTAA globalists have already launched their campaign for a single hemispheric currency as a counterpart to the euro, which replaced the currencies of the EU member states in January of this year. For now, the dollar is being touted as the hemispheric legal tender, but plans have already been floated to replace the dollar with a new currency called the "amero."

Strikingly obvious is that the NAFTA/ FTAA "broadening and deepening" and "harmonization and integration" represent a radical, revolutionary assault on national sovereignty and constitutional government. Piece by piece, governmental functions are being ripped from protective firewalls so carefully constructed by our own country’s Founding Fathers. These powers are being transferred to unaccountable, unelected international bureaucracies that are not bound by the checks and balances that have prevented the accumulation of absolute, tyrannical power in our constitutional system of government.

The people of the EU have only recently begun realizing that the process started five decades ago under the banner of "free trade" was really a stealth attack aimed at nothing less than destroying their national sovereignties and imposing a tyrannical oligarchy ruling over them from Brussels. The EU has become a supranational regional bloc in the new world order, and its ruling elite now pushes to further concentrate and centralize power at the global level — under an all-powerful United Nations. That same EU process is now being imposed on the Western Hemisphere, but on an accelerated schedule. What took decades to accomplish in Europe, the FTAA schemers intend to achieve in the next few years. They have, in fact, set the fast-approaching 2005 as the target year for locking the FTAA into place.

"We’re working to build a Free Trade Area of the Americas, and we’re determined to complete those negotiations by January of 2005," President George W. Bush declared in his January 16, 2002 speech to the Organization for American States (OAS) and the World Affairs Council in Washington, D.C. "We plan to complete a free trade agreement with Chile early this year. And once we conclude the agreement, I urge Congress to take it up quickly. And I ask the Senate to schedule a vote, as soon as it returns, on renewing and expanding the Andean Trade Preference Act. Today, I announce that the United States will explore a free trade agreement with the countries of Central America.... Our purpose is to strengthen the economic ties we already have with these nations … and to take another step toward completing the Free Trade Area of the Americas."

The 2005 timetable did not originate with President Bush; he was merely renewing a pledge that his predecessor, Bill Clinton, had also made when endorsing the FTAA agenda in 1994. In December of that year, President Clinton hosted the Summit of the Americas in Miami, which served as the FTAA launch pad. He endorsed both the "Declaration of Principles" and the "Plan of Action" promulgated at the conference.

The Declaration’s preamble declares, "We are determined to consolidate and advance closer bonds of cooperation.... We reiterate our firm adherence to the principles of international law and the purposes and principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter and in the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS)...." Moreover, the Declaration pledges "to begin immediately to construct the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)," to be concluded no later than 2005. The signatories also swore to "advance and implement the commitments made at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development" (the enviro-Marxist Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro) by creating "cooperative partnerships to strengthen our capacity to prevent and control pollution" and promote "sustainable development" (globalese for UN control over economic, industrial, and population matters).

The FTAA Plan of Action states that governments will "cooperate fully with all United Nations and inter-American human rights bodies," "undertake all measures necessary to guarantee the rights of children, and, where they have not already done so, give serious consideration to ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child." The governments will also seek to strengthen "the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights," both of which can be expected to interfere with increasing frequency in U.S. civil and criminal cases.

That barely scratches the surface of the kinds of transnational meddling in U.S. affairs that the FTAA will bring. At that 1994 summit, the presidents of El Salvador and Guatemala condemned California’s Proposition 187. This measure to deny various welfare benefits to illegal aliens was passed by an overwhelming majority of California voters. Proposition 187, said the presidents, grossly violated "children’s rights." In similar fashion, the Mexican consul demanded that the U.S. "consult" with its hemispheric neighbors before passing certain laws. However, news coverage of these and other manifestations of the new world disorder bearing down on us received short shrift. As with coverage of NAFTA, the internationalist media giants focused public attention on the glorious economic benefits that allegedly would accrue with the new wave of hemispheric trade that the FTAA would bring.

A few candid admissions did surface. Mack McLarty, President Clinton’s chief of staff, offered this comment: "[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." The terms integration and convergence pass over the heads of average Americans. But they are pregnant with meaning for committed globalists, of which Mr. McLarty is a hearty specimen. Subsequently moving on to a heady (and highly profitable) partnership with Henry Kissinger, McLarty now prominently advocates hemispheric integration and convergence in the business and financial communities.

Henry Kissinger, a member of the executive committee of the Trilateral Commission and a longtime power in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), called the NAFTA vote the single most important decision that Congress would make during Mr. Clinton’s first term. Indeed, Kissinger admitted in the Los Angeles Times in 1993 that passing NAFTA "will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War...." NAFTA "is not a conventional trade agreement," he said, "but the architecture of a new international system."

Self-appointed Wisemen

Over the past decade, many of Kissinger’s Trilateralist and CFR brethren have expounded on how important this "new international system" is in constructing their subversive "new world order." Some of them openly admit that NAFTA and the FTAA can, and will, follow the sovereignty-destroying path blazed by the EU. Many of the most important revelations in this regard can be found in the pages of the CFR’s journal, Foreign Affairs. In the Fall 1991 issue, for example, CFR member M. Delal Baer penned an article entitled "North American Free Trade," hinting at the hemispheric leviathan emerging from the murky depths.

"The creation of trinational dispute-resolution mechanisms and rule-making bodies on border and environmental issues may also be embryonic forms of more comprehensive structures," said Baer. "After all, international organizations and agreements like GATT and NAFTA by definition minimize assertions of sovereignty in favor of a joint rule-making authority." (Emphasis added.) Dr. Baer went on to draw a direct analogy to the EU, suggesting:

It may be useful to revisit the spirit of the Monnet Commission, which provided a blueprint for Europe at a moment of extraordinary opportunity. The three nations of North America, in more modest fashion, have also arrived at a defining moment. They may want to create a wiseman’s North American commission to operate in the post-ratification period.... The commission might also adopt a forward-looking agenda on themes such as North American competitiveness, links between scientific institutions, borderland integration, the continental ecological system and educational and cultural exchanges.

The Monnet Commission Baer refers to was named for Jean Monnet, the socialist one-worlder who served as the principal architect of the Common Market. He and his self-appointed, self-anointed "wisemen" — together with their American counterparts — gradually foisted the EU on the people of Europe, using deception, outright lies, bribery, extortion, and corruption to achieve their objective.

Jacques Delors, the socialist president of the European Community Commission in 1992, when the NAFTA debate was raging, clearly saw the parallels between the two regional organizations. Delors gloated that "NAFTA is a form of flattery for us Europeans. In many ways, we have shown what positive, liberating effect these regional arrangements can have." Liberating for whom? Why, for one-world "wisemen" like Delors, naturally, who detest constitutional limitations on their powers.

In 1994, an important study by Gary Clyde Hufbauer (CFR) and Jeffrey J. Schott provided a fairly detailed guide to the globalist game plan for the hemisphere. Entitled Western Hemisphere Economic Integration, the Hufbauer-Schott study was published by the Institute for International Economics (IIE), a close sister of the CFR. The IIE, says The London Observer, "may be the most influential think-tank on the planet," with "an extraordinary record in turning ideas into effective policy."

"After four decades of dedicated effort," said the IIE report, "Western Europe has just arrived at the threshold of … monetary union, and fiscal coordination. It seems likely that trade and investment integration will proceed at a faster pace within the Western Hemisphere." Yes, the IIE-CFR internationalists have learned from the EU experience and expect to use those lessons to speed the process along in the Americas.

According to Hufbauer and Schott, "the more countries that participate in integration and the wider its scope, the greater the need for some institutional mechanism to administer the arrangements and to resolve the inevitable disputes, and the stronger the case for a common legal framework." This means supranational legislative, executive, and judicial institutions, of course. "The European Commission, Council, Parliament, and Court of Justice have many of the powers of comparable institutions in federal states," they noted approvingly before commenting, "On this subject, we score Europe with a 5 [on a scale of 0 to 5]."

But Hufbauer and Schott propose going even beyond the EU’s rapacious appetite. They assert that "integration between NAFTA and Latin America should be legally open-ended; potentially the WHFTA [an earlier name for the FTAA] should include countries outside the hemisphere." They assert: "Economic logic suggests that the expansion of NAFTA in an Asian direction is just as desirable as its expansion in a Latin American direction."

A more recent brief for this hijacking of the Americas is provided by Felipe A.M. de la Balze, director of the Argentine Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of international economics. In an article entitled "Finding Allies in the Back Yard: NAFTA and the Southern Cone," in the July/August 2001 Foreign Affairs, de la Balze points his fellow Insiders toward the EU experience. "Witness the successive expansions of the European integration project (now the European Union)," he says, "which incorporated Italy in the 1950s, Spain in the 1970s, and then Greece, Ireland, and Portugal in the 1980s."

He continues:

Now a similar opportunity for integration exists in the Southern Cone of South America. A core group of countries — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay — have made great strides in recent years and are poised, despite their short-term economic problems, to make steady political and economic gains over the next decade....

To this end, the best incentive the United States can provide is an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the Southern Cone, making these South American nations members of the pact alongside the United States, Canada, and Mexico. But economic integration will not succeed without a compelling political rationale as well: namely, the promotion of democracy and regional security that could follow the creation of a "super NAFTA."

Integration Express

Having helped design the economic program in Argentina that has brought about that country’s bankruptcy and present crisis, de la Balze believes it is time to crank up the "integration express": "A seven-state NAFTA, incorporating democratic and security accords as well as economic agreements, would offer a wide array of benefits to the entire hemisphere and could eventually integrate other Latin American countries." De la Balze acknowledges that the countries he proposes to integrate into the NAFTA/FTAA "need help in addressing endemic problems such as economic instability, low per-capita income, illiberal democratic practices, and narcoterrorism." And that "bringing economic growth and social stability to South America will require not only a vibrant private sector and functioning markets but also public education for the young, job training for the unemployed, public health care for the poor, and courts and police that treat all citizens alike." In other words, it will take huge transfers of wealth from U.S. taxpayers, as well as transfers of U.S. sovereignty to the new FTAA institutions. The program he outlines is a hemispheric socialist manifesto, disguised with rhetoric about free trade. "Again, Europe provides a good precedent," de la Balze claims.

President George W. Bush, like Bill Clinton before him, is following the destructive and subversive FTAA road plan laid out by de la Balze, Hufbauer, Schott, Baer, Kissinger, et al. Why? Senator Barry Goldwater explained in his 1979 memoir, With No Apologies, that despite the heated rhetoric and change in party label from one administration to the next, the same internationalist policies continue unabated:

When a new President comes on board, there is a great turnover in personnel but no change in policy. Example: During the Nixon years Henry Kissinger, CFR member and Nelson Rockefeller’s protégé, was in charge of foreign policy. When Jimmy Carter was elected, Kissinger was replaced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, CFR member and David Rockefeller’s protégé.

That same musical chairs rotation of CFR-Trilateral one-worlders has continued through the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II administrations. This was plainly evident at a February 15, 2002 CFR program televised on C-SPAN. Vice President Dick Cheney, the featured speaker, drew a round of laughter by noting that he had been a longtime member of the Council but that he couldn’t let his constituents back in Wyoming know that when he was serving as a member of Congress. The first person to speak following Mr. Cheney’s speech was David Rockefeller, former chairman of both the CFR and Trilateral Commission (TC). "Mr. Vice President," said Rockefeller, "I just enjoyed so much your whole speech, but I was particularly pleased that you gave such a strong endorsement for the free-trade agreement for all the Americas — a subject that has been of great concern to me for many years and particularly recently."

Indeed, David Rockefeller and the Rockefeller family have spearheaded the entire FTAA process for several decades through organizations such as the CFR, TC, IIE, the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Council of the Americas, The Americas Society, the Center for Inter-American Relations, and other institutions.

Both the FTAA and Trilateral processes entail building regional relationships that will eventually coalesce in world government. In With No Apologies, Goldwater noted that "the Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power — political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical.... What the Trilaterals truly intend is the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nation-states involved.... As managers and creators of the system they will rule the future."

Clearly, the EU-NAFTA-FTAA schemes are intended to accomplish precisely that criminal and treasonous objective. As such, they are far more dangerous than any of the terrorist attacks that Osama bin Laden or others of his ilk can throw at us.