posted April 29, 2004 05:05 PM            

quote:

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Michigan is one of the first states to fall into line. Our unemployment rate is skyhigh, we`re outsourced to death, welfare roles are breaking the state,tax`s still rising and no end in sight.

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I'm a little surprised to hear that because the unemployment rate in the US is below the averages for the 70's 80's and 90's and is at the same level as it was in the months before Clinton was reelected in 1996, 5.7%. Additionally, more people are working in the US than at any time in history.
http://www.bls.gov/

posted April 29, 2004 05:30 PM            

I mean, if Kerry gets in, his firsthand knowledge of and experience with the working class will certainly help to fix any unemployment problems, right?

posted April 29, 2004 07:12 PM            

Holland to lose part of Johnson Controls
March 30, 2004

BY JAMIE BUTTERS
FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

Johnson Controls Inc. plans to move almost 900 jobs from Holland, Mich., to Mexico over the next year-and-a-half as it seeks lower wages for workers making sun visors.

Workers and local officials were told Monday that Holland's biggest employer and taxpayer was cutting its local workforce by one-sixth.

The move comes as manufacturing jobs seem to be heading from Michigan to Mexico in droves. Electrolux AB is moving 2,700 refrigerator-making jobs from Greenville, Mich., to Mexico. Southfield-based Federal-Mogul Corp. is considering closing two plants and moving the work to Mexico. Over the last four years, Michigan has lost about 300,000 jobs -- more than half of them in manufacturing.

Keith Wandell, president of JCI's automotive group, said the decision was difficult, but the choice was simple: Move the work to Mexico or lose sales to a company that would. "This business, quite frankly, would be gone one way or another," he said.

JCI executives said that automaker demands for lower prices forced the decision. The plant makes visors for most of the world's major automakers: General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co., DaimlerChrysler AG, Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co., Nissan Motor Co. and Mitsubishi Motors Corp.

The company said visor production would be phased out during 18 months, beginning this summer, although Holland Mayor Al McGeehan said at least one worker told him he was laid off on Monday.

Wandell said the 885 employees who lose these jobs will be considered for other spots at JCI plants, or they will receive severance pay, benefits and other assistance.

The Southview plant, which is one of five JCI plants in Holland, will continue to employ 427 people making door panels, which are often more profitable -- and harder to ship to automakers' assembly plants.

The visors that will now be made in Mexico will continue to be designed and engineered at a 1,800-person technical center in Holland.

In total, the company employs about 5,000 people in the town of 35,000 in western Michigan.

JCI, based in Milwaukee, Wis., did not seek government assistance to keep the jobs in Michigan because the wage difference was too big to be overcome, executives said.

JCI would not say what workers at the plant typically earned, although workers at its unionized plants are believed to receive $14 to $18 an hour, excluding benefits -- about 10 times a typical Mexican wage.

An average worker at an auto supply plant in Ramos Arizpe, where JCI is moving the work, earns about $2.25 per hour -- including benefits -- said Christian Perez of TeamNAFTA, a consulting firm that helps companies find sites in Mexico.

"America and Holland cannot compete with $1.50-an-hour jobs," McGeehan said. "America cannot continue to absorb these kinds of hits. I know Holland can't."

Ramos Arizpe, in central Mexico, and nearby Saltillo are manufacturing-heavy suburbs of Monterrey, about 200 to 300 miles west of the southern tip of Texas.

JCI previously made sun visors in Ramos Arizpe only for GM and Chrysler Group vehicles made in Mexico, such as the Buick Rendezvous and Chrysler PT Cruiser.

In the future it will make them in Mexico and ship them back to U.S. plants.

The company stressed that it will continue to employ more than 8,000 Michiganders at 10 plants, two technical centers and the automotive group's headquarters in Plymouth Township.

"We continue to be a strong supporter of Michigan," Wandell said.

But Holland's mayor said this kind of bad news has become all too common.

"Probably the most disconcerting part of this downsizing of our manufacturing base is that we're not surprised any more with this kind of an announcement," he said. "Saddened? Yes, deeply. But surprised? Sadly, no."
======================================

I was going to copy & paste but this is a pdf file.
http://www.michigan.gov/documents/December_2003_85496_7.pdf

So far this quarter, the unemployment has risen and many more jobs lost.

posted April 30, 2004 01:39 AM            

There's a wealth of information on the sites you linked. I've now read a lot of it and some seems very far fetched and written from a dedicated conspiracy theorist angle. Some of it seems plausible in light of what actually happen here in the last 40 years.

I have a hard time reconciling Bush and Kerry as mister right and left hand of the same body.

I had a look at this a long time ago and didn't reach any conclusion. The group I explored at that time was the John Birch Society and I'm not sure they're wrong. At least they don't make wild accusations or spin wild conspiracies. If you're interested, you can have a look here: http://www.jbs.org/

I'm not a member and never have been so I have no ax to grind.

There was an article a while back by a person alleged to have been privy to information about the CFR. The gist of his article was that a member or members had been very open to him that they were working to bring about a one world government. The effort was ongoing, slowly being implemented one step at a time so as to not alarm anyone and that their plan was a very long range plan.

Not sure about your reference to Apocalyptics? The four horsemen of the Apocalypse is a reference to the end times of the age. The President cannot be said to buy into a world wide corrupt conspiracy and at the same time be attempting to bring on or further the end of the age. Different goals altogether. One an utterly corrupt institution and the other spiritual in nature.

I have seen no indication whatsoever that the US will benefit from Iraqi oil---except that stable oil supplies and stable oil prices are necessary to the industrial nations. I think that in a relatively few years, most crude oil will be refined into lubricants, fertilizer and synthetic yarns. Hydrogen fuel is coming on.

There is no question that there is a group of people who appear on the membership lists of lots of organizations. Leading to the conclusion that those groups are interlocked and working towards the same ends

North Korea is being dealt with by a group of nations. Depending on what the outcome is in Iraq, North Korea will or will not cease their nuclear weapons research and stop selling missile technology to rogue nations. No question N. Korea is very concerned about the sudden change in American policy which is a hard line policy to hold nations accountable for sponsoring terrorists and sending them out as proxies to perform acts the nations are afraid to undertake themselves. Notice, N. Korea has changed it's tune considerably and is now paranoid that the US is planning to attack them. They are also eager to talk about a non aggression treaty with the US. In my opinion, the President's foreign policy is the right policy and that policy is having the desired effect.

Interesting what you said about Vinnell Corp. Vinnell is a Northrup Grumman subsidiary. So, I don't quite understand what the Carlyle Group has to do with it, except perhaps own some stock. Since Northrup owns Vinnell, it seems unlikely Caryle could be involved in an ownership and/or operational control position. http://www.vinnell.com/

jwhop

posted April 30, 2004 10:53 AM              

---------

okay dick tracy, here's what me and my google found (btw the big G's going public soon - i might as well buy stock!)...

yah, conspiracy stuff makes my head spin, but maybe that’s the purpose – to get the motor running. i dunno about all the blood ritual stuff (can we get a vampire graemlin over here?) but i've often wondered if the true power behind world economic and political maneuverings is really a small and elite group indeed – with family roots going back to european nobility.

quote:

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I have a hard time reconciling Bush and Kerry as mister right and left hand of the same body.

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anyway, i’ll check into the John Birch Society – thanks. and the info i found on Club of Rome seems to gather around their 1972 book about global warming trends – a favorite subject of yours, if i remember correctly!

i find it interesting that the “anti-globalization” protestors have gotten SO much flack, but it seems there is actually some agreement from the “right” (and not just you, jw) about some of their fears – basically a trans-continental authority/yoke from which there is no escape. except that the "lefties" fear the power of incorporation, the "right" fears the U.N. and the goals of “old europe” - a lot of overlap there, too. (and what's this “Black Nobility” stuff?)

quote:

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Not sure about your reference to Apocalyptics? The four horsemen of the Apocalypse is a reference to the end times of the age. The President cannot be said to buy into a world wide corrupt conspiracy and at the same time be attempting to bring on or further the end of the age. Different goals altogether. One an utterly corrupt institution and the other spiritual in nature.

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there should be more articles around today because PBS (translate Club of Rome? ) aired a show on it last night (which I didn’t’ see)

quote:

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April 29, 2004/TV REVIEW | 'THE JESUS FACTOR' /Understanding the President and His God/By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
… And at a time when Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" is one of the top-earning movies, and the "Left Behind" series of books, apocalyptic Christian thrillers by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (the Antichrist heads the United Nations), has outsold John Grisham, the evangelical Christian movement is highly visible even in places like New York and Los Angeles.
…
Once the younger Mr. Bush's faith took hold, it spread to his political ambitions. "I believe that God wants me to be president," is what Richard Land, a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, recalls hearing Mr. Bush say in a meeting with close associates on the day of his second inaugural as governor of Texas. Once elected president, Mr. Bush went to work. "We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God," he says in a 2002 clip. "And those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench.
…
The documentary revisits a 1993 interview Mr. Bush had with a reporter for The Houston Post, Ken Herman, on the day he announced his intention to run for governor. Mr. Herman recalls that Mr. Bush said he believed that a person had to accept Christ to go to heaven, a view that Mr. Herman published.

"The political ramifications of that were huge," Mr. Wead explains. "And so he doesn't talk about that anymore." (During the 2000 campaign Mr. Bush said he thought schools should teach both creationism and evolution, but he has not been as forthcoming about which theory he personally prefers.)

---

on another note entirely, I’m glad you think hydrogen is the wave of the future. I also believe there’s a lot of possibility in solar. what do you expect the big oil companies are going to do when their commodity falls out of the loop? can hydrogen replace oil as a money-maker? (just curious – my bet is they start buying up water rights)

quote:

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North Korea is being dealt with by a group of nations. Depending on what the outcome is in Iraq, North Korea will or will not cease their nuclear weapons research and stop selling missile technology to rogue nations... They are also eager to talk about a non aggression treaty with the US. In my opinion, the President's foreign policy is the right policy and that policy is having the desired effect.

---

quote:

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Interesting what you said about Vinnell Corp. Vinnell is a Northrup Grumman subsidiary. So, I don't quite understand what the Carlyle Group has to do with it, except perhaps own some stock. Since Northrup owns Vinnell, it seems unlikely Caryle could be involved in an ownership and/or operational control position. http://www.vinnell.com/

---

from a 2003 NG press release:

quote:

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RESTON, Va., May 13, 2003 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ -- Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) today confirmed that nine employees of its Vinnell Corporation subsidiary were killed Monday evening in an apparent terrorist attack on a company facility in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Identities of the deceased were not disclosed and the families of those employees have been notified.
…
Vinnell Arabia is under contract to the U.S. Army to provide training services to the Saudi Arabian National Guard. The company employs about 800 people in Riyadh, a combination of United States, Saudi Arabian and citizens of other countries. U.S. citizens number 300.

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quote:

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RESTON, Va., July 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Vinnell Corporation, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC), has been awarded a $48 million contract to train the nucleus of a new Iraqi Army.

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quote:

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Thomas Fintel
Vice President & General Manager
Enterprise Management Services Division
Northrop Grumman Mission Systems
Thomas Fintel is vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Management Services (EMS) Division in Northrop Grumman Mission Systems. He also is president and director of Vinnell Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Mission Systems.

Mr. Fintel formerly served as vice president and acting general manager, EMS, and as senior vice president, acting chief executive officer, Vinnell Corporation. Mr. Fintel joined TRW in December 1997 when TRW acquired Vinnell Corp. In December 2002, TRW was acquired by Northrop Grumman. He previously worked as vice president of operations for Vinnell Corporation, where he oversaw contract operations in Saudi-Arabia (the Royal Saudi Land Forces Bradley Program, the Saudi Arabian National Guard Modernization Program, and the Royal Saudi Air Force Staff Support Program), Oman (USAF War Reserve Materiel prepositioning), Turkey (support of all U.S. Department of Defense base operations in country), Egypt (support of U.S. Air Force F-16 and U.S. Army Apache helicopter deployment to the Egyptian Air Force) and three other programs in the Continental United States.

---

quote:

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November 03, 2003/# 2003-52
Kent Kresa, Former Chairman and CEO of Northrop Grumman, to Join Carlyle as Senior Advisor
Washington, DC - Global private equity firm The Carlyle Group today announced that Kent Kresa, the former Chairman and CEO of Northrop Grumman Corporation, has joined Carlyle as a Senior Advisor to its aerospace and defense group. Mr. Kresa’s role at Carlyle will begin in October 2003.

---

also, what are your thoughts on companies like blackwater?

thanks for taking the time to talk.

x

posted May 02, 2004 05:33 PM            

This is a small sample of the reading I've done on the CFR and related groups. It's surprising--at least it surprised me and it's alarming---at least it alarmed me.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect on January 1, 1994, amid great hoopla and promises that it would bring a continuous wave of progress and prosperity to all three nations involved: Mexico, Canada and the United States. Although some U.S. businesses have indeed benefited from the new arrangement, many others have not. Thousands of businesses and millions of jobs, especially in manufacturing, have fled the U.S. for Mexico, China and elsewhere. Many critical skills, technologies and production plants have disappeared from America’s economic landscape.

Another major promise of the "Free Trade" advocates was that once NAFTA went into effect, Mexico would experience dynamic economic growth and, as a result, there would be little or no incentive for Mexicans to move to the U.S. The decades-long massive influx of illegal aliens would end. Unfortunately, that has not been the case; over the past 10 years, the deluge of illegal migrants has grown steadily worse.

Far more serious than NAFTA’s economic and immigration consequences, however, is the dangerous threat it presents to our national sovereignty. As we pointed out during the ratification debate, if NAFTA were truly about freeing up trade, the agreement wouldn’t have required 2,000 pages of legalese establishing dozens of governing councils, committees, commissions, working groups and tribunals concerned not only with trade but also with environmental and labor standards, as well as other matters. Now, the same forces that designed and promoted NAFTA are insisting that it must be "broadened" and "deepened" under the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). By "broadened" they mean that NAFTA must be expanded geographically to include all 34 nations of the Western Hemisphere, with the exception (for now) of Communist Cuba. And by "deepened" they mean that NAFTA must be strengthened politically to allow for hemispheric governance and regulation on matters of education, health care, immigration, security, population, unemployment, agriculture, workplace safety, transportation, energy — virtually every area that is now under the sovereign jurisdiction of the nation-state and its political subdivisions.

In 1992 and 1993, the campaign to pass NAFTA built to a heated crescendo. However, few American citizens — on either side of the NAFTA debate — realized that the whole process had been put in motion decades before and systematically built into a seemingly unstoppable force. Although Presidents George Bush (the elder) and Bill Clinton were the most visible figures associated with the campaign for NAFTA, they were merely fronting for much more powerful forces operating behind the scenes.

Regular readers of The New American are very familiar with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC), two of the premier organizations dedicated to undermining the U.S. Constitution and submerging the United States in a global government. Leaders and members of these two pillars of the Establishment have provided the critical economic and political impetus for NAFTA and the FTAA.

In addition, there are several organizations focused specifically on Latin America that have provided essential support for the effort to merge the countries of the Western Hemisphere. The most important groups in this category include the Council of the Americas (COA), the Americas Society, and the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD). These organizations, founded by David Rockefeller and dominated by CFR and TC members, have, over the course of the past three decades, drawn many business, political, media and academic leaders in the U.S. and Latin America into the globalist camp. The influence of these groups is immensely enhanced by their close association with central banks, major private U.S. banks, and multilateral lending institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and Inter-American Development Bank. (These banking institutions are also dominated by CFR and TC members.)

As a result, what appears to be a popular, widespread and organic "movement" to "integrate" the hemisphere is, in reality, an entirely contrived façade, propped up by a relative handful of one-world elitists, numbering no more than several hundred. Their advantage is that they are very well organized, well funded, and strategically placed in highly leveraged positions of power and influence.

posted May 02, 2004 05:38 PM            

More on the FTAA

Proponents argue that the FTAA would increase prosperity by eliminating trade and investment barriers between the nations of the Western Hemisphere. The FTAA would expand NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, to include all of the Latin American countries with the exception of Cuba. NAFTA currently applies only to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Privately, proponents are also saying that the FTAA would deepen NAFTA by claiming jurisdiction over an ever-increasing number of functions that have previously been under the control of national, state, and local governments.

Proponents are employing numerous deceptions to keep the American public asleep while this revolutionary scheme is implemented. First is the name itself – the use of the term Free Trade in the name is a violation of truth in labeling. The objective of this charade is to enlist support among those who understand the economic benefits of true free trade.

The Free Trade Charade
Commenting about NAFTA, the FTAA’s predecessor, James Bovard of the CATO Institute warned, "With each passing month, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is acquiring more protectionist overtones." Bovard notes that the pact contains Byzantine "rules of origin" for products to qualify as North American products. He also points out the unlikelihood that this treaty, which is over 1,000 pages long, could represent anything resembling bona fide free trade: "Free trade is not complex -- it is protectionism that requires endless administrative gimmicks to camouflage its true nature. NAFTA amounts to a proliferation of new definitions of fair trade."

The plan for NAFTA mandated the creation of more than 30 international government committees, subcommittees, councils, working groups, and subgroups. For example, NAFTA established the Free Trade Council with at least eight permanent committees, six "working groups," and five subcommittees and subgroups. And NAFTA’s side agreement on import surges called for the creation of a permanent "Working Group on Emergency Actions." Other side agreements on labor and the environment called for still more "law-making" bodies and advisory committees.

NAFTA supporter Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) bragged about the "iron fist" of that pact. No, NAFTA was not about free trade. Nor is the FTAA, which is based on an expansion of NAFTA. 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."

Then What?
An even bigger deception than the name itself is the true objective of the FTAA step. 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 of 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 noted, "but the architecture of a new international system."

David Rockefeller, Kissinger's superior among the Trilateralists and members of the Council on Foreign Relations, 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."

Still another supporter, Representative Robert Matsui (D-CA), candidly admitted that the NAFTA agreement brings with it a surrender of American "independence."

The FTAA is a key milestone in a major grab for political power over the nations of this hemisphere. Proponents intend for the FTAA to follow the same route that globalists used to deceive the nations of Europe into giving up their sovereignty step-by-step to the government of the EU in Brussels. The first step in those plans was a so-called "free trade zone" -- the Common Market. As nations were being enticed to join the European common market, proponents lied as to their ultimate intentions by denying that any political sovereignty was at stake.

In less public forums, FTAA proponents admit the parallel to the European Union.

Open Borders
Proponents also conceal the effect of the FTAA on U.S. borders, realizing that the American public would not support their revolutionary goals. Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO) has clearly and correctly warned:

"There are people in the [Bush] administration, and in Mexico, and in Congress, who believe that we should do away with borders entirely. Their ultimate goal is to create this hemispheric ‘free trade’ area consolidating all of North and South America into some kind of ‘United States of the Americas.’"

Mexico’s Vicente Fox, in a 2002 address to European elites, was unexpectedly candid about these aims:

"Eventually our long-range objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada, our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union, with the goal of attending to future themes [such as] the future prosperity of North America, and the movement of capital, goods, services, and persons." [Emphasis ours]

This same vision has been endorsed by powerful people in our nation -- including some regarded to be conservative. Among those who applauded Fox's vision was Robert L. Bartley, editor of the influential Wall Street Journal:

"Reformist Mexican President Vicente Fox raises eyebrows with his suggestion that over a decade or two Nafta should evolve into something like the European Union, with open borders for not only goods and investment but also people. He can rest assured that there is one voice north of the Rio Grande that supports his vision. To wit, this newspaper."

"Indeed, during the immigration debate of 1984 we suggested an ultimate goal to guide passing policies — a constitutional amendment: "There shall be -- open borders."

—July 2, 2002 editorial entitled "Open NAFTA Borders? Why Not?"

Harmonization
When globalists seek to rally support for their schemes, they often use code terms such as "convergence," "integration,’ and [upward or downward) "harmonization." These deliberately vague and ambiguous buzz words are calculated to seem unthreatening to the general public.

But what the globalists mean by these terms reveals a great deal about how their plans will actually affect Americans. In the globalist lexicon, liberalization, harmonization, integration, and cooperation mean socialization, internationalization, expansion, centralization, and concentration of the powers of government.

When negotiators for the European Community or the North American Free Trade Agreement use the term "harmonization," they are referring to the effort to impose uniform wages and regulations across national borders. With respect to human rights, "harmonization" refers to the subordination of national constitutions to UN human rights conventions and covenants.

Naturally, in the United Nations, where the vast majority of member states are authoritarian regimes, "harmonization" means that American citizens must yield their rights for the common "global good." The UN Charter, of course, like most of the national constitutions of UN member states, recognizes no God-given individual rights and certainly no individual right to keep and bear arms. So, for example, "harmonization" would inevitably mean tightening controls on the loosely regulated U.S. gun business .

Upward harmonization means taking the socialist regulations and standards that are stifling business and ensuring that these standards are harmonized upward through the hemisphere. On the other hand, downward harmonization refers to the fact that for the nations of our hemisphere to "converge," the standard of living of most Americans will have to plummet.

Other Deceptions
This web site also presents evidence of other deceptions, such as:

1. The real forces driving the FTAA proposal that are kept from public scrutiny.

What are the origins of the FTAA?

Internationalists/Globalists

2. The orchestration of a phony hemispheric consensus so that it appears that leaders from Canada, Mexico, and Latin America all independently favor an FTAA.

3. The globalist funding of phony opposition to the FTAA. This phony opposition includes not only the rabble demonstrating in the streets but also Establishment-anointed "respectable" opposition. Both forms serve to confuse the American public and help build support for an even more aggressive FTAA agenda by demanding upward harmonization of the radical regulation that is already undermining our economic vitality.

4. Offers of loans through the World Bank to develop the infrastructure of the poorer countries of Latin America. These "bribes" are designed to lure those nations into the FTAA trap, from which there will be no escape.

And the last deception:

5. The claim that the FTAA will promote prosperity throughout the region and in America. This claim is merely bait and dishonest bait at that. Prosperity comes from a culture and a political system that protects freedom. Men must be free to innovate and to keep the fruits of their labor. That opportunity explains the incredible rise of the American middle class during the 19th and 20th centuries and why so many people came to this nation in search of a better life.

The Internationalists promoting the FTAA have rejected those lessons of history – they seek to regulate the world, not to advance freedom either at home or abroad. And they have little compunction in providing foreign aid to corrupt regimes that keep their people in poverty.
http://www.stoptheftaa.org/ftaa/

posted May 02, 2004 05:51 PM            

What are the origins of the FTAA?

A prime illustration of the phoniness of the political party wrestling match is the drive for the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Three days before the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec, a newly inaugurated President Bush affirmed his support for the Quebec agenda: "[The FTAA] will make our hemisphere the largest free-trade area in the world, encompassing 34 countries and 800 million people," George W. declared.

But the drive for an FTAA started long before George W. Bush occupied the White House. Plans for an FTAA were launched publicly in 1994 at the Summit of the Americas in Miami, Florida. The Summit was hosted by President Clinton, who also openly embraced the FTAA. When President Bush endorsed the 2005 timetable for the FTAA, he was merely renewing a pledge that his predecessor, Bill Clinton, had made in 1994.

But it would be a mistake to credit our playboy former president (or any president) with the leadership for creating an FTAA. In fact, the roots of the FTAA plans were put in place decades earlier by Insider architects who developed strategies and established organizations to build a network of Insider allies in Latin America — organizations such as David Rockefeller’s Council for the Americas.

As journalist William Jasper noted following the Miami event, "the Summit of the Americas and the FTAA were conceived, nurtured, and brought to fruition by the Council of the Americas (David Rockefeller, founder and honorary chairman), the Americas Society (David Rockefeller, chairman), the Forum of the Americas (David Rockefeller, founder), the U.S. Council of the Mexico-U.S. Business Committee (Rodman C. Rockefeller, chairman), the Council on Foreign Relations (David Rockefeller, former chairman), the Trilateral Commission (David Rockefeller, founder and honorary chairman), the Chase Manhattan Bank (David Rockefeller, former chairman), and the Institute for International Economics (David Rockefeller, financial backer and board member)."

In a more recent article (see link to "Welcome Mat for Terrorists," below) William Jasper traces the roots of the FTAA back even further. Incredibly, the idea for a regional common market was first proposed by Fidel Castro at a 1959 conference in Buenos Aires, before Fidel’s Communist ties were publicly acknowledged. Less than two years later, internationalists and pro-communists in the Kennedy administration advanced Castro’s proposal as the Alliance for Progress:

"What we are now witnessing as the unfolding FTAA began as a revolutionary program of the Kennedy administration under the lofty sounding title of Alliance for Progress. The Alliance for Progress, designed on the pattern of the Marshall Plan, was established to funnel billions of foreign aid dollars to socialist parties and Communist movements in Latin America, with the aim of melding all of the region’s countries into a common market, just as the Marshall Planners had done after World War II in Europe."

Actually, the American Insiders driving the FTAA are not mere copycat observers of the EU example. American Insiders were, in fact, the principal architects behind the drive for a united Europe. A few years ago, declassified government documents revealed that our own intelligence community had funded and directed the Euro-federalist movement in the fifties and sixties.
http://www.stoptheftaa.org/faq/faq6.html#answer

This:

Internationalism/Globalism

"For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it." – Patrick Henry, in his famous "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" oration at St. John’s Church on March 23, 1775.

When Patrick Henry spoke the above words, Americans stood at a crossroads, facing great danger. Today, Americans face a different but in many ways even greater danger — in large part because too few of us understand the threat.

It is impossible to provide a convincing summary of that threat, which encompasses the globalist/internationalist movement, in just a few paragraphs. Yet understanding that movement is essential in order to appreciate just how important the FTAA is to the internationalist elites driving this scheme and where they want the FTAA to lead. Accordingly, the reader unfamiliar with this topic is urged to read a few of the articles recommended below and become acquainted with some of the unpublicized admissions of the elites themselves.

Whatever arguments their think tanks generate to justify their schemes, the internationalists should not be allowed to obscure two key facts: 1) they are unalterably determined to accomplish their revolution; and 2) they are more than willing to deceive the public as to their aims.

A surprising admission of this practice appeared in a special "Issues 2002" issue of the International Edition of Newsweek. In "Death of a Founding Myth" Managing Editor Michael Hirsh puts a glowing face on the deception and argues that "we must now embrace the global community we ourselves built." Referring to the developments of the last century Hirsh writes:

"While the isolationists … tempted millions with their siren’s appeal to nativism — the internationalists were always hard at work in quiet places making plans for a more perfect global community. In the end the internationalists have always dominated national policy. Even so, they haven’t bragged about their globe-building for fear of reawakening the other half of the American psyche, our berserker nativism. And so they have always done it in the most out-of-the-way places and with little ado."

A current example of internationalist globe-building is the drive to amalgamate the Americas into one hemispheric union, through the FTAA. True to form the elitist architects hide their true intentions from the people who will be affected. This hemispheric union, ostensibly economic at the outset, would progressively encompass more and more of the political, leading to the eradication of national borders and the subordination of national constitutions to an emerging new regional government. The internationalist prototype for this progressive merger is the European Union. Internationalists are now attempting to replicate their successful EU prototype in Asia and Africa as well as in this hemisphere.

In a 1995 speech to an elitist audience in San Francisco, Zbigniev Brzynski, national security advisor for Jimmy Carter and architect of the Trilateral Commission, clearly stated the objective of the regionalism strategy:

"We cannot leap into world government in one quick step.... [This objective] requires a process of gradually expanding the range of democratic cooperation ... a widening, step by step, stone by stone, [of] existing relatively narrow zones of stability.... [T]he precondition for eventual globalization -- genuine globalization -- is progressive regionalization, because thereby we move toward large, more stable, more cooperative units."

In our system of government, such a drastic transfer of political power would require a constitutional amendment. But that would open up the proposal to debate and certain rejection. So the internationalists look to supercede the Constitution by simply ignoring it, superceding it through steady usurpation. Any federal politician who supports such a scheme has violated his oath of office to uphold the Constitution.

The evidence of such arrogant duplicity alone should inspire any prudent American to withdraw all trust and seek different leadership. It is dangerous and wishful thinking at best to believe that leaders who are so willing to violate their trust and deceive the American public really have the public’s interests at heart. In fact, the wars and other destruction that the Internationlists have visited upon the world to further their agenda leaves little doubt that if they were once able to wield the total power they seek they would be more than willing to suppress any dissent with the bloody hand of tyranny that has marked the totalitarian regimes of the previous century.

The subversive drive to build a world government is succeeding primarily because most Americans neither perceive the danger nor the direction from which the threat is coming — we are being betrayed from within our own camp. The tough reality, one that most otherwise informed Americans have yet to recognize, is that many of our top leaders, despite their smiles and nice-sounding words, are up to their eyeballs in advancing this subversive revolution. The main threat does not come from the plans of petty bureaucrats or wide-eyed radicals or even as a Communist plot from abroad. It comes from within. And that circumstance makes the threat much more dangerous and difficult to combat.

Yet the fact that the internationalists have to deceive the public points to a weakness in their grip on power. The internationalists can be stopped through exposure -- if a sufficient number of determined Americans will inform themselves and organize to do so.
http://www.stoptheftaa.org/ftaa/globalism.html

posted May 02, 2004 06:02 PM            

I haven't read " Rule by Secrecy". In fact I haven't looked at any of this stuff we're discussing for a very long time. I'll try to hunt up a copy.

posted May 02, 2004 06:18 PM            

Marrs is a respected investigator who wrote the book Crossfire: The plot That Killed Kennedy. The book is used in many colleges. I recommend this book when you`re in for a scolarly review of the assination.

I`m still working thru the material you`ve provided, thanks

juniperb