"Those who will learn nothing from history are condemned to repeat it."

—George Santayana

FTAA advocates have described their plan as a broadening (adding more nations) and deepening (enlarging the scope and authority) of NAFTA – the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement. So let’s take a look at NAFTA.

The NAFTA agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada was signed by President George Bush (the senior) in 1992. But it still had to be approved by Congress. A tough battle would ensue despite high level support in both major parties. The following year, President Clinton mustered all of his political clout to push the measure through Congress. The office of Representative Gerald Solomon (R-NY) circulated a list of some 37 special side deals and pork barrel projects the Clinton Administration used to buy passage of the trade agreement.

The President's November 17th political victory in the House of Representatives came by a 234-200 vote. Opposition was greatest in the House and by most accounts opponents held the upper hand until the final week. The last-minute push was alluded to by the President: "We had to come from a long way back to win this fight." The Senate vote three days later in support of NAFTA (61-38) was anticlimactic.

Like the FTAA, NAFTA advocates titled their measure to mislead the public into believing falsely that the agreement was principally concerned with lowering tariffs and promoting free trade within a growing prosperity zone.

Although NAFTA was promoted as a "free trade" agreement among the nations of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, it has much more to do with economic integration and eventual political merger than it does with free trade. Consider: The mammoth NAFTA document was 1,700 pages of government intervention. The treaty itself was "only" 741 pages, but there were an additional 348 pages of annexes and 619 pages of footnotes and amplifications. Free trade and 1,700 pages of bureaucratese amount to a contradiction.

The major rub of the NAFTA treaty was chapter 20, which mandated the creation of a North American "Free Trade Commission" and a vast new bureaucracy under this commission called the "Secretariat."

The major advocates of NAFTA/FTAA generally try to deceive the public as to the magnitude and real objective of their revolutionary proposals. Nevertheless, there have been some startling and candid admissions in the general press:

Former Secretary of State 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 vote on NAFTA the single most important decision that Congress would make during Mr. Clinton's first term. Indeed, Kissinger acknowledged in the Los Angeles Times that passage "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 noted, "but the architecture of a new international system."

David Rockefeller, Kissinger's superior among the Trilateralists and CFR coterie, exhorted in the Wall Street Journal: "Everything is in place -- after 500 years -- to build a true 'new world' in the Western Hemisphere."

Another proponent, Andrew Reding of the New School for Social Research, admitted in a Canadian publication that the passage of NAFTA, which he called "an incipient form of international government," would "signal the formation, however tentatively, of a new political unit -- North America." This is not idle speculation, for as Reding suggested, "with economic integration will come political integration."

Representative Robert Matsui (D-CA), another NAFTA supporter, candidly admitted that the agreement brings with it a surrender of American "independence." And NAFTA supporter Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) has bragged about the "iron fist" of the pact. No, NAFTA was not about free trade.

In case there is any doubt about the teeth in the NAFTA agreement, consider the candid statements of U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, the negotiator of the "side agreement" on the environment. Kantor said officially that "no nation can lower labor or environmental standards, only raise them .... " In the Wall Street Journal on August 17, 1993, Kantor explicitly stated that "no country in the agreement can lower its environmental standards -- ever."

Recommended reading:

Global Tyranny … Bloc by Bloc - The New American - April 9, 2001

The construction of a world super-state is progressing one chunk at a time with NAFTA set to become the "European Union" of the Western Hemisphere.

NAFTA: Bureaucracy Unlimited - The New American - October 18, 1993

An Army of Governmental Agencies - The New American - October 18, 1993

NAFTA: The Misnamed Treaty - The New American - December 28, 1992

Further reading in Archives