"Don’t trust the fox to protect the chickens." -- Obvious to those who can recognize the "fox"

America has long been admired as the land of opportunity. In America, hard work was rewarded. Most Americans could better themselves and look forward to rising prosperity.

But this American dream is in trouble. Not because there is some new threat of foreign competition from low-wage countries. Nor is it because greedy American businessmen, ever eager for profits, have suddenly discovered how they can cut costs by shifting manufacturing and investment abroad to these cheaper labor markets.

Without a recognition of the underlying causes, it is all too easy to blame symptoms and support cures that actually aid the disease. Surprisingly, destructive government programs and agencies -- in effect for years -- are responsible for much of the loss of quality American jobs and manufacturing. These programs and agencies encourage businessmen to invest abroad with both a carrot and a stick. [See "Engineered Extinction" under "Recommended reading" below.]

Wielding the stick are the oppressive regulatory agencies that drive up the cost of doing business here at home. Other government agencies, such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation hold out the carrot by providing incentives and assuming risks so that businesses find it advantageous to invest abroad, even in Communist nations such as China.

Rather than reversing these destructive policies, internationalists are cynically seizing the crisis they helped to create in order to sell even more destructive proposals as cures. The proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas is the prime example.

An essential step toward activating Congress to reject the FTAA agreement is to help a substantial bloc of American opinion molders understand the real intentions of the internationalists. Then these opinion molders can withdraw their trust from the architects of America’s decline.

The attack on America’s productive capacity is virtually universal. Areas threatened include:

The classical free trade model shows how high-wage nations and low-wage nations can trade with each other for mutual benefit through the principal of comparative advantage. [Voluntary trade should be mutually beneficial because it’s voluntary.] But the basic model does not account for government policies that encourage major movements of labor (immigration) and investment. We should never underestimate the power of misapplied government to create a ghost town or impoverish its people.

The question is: If hi-tech jobs, manufacturing jobs, service jobs, and resource industry jobs are shifted abroad, what will be left for Americans to produce so that they can purchase in the world economy and enjoy a rising standard of living (or even maintain where they are)? When the plans of the globalists [link] are understood, the answer is grim. They have targeted the American middle class [link] for extinction.

The promised help for the less fortunate throughout Latin America is also a fraud.

"Helping" Latin America