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This is the second installment in a series of articles looking at the forces behind the scenes propelling us toward globalization through NAFTA, the FTAA and the WTO.

‘‘The Battle of Seattle." That is the common name given to the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial conference of November 30-December 3, 1999, where a 1960s-style generation of political street rioting was born anew. Images of tear gas, burning cars, chanting mobs, baton-wielding riot police, frightened diplomats, and millions of dollars in damage were left indelibly on the minds of those who viewed the footage on the nightly news. What started as relatively peaceful demonstrations by tens of thousands of anti-WTO activists from mostly leftist groups — labor unions, environmentalists, socialists, Communists — turned suddenly violent, as cadres of anarchists sallied out from the main body of demonstrators to attack police, bystanders and property.

Most of the organizers of the demonstrations denounced the violence and disavowed any connection to the individuals who had initiated the riots. The violent anarchists had accomplished a very important objective: They had made the motley, scruffy anti-WTO demonstrators appear to be reasonable, responsible citizens by comparison. And the anti-WTO demonstrators, in turn, made President Bill Clinton and the one-world revolutionaries inside the WTO negotiations look positively conservative, even as Clinton and company set about constructing a revolutionary structure — the World Trade Organization — which would have many of the features of an embryonic world government. (In our April 5 issue, we examined the backgrounds of some of these key globalist architects; see "A NAFTA/FTAA Rogues’ Gallery.")

The real issue at stake was (and remains) national sovereignty; the WTO architects were (and are) furtively creating an unaccountable global apparatus without constitutional restraints, that could overrule the laws of sovereign nations, and that was designed to gradually assume more powers. The WTO, which was approved by Congress in 1994, clearly was not about promoting "free trade," as its promoters falsely claimed. It was about a massive, unconstitutional transfer of power.

But the leaders of the demonstrations against the WTO were not opposing this central threat posed by the WTO. Instead, they were upset that the WTO’s focus on trade was too narrow; they insisted that, to be acceptable, the WTO regime must not only mandate global trade rules, but also global laws concerning the environment, labor, health and other matters. "We want to fix the WTO, not abolish it," insisted the leaders of a coalition of the big environmentalist groups — including World Wildlife Fund, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth — in an open letter to the WTO Ministerial. What kind of opposition is that? Answer: compromised, controlled, paid, phony opposition. These "Watermelon Marxists" — green on the outside, red on the inside — want a bigger, more powerful WTO, and a place at the table as equal-partner dictators in the new global regime. It is worth noting that all of these groups are heavily funded by the big tax-exempt foundations which are run by the world government advocates from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the same architects who designed the WTO.

Big Labor, like the environmental lobby, also opposed U.S. withdrawal from the global trade authority. "We need a rules-based trading system," the AFL-CIO explained on October 29, 1999, in the lead-up to Seattle. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney (CFR), like the leaders of the enviro-extremist groups, wants to see a WTO with more power, specifically power to mandate global labor policies. This same dynamic is being played out today, with Sweeney and other top labor leaders pushing for incorporating the UN’s International Labor Organization (ILO) standards into the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). A May 5 Reuters news story reported:

Top Democrats have warned CAFTA is in trouble in Congress because of its labor provisions, which they say are too weak. They want the agreement renegotiated to require the five countries — Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua — to incorporate the International Labor Organization’s "core labor standards" into their laws.

There were (and are) many articulate, principled, patriotic, constitutionalist, no-compromise opponents of the WTO and its regional subsidiaries such as NAFTA, CAFTA and the FTAA. But you don’t see or hear them in the controlled "debate." They have been frozen out of the equation because for them sovereignty, freedom and the Constitution are not negotiable. The public "debate" — at least as presented by the CFR Insider-dominated media and political institutions — has been between the one-world principals and their paid agents.

Following the Battle in Seattle, Francis Fukuyama, a full-fledged globalist (he’s a member of both the CFR and the Trilateral Commission), explained that the Marxist globalists should be grateful to the capitalist globalists for the WTO. "By creating the WTO, global capitalism has solved the left’s collective action problem," he opined in the December 1, 1999 Wall Street Journal. "The WTO," Fukuyama explained, "is the only international organization that stands any chance of evolving into an institution of global governance, setting rules not only for how countries will trade and invest with one another, but also for how they will deal with issues like labor standards and the environment."

To those who will take the time to examine the evidence, it soon becomes overwhelmingly apparent that the tie-dyed revolutionaries in the streets actually are working in concert with the silk-tied revolutionaries in the suites. Both are part of a giant pincer strategy, applying simultaneous "pressure from above and below." Their scripted "confrontations" are about as genuine as the ludicrous Monday Night television "wrestling" matches between those strutting, steroid-drenched grapplers in masks and tights.

More phony debates, more charades and more rigged wrestling matches are on the agenda, as the battles over CAFTA, FTAA, WTO expansion and other trade agreements heat up. Coalitions of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) claiming to represent tens of millions of U.S. voters and hundreds of millions of people around the globe are putting pressure on Congress to oppose CAFTA and FTAA unless they are expanded to include environmental, labor, health, education, and other matters. Americans committed to preserving our constitutional republic, our independence and our economic viability must expose this false opposition; we must not allow them to usurp our voice and speak in our name.

In the remainder of this article we profile several key agents who have been playing major roles in this rigged debate. An old rule of politics is very apropos in this respect: Follow the money. That’s what you must do if you want to know who is working for whom, and what their real agenda is. An important corollary is: Follow the arguments. No matter how strongly they protest against the FTAA (or CAFTA, or the WTO), if they are willing, ultimately, to compromise U.S. sovereignty for their own objectives, they are themselves compromised. And a final corollary: Follow the connections. As the examples below illustrate, the agents charged with controlling the opposition usually have identifiable ties to principal organizations that are leading the charge for world government.