Bait and Switch, Blue Smoke and Mirrors, NewSpeak – Take Your Pick. NAFTA Is All These and More

NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, an agreement signed by Canada, Mexico, and the United States on January 1, 1989, by President Clinton, is ostensibly a trilateral trade bloc in North America. I say ostensibly because, like many, if not most, of the treaties, trade agreements, accords, and pacts promoted and agreed to in the world in the past century, NAFTA is not what the powers-that-be want you to think it is.

NAFTA is not primarily about business, balance of trade, or jobs. Free trade was, and is, the mantra used to get the public to quit holding their collective nose and swallow the swill and pretend they were eating caviar.

With our modern day NewSpeak, free trade is really managed trade; there isn’t a speck of free trade in the agreement. But then it isn’t, and wasn’t ever supposed to be, about free trade. NAFTA is just another tool to achieve regionalism – this one on a demi-continental scale. Along with merging the countries into a North American Union, there is, ta-da, the environment cudgel, the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation. Which is overseen (enforced) by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation in Montreal. The CEC states its purpose is:

The Commission for Environmental Cooperation is a trinational organization through which the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States collaborate, with input from civil society, on the protection, conservation, and enhancement of North America’s environment.

 Its objectives include facilitating cooperation and public participation to foster conservation, protection and enhancement of the North American environment for the benefit of present and future generations, in the context of increasing economic, trade and social links between the three countries. It also aims to help prevent potential trade and environmental conflicts, promote the effective enforcement of environmental laws and provide high-quality information on all these subjects.

The CEC is to ‘receive and adjudicate’ notices of alleged environmental violations of any of the three countries. Yes, the US is allowing another country to judge our environmental laws.

You think NAFTA isn’t about combining the three countries into one? You think the US is a much great country than Mexico or Canada? You think strong, constitutional states like Texas would never go along? Think again.

Then Texas governor, Rick Perry, created a public/private partnership with the Spanish firm Centra to construct the Trans-Texas Corridor, the first segment of the NAFTA Superhighway (which would eventually go up into Canada and all the way down Mexico. And Perry didn’t do it without the consent of the GOP.

Tom wrote in 2007,
Goliath is the globalist-inspired Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) – better known as the North American Union (NAU) and the Trans Texas Corridor (TCC) – also know as the NAFTA Highway.

“To date a dozen states have introduced resolutions to oppose the SPP and the NAU. Some states have also included language to oppose creation of a new currency called the Amero. Also opposed in most of the resolutions is the super highway (TCC) to run from Laredo, Texas all the way to Kansas City and more. Specifically, all of the resolutions are reacting to a wide range of concepts and structures dealing with the integration of North America into one “harmonized” union.

“The states where resolutions have been introduced include Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia and Washington.

“The Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) will be a quarter of a mile wide. It will travel straight up the center of Texas. It will take by Eminent Domain more than 580 thousand acres of private land, much of it prime Texas farmland. It will displace more than one million Texans.

“The full plan for the TTC by the Texas Transportation Commission (TxDot) outlines 4,000 miles of corridors that crisscross the state. The corridor is so wide that it will literally divide the state in two. There are very few plans for overpasses to cross it, yet it will be impossible to cross without them. The TxDOT has basically told local communities that if they want overpasses, then the communities will have to supply them – at an estimated cost of about $2.5 million each. Without the overpasses fire, police and ambulances will not be able to serve their communities. Property owners may find it cuts down the middle of their land. To get from one side to the other they may have to travel many miles to an overpass.

“The TTC is not highway improvement for Texas. There are few exit ramps planned for the TTC. Car lanes will be in the center of the corridor. There will be few opportunities to get on and off the TTC. Communities that how depend on traffic from existing highways for such services as restaurants and gas stations will lose that business. Instead, the Spanish company Cintra, which has the 50-year lease to build and operate the TTC will establish facilities down the center of the corridor and control that business.

“The key to the lease with Cintra is a legal document called a “Comprehensive Development Agreement” (CDA). These contracts often include equity guarantees, debt guarantees, exchange rate guarantees, subordinated loans, shadow toll payments, and minimum revenue guarantees. In other words, the state has signed a 50-year lease with Cintra, giving it absolute guarantees of a specific rate of return on its investment. TxDoT is turning over assets paid for by the taxpayers of Texas and guaranteeing that no highway will compete in any way with the TTC. To achieve these revenue guarantees, there is no way for the Texas government to control what Cintra charges for tolls and there will be no alternative route for drivers to take if the tolls are too high.

“The TTC is being built for one reason and only one reason – massive profits for corporations who want the highway to run goods as cheaply as possible. Once built there will be no chance for anyone or any community in its path to obtain justice for taken property or reduce toll rates. Local courts will have no say in the matter. All disputes will be handled by an International court system either through NAFTA or the SPP.”

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Don’t Renegotiate — Get US Out! of NAFTA

In an article by Larry Greenley

Many of you can recall that back in 1993 when the NAFTA agreement was being considered by Congress, Henry Kissinger wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times entitled “With NAFTA, U.S. Finally Creates a New World Order.” That title alone reveals why we say that NAFTA is not about jobs, but about our freedom and independence. In this article Kissinger referred to NAFTA as “the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War” and stated further that it “is not a conventional trade agreement, but the architecture of a new international system.”

What had happened is that Donald Trump had run smack-dab into one of the internationalist establishment’s most important steppingstones toward world government, the North American Union (NAU). The NAFTA agreement represents the foundation of the eventual North American Union, a supranational governmental entity that would be comprised of the three formerly sovereign nations, the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The NAU is modeled after the internationalist establishment’s highly successful, although hugely deceptive, project to establish the European Union via so-called free trade agreements.

Since many of Trump’s advisors are members in good standing of the internationalist establishment, no wonder they advised him very powerfully to forget about withdrawing from NAFTA and instead work on renegotiating the agreement. In fact, they already had been planning to update NAFTA. The TPP agreement would have accomplished this, but now that we’ve withdrawn from the TPP, renegotiating NAFTA is exactly what they want as a next step towards regional government, aka the North American Union (NAU), on the way toward world government under the United Nations.

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Five things to know about Trump and NAFTA

Talk is growing that President Trump could really pull the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico.

Here are five things to know about what’s happening.

The talks have been rocky 

Trump has vowed to renegotiate NAFTA on terms that are better for U.S. workers and businesses, but some of his proposals have drawn opposition from business groups and seem unlikely to ever be accepted by Ottawa or Mexico City.

As a result, there is increased anxiety that the three countries won’t be able to hammer out a deal, and Trump will terminate the trade deal after the planned seven rounds of talks are concluded at the end of the year.

Behind the scenes, sources say that differences are growing, imperiling the prospect that talks will be successful.

U.S. proposals are stoking tensions

Two contentious proposals from Trump are causing consternation for many U.S. businesses, as well as Canada and Mexico.

The first is a sunset clause that would require the three nations to periodically vote to keep the deal in place or face NAFTA’s expiration in five years.

Tensions are high between Trump and business

Republican administrations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are generally aligned on policy issues.

On NAFTA, they’re looking more like enemies.

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To sum it all up somewhat succinctly, listen to two other experts on NAFTA.

Henry Lamb and Dr. Steven Yates in Arthur E. Palumbo’s The Authentic Constitution: An Originalist View of America’s Legacy on NAFTA.

“These trade agreements were sold to Congress, and to the American people, as ‘Free Trade’ agreements. Nothing could be further from the truth. These agreements are actually mountains of regulations, developed and enforced by unelected bureaucrats. The are, in fact, agreements by participating nations, to allow unelected bureaucrats to manage trade among the participants.

“These trade agreements have extraordinary legal power. The decisions of an appointed international tribunal have the power to force participating nations to conform their laws to comply with the tribunal’s decisions or face economic penalties.” Lamb

“I don’t see how one can peruse the official documents of NAFTA and the WTO without realizing that the former was not really a free trade agreement and the latter is not really about free trade. Both are about trade micromanaged and controlled by contingents of bureaucrats, politicians, and politically well connected corporations and business groups. In other words, what NAFTA created was the opposite of free trade.” Yates

Dr. Yates goes on to state: “The reality is that international tribunals created by NAFTA are already arrogating for themselves the authority to overrule US courts in trade spats between American and foreign firms. . . . [and] The WTO has been considerably more aggressive in handing down judgments against state laws in ways that indicate growing attacks on US sovereignty.” [Read More]

Public Citizen, in an article evaluating NAFTA’s performance for the first ten years of its existence:

“Think of NAFTA as a Trojan Horse attack on sovereignty and democracy hidden beneath the ‘free trade’ cover was an entire antidemocratic governance system under which policies affecting our daily lives in innumerable ways are decided out of our sight or control. When NAFTA was debated in 1993, few realized that this ‘trade agreement’ included hundreds of pages of non trade policies to which every signatory country was required to conform its domestic laws even if Congress or state legislatures had oppose the very policies NAFTA’s terms required. Plus, NAFTA established dozens of closed door committees empowered to set new standards outside the domestic regulatory process which requires openness and public participation. NAFTA’s vast rules are enforced by powerful trade tribunals that lack even the most basic due process guarantees and operate entirely outside the US court system.”

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Kathleen Marquardt
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Kathleen Marquardt has been an advocate for property rights and freedom for decades. While not intending to be an activist, she has become a leader and an avid supporter of constitutional rights, promoter of civility, sound science, and reason. She is dedicated to exposing the fallacies of the radical environmental and animal rights movements. She has been featured in national publications including Fortune, People, the Washington Post, and Field and Stream, as well as television news programs such as Hard Copy, The McLaughlin Group, Geraldo, and many others. Today, she serves as Vice President of American Policy Center. Kathleen now writes and speaks on Agenda21/2030, and its threat to our culture and our system of representative government.