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Liberal Politicians Launched the Idea of “Free Trade Agreements” In the 1960s to Strip Nations of Sovereignty
Preface: Liberals might assume that it is Republicans who are cheerleaders for global corporations at the expense of government. But, as shown below, liberal politicians have been just as bad … or worse.
Matt Stoller – who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, Salon, The Nation and Reuters – knows his way around Washington.
Stoller – a prominent liberal – has scoured the Congressional Record to unearth hidden historical facts. For example, Stoller has previously shown that the U.S. government push for a “New World Order” is no wacky conspiracy theory, but extensively documented in the Congressional Record.
Now, Stoller uses the Congressional Record to show that “free trade” pacts were always about weakening nation-states to promote rule by multinationals:
Political officials (liberal ones, actually) engaged in an actual campaign to get rid of countries with their pesky parochial interests, and have the whole world managed by global corporations. Yup, this actually was explicit in the 1960s, as opposed to today’s passive aggressive arguments which amount to the same thing.
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Liberal internationalists, including people like Chase CEO David Rockefeller and former Undersecretary of State and an architect of 1960s American trade policies George Ball, began pressing for reductions in non-tariff barriers, which they perceived as the next set of trade impediments to pull down. But the idea behind getting rid of these barriers wasn’t about free trade, it was about reorganizing the world so that corporations could manage resources for “the benefit of mankind”. It was a weird utopian vision that you can hear today in the current United States Trade Representative Michael Froman’s speeches. I’ve spoken with Froman about this history, and Froman himself does not seem to know much about it. But he is captive of these ideas, nonetheless, as is much of the elite class. They do not know the original ideology behind what is now just bureaucratic true believer-ism, they just know that free trade is good and right and true.
But back to the 1967 hearing. In the opening statement, before a legion of impressive Senators and Congressmen, Ball attacks the very notion of sovereignty. He goes after the idea that “business decisions” could be “frustrated by a multiplicity of different restrictions by relatively small nation states that are based on parochial considerations,” and lauds the multinational corporation as the most perfect structure devised for the benefit of mankind. He also foreshadows our modern world by suggesting that commercial, monetary, and antitrust policies should just be and will inevitably be handled by supranational organizations. [Background.]
Here’s just some of that statement. It really is worth reading, I’ve bolded the surprising parts.
“For the widespread development of the multinational corporation is one of our major accomplishments in the years since the war, though its meaning and importance have not been generally understood. For the first time in history man has at his command an instrument that enables him to employ resource flexibility to meet the needs of peopels all over the world. Today a corporate management in Detroit or New York or London or Dusseldorf may decide that it can best serve the market of country Z by combining the resources of country X with labor and plan facilities in country Y – and it may alter that decision 6 months from now if changes occur in costs or price or transport. It is the ability to look out over the world and freely survey all possible sources of production… that is enabling man to employ the world’s finite stock of resources with a new degree of efficiency for the benefit of all mandkind.
But to fulfill its full potential the multinational corporation must be able to operate with little regard for national boundaries – or, in other words, for restrictions imposed by individual national governments.
To achieve such a free trading environment we must do far more than merely reduce or eliminate tariffs. We must move in the direction of common fiscal concepts, a common monetary policy, and common ideas of commercial responsibility. Already the economically advanced nations have made some progress in all of these areas through such agencies as the OECD and the committees it has sponsored, the Group of Ten, and the IMF, but we still have a long way to go. In my view, we could steer a faster and more direct course… by agreeing that what we seek at the end of the voyage is the full realization of the benefits of a world economy.
Implied in this, of course, is a considerable erosion of the rigid concepts of national sovereignty, but that erosion is taking place every day as national economies grow increasingly interdependent, and I think it desirable that this process be consciously continued. What I am recommending is nothing so unreal and idealistic as a world government, since I have spent too many years in the guerrilla warfare of practical diplomacy to be bemused by utopian visions. But it seems beyond question that modern business – sustained and reinforced by modern technology – has outgrown the constrictive limits of the antiquated political structures in which most of the world is organized, and that itself is a political fact which cannot be ignored. For the explosion of business beyond national borders will tend to create needs and pressures that can help alter political structures to fit the requirements of modern man far more adequately than the present crazy quilt of small national states. And meanwhile, commercial, monetary, and antitrust policies – and even the domiciliary supervision of earth-straddling corporations – will have to be increasingly entrusted to supranational institutions….
We will never be able to put the world’s resources to use with full efficiency so long as business decisions are frustrated by a multiplicity of different restrictions by relatively small nation states that are based on parochial considerations, reflect no common philosophy, and are keyed to no common goal.” ***
These ["free trade"] agreements are not and never have been about trade. You simply cannot disentangle colonialism, the American effort to create the European Union, and American trade efforts. After their opening statements, Ball and Rockefeller go on on to talk about how European states need to be wedged into a common monetary union with our trade efforts and that Latin America needs to be managed into prosperity by the US and Africa by Europe. Through such efforts, they thought that the US could put together a global economy over the next thirty years. Thirty years later was 1997, which was exactly when NAFTA was being implemented and China was nearing its entry into the WTO. Impeccable predictions, gents.
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I guess it turns out that the conspiracy theorists who believe in UN-controlled black helicopters aren’t as wrong as you might think about trade policy, and not just because United Technologies, which actually makes black helicopters, has endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
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These agreements are about getting rid of national sovereignty, and the people who first pressed for NAFTA were explicit about it. They really did want a global government for corporations.
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Ball in particular expressed his idea of a government by the corporations, for the corporations, in order to benefit all mankind. Keep that in mind when you think you’re being paranoid.
The full hearing can be downloaded here, though it is a big file.
The bottom line is not that liberals – or conservatives – are evil.
It’s that neither the Democratic or Republican parties reflect the true values of the American people (and see this).
Indeed, a scripted psuedo-war between the parties is often used by the powers-that-be as a way to divide and conquer the American people, so that we are too distracted to stand up to reclaim our power from the idiots in both parties who are only governing for their own profit … and a small handful of their buddies. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.
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And that is the key.....patience. It's takes a while for the frog to boil. But time is what you need to boil it without it knowing it until it's too late.
Plus having the frog watch Dancing with the Stars or Miley Cyrus twerking doesn't hurt either.
It's a technology race arms race. Can they develop the systems and weapons to really allow the few to directly control the many. Even idiots like Matt Damon get that.
A MUST SEE:
http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/
Economist breaks down what is the TPP, "Free trade"
Good article, gave it five dots.. But don't let Clinton and the 90's Republicrats totally off the hook. Without the Republicans in congress hauling the water, NAFTA would have never passed.
T'was liberal blue blood republicans after Mexican low-cost labor that drove nafter.
Or Nixon & Kissenger.
Ford was just a clean-up guy trying to stabilize things after Nixon imploded.
Carter was an accident on the road to globalism, but the worm really turned when the great GE shill, Reagan came into office in the 1980, bringing Bush (and all his CIA 'connections') with him.
Clinton was the stealth Internationalist, able to keep the Dems in check while the bankers were finally given the green light to plunder as he was leaving office.
Bush 2 stole the 200 elections, and I will never believe otherwise, installing Cheney, the ultimate elitist, in the Directors position.
Now, the Obama puppet is just another bought & paid for traitor to America with a teleprompter.
It's been a long & winding road. I need to go vomit now.
Yeah, they sure knew what they were getting when they promoted O'bumbler into the big chair. Hope and Change you can Believe in, quickly morphed into business as usual.
The American Social Contract was ripped up. Now our Overlords stare us down, grinning like banshees, " so what are ya going ta do about it, sucker !"
Free trade has nothing on free markets. Both are a con.
Good work GW.
Thanks
"All Mankind" never meant you.
Excellent article,
mostly right, but,
Most politicians became international banksters' puppets.
Most labels for politicians were deliberately misleading.
I did not like free trade when it first came out. How could our workers compete with workers
who get paid next to nothing. No one would listen to me. Where was the MSM? Every body
was all for shopping at Wal-Mart. They thought it was the other guy who's job would be lost.
Now they see it is their kids who have no jobs. The politicians who sold us out to the one
percent. No government is any better than those who run it. Crimes have been committed
and no one has been sent to jail. I've lost hope in my old age.
You sound as if you don't even like the idea of (true) free trade...a state protectionist. You would rather have government controlling borders, keeping free people out, preventing us hiring the most cost-efficient workers and dictating what we may buy, where it may come from, how much more we must pay...?
"the most cost-efficient workers"
What a sick joke. How about the most cost-efficient government, the most cost-efficient banks, and the most cost-efficient executives. Oh, I forgot- that is illegal....
I am nearly 74 years old also Amcockerspaniel. Thank God my time remaining is short. I really feel like a dinosaur in my own time. I have very little in common with this current American culture. I am disgusted and shamed by most of what I hear and see.
I have spoken against free trade since I awoke to the con in the early 1970s. I have watched over these 40-odd years as our country has steadily been destroyed and the progressive-inculcated populace has been excreted from the public indoctrination centers until these ignorant and deceived dependent parasites, along with the illegal aliens, cartoon characters, felons, dead Demoncrats, black morons, fictional votes mysteriously found in car trunks, and dogs now dominate......and have, along with the vote-counting computer fraud of George Soros, incredibly, installed an America-hating illegal alien into the white house.
I find it difficult to have any sympathy for the brain-dead young fools that are ruining their own future and destroying the greatest country in the history of the world.
We are in the last days of our freedoms and any remaining vestige of prosperity.
Pushing 72 and feeling much the same.
Also politicians don't write the legislation corporations and banks do, they just pass them most of the time they don't even understand or read it.
Exactly. We have the best little government that money can buy; but it's not our money that buys it.
Of course! One of the worst lies of the 20th century: free trade. There is no such thing. This has brought us currency wars. Massive debt. Chinese slave labor. All subverting "free trade". Market stabilized trade tariffs was not perfect. You might think of trade wars etc. but I promise you that is a much better predicament than what we have now. It allowed competition which is what "free trade" was suppose to do but instead we compete by destroying purchasing power and increasing virtual slave labor. China produces widgets for pennies on the dollar destroying American jobs and sovereignty. But this hasn't destroyed nationalism quite yet. And I don't mean uber nationalism although some of that may be creeping in in some places. I suspect China is not really on board with globalism and of course Russia is not. I don't think the US is either. That is if the masses really understood what this means.
No brainier prediction for the future: WAR.
Don't worry. They are restructuring things so that, after the petrodollar is dead, Americans can take their turn as providers of insanely cheap labor to prodiuce the uselss and endless supply of consumer products the Chinese will crave. And around and around it goes!
and even the domiciliary supervision of earth-straddling corporations – will have to be increasingly entrusted to supranational institutions….
Hegelian dialect.
Problem: supervision of multinational corporations. The solution is global governance.
Problem: out of control financial sector (wall street) and currency wars. The solution is global governance and a global currency.
Don't focus too much on the tools being used as much as who is wielding the tools and their goals.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/ukraine-protests-israeli-ex-officer-leads-milit...
Right, and when you resist, you get ex IDF goons running "revolutions"...
I read the article, not sure what you are implying. But i have a suspicion. Ukrainian born Israelis with military training are leading small groups of opposition. And?
Two former IDF originally from Ukraine constitute an Israelis conspiracy?
It's good to connect the dots. But in this case I think it's more likely that the former IDF are interested in helping the Ukrainian people suffering under a dictator.
Considering this is where they are from, it makes more sense that they felt a need to help the people and are not part of an Israeli agenda.
Notwithstanding of course, the Geo-political agendas that are playing out.
One of your VERY BEST GEORGE if not THE BEST!
Putting aside the atrocities of murdering millions and albeit for his own purposes Stalin had a hand in foiling the NWO but that doesn't mean the plan is dead.
Origins of the Cold War: How Stalin Foiled a ‘New World Order’Thank you, George.
Spot on.
+ a Bazillion
Ha, how the money talks....
So, did you run this by your golf buddies yet?
Sure does --- How Obama’s Chief Negotiators on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty Received Huge Bonuses from Mega Banks
George Washington...This is "Off Topic" but you need to read this MSM Garbage...
http://news.yahoo.com/substitute-teacher-taped-spouting-bizarre-conspiracy-theories-high-135248463.html
The irony is that libertarians (true, not Beltway) want to dismantle the nation-state as well, only not to create a world state but to eradicate the state per se.
Here's why (and yes, this is a book, but at least it's free):
http://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/albert-jay-nock/our-enemy-the-state
And cryptocurrencies (bring it on, critics) stand to be the most important means to that end, as money is all it comes down to in this moment in time.
When they say they are aiming for maximum efficiency, what they really mean is slavery.
One need only look at the US granting China 'Most Favored Nation' trading status in the '80s to discover the sway over national policy by the international corporate interests. If you recall, this was done at the zenith of the cold war - the US was supposedly at war against communism... yet we made China our #1 trading partner who was (an is)... you guessed it - Communist!
It made no sense whatever from a soverignty or national interest perspective... it still doesn't. (unless you are a multi-national corporation or bank)
that;s the crucial fact of the late twentieth Century; it was signed into law by Billy Clinton. The fact that no one paid attention or said "boo"; was vastly encouraging to the controllers; who then knew they could get away with anything.